Surprise! Fighting imperial wars in a democracy is very difficult. What to do?
The Man in the Grey Turtleneck has, once again, conferred the coveted honor of Wanker
of the day on David Ignatius. And how well-earned! However, there's an aspect to the column that has been insufficiently highlighted:
But we go to war with the democracy we've got ...
Future military planners will have to recognize that American democracy, in which political mandates must be renewed in two-year increments, makes us uniquely unsuited to fight protracted counterinsurgency wars. Petraeus likes to observe that it takes, on average, at least nine years to prevail in such a war. If that measure is correct, Petraeus must know there is little chance that a frustrated and angry American public will grant him enough time for success. So [?] the question is: How to extricate ourselves in a way that minimizes the damage to the United States, its allies and Iraq?
Except, that's not the question that Ignatius, a fully paid up member of the Court at Versailles on the Potomac, is really asking, is it?
The question Ignatius really wants to ask is this:
How can we get rid of that pesky election cycle so we can pursue our imperial wars without accountability?
Of course, since Ignatius is a weinie-chomping, teabagging Beltway insider, he's sniffing around the question, either not daring to ask it, or in denial about the consequences of his words.
Broder feels the same way:
A particularly virulent strain of populism has made official Washington altogether too responsive to public opinion.
In today's Washington, the "wants" of people count far more heavily than the nation's needs.
Yeah, right. I think it's a great idea to let Broder and Ignatius help the Wise Men, and Teh Serious, and Our Betters, and the Conservative movement figure out what the nation needs. Er, hasn't that been exactly what's been happening over the last eight years?
WHIG slut Hoagland says the same thing. I mean, do these people all go to the same parties, or something?
But deeply polarized nations that devote an inordinate amount of their time and energy to hunting and prosecuting both real villains and convenient scapegoats -- at the expense of failing to recognize and respect heroes and helpers of the common good -- do pay an enormous collective price. Such nations descend into easily manipulated despair and resentment that inevitably lead to ever greater destruction*. Americans would do well to ponder that in a summer of doubt and division.
Translation: It's bad when democracies hold elected officials accountable for disasters. (Hoagland: "Inordinate amount of their time and energy....") It's bad when citizens start writing their own content and becoming activists (Hoagland: ".. easily manipulated despair....") It's bad when people care passionately about politics and have (gasp) disagreements (Hoagland: "... doubt and division.")
Versailles stank because the courtiers pissed in the corners. Today's Beltway stinks, and for much the same reason. Broder, Ignatius, and Hoagland--although paper-trained--are stinking up the place. And it's not even their place.
NOTE ** Jeebus, Jim, where were you when Limbaugh took over the airwaves and the VRWC took over the press? Clutching your pearls in the powder room?
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Q. How do you get the media to stop acting like courtiers?
A. Elect a Democratic president.
Suddenly the clouds will part, and accountability will be all the rage again. No offense will be too small, including firing people from the White House travel office -- clearly a bigger scandal than using the DOJ to harass candidates from the opposition party, spying on the entire populace, abandoning a major American city, and starting a war on fraudulent pretenses.
Media Myopia so outrageous maybe direct action is in order?
As to Ignatius, I rather doubt that he really means to question the holding of elections as scheduled constitutionally, even in his dreams. What I think he's hinting at because he's too much the wimp to bellow it, has to do with the Democratic Congress holding all those hearings looking into stuff that makes bipartisanship difficult.
That none of these bastards had a word to say about six years of congressional oversight, starting when the Repubs started owning congress in 1994, which took the form of irresponsible use of congressional power to make it impossible for a duly-twice-elected president to actually govern says all you need to know about the beltway courtiers.
I'm beginning to think that some kind of direct action, picketing these outlets, not to keep people from going to work, but to attract the attention of passerbyes to the work of Media Matters perhaps, or when there is a particularly odious attack on Democrats, or bloggers, or, for instance, in defense of Social Security, which these overpaid creeps clearly think the rest of us should be weaned from...it's the kind of thing that the left used to be good at...thinking of fun ways to catch people's attention to get some new information to them...I think that might do more good than large anti-war demonstrations seem to do these days, in part, because the media coverage of same is so wan; the attitudes of big media in the sixties and seventies was pretty much the same as now, especially about anti-Vietnam war protests...you should read the Washington Post and the NYTimes editorials about the huge protests at the Pentagon, for instance; the courtiers acted like it was the storming of the Bastille, with all the attendant horror of the French revolution that followed, if not the attack on the Winter Palace of the Tsar...
I want to be clear; Ignatius hostility to accountability by congressional oversight is every bit as much a negative as if he were secretly hoping for the 2008 elections to be canceled; worse, in fact; such a position would be immediately shocking and attacked forthwith; casting doubts on the need for ordinary Americans to know what their government is damn well doing is much less likely to arouse suspicions, accept from those who are paying close attention, that it arises from an equally as undemocratic impulse...