Trash Talkin With The Terrorists

by digby

I’ve always wondered why Chris Matthews has Kathleen Parker on his syndicated week-end show so often. She’s an attractive woman, but she has the personality of a door knob and makes deadly boring television. Today, I realized it’s because they share the same anachronistic 50’s sitcom view of life.

Parker’s WaPo column begins rather humorously, although it’s clear she didn’t intend it to be:

On any given day, one isn’t likely to find common cause with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He’s a dangerous, lying, Holocaust- denying, Jew-hating cutthroat thug — not to put too fine a point on it.

But he was dead-on when he wondered why a once-great power such as Britain sends mothers of toddlers to fight its battles.

Well, isn’t that something? A lying, Jew-hating, cutthroat thug he may be, but he does make a good point when he sophomorically attacks the west with silly, schoolyard taunts unworthy of anyone over 8. It’s “dead-on” that the British navy is a bunch of pansies who have women “fighting their battles” for them. Well, a stopped clock and all that…

Just because we may not “feel” humiliated doesn’t mean we’re not. In the eyes of Iran and other Muslim nations, we’re wimps. While the West puts mothers in boats with rough men, Muslim men “rescue” women and drape them in floral hijabs.

We can debate whether they’re right until all our boys wear aprons, but it won’t change the way we’re perceived. The propaganda value Iran gained from its lone female hostage, the mother of a 3-year-old, was incalculable.

Ok wait a minute. Who are the rough men and who are the ones with floral scarves and aprons again? It’s so hard to keep your moral clarity straight when the rightwing of the Republican party keeps endorsing the view that we should capitulate to the islamofascists one minute and resist them to the death the next. But whatever. Parker says with stalwart assurance that the propaganda value of this woman being “rescued” by the Iranians is “incalculable.”

I agree that it’s entirely possible that the Iranians and al-Qaeda and all sorts of unsavory types around the world have become emboldened by American (and British) military policy, but I doubt that it has much to do with women in combat. The problem is that our president, in his ignorance and hubris, has just proved to the entire world that the United States has no earthly clue what it is doing. The administration even insists to everyone who will listen that the US intelligence services couldn’t find water if they fell off a boat.

Any administration that really cared about national security would not have lied about something so obvious as Saddam’s mythic weapons cache with such assuredness and then blamed the entire US intelligence service when they were not found. If you want to make a country look weak and inept, that’s one excellent way to do it.

And then there is the fact that the Iraq occupation itself is in total chaos. The North Koreans went right ahead a built a bomb while John Bolton was swinging his ineffectual little stick around. Guanatanamo is an immoral embarrassment that nobody on earth sees as anything more than an unsophisticated propaganda ploy that blew up in our faces. And after almost seven years we have no idea where Osama bin Laden is.

Let’s just say that those, among many more, might be the bigger propaganda victories with “incalculable” value to the enemy than some British sailor in a headscarf.

Parker is parroting the Dick Cheney fifth grade schoolyard school of foreign policy. The entire world rests on whether the United States out trash-talks the enemies of our nation, who are lurking everywhere, throwing rhetorical zingers about our national manhood. Failure on the ground is meaningless in any substantial sense. What matters is if we keep swaggering around like we know what we are doing even when its patently obvious that we don’t.

The problem, you see, is that up until now they haven’t taken us seriously. Only by repeatedly making threats, giving bellicose speeches and invading countries willy nilly will they realize that we can’t be defeated. To the Schoolyad School, Ahmadinejad is, therefore, a very serious foe even though he’s actually a sort of circus clown who doesn’t wield any real power. He is a first class insult artist. Indeed, Parker’s instinct to capitulate to his taunts by banning women from the military is testament to how formidable he is to these people. One off-hand comment about British manhood and she starts shrieking like a ninny that he’s right.

Cheney knows that the way to win his GWOT has nothing to do with better intelligence, competent leadership, sophisticated diplomacy or even superior military might. What we must do is psych the terrorists out with our patented Hollywood macho style (and that doesn’t include wimminfolk on the boat.) As Parker says in her column, it’s all about how we are perceived.

Pay no attention to all the actual dead people lying around. They’re just extras in our rhetorical battle of wills.

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