License to kill?

Jonah Goldberg, noting a common double standard, observed something too often forgotten -- that the MSM's portrayal of a war as "good" or "bad" depends on who's running it:

I'm not saying there are no good arguments against the war. I am saying that many of you don't care about the war. If Bill Clinton or Al Gore had conducted this war, you would be weeping joyously about Iraqi children going to school and women registering to vote. If this war had been successful rather than hard, John Kerry would be boasting today about how he supported it — much as he did every time it looked like the polls were moving in that direction. You may have forgotten Kerry's anti-Dean gloating when Saddam was captured, but many of us haven't. He would be saying the lack of WMDs are irrelevant and that Bush's lies were mistakes. And that's the point. I don't care if you hate George W. Bush; it's not like I love the guy. And I don't care if you opposed the war from day one. What disgusts me are those people who say toppling Saddam and fighting the terror war on their turf rather than ours is a mistake, not because these are bad ideas, but merely because your vanity cannot tolerate the notion that George W. Bush is right or that George W. Bush's rightness might cost John Kerry the election.
I want to discuss something that hasn't gotten much play: whether a John Kerry presidency might (because of political realities) result in a war conducted without the type of restraint characterizing the war so far.

Under this alternate reality scenario, two things might happen:

  • 1. Kerry would be forced to overcompensate for his perception as a peacenik -- and the best way to do this would be a full reactivation of his well-known dark side -- that evil "Ghenghis Khan" past which he claims to have renounced. Nicely symmetrical -- even plausible!
  • 2. Because of the honeymoon generally accorded new presidents (as well as the fact that the MSM are already enormously biased in his favor), Kerry would in fact have a license to kill, to bomb, to lay waste, even (dare I say it?) to go Roman, against enemies like Zarqawi, al Sadr, bin Laden, etc.
  • Lest anyone be put at ease by Kerry the NeoHawk, I also see a much more ominous dark side which could created by the same hypothetical factual scenario. As I have argued before, because another major terrorist attack is likely in the next five years, these same factors (overcompensation plus license from the MSM) would not bode well for civil liberties.

    Hell, I think it's worth repeating what I said in April:

    ....I am less concerned with campaign promises than the practical dynamics of politics. A classic illustration of such dynamics was Nixon's rapprochement with China. Such a thing would have been impossible for a Democrat, because of the "soft-on-Communism" charge. But for Nixon, no problem. Ditto, Clinton's welfare reform, and other instances of his counterintuitive "triangulation."

    I think if Kerry were president during another major terrorist attack, similar dynamics, by making him fear a "soft-on-terrorism" charge, might well cause him to jettison the civil liberties sensitivities he likes to voice. (Contrast his present qualms with the Patriot Act with the fact that he had no problem voting for it in 2001 -- when he was far from being president.)

    With Kerry as president, Republicans would be unlikely to serve as voices of restraint or moderation on the terrorist issue that the Democrats would be expected to be if Bush continues as president. (Most likely, Republicans would be thinking ahead to 2008 and watching Kerry for any sign of weakness or softness, because that's how politics works.)

    Bush, however, in addition to the ACLU wing of the Democratic Pary, would have to contend with disgruntled Republican libertarians as well as paranoid right-wing anti-globalists in his own party.

    Would freedom's chances for bare survival would be better under Bush? My Machiavellian side suspects they would, counterintuitive as this sounds. I may be wrong, but the election's a log way off. Hopefully, so is another September 11.

    And I haven't even touched on Second Amendment freedoms. (It wouldn't take much imagination, though....)

    The October 2004 Reason magazine confirms and heightens my suspicion, noting that in the 1990s Kerry and the dread John Ashcroft were on opposite sides of the civil liberties debate. Ashcroft supported electronic freedom, while Kerry opposed it, instead supporting the Orwellian Clipper Chip. Kerry's words:
    Responding directly to a column in Wired on encryption that said "trusting the government with your privacy is like having a Peeping Tom install your window blinds," Kerry invoked the Americans killed in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. "[O]ne would be hard-pressed," he wrote, "to find a single grieving relative of those killed in the bombings of the World Trade Center in New York or the federal building in Oklahoma City who would not have gladly sacrificed a measure of personal privacy if it could have saved a loved one."

    Change a few words, and the passage could easily fit into Attorney General Ashcroft’s infamous speech to the Senate Judiciary Committee in late 2001 -- the one where he declared, "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberties, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists -- for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve."

    Here here! Who better than a liberal to get the job done right and put this libertarian nonsense behind us for once and for all?

    I am beginning to understand why Hillary Clinton was described in 2021 as "the most uncompromising wartime president in the history of the United States."

    I hate alternate reality!

    UPDATE: Please read my update to this post.

    posted by Eric on 10.15.04 at 10:00 AM





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    » CARNIVAL OF THE VANITIES, EPISODE #109 from The People's Republic of Seabrook
    Once upon a time, in a land far, far away…uh, wait, wrong story…. It was a dark and stormy night…no, that’s not it, either…. Slowly, gently, with a touch that belied her barely-restrained passion…her gentle fingers,... [Read More]
    Tracked on October 20, 2004 01:45 AM



    Comments

    It is easy to forget now that Bill Clinton was roundly attacked by labor groups on account of NAFTA, by gay and Lesbian groups for DOMA and "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and by anti-war groups for his bombardment of Yugoslavia. He was way to the right of traditional Democratic constituencies and Sen. Clinton is believed to be more Conservative still.

    I do think that the risk is there for civil liberties to be eroded under a Democratic president, partly because groups like the ACLU could be lulled into a false sense of security and not aggressively pursue counter-action on behalf of these rights in the same way that they would with a Republican administration.

    Whoever is the next president, it will be the responsibility of both the left and the right to be vigilant on these matters.

    bink   ·  October 15, 2004 10:47 AM

    Extremely interesting analysis. A number of Objectivists, including Leonard Peikoff himself, have made the case that Bush must not be re-elected precisely because, while he is perceived by most to be a hawk, he is really an appeasing dove, cooing about "the Religion of Peace", and that if this continues, the majority of the American people will not even be able to _recognize_ a real hawk, since they think Bush is one. As you say, we might be able to force Kerry to take a stronger stand against Islam's terrorists than Bush has, precisely because if he doesn't, people will condemn him for being soft and weak.

    On the other side, if Kerry wins, the ACLU and others may let down their guard when he infringes on individual liberties, particularly gun rights but also free speech and privacy. During the Clinton administration, I spent eight years listening to Democrats defending everything he did as " anecessary compromise". He instituted "don't ask, don't tell" in the military, the DOMA, and, worst of all, he and his Attorney General pushed for censorship of all sexually-arousing imagery on the Internet. Fortunately, the Supreme Court struck that one down as un-Constitutional, but the President himself had sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution.

    If Kerry is elected, I can picture with ease him signing the worst kinds of anti-homosexual legislation, possibly including an FMA or even a Federal Anti-Sodomy Amendment, and the Democrats, including supposedly pro-homosexual organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign, justifying it all as "a necessary compromise" because other issues, i.e., the Democrats' welfare-state economic agenda, are supposedly "more important".

    Thank you both! I don't claim to be right; only to try to think, and encourage others to do the same. It's very gratifying to see people thinking, and it really doesn't matter whether we agree. Besides, no one knows what will happen; before 9/11 my libertarianism hadn't really been challenged as it has.

    Eric Scheie   ·  October 16, 2004 11:20 PM


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