Beautiful Sore Losers
Jonah Goldberg's new column is about Moran and his fellow conspiracy-theorists:
that's why Moran, Buchanan, Matthews, Novak Ñ and more leftists than I can count Ñ should be ashamed. They've lost an argument. They lost it on the merits and they don't like it. In their arrogance or bitterness, they assume they couldn't have lost the fight fairly, and so they look for whispering neocons and clever Jews (or, in other contexts, nefarious oil traders). This is an ugly, ugly way to argue because it forces the opposition to prove a negative and it questions the patriotism of people who've never said an unpatriotic thing. In short, they are sore losers, and the farthest thing from beautiful.
The "argument" he's talking about is the one over whether Saddam Hussein should be deposed. But have "they", in fact, lost this argument? On points, they have, certainly. Long ago. But Saddam's still in power. Axis-funded terror campaigns continue apace. The danger of a future WMD-fortified attack on the West still looms, as yet unchallenged.
Meanwhile, our president is still on the phone pleading for Angola's permission (the wizard having unaccountably granted the gift of Courage to Mr. Blair instead.) I'm sure if he could figure out a way to duck out of the whole mess, he would jump on it. It's not just stubborn journalists with their own agendas who wish he would: the mass populations of entire nations, their leaders no less stubborn, no more agenda-free, share Buchanan's dream that he will do so; and in such nations, mirabile dictu, there is also a broad tendency to blame the Jews.
That blaming the Jews is wrong, practically as well as morally, is easily demonstrated. The G-file practically writes itself. Despite this rhetoric of desperation, the American public, still reeling from 9/11's trauma and having learned lessons from it that have eluded much of the rest of the world, will by all accounts support action, once their leaders finally get around to it. As they will, no doubt, eventually do. But if the "argument" about Saddam has been settled definitively, I must have missed it. Where's the kaboom?
UPDATE: A reader emails this quote from Andrew Sullivan's blog, which I had somehow missed:
I'm left with the conclusion that we will only get such a consensus in favor of pre-emption after the destruction of a major Western city, or a chemical or biological catastrophe. In this sense, Blair and Bush may simply be ahead of their time. And what they see as the potential threat is so depressing and terrifying that it's perhaps only understandable that the world for a while will wish to look the other way. The truth is and we may as well admit it: we have failed to convince the world, just as Churchill failed to convince the world in the 1930s. And as 9/11 recedes a little, we are even tempted to falter in this dreadful analysis ourselves.Posted by Dr. Frank at March 13, 2003 11:28 AM | TrackBack