Beating around the Bush

In his bloggy insta-analysis of the Bush Iraq War speech today, my Pajamas colleague David Corn offers some praise but mostly brickbats for the president. He backhandedly compliments Bush for finally recognizing that the comically misnomered “insurgency” (Zarqawi equals Zapata?) is a combination of unreconstructed Baathist fascists, Al Qaeda-style religious psychokillers and assembled lumpen street thugs – not just amorphous “terrorists.”

Well, David, did you really think Bush – or nearly everybody else on the planet – didn’t know that? Yes, there are people in the “insurgency” who couldn’t be less interested in what happens in Cincinatti and, yes, there are people who believe that we are all infidels who should be sent to hell and the caliphate installed uber alles. And there are even those who are willing to play it both ways, for whatever reason (like Saddam).

The question is, as Comrade Lenin said … What is to be done? This is something our modern reified left rarely asks or says. They don’t even seem to be very interested in it. Corn skips over this most relevant of all questions, saying only that Bush’s speech “won’t matter.” Very few speeches indeed do (and most only in retrospect). You would think left/liberals would have some positive response about the overthrow of a hideous dicator, something which, when I was on the left, I was begging our government to do (Pinochet most notoriously). But now, it would seem, since a Republican was involved, we were over-reaching. Well, maybe so. But historically, the jury is still out on that … way out. And the soi-disant left still has no real response to the world situation other than Not Bush. Bo-ring!