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Blankley: Watch Out For September! American Government Might Start Working Properly, And We Don’t Want That

Not satisfied with having their harpy cries of doom disappointed when the devastation of Lebanon did not usher in Armageddon and the Mahdi (or was it the smoking gun?) did not appear in the form of a mushroom cloud on 22 August 2006, war supporters are gearing up for another summer of dire warnings.  Tony Blankley seems to be worried […]

Not satisfied with having their harpy cries of doom disappointed when the devastation of Lebanon did not usher in Armageddon and the Mahdi (or was it the smoking gun?) did not appear in the form of a mushroom cloud on 22 August 2006, war supporters are gearing up for another summer of dire warnings.  Tony Blankley seems to be worried that we are on the verge of something as bad as WWI or WWII or maybe both put together…because in September there will finally be some accountability for the morally bankrupt war policy that he and his allies have supported:

No [sic] even a middling student of history can be anything less than appalled at how often mankind lurches into its episodic catastrophes due to momentary lapses of common sense shared by vast majorities.

In 1914, from London to Paris to Berlin to Vienna to St. Petersburg and Moscow, most people briefly thought that World War I would be over and won by Christmas. In retrospect, the known close balance of lethality held by the two belligerent alliances (and the advantage the machine gun gave to the defense) should have led people to presume a long and bloody abattoir of a war.

In the 1930s, the idea that the manifest expansive urges of the Japanese Empire and Hitler’s Germany would somehow be self-limiting should never have become the consensus expectation both in Europe and the United States. 
 

Blankley is comparing these two, of course, to general public disgust with the Republican Party over Iraq, which is apparently going to lead to epic disaster on par with global conflagrations…by starting to get us out of a war.  There follows a warning about the madness of crowds, because there is nothing that worries the preachers of the armed doctrine of democratists than popular unrest at home:

Cynical or foolish politicians will reflexively give the people what they want. Even most sincere and thoughtful politicians will rarely find the strength to long resist the urge of the public. Vox Populi, Vox Dei — (although sometimes politicians should listen to the advice given to Charlemagne by his advisor, Alcuin: “And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.”)

This is often true, but why is it that war supporters only seem to discover a sane perspective on the dangers of mass politics at the moment when their policy preferences are in danger of being overthrown?  It seems to me that there were not many invocations of the wisdom of Charlemagne or any other skeptic of popular government to be found in Republican ranks when everyone and his brother was intoxicated with the wonder of seeing numerous purple-fingered Arabs or started wrapping themselves (figuratively) in orange banners in tribute to glorious Ukrainian revolution.  You couldn’t get such people to shut up, so exuberant were they about “people power.”  Nor was there much concern about the folly of the mob when they returned Dobleve to power in ’04.  I would like to think that we anti-democrats have been a bit more consistent in our fairly unremitting disrespect for mass democracy when it opposes our preferences and when it favours our preferences.

As near as I can tell, Blankley thinks September is going to be so “cruel” because it will finally signal the end of Mr. Bush’s ability to indefinitely con the public and abuse the military.  Political pressure will build up such that even the Decider will have to take account of it.  There may even be enough Republican defections from what I might call the Lemming Caucus to overcome Mr. Bush’s veto by that point.  Plus, Gen. Petraeus will report the success, or lack thereof, of the “surge,” at which point there will be nothing behind which war supporters will be able to hide.  Not that they won’t do all they can to manufacture new “corners” that we have almost “turned” and new “plans” that need to be tried, but they will no longer be able to retain credibility with even the much-diminished core supporters who have remained with them till now.

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