September 3, 2004

Brace Yourself

Victor Davis Hanson writes a column each Friday. Todays is very much worth reading: bq. Brace Yourself The months ahead will be momentous. bq. The summer and fall have been and will be momentous: national political conventions, elections slated in Afghanistan and here at home, the Olympics, high gas prices, and near cultural hysteria, whether measured by Fahrenheit 9/11 or the Swift-boat ads. But brace yourself — this is only the beginning. We should expect not only the dirtiest election in years, but also some real challenges the United States has not experienced since 1941. He then covers the following topics - I'll excerpt a paragraph r two from each one: bq. HYSTERIA Almost every day, al Qaeda suspects or affiliated terrorists are arrested somewhere in the world. Islamic fascists blow up Israelis, behead Nepalese, murder Russians children in schools and on the street, and kidnap French journalists (so much for appeasement). They want to destroy trains in New York as they did in Madrid. They seek to ruin democracy in Kabul and Baghdad and take down Russian airliners. Nearly each week they are caught forming cells in Europe and the United States — all akin in their desire for theocracy, incoherent demands, partiality for barbarous methods of killing civilians, and hatred of Western-style liberalism and freedom. bq. OIL We should also accept that the terrorists have finally caught on to just how fragile the world’s oil supply is. The global economy is recovering. India and China are becoming voracious energy importers. The United States will neither tap all of its own ample reserves nor embark on a new round of fuel-efficiency standards. Global speculators and investors are hypersensitive to even the slightest disruption in supply. bq. Thus we see daily attacks on facilities near Basra and in Kurdistan. The point of these bombings is not to shut down oil exportation altogether, but to make it clear that petroleum demand and supply is a fragile equation, requiring countries to pay exorbitant prices to unsavory regimes and causes, and to embrace political concessions. bq. NUCLEAR IRAN Get ready for a nuclear Iran — and perhaps sooner than we think. Oil exporters don’t burn off their natural gas and then complain that they need reactors to light their streets. Only Jimmy Carter believes that. Indeed, an ideal storm has arisen that has given the Tehran theocracy unforeseen opportunities to press ahead. bq. The ongoing fighting in southern Iraq — astutely aided and abetted by the mullahs — gives the impression that the United States is not ready or willing to pressure the Iranians to desist. Anti-war hysteria in the United States, they assume, assures them of a temporary pass: A fragile petroleum market cannot take another Middle East war. “Preemption” and “unilateralism” are now no longer doctrines but caricatured profanities. And a Europe that appeased Saddam for cash will be outright fawning when faced with three-stage, nuclear-tipped rockets pointed at Brussels. bq. HE’S BACK Michael Moore is only temporarily dormant, and, as we just saw, he is starting to froth and rumble. It has been a little while since he was in the spotlight with Fahrenheit 9/11 — a near-fatal quiet for an egomaniac of his caliber. He inaugurated the present cycle of American viciousness right after 9/11 (lamenting that Republicans were not more in evidence at the 9/11 World Trade Center) and never really stopped — calling Americans “stupid,” praising the beheaders in Iraq as “Minutemen,” and slurring Bush as a “a drunk, a thief, a possible felon, an unconvicted deserter, and a crybaby.” For the moment his presence has been trumped by the Swift-boat veterans, whose mainstream third-party ads have done more harm to Kerry than Moore’s creative slumming ever did to Bush. bq. But it is worse than that. Michael Moore is a greater albatross around John Kerry than any Republican ever could have wished — providing tit-for-tat exemption for outside groups on the right to emulate his methodology, but without his counterproductive, buffoonish, and repulsive antics. Moore is the Abbie Hoffman or Jerry Rubin of our times, and thus might do for John Kerry what the latter two and their followers did for Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern. He then closes with this observation: bq. If Bush wins in November, and I think he will, then there will be recriminations and fury of the like we have not seen since the Right imploded after 1964. For many of us lifelong Democrats, the very sight of Michael Moore perched next to Jimmy Carter at the convention in Boston says it all — the sorry coming together of conspiratorial anti-Americanism and self-righteous appeasement. bq. We are not at the end of history, but rather at its new beginning. All the old truths — conventional warfare, the Atlantic alliance, petroleum-based affluence, conventional political debate, etiquette, principled disagreement, and the old populist Democratic party are coming under question. And the only thing that is clear from what will follow is that it will all be loud, messy, full of surprises — and occasionally quite scary. Great stuff... Posted by DaveH at September 3, 2004 1:24 PM