Swing Yr Fiery Sword

Lincoln, Karl Lindtvedt, 2007 (courtesy Dust Congress)

Josh Marshall posted an interesting little polemic over on Talking Points Memo the other day that I am going to re-post in full:

(June 18, 2007 -- 02:32 PM EDT)

Thinking back over the blather last week over Sen. Reid's (D-NV) comments about Gen. Pace, it's quite astonishing that the White House could with a straight face attack Reid for questioning Pace's competence only day's after they'd fired him. Think about that. The White House fires Pace as part of its many-month effort to sack everyone from the Rumsfeld era at the Pentagon. And Reid is in hot water for questioning the man's abilities?

But setting aside abilities, politicians can criticize generals. That is after all the very nature of our political system. And it is a symptom of the deeply decayed and desperate state of the Iraq War debate that this is even a question. We are now far past the point of supporting the troops in their mission, ensuring that they are properly armed and protected, or anything else tied to respecting and honoring the overwhelmingly very young men and women who are paying with risk to their lives for the decisions we collectively make here at home.

Now apparently even criticism of the policy/strategy level command in Washington (this is after all what the JCS are) is beyond the pale, a sign of denigration of the military itself.

We can say whatever we want about double standards, that Sen. McCain (R-AZ) said even more to the face of the then-actual commander of American forces in Iraq (Gen. Casey) not long ago. But that's just a partisan distraction.

The real issue here is shaking ourselves loose from the degradation of our own civic and republican collective character that the war has brought us. Some principles are clear and worth repeating: You can't have a war for democracy fought by people whose principles are authoritarian and anti-democratic. It's not a throwaway line or a barb. It's the only pivot around which to understand the Bush years.

A few days ago, Andrew Sullivan linked to this rancid post by Glenn Reynolds previewing the coming claims that the war was sabotaged by the critics of the war who had more or less no power whatsoever during the entire prosecution of it.

But Reynolds' post and all his prefab reader emails should put us on notice that the architects of this and its dead-ender supports plan to lie their way out of this war just as they lied their way into it -- now whipping up a dust storm of rationalizations for their failures, imbecilities and lies much as the original entry into the conflict was floated on phoney claims about weapons of mass destruction and nonexistent ties between the past Iraqi regime and al Qaeda.

The only antidote to the advance of this sort of authoritarian mentality and strategy of organized lying that it is inevitably built on is the truth. Not that we can know the truth ourselves with any confidence or consistency. But we can take stock of the facts of the case as honestly as we can and speak them frankly. And that means breaking out of, ignoring, as many rhetorical bait and switch games as possible.

-- Josh Marshall

Now, I don't often stray too deep into politics on this blog, but this kind of got my hackles up. The most disappointing thing about the last six years, I'm sad to admit, is that the belief that I secretly, and I suppose, naively harbor, that some echelon of society, specifically, of powerful people, are still principled, and by principled, I mean in the old ways - adhering to truth, decency, equanimity - to high-minded, but universal ideals. The shock of the last six years is not that there is a cadre of powerful people adhering to a set of principles opposed to mine, or that powerful people can be arrogant, delusional, deceitful, or any such thing. It's rather the willingness of others to stand by this happens, particularly when nothing much is at stake but their own integrity (I'm talking mostly about senior Senate Republicans, I guess, who, as much as I politically disagree with them, occupy a bit of fantasy, where they are supposed to be the high-minded old gray hairs - conservatives in the sense of traditionalists...)

So it goes, I guess...