I was chatting with some friends after the Maher show. They'd been against the war from the beginning. They were African-American and said it was obvious to them that the WMD argument was what they called "game." They weren't surprised. I was. I believed George W. Bush. And I trusted him. And as the evidence has poured in that my faith and trust were betrayed, my surprise has turned to rage. I'm not a generally angry person. But if I have placed my trust in someone on a matter of this gravity and I find out they lied, bungled and betrayed me and others who trusted them, then all I can say is: they picked the wrong guy to bamboozle.
You don't send 19 year-old kids to risk their lives and die to protect your own political power or advance your own partisan purposes. You don't abandon thousands of innocent Iraqis who also trusted you to marauding gangs of terrorists and murderers, and stand by and tell critics to "back off". You don't ask people of good faith to support you in a critical war and then secretly breach the Geneva Conventions and torture people and blame only a few grunts on the ground for your war-crimes.
The anger of the left, I realize, was always there. But the anger of the betrayed and decent right and center is deeper. Some readers think my anger has gotten the best of me. Maybe on occasions it has. But I'd rather be too angry than too afraid to call these people what they are. - Andrew Sullivan
** update **
I highlighted the part that pissed me off.. Sullivan is saying that because some people are "decent" and were "betrayed", their anger is somehow "deeper" than the lefties who knew from the very begining that Bush was a dangerous idiot. It didn't take much in the way of observational abilities to figure that one out before the 2000 election.
Deeper? That's total bullshit. Sullivan still doesn't get it. He still thinks that the philosophy of war, and the right wing agenda is the correct one. To him, the problem is the Bush administration incompetence, and violation of basic constitutional principals, not the actual political philosophy itself.
I've said it time and again. The "conservative" movement is fundamentally flawed, and will always result in death and destruction, hatred, and class warfare. Sullivan just can't grasp that basic concept, and actually thinks the "decent" right winger's anger is deeper than the liberals?
Fuck you Andy..
** update 2**
Matt Yglesias reviews Sullivan's new book here. He makes essentially the same point as I, but being an "influential" writer, he tarts it all up in a long winded version of "he still doesn't get it".
Which brings us to the real problem here, such as it is. Though billed as "one of today's most provocative social and political commentators" on his book jacket, Sullivan's substantive views are almost frighteningly banal. Far from "bold and provocative," Sullivan offers up an unusually colorful expression of what is, in fact, the bland conventional wisdom of the Anglo-American elite. In foreign affairs he's hawkish, chastened by Iraq but not so chastened as to revisit any of the empirical or theoretical premises that led America into its current quagmire.** update 3 **
A reader writes Sullivan and expresses my point.
The thing is.. despite Sullivan's mea culpas, he still treats the whole sordid exercise as an intellectual error instead of the most profound political fuckup in the history of the United States.
Can anybody think of a worse president than Bush? Can anyone think of a worse blunder than Iraq, and the myriad of political disasters, and constitutional crises, it has spawned?
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