krebscycle

Glenn Greenwald led me to this ridiculous bit of moral preening on the death of Osama bin Ladin.

Well, what you feel is your business and what I feel is mine, and now he is dead and the question is only what kind of a country we want to rebuild in the wake of his death. For now I can only observe: we live in the kind of country where so many say “hey, just this once, don’t question the government, don’t ask questions, just go along.” We live in the kind of country where someone as powerful as John Kerry commands us to shut up and move on for the good of the motherland. We live in the kind of country where countless random Twitter users attack Glenn Greenwald for keeping his convictions about civil liberties and the rule of law (for being principled), as loudly as they celebrated him when the president he criticized was on the other team. You can like these realities or you can dislike them or you can be indifferent towards them, and you can work as your conscience dictates.

Well, maybe Mr. de Boer lives elsewhere, but I live in a country where the so-called and self-proclaimed “left” thinks of solidarity and political effectiveness as creepy intrusions on their new-car-smelling and unused intellectual independence and conflates moral purity with irresponsibility and retreat into privilege. Here we are, 2 years from freeing the most powerful office in the world from a crew that still loudly proclaims torture to be a virtue, that spread war and devastation worldwide and that plunged hundreds of millions into poverty, and the “left intellectuals” who bless us with their counsel are mostly concerned with demonstrating their pursed lipped disapproval of anything that smacks of effective politics. The moral stain that we are supposed to fear the most is not that Dick Cheney’s vampiric allies will grasp the levers of power once again on our watch, but that, God forbid, anyone  could possibly forget for a moment that our left intellectuals condemn of the use of power for anything.

The Republicans in Florida have just passed laws that successfully intimidated the League of Women Voters into dropping voter registration efforts and yet the piercing moral crisis that our Left Intellectuals seize upon is the correct level of disdain to show for the US military effort that killed Osama bin Ladin. Persisting despite a Gulag level of repression in which  “so many say ‘hey, just this once, don’t question the government, don’t ask questions, just go along’”, our courageous left intellectuals need us to know that they have qualms! Why even John Kerry has told them to shut up and move on from their tedious speculations about what sequence of events led US soldiers to shoot a religious psychopath holed up in an armed compound down the street from a Pakistani military base. Yet, like, the Russian Intellectuals who defied Stalin or the SNCC students who defied the Klan, our Left Intellectuals continue to blog post, undaunted, and unbowed and unending.

It’s not Greenwald’s self-proclaimed principles that many of us find irritating, it’s his duplicitous argumentation and his morally indefensible claim (embraced by Mr. de Boer) that President Obama is so compromised that the Just must wash hands and walk away, leaving the Deluded and so on to their doom. Here’s a great example of how Greenwald argues.

Beyond that, the formal position of the Democratic Party for years – since John Kerry enunciated it when running against Bush – has been that Terrorism should be primarily dealt with within a law enforcement rather than war paradigm, and that Terrorists should be viewed as criminals, not warriors; and yet many of the same people who once rejected the war paradigm now turn around and cite war theories to justify bin Laden’s killing as a “proper military target”

Despite the impression that Greenwald seeks to give here,  Kerry never ever suggested that military strikes against Al Queda were inappropriate and if you pay very close attention you can see that Glenn has put in a “primarily” to give himself an out. The cite leads to a George Will (!) article in which we read

During the 2004 presidential campaign, Sen. John Kerry received much derision for his belief (as expressed in a Jan. 29 debate in South Carolina) that although the war on terror will be “occasionally military,” it is “primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world.”

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11123/1143578-109-0.stm#ixzz1Lstw9gJN

So we see Kerry was certainly not rejecting use of military force – and when we look at the debate transcript itself which involved a critique of Bush’s war in Iraq we see that Kerry offered zero support for Greenwald’s claim at all. Here is what precedes the line Will quotes.

BROKAW: Where has the exaggeration been in the threat on terrorism?

KERRY: Well, 45 minutes deployment of weapons of mass destruction, number one.

Aerial vehicles to be able to deliver materials of mass destruction, number two.

I mean, I – nuclear weapons, number three.

I could run a long list of clear misleading, clear exaggeration. The linkage to Al Qaida, number four.

That said, they are really misleading all of America, Tom, in a profound way. The war on terror is less – it is occasionally military, and it will be, and it will continue to be for a long time. And we will need the best-trained and the most well-equipped and the most capable military, such as we have today.

But it’s primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world – the very thing this administration is worst at

There is, of course, absolutely no contradiction between opposing large scale wars fought on grounds that are false and supporting Special Forces attacks on the leader of AQ. What Kerry argued was that invading Iraq did not advance the nation’s struggle against terrorism. He did not at any point claim that military strikes on AQ camps were wrong, in fact he specifically said that would “continue to be [military] for a long time”. In the same campaign

In a satellite interview with Milwaukee TV station WISN, Kerry said, “I regret that when George Bush had the opportunity in Afghanistan at Tora Bora, he didn’t choose to use American forces to hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden.” http://articles.cnn.com/2004-10-29/politics/kerry.friday_1_tora-bora-bin-terrorist-mastermind?_s=PM:ALLPOLITICS

Does that sound like a directive that “Terrorists should be viewed as criminals, not warriors”? No wonder Senator Kerry was impelled to send a sharp “shut up” to people who involved him in their stupid games.

And I’m just going to quote Mr. de Boer’s last words because they are so precious.

But sell your fucking purity tests somewhere else. You cheered bin Laden’s death in between twiddling with your Dominoes app and remembering to Tivo America’s Next Great Fry Cook. I have no interest in public celebration, yours, mine, or anyone else’s.

Footnote:

[1] No disrespect to hippies.