[Today’s run: rest day]
I frequently go to the Atlantic Monthly website and check out what Megan McArdle has to say. She is one of the most stable and thoughtful people blogging today. Let me say that up front.
And today, like some days, I wandered around a bit. I saw that James Fallows was all aflutter about the recent Doonesbury comic strip.
The author of Doonesbury, Gary Trudeau, interjects himself into the scene as, of all things, a “conservative” college lecturer. And makes the assertion that the war in Iraq was “the biggest foreign policy disaster in U.S. history”.
Now, people know that I like to exaggerate sometimes, for literary effect and all that. But Fallows is on that statement as if it were gospel. Woah. Here’s a guy who worked in the Carter Administration. Did he sleep through the Iranian Hostage Crisis? He never heard of the Vietnam War (10 times the casualties, our allies caught in a lurch when we didn’t fulfill our obligations, a brutal communist regime, “boat people”)? Or maybe he never heard of the Bay of Pigs?
The other part of Trudeau’s strip that Fallows seems to enjoy is the erroneous statement that no one in the Bush Administration has “taken responsibility” for the war. How many books have we had out already from those in the former government telling about how they made the decisions they made?
I have my own opinion about the Iraq war and I won’t bore you with that. I don’t have any special information or insight, so better to go read someone who knows something. But I will say that I find it both calming and distressing how the Bush Administration’s actions have been distorted from the very beginning. I don’t think they did everything right. But they have been fairly obvious. People like Trudeau and Fallows are the type to get all misty-eyed about JFK who, along with Johnson, made a much bigger mess, with less justification, for much less gain. That is distressing because it would be nice to have some agreement on the obvious facts. It is calming because it is so predictable.
And the real clincher is that both Trudeau and Fallows are “big government” liberals. They hate the heavy hand of government that makes faulty decisions and sends soldiers off to war. But when it comes to healthcare policy, “please sir, can I have another?” I’ve never understood exactly where this government infallibility effect is supposed to kick in. Is it only on “humanitarian” issues like clean air or preschools or telling Christian pharmacists that they must sell abortion drugs to pre-teens?
Some of the people in our country really don’t seem to have much common sense. They have no memory and seemingly no understanding of human nature. Unfortunately, they are the ones currently in power and hungry for more power.