Love-Bombing the Opposition to the War

Mickey Kaus of Slate magazine is the Joe Lieberman of journalism, a guy who claims to still be a liberal although he devotes all of his energy to attacking liberals and war opponents. Outside Lieberman himself, Kaus is probably the only neo-conservative in the country who tries to pass as a liberal. Tonight, Kaus put out a particularly mean-spirited attack on Chuck Hagel and the "love-bombing" that Hagel is getting from the mainstream media.

Funny, I don't remember Kaus giving any resistance to the MSM when it was love-bombing President Bush after 9-11, uncritically repeating ever lie in Colin Powell's fraudulent UN presentation, or romanticizing the initial invasion of Iraq.

And look how well that all turned out!

Chuck Hagel is no hero of anti-war activism, but he does deserve credit for his scepticism concerning the war. He started pounding away at the Bush administration's incompetence almost as soon as it emerged and has ramped up his war opposition in response to the surge. And Hagel is right! The surge isn't about "victory," it's about President Bush avoiding "defeat" until after he leaves office. It's about ensuring that the next President gets stuck cleaning up the mess in Iraq, paying the bills, and tending to the maimed and wounded.

And Hagel is also right to emphasize his war experience. Just like Kerry was. For the Bush administration, the war is about a series of word fetishes--a "free and stable Iraq", an "ally in the war on terror," a "generational struggle," a "test of will," and so on. None of these slogans were anything more than public relations ploys for advertising the Bush administration's belief in their own toughness. Hagel's emphasis on his war experience frees discussion from Bush administration language games and gets down to the actual reality of the lives wasted in this pointless war. The war does have heroes other than the soldiers who have been fighting. That is the war opponents who've kept up their opposition from the time Bush and Cheney began pushing the invasion scam through the initial occupation to the current surge debate. Some journalists (especially at McLatchey), some politicians (Russ Feingold and some House Democrats), and some celebrities have served as the face of war opposition, but the guts of the anti-war effort has been the tens of thousands of bloggers, internet posters, and other people who kept up the anti-war meme through thick and thin. A few liberal bloggers have broken through to some notoriety. However, most war opponents have had no reward and feel little if any satisfaction that the war has failed so dismally. But they've kept on anyway and deserve a lot of credit for doing so.