Gitmo blues

Each day I anxiously check my email inbox for the latest humorous justification of our president’s daffy policies. Last week I was regaled with an essay by Charlie Daniels explaining that the Guantanamo prison camp should be a source of pride for America.

You can follow this link, but the upshot is that these detainees are “killers and terrorists” who are being “fed well” and obtaining “quality medical care” therefore the “left” should just shut up about the unconstitutionality of the prison camp. He then takes the opportunity to bring up Bill Clinton’s deficiencies as the reason for terrorism in the first place. Daniels finishes his senseless diatribe with a potshot at (almost) all lawyers -- his lawyer, of course, is among the few reasonable ones(!) Mr. Daniels conveniently left out this reference about the International Committee of the Red Cross, whose report last fall documented torture in contradiction to both the Geneva Conventions and the US Constitution.

The essay speaks for itself on the utter inability for Bushies to find rational evidence that the current administration policies are achieving anything in accordance with the stated purpose of this nation. Therefore, they send emotional essays designed to garner support for Mr. Bush’s failing policies, such as his Maoist internment camp. I can understand carefully rationalizing Gitmo on the grounds of national security as a temporary means to an eventual end. But instead, Daniels recklessly tries to make the case that the detainees are “better off” by being incarcerated, with no hesitation at all in abrogating human rights based only on some unknown allegations and wildly implying that Constitutional and human rights can be abridged by the fiat of one man. C’mon, Charlie, you must certainly have heard of Solzhenitsyn and the Soviet Gulag Archipelago and winced at the prospect of the government’s proverbial midnight knock on the door followed by the disappearance of fathers, brothers, uncles and cousins into decades’ long internment with no day in court. As Americans who have lived through the cold war, we must all still remember the disdain with which we greeted such horror stories and a previous US president who referred to it’s perpetrators as the “evil empire.” Are we now sending our own young men and women to fight wars in order to justify similar imprisonment at the hands of our own government? On the one hand, I read such email because it keeps me abreast of what the unwashed masses are percolating through their tiny redneck minds. But frankly, some things I would rather not know; this world is scary enough without Mr. Daniels sharpening the fine point of our national misdirection.

The Bush supporters who send such trash are monolithic in their wanton lack of insight regarding history and the failures of previous empires. If only one could seek the counsel of Caesar Augustus or Winston Churchill on the folly of trying to impose outside government in the Near East. I imagine that the Bush supporters are emboldened by the recent elections in Iraq as proof of the impending success of the president’s experiment in pre-emption and imposed democracy. Any student of history will tell you that we are in the second inning of this game, and their best hitters are just warming up. The resentment and strife caused by US’ heavy-handed support of despots does not go unnoticed among the masses in that part of the world. I would recommend the reading of Thucydides’ classic The Peloponnesian Wars (or at least review the Cliff’s notes) for further evidence of the difficulties of imposed government and peace through force. For a more readable review of the history of such failed missions, John Judis’ recent Folly of Empire would be appropriate.

Somehow, however, I have a feeling that anybody who would go to the trouble of actually emailing an essay about Constitutional law by Charlie Daniels is certainly not interested in any type of intellectual distillation of history. I can imagine this person reading Daniels’ rant and thinking, “Hmmm, this makes so much sense. I just have to email it everyone I know so they can feel proud of Bush shredding the Constitution, too.” Weird.

Over the past several years, I have become amazed at the utter lack of curiosity by the most vocal Bush supporters. My email inbox has been the resting place of innumerable anti-Hillary cartoons and John Kerry jokes, but rarely is a serious policy piece sent or discussed. At times I have been encouraged that the diatribes were meant just to get a response out of the opposition (i.e., me), and perhaps that was the primary purpose of the Daniels email. But on further review of past emails and discussion, I can honestly say that almost no thoughtful discussion has taken place. I love jokes and sarcasm as much as the next guy, but an occasional Dan Henninger or Charles Krauthammer opinion could provide some meat to chew on. Instead, prior to the Iraq War in 2003, this same emailer who forwarded the Daniels piece sent an article by a stockbroker stating that we had to attack Iraq because it would have been too expensive to bring the soldiers home now after all the trouble of deploying them during the winter of 2002-03. Then, of course, the author finished his spiel about how March of 2003 was a “great time” to start buying stocks. Sales pitches by stockbrokers seem to pass for policy discussion about the most important decisions made by our president. No wonder Bush got re-elected after such a total cluster fuck of a first term.

Needless to say, I am increasingly unimpressed with the dialogue by Bush supporters such as Mr. Daniels and the current emailer. Almost all of it is sophomoric blather that is based on irrational beliefs or jingoist emotion. Whether it’s abstinence-only education and the perceived value of faith-based federal programs or the fatal miscalculation that US soldiers would be warmly greeted as “liberators” in Iraq, Bush and his ilk seem to fail on every argument. The latest salvo against the Social Security pseudo-crisis is another testament to irrational fear mongering and lack of insight. Imagine what the $200 billion dollars wasted in Iraq could have done to shore up Social Security (or Medicare, or Medicaid, or any one of about 20 federal programs that are probably in worse shape than Social Security.)

The American people are a forgiving lot. Most seem to favor the simplistic way Bush envisions the world without seeing the absurdity of it. After the US supported Saddam, the Shah of Iran and the Saudi despots for several decades, Bush and 52% of the American people actually thought that the Iraqi people would throw flower petals the as the US soldiers paraded in their tanks and half-tracks down streets of Baghdad. How simple. How beautiful. How predictably wrong. You can say what you want about Clinton, but he was never that stupid. Even the usually delusional French look downright lucid next to the Bushies.

I will wrap this up. In the future, while you are perusing the Wall Street Journal, AP reports and the Washington Post, perhaps a quick forward of a valid opinion piece would be in order. I’m pretty sure our nation doesn’t need legal advice from the country music crowd. What’s next, fellas, a personal finance seminar by Neil Bush?
Grodge