[Middle East, Politics]
From Out of My Spider Hole, to Explain the Obvious.
I'm still on sabbatical, and doing rather well at it. I could go weeks without writing the word "Bush" and suffer very little. However, the righties are behaving more indecently--by an order of magnitude--and I just can't take it anymore. Let's cue Andrew Sullivan, though the numbers are legion:
But I just read the last three pages of posts on the main site, and there's only one even vaguely alluding to the crisis with Hezbollah. That's just plain weird. I know we're not supposed to notice silence on blogs - people are free to ignore all sorts of stories. But the silence can be instructive (hey, I studied with a Straussian).... This would make sense if there were no connections between Hezbollah and Iran and Iraq. Are lefties unable to grapple with complex regional wars? Nah. They're just wimping out.To recap: the righties, who used 9/11 as an excuse to practice a little masturbatory fantasy and invade Iraq, now criticize the left for being silent on the obvious--and predicted--results of this steaming pile of arrogance and stupidity. The implication is obvious: lefty haters of America love to see Muslim terrorists blow up Jews, particularly when it makes Bush's invasion look like a steaming pile of lies, arrogance, and stupidity. Due to our love of radical terrorism and our hate of America, we can't really bring ourselves to sell out our terrorist champions.
Yeah? Well fuck you and the Hummer you rode in on. No one on the left celebrates the loss of life. We just can't as easily inure ourselves to the deaths of Lebanese innocents and find moral clarity in all of this. The terrorists of Hezbollah are despicable. Nothing excuses their actions, yet reasonable people understand them. The Israeli carpet-bombing of Beirut is despicable. Nothing excuses their actions, yet reasonable people understand them.
Lefties watch, aghast, as events play out. We are mute because, having been sidelined for so long, we are in no position to offer clarifying advice now. Would it have been nice if Pinhead George had called Ehud Olmert and, as his father once did, ask that Israel keep its powder dry while the world came to quick and consensual agreement? Yes. Would it have been nice if George had been engaged in Israel over the past five years? Would we have loved to see a robustly rehabilitated Afghanistan, not a decimated Iraq, form the democratic bulwark upon which peace in the Muslim world might possibly have risen? Would we have appreciated a White House that engaged Iran, rather than call it names and set up a homicidal nut to become President? Yes, yes, yes. But we weren't consulted. We were told that anything short of full agreement with the lies, arrogance, and stupidity of the Bush administration were tantamount to treason.
So to anyone who asserts that our silence amounts to nothing more than further proof of our treason, you can kiss my sweet liberal ass. You're the rat bastards who got us here, you tell us how you're gonna get us out of it.