McCain’s problem is that his party is unfit to govern. As research from the Republican pollster David Winston has shown, any policy becomes less popular when people learn that Republicans are supporting it. If the G.O.P. sponsored the sunrise, voters would prefer gloom. Many Republicans are under the illusion that they are in trouble because they’ve betrayed their core principles. The sad truth is that if they’d been more conservative, they’d be even further behind.
All true. But a liberal didn’t write it. David Brooks did.
Urk. This is yet another example of Brooks seeming to be even-handed and honest, of appearing to be reasonable and even disinterested when, actually… it’s a trap!
A well-disguised trap. Here’s the hint that Brooks is still a fargin bastich:
Voters agree with Obama’s original position on Iraq, but according to the Pew Research Center, they trust McCain more to handle the issue.
Ok, that’s not much to go on but consider: Brooks is one of those “National Greatness” neoconmen. Like Teh Kristolmethodists, Teh Pod People, David Frum Canadia, and, yes, like John McCain[1], Brooks is quite willing to be flexible when it comes to domestic — and, especially, economic — policy because he’s an opportunist. It’s all negotiable; go to where the votes are. But what’s non-negotiable and what trumps all other causes is the War on China Eurasia Terra, the prosecution of which is the main thing that makes America “great”.
Frum, in a POS column published the day before Brooks’s (but across the pond), under the headline “Republicans need to start offering answers,” is more explicit:
If the 2008 presidential election were all about Iraq, John McCain would win.
According to the authoritative Pew poll, Americans have become steadily more optimistic about Iraq over the past 15 months. Almost one-half the American public now thinks the Iraq war is going “very” or “fairly” well – up 18 points since before the surge.
The public is now evenly divided between those who want to maintain the commitment to Iraq and those who want to begin winding it down – an 11 point shift. Only 14 per cent of Americans want an immediate withdrawal from Iraq.
The rest of the column is also like Brooks’s, only with bolder lies and more transparently insincere sympathy with the middle class’s pain [it would be a good column for Brad DeLong to demolish if he could ever stop being a huge jackass]. As for the public’s attitude to the war: well, they hate it. Also, you can’t expect neoconmen to rationally appraise anyone’s opinion of their Precious. Still, the weird poll numbers they cite do reflect something troubling to decent people but comforting to sociopathic neoconmen: the persisting susceptibility of the public to fear-mongering and demagoguery.
Why do neoconmen want perpetual war so much (aside from the psychological dividends it pays these sickfucks personally)? There are many reasons, from short-term electoral ones to long-term economic designs[2] but the most important undergirds the whole wingnut kulturkampf: Neoconmen hate Americans, they see us as soft, decadent, unpatriotic, impious, anarchic. War, they think (and not without reason), will rectify these faults and make Americans into a more perfect people. So long as there’s war and a plausible boogeyman (beware, Teh Muslim is lurking under your bed, just waiting for you to tire of the long vigil so that he may throw acid in your wife’s face, shoot your dog, ban pork chops, park camels in your garage, and suicide bomb your children’s school bus!), Americans will fear. And as long as Americans fear, they are extremely pliable to the manipulations of the rightwing which always sees itself as the “loyal party.” Inculcate fear, then aggression and paranoia are sure to follow (which, in turn, nicely reinforces pro-war sentiment which begets more fear, etc.) until, hopefully, a critical mass of batshit insanity is achieved. The endgame, of course, is the militarization of society, in which a cowed people embrace the most cornball-yet-Satanic 1950s bourgeois-McCarthyite values. Thus, neoconmen will accept, if they must, a return of Eisenhowerian tax rates, “big government,” etc., as long as it means they get to keep their new Cold War. Fuck the Iraqis’ lives[3], it’s the American people’s character they’re trying to “save;” and it’s John “Permanent Occupation” McCain who’s mostly likely to deliver the desired result.
Notes:
[1] Cootie alert, factor bazillion. But Yggie the Stooge is right here even if it’s many years too late not to mention ripping-off arguments by far more prescient and decent people.
[2] Every dollar spent on a bomb is a dollar not spent on, say, food stamps. Plus interest.
[3] Brent Scowcroft: “I don’t think [Richard] Perle gives a shit about democracy. Fundamentally, it’s all a means to an end.” [As quoted in Prince of Darkness: Richard Perle, by Alan Weisman]
