Compassionate Warmongering

I've been pondering about Mr. Bush recently. I've observed in myself a drawing away from him -- something that is very unlike me. It isn't the war. I'm for the war. Kill them all. The bad guys, I mean, not the innocent. We have to be careful, because God's not going to sort them out. They're all going to hell. Moslem, you see. Moslems all go to hell. Those 72 virgins in Moslem paradise? They're all seven foot tall sumo wrestlers, and when the martyr gets there, they smile and pull out their beefy penises. It's their paradise, not his. Let's see -- seventy-two burly Japanese virgins ... why, that gives each of them exactly 20 minutes every day, to work on the boy. Allah sure knows his math. But pardon this theological digression. We were discussing Bush.

I'm a little disappointed. He seems to have been serious about that campaign slogan, Compassionate Conservatism. Well, the compassion part, anyway. Compassion for the drug companies and that huge new government medical entitlement a while back. I'm a bit vague on the details. Compassion for illegal aliens. It just doesn't strike me as conservative. At all. But we should have known. He did say during the campaign that he wanted to regularize the illegals. And it does seem that he likes to do what he says he'll do. It's disappointing though. We expected a conservative.

But politics is about disappointment. Even when we get what we think we want, it's government. That means inefficient and bureaucratic. What isn't, though. Not a matter of life and death. Hardly ever.

But the war. The war. It's disappointing that the American people have learned nothing from the cowardice and betrayal of the pols of the Vietnam era. Cut and run worked out to 30 plus years of totalitarianism, in that case. And a poisoning of the American psyche. Well, who doesn't have a poisoned psyche? I do. Must we do it again, though? It's a disappointment to me. If it's not the Torchbearer of Liberty, then America is nothing, nothing but another rich country. A nation of shopkeepers -- or since we're becoming French, I should say une nation de boutiquiers.

It was Bush's job not just to conduct the war successfully, which he finally seems to be doing, if perhaps too late. It was his job to lead American opinion to support and to continue to support the effort. He himself is not an eloquent man. But he has speech writers, and he has a staff, and he had a Congress full of people in love with the sound of their own voices. He should have caused to be organized a counterbalancing campaign, against the flaccid anti-liberty media that blows with the wind but always leans to the left. Leaders need to lead. To lead means to be followed. By this criteria, Bush has utterly failed.

If we tweak the definition, and emphasis not polls and vacillating opinions, but rather the reaching of goals, then as is clear to everyone, Bush's fate depends on success in Iraq. His fate. His fate. Our fate. The world can descend into chaos. There have been Hundred Years' Wars before. The Seventy-five Years' War of the last century, from 1914 to 1989, was a model of irenic stability compared to what might come. This is what's important. I like Bush as a personality. I will damn him to hell if he allows the undertaking of the past years to falter and fail because he could not summon the wherewithal to finish what he started. We do not need another Vietnam.

Vietnam, as almost everyone needs to be informed, does not stand for an unpopular and unwinnable quagmire. It stands for a failure of will in a matter of dire importance. My middle age may be polluted with the same poison that my youth was, of public, national disloyalty and savage unpatriotism. Antipatriatism, not in a stupid chauvinist jingoism sense, but as a considered and systematic undermining of the long-term greater good. If Iraq is a reiterating second act to the horrid seventies, then I am certain there will be a third act, that defines our era as a tragedy. Tragedies are like comedies, only everyone's unhappy and the heroes end up dead. You know, like if we give up in Iraq.

Well then. Bush isn't much of a speaker. Not much of an actor either. Not much of a director. But he is the author of the play. Let's hope he's a genius. I don't know. Could be. I am, and nobody's ever heard of me. There are two uber-important issues facing America. Bush is an idiot on one of them. Illegal immigration. But we knew that coming in. We can overlook the immorality of his position, if only he'll get the really super-dooper thing right.

No blood for oil? Oil is important, and it's not unfitting that blood should be spilled for it. That's not what this is about. This is about a coming Thousand Year Reich of antinomian chaos and sharia law. How many world wars do we have to fight, before we get it right? This is the fourth. If we lose it, there may be others, but there will be no "we" to fight it. It will be between the Shiites and the Sunnis.

Yeah, I'm no prophet. I'm just sitting here almost naked typing whatever comes into my head. I hope to God that's not what Bush has been doing. If so, I hope Paradise finds 72 obese asiatics eagerly anticipating his arrival.


J