On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, I take my son and two of his teammates to swimming practice at the ungodly hour of 5:30 am. Before we take off, I walk to the front door and pick up my own, personal copy of the Des Moines Register. I skim through the front page section. I quickly make my way to the Editorial/Opinion, and there she is looking at me. (God, if that woman smiled her face would shatter.)
You know who I mean. She of the post-modern, transnational, socialist drone. No government program is too big. No Republican is too evil. No person of color is responsible for their actions. No one in poverty is responsible for their plight. No immigrants should be responsible to make their way in this country with out loads of government subsidies.
It’s a familiar and (I know this is a tad bizarre...) comforting part of my day. Hey, it's my routine and she helps keep it routine. And, at 5:25 this morning, there she was. And she did not disappoint. Granted, there was nothing new. But again, that's part of what makes reading her column comfortable and routine.
And
there they were: the tired old arguments again:
We're throwing away our kids lives and savings on this illegitimate war.
Americans military folks are blood thirsty rapacious cretins.
Bush lied, there was never any imminent WMD threat.
Unilateral, illegitimate war, no UN blessing
The US occupation is bad, not as bad as Saddam… but almost
We can't just go around knocking off the bad guys.
Muslim clerics in Iraq are unhappy about us (when are they not?)
Countless Iraqi civilians died at our hands
Bush just wanted the oil, construction contracts for his cronies.
Dennis Kucinich's opinion is worth putting to print.
Halliburton, Halliburton, Halliburton...
Capturing Saddam was no really anything to be proud or happy about.
Anyone who reads this blog can pretty much guess what my retorts would be to these creaky, vapid arguments. They could predict the treatment I would give this clumsy, almost pathetic apologia for Saddam and childish tantrum by this woman against the motives and actions of her adopted country.
But hey... been there, done that. Friends, there's not a thing that's new here. It's as pedantic and humorless as any of her other pieces on the war. She repeats the same half-truths and outright lies that one finds on the Democratic Underground or spewing from the foul, self-promoting mouth of Michael “the Hutt� Moore.
Scroll back up to the list. Other than the specifics relating to Saddam’s capture and Kucinich’s tin foil hat ravings, do you see anything new? Has her argument developed at all over the last 8 months? Does she have any new evidence to present? Has she found anything positive about what this country did? Has she mentioned even ONE of the atrocities perpetrated against his own people by that skulking, cowardly rat we just pinched? Does she ever take the United Nations, or France or the Palestinian Authority to task for anything?
Christ, you begin to think that this woman became a citizen of the United States as some kind of societal make over project. What in God’s name does she like about this country (other than the people she perceives to be victims) AS IS? It’s like the woman who takes on a project husband. Everything he does pisses her off... but hey… what a challenge! And she’s sure she can “fix� him. Yeah… fix in the way you “fix� a male housecat.
I’ve thought a lot about her today. I even did a little Internet research and found out some interesting facts.
You want to know who her parents worked for…? Now, wait for it… THE UNITED NATIONS. Want to know two of the places that they were posted…? Try Egypt and Libya. Then off to New York, presumably for the juicy UN Headquarters posting with that prized free double parking sticker for your car.
Her CV is just what you’d expect… a BA in Sociology from Brandeis, an MS in Journalism from Columbia. And… just for the icing on the cake… an MA in Political Economy from Cambridge. Heaping helpings of tabula rasa and societal predominance over the individual at Brandeis. Journalist as socialist southsayer/consciousness raiser at Columbia. Economist as political functionary and wealth re-distributor from Cambridge.
I knew there had to be the idealism of the academy in her. The only problem is that idealism not tempered by realism tends to turn rotten by middle age. And that is where she is now. Her idealism is warped into a fantasy world in which:
The experience of the 1960’s actually changed human nature. Oh… I forgot, there is no “human nature�… each child and each generation is a blank slate that can be moulded by social engineering. I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony…
The United Nations in a benevolent and wise world-governing, consensus-building body and the only hope for mankind. Look at Kofi, he’s’such a nice old man. He means well. Just ask all of those dead Rwandans… oops.
The United States is run by corporate interests why buy and pay for Presidents and only care about profit. Hey, we want oil and constructions contracts, we just take ‘em. Sure… we could have bought off Saddam way cheaper… but this whole “war on terror� thing is obviously just to throw them off the trail.
The sitting President of the United States is a simpleton… that is, when he’s not busy being a war monger. Yeah, he’s so simple that he has the courage to stand for what is right and to defend this country. He’s so simple that he looks evil in the face and calls it by name. Come on now, there’s no evil in the world. There’s just folks that want us dead and our culture wiped out that we haven’t met yet!
The European and East Cost intelligencia have a lock on all sophistication, taste, judgment and wisdom. Hey, they’ve got to be smart. Have you seen the draft of the European Union Constitution? Dude, it’s like really thick… it’s like, much longer than ours, man.
Middle America is full of dim, violent Neanderthals who drive big trucks for no reason, are programmed by television, beat their wives and hate all minorities except for sports stars. Just keep moving. No common sense, ingenuity, drive or creativity here. Nope… all we got is destitute Hispanic folks working in meat packing plants.
The murder and mayhem of September 11th was a criminal act carried out by desperate people driven to their acts by… you guessed it… us. This more than anything else separates Rekha Basu’s world view from mine. On 9/11/2001, the world changed. I got it. I’m guessing that if you are a frequent visitor to this site that you got it.
She hates President Bush because he got it in spades and did precisely what he said he would do when, less than a year before he took the oath of office: “protect and defend�… He put the conflict in simple terms that we Midwestern simpletons understand… “with us, or against us�. And then he led us into action. And if there is anything that a delusional academic hates it’s a man of action.
Rekha Basu lives in a child like world of ideas where the United States cannot defend itself (and the rest of western culture to boot, by the way…) until it is perfect in every way.
Nearly 3,000 of our innocent citizens dead? Nuh-uh… you go be a good boy, count to ten and then petition the Court of The Hague.
300,000 men, women and children in mass graves in Iraq? Hey… you can’t claim that your country is better and more moral Saddam’s Iraq because people were put on death row and later found innocent.
And logically you see… that means that Bush is really just as bad as Saddam.
It dawned on me today that my biggest issue with Rekha Basu is that she is not a grownup. If she believes that Kofi Annan is the leader of the world, she has willfully maintained herself as a child. And, because she is lucky to live in the United States of America, she can maintain (and get paid for proselytizing) this childish fantasy world in which the world did not change on September 11, 2001 and the capture of Saddam Hussein -- alive, disgraced and ridiculous -- is nothing to celebrate.
Update: Jeff at Tusk and Talon gives Rekha a rightous frisking... uh... I mean
Fisking.
