The Air On Bizzaro World

A little earlier this afternoon I was reading a great James Lileks post. Here's a taste:

The arguments over the Rove / Plame affair are best hashed out elsewhere. I was nearly swayed by an interview with noted thinker and finger-painter Ted Rall today, until he said he wouldn’t believe the administration if they said the sky was blue. People say this as if it proves their bonafides as a critic, but really, that’s a rather easy thing to verify. If the sky is indeed blue and Scott McClellan makes that point, you could assume that they have painted the windows, I guess. In any case I’m amused how this Scandal seems disconnected from the issue of yellowcake in light of the post 9/11 atmosphere. Given all the tales in the 90s about the threat Saddam faced – a threat everyone accepted when Clinton was launching strikes and pulling serious faces – the idea that the whole Niger-yellowcake nexus should have gotten a big shrug in 2002, when the WTC rubble still smoked, seems to be another act of willful amnesia. If anyone in 02 could have thought we’d be parsing who said what about which agent re a politically motivated rewrite of the intel, they’d have heaved a sigh of relief: so we didn’t get hit again.

It’s all a luxury that seems vapid only after something bad happens again. You’ll note that when Blair gives a press conference nowadays the press doesn’t bring up the Downing Street Memo. Give them time, though; in due course the press will shake off that ill-fitting caot of national solidarity and start asking why the bombers weren’t detected by orbital satellites the day they were born. The role of the press is to reset the clock to yesterday morn, ferret out the slightest hint of imperfection, and splash the front page with the words that give them that priapic prang: Ongoing Investigation. Questions remain. But sources say.

I thought of that when I saw Cap'n Ed's post about this:

The U.S. Congress should pass legislation defining the legal status of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay to avoid more damage to the United States' image abroad and reprisals against U.S. soldiers, senators said on Thursday. ...

Senators said harsh interrogation practices and the refusal to grant prisoner of war status to detainees could backfire when U.S. soldiers are captured.

"Our troops are looking at us to see whether we're going to adopt a standard that if they were captured would be acceptable," said Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the committee's top Democrat.

Morrissey suggests that this may be evidence that the Democrats have "gone insane." My reflex reaction was, "When did al Qaeda start taking prisoners?"

Don't kid yourselves. Levin isn't an idiot; he's a fanatic.

What we have to remember is that this is not a bona fide, good faith, if hideously misguided, proposal on war policy; rather, it is another attempt to obstruct our ability to effectively fight the GWOT by making it more difficult to extract intelligence information from captured terrorists, and even keep them under lock and key at all by forcing the government to either let them into the civilian court system, compelling the public release of invaluable classified intel, or turning them loose to resume the jihad against us. It's not substantively different from the drive of House Democrats to water down the Patriot Act. The end result would be the same: who knows how many more dead American civilians who might not perish otherwise.

Does that mean the Donks want to see more Americans die? Not as such. What it does mean is basically twofold:

1) They have developed a political Samson complex, which means that if they can't be in power, they will do everything they can to make the country ungovernable. And that includes the conduct of the GWOT. If more Americans have to die because of it, well, that's Bush's fault for "misleading us into Iraq to breed more terrorists."

2) Their thoroughly and comprehensively discredited ideology has degenerated into a sort of apostate secularist religion. Evidence no longer matters, truth no longer matters, and facts no longer matter (which is how a pathological liar like Joe Wilson can go before the cameras today and have the breathtaking chutzpah to lecture the President on "keeping his word" by "firing Karl Rove"). Libs can no longer be talked to or reasoned with. It's why there's no longer public debate as the term used to be understood. There can be no honest exchange of ideas with a party that is so steeped in crypto-Marxist superstition and the intolerable reality of its long-term electoral decline that its members have retreated into a mass partisan delusion that they adamantly and ferociously cling to like my son when it's time to put away his GameBoy Advanced.

