George Bush said something interesting in a recent interview:
“It’s different being a candidate and being the president,” Bush said in an Oval Office interview. “No matter who the president is, no matter what party, when they sit here in the Oval Office and seriously consider the effect of a vacuum being created in the Middle East, particularly one trying to be created by al Qaeda, they will then begin to understand the need to continue to support the young democracy.”
What Bush is recognizing here is something that is becoming increasingly obvious – the left/right dichotomy in our society is a phony exploited by those who lust for power. This is an obvious problem for democracies in general, but we are at a dramatic crossroads in that regard.
In the future, everything will be situational, just as it has been in the past. Would Al Gore – now making fame and fortune on the global warming-oscar-nobel prize lecture circuit – have gone into Iraq himself if he had won in 2000? Of course, there’s no way of knowing this side of the space/time continuum, but I wouldn’t bet against it. Clinton was not hesitant to use power in Bosnia and who knows how he would have reacted after 9/11? Perhaps more “arrogantly” than Bush has. The likes of Glenn Greenwald, instead of complaining about the fixation on Ahmadinejad, could have been arguing for the Iranian’s extinction. Ideology has become a form of bourgeois objectification in our society – a crutch for non-thinking.
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