William Norman Grigg, Senior Editor, The New American
21-Nov-2005
As is always the case with totalitarian movements, the War Party is led and defended by individuals who are hardly slaves to intellectual or ethical consistency.
Vice President Dick Cheney used another speech in front of a neo-“conservative” group – in this case, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) – to reiterate his claim that it is “reprehensible” to accuse President Bush (or anybody else in his administration) of deceiving our country into war.
Jonah Goldberg of National Review, who once enjoyed a sinecure at AEI, either didn’t get his copy of the script, or was given leeway to improvise an interesting variation on the Bush administration’s defense strategy. While Bush, Cheney, and other administration officials stolidly proclaim their honesty, Goldberg offers a high school debate washout’s version of Plato’s “needful falsehood” defense: Bush, like FDR, had to lie us into war for our own good.
“What if Bush did lie, big time?” mused Goldberg in his syndicated column for November 17. “What, exactly, would that mean?” For Bush’s critics, both “serious and moonbat like,” this would mean Bush is “a criminal warmonger, a failed president, and – most certainly – impeachment fodder.”
But wait! This can’t be true, continues Goldberg, since the sainted FDR, who is placed just beneath Lincoln in the neo-“conservative” pantheon, did exactly the same thing to embroil the U.S. in World War II, aka the Holy Crusade to Defend the Soviet Union (from its slightly less murderous totalitarian sibling.)
A digression is necessary here.
Between September 1939 and June 1941, Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia were co-aggressors; Stalin and Hitler were co-architects of the Holocaust, which was largely the outgrowth of the Soviet-Nazi gang-rape of Poland. By the time Hitler’s machinery of mass liquidation was in full operation, Stalin had already annihilated at least ten million people through engineered famine in Ukraine. (Although the prestige press, led by the New York Times and its Pulitzer Prize winning Soviet apologist Walter Duranty, sought to suppress the facts about the Ukrainian terror famine, a coalition of Ukrainian and Jewish groups held several large protest rallies to raise public awareness of the ongoing slaughter.)
The state Stalin inherited from Lenin had devised and perfected the methods of political mass murder used by the German National Socialists to slaughter Jews and others targeted for extinction.
In 1940, millions of Americans recognized that the USSR and Nazi Germany were morally identical aggressor nations, and had no appetite to leap to the defense of either power when Hitler double-crossed his senior partner in the totalitarian Axis in June 1941. This was principled and patriotic neutrality, not cowardice or indifference to human suffering.
FDR and his Soviet-aligned “Brain Trust” were vividly aware that they had no constituency for war in 1940, and – outside the ranks of the American Communist Party – this didn’t change when Hitler invaded Soviet Russia in June 1941. FDR tried mightily to engineer an incident with Germany that would have justified a war, but Hitler, who was myriad loathsome and despicable things, was no fool. Thus it was, shall we say, fortuitous for FDR and his cohorts when the Pearl Harbor attack opened the back door to war. That attack was an equally welcome development for the Soviet Union, which began the war as an aggressor and at war’s end had consummated all of its aggressive designs.
In seeking a third term in office (thus tacitly claiming a status greater than Washington, whose informal two-term limit had been followed by his successors until 1940) FDR blatantly and unabashedly lied about his intention to embroil our nation in the war – a fact Jonah Goldberg celebrates in his defense of Bush’s cognate dishonesty:
“Roosevelt won his unprecedented third election on the vow that he wouldn’t send American boys to war: `While I am talking to you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance. I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.’ This was almost surely a lie.”
“Does this make FDR a bad president?” continues Goldberg’s theodicy on behalf of the divine office of War President. “No. While I have my problems with FDR, most historians are right to be forgiving of deceit in a just cause. World War II needed to be fought, and FDR saw this sooner than others.”
“The Bush Doctrine is not chiefly about [Weapons of Mass Destruction] and never was,” Goldberg concludes. “Like FDR’s vision, it balances democracy, security and morality”. If Bush succeeds – still a big if – the painful irony for Bush’s critics is that he will go down in history as a great president, even if he lied, while they will take their paranoia to their graves.
Didya catch that? Even if Bush’s lies are irrefutably documented, his critics would still be guilty of “paranoia” presumably for disputing the Dear Leader’s Greatness and Vision.
So the Cheney position is that it’s reprehensible to accuse Bush of lying, and the Goldberg variation holds that it’s reprehensible to object to Bush’s lies.
And these are the folks who like to lecture us about the need for “moral clarity”.
Source: http://www.thenewamerican.com/artman/publish/article_2662.shtml