In this case, Democrats believe in the efficacy of pacifism and foreign policy weakness with a faith blinder than an eyeless man, and that requires that we grant Gitmo zombies - er, detainees - POW status they do not deserve and the Geneva Conventions do not require, in order to "reach out" to enemies whose only response will be to contemptuously chop our hands off and and try to slice & dice the rest. That this approach was tried throughout the '90s and resulted in the escalating series of attacks culminating in 9/11 is irrelevant, because those things didn't happen, or if they did it was in a parallel dimension, or "another time," and were all Bush's fault in any case because everything's Bush's fault. And regardless it'll work this time, and if not it'll work the next time, as many times as we have to try it. Because we can't do anything else, even if something else would work, because it's not about what works, but whether we're "doing the right thing." And the right thing is liberalism, no matter how wrong it is, and if you disagree, well, you don't get to disagree.

It is perhaps the greatest irony of our time that the contemporary left has become in many ways so like the enemy we face - defeated, disgruntled, and submerged in victimist fantasizing - and yet is so oblivious to its self-dhimmization that they can convince themselves that it really is 1973 again and they've got the neoNixon on the run and forcing a bug out from that "illegal war" is just a matter of time. Because that is the core, the very sacrament, of their dead faith. And even death - even en masse - must not be allowed to stand in the way of its blanket exercise.

It is written, "When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things." But some people don't want to grow up, because they are inextricably, and jealously, mired in the past - even if that denies everybody else a viable future.

Kind of a "Peter Pan meets Stockholm Syndrome" dynamic.

And that's about as bizarre as reality gets.

UPDATE, BUMP TO 7/15: Victor Davis Hanson elaborates further:

Why does this false narrative, then, persist — other than that it had a certain political utility in the 2002 and 2004 elections?

In a word, this version of events brings spiritual calm for millions of troubled though affluent and blessed Westerners. There are three sacraments to their postmodern thinking, besides the primordial fear that so often leads to appeasement.

Our first hindrance is moral equivalence. For the hard Left there is no absolute right and wrong since amorality is defined arbitrarily and only by those in power. Taking back Fallujah from beheaders and terrorists is no different from bombing the London subway since civilians may die in either case. The deliberate rather than accidental targeting of noncombatants makes little difference, especially since the underdog in Fallujah is not to be judged by the same standard as the overdogs in London and New York. A half-dozen roughed up prisoners in Guantanamo are the same as the Nazi death camps or the Gulag.

Our second shackle is utopian pacifism — ‘war never solved anything’ and ‘violence only begets violence.’ Thus it makes no sense to resort to violence, since reason and conflict resolution can convince even a bin Laden to come to the table. That most evil has ended tragically and most good has resumed through armed struggle — whether in Germany, Japan, and Italy or Panama, Belgrade, and Kabul — is irrelevant. Apparently on some past day, sophisticated Westerners, in their infinite wisdom and morality, transcended age-old human nature, and as a reward were given a pass from the smelly, dirty old world of the past six millennia.

The third restraint is multiculturalism, or the idea that all social practices are of equal merit. Who are we to generalize that the regimes and fundamentalist sects of the Middle East result in economic backwardness, intolerance of religious and ethnic minorities, gender apartheid, racism, homophobia, and patriarchy? Being different from the West is never being worse.

These tenets in various forms are not merely found in the womb of the universities, but filter down into our popular culture, grade schools, and national political discourse — and make it hard to fight a war against stealthy enemies who proclaim constant and shifting grievances. If at times these doctrines are proven bankrupt by the evidence it matters little, because such beliefs are near religious in nature — a secular creed that will brook no empirical challenge. These articles of faith apparently fill a deep psychological need for millions of Westerners, guilty over their privilege, free to do anything without constraints or repercussions, and convinced that their own culture has made them spectacularly rich and leisured only at the expense of others. [emphasis added]

Wow. Being on the same intellectual page with VDH is rarified air indeed. No wonder I felt lightheaded three hours and forty-one minutes ago.