Friday, October 01, 2004

Lileks, you ignorant slut.

I didn't realize just how bad the debate had gone for Bush until I read Lileks' insane and stupid rant about it this morning. Here it is, with my comments interspersed:


I hate the debates. I have a vision of 65 million undecided Americans tuning in and making a snap judgment for all the wrong reasons.


Wrong reasons? Like listening to a candidate field questions about major issues in a forum without aides, handlers, and notes? This isn't shooting the messenger, this is shooting the medium. Marshall McLuhan would be proud. Next time just come out and say "Presidents don't need none of that fancy book learning!", m'kay?

Wow, he pounded the podium to emphasize each word - but the other guy pounded each syllable. What’s this about sealing Fallujer? Is it leaking? Did they have a flood?

"Pay no attention to the city in Iraq that has spiraled out of control into a sea of violence and misery! Don't look at how the President has ceded it to the terrorist insurgency in Iraq! Look, look! An iMac!"

But mostly I hate the debates because I simply cannot abide hearing certain statements I’ve been hearing over, and over, and over again. I can’t take any more talk about bringing allies to the table. Which ones? Brazil? Mynmar? Microfrickin’nesia? Are there some incredibly important and powerful nations out there whose existence has hitherto escaped me? Fermany? Gerance? The Galactic Order of the Belgian Dominion? Did we piss off the Vulcans? Who?

Maybe it's the allies Bush touted as part of the "coalition of the willing" that have been dropping like flies, because this President can't even hold that together? And that "bringing allies to the table" would involve actually maintaining the alliances one makes, and working to keep one's allies on one's side instead of cutting and running because you had no farking idea what you were getting into?

If we mean “France and Germany,” then please explain to me why the reluctant participation of these two countries somehow bestows the magic kiss of legitimacy. They want in? Fine. They don’t? Fine. At this point mooning over France is like being that sophomore loser dorm pal who spent his dateless weekends telling his loser roommate about a high school sweetheart who stood him up for the prom. Give it up. Move on. I understand; they are wise and nuanced, we are young and dumb. We’re the cowboy leaning with his back against the bar, elbows on the rail, watching the door; we need our European betters to teach us how to ape the subtle forms of Nijinsky, limbs arrayed in the exquisite form of the Dying Swan.

"Look at how pretty the iMac is! Isn't it a pretty iMac?"

Understood. But I don’t want to be the Dying Swan. And I don’t want posture lessons from a country that spent the last 20 years flopping on its back and grabbing its ankles when Saddam showed up waving stacks of Francs in exchange for bang-sticks. Don’t you think I know about France’s relations with Saddam? Surely the advocates of the French Touch must know, and don’t care. Or they don’t know – in which case their advice is useless.

"This iMac is the only creature in the world that I would ever let marry my child, who is the first child in the history of children to do anything, ever!"

Germany? Whatever.

And it took lots of dead Americans to be able to say that.

The mind boggles at whatever the fuck is meant by this.

Also dead Russians. Is Russia the great ally we’ve dissed? If we invite Russia to help, then we have to tell them things. I don’t want to tell them things. At least as they relate to the battlefield.

"Mustn't tell the things...my precious, precious things..." Because, you know, if the Russians were providing manpower or logistical support or whatever in Iraq now we'd also have to give them the keys to the nukular football, like we did with Poland. Don't forget Poland!

Hmm. Maybe you should, actually. It seems the Poles would like you to.

Perhaps the “ally” is that big blue wobbly mass known as the UN, that paragon of moral clarity, that conscience of the globe. You want to really anger a UN official? Tow his car. Short of that you can get away with anything. (Sudan is on the human rights commission, to cite a prominent and amusing detail. It’s like putting Tony Soprano on the New Jersey Waste Management Regulation Board.) I don’t worry that the UN is angry with us. I’d be worried if they weren’t.

The sad thing about this sort of nonsense is its myopic insistence that just because this administration is incapable of bringing the UN to its way of thinking, the institution must be completely useless and evil to its core. It's utterly impossible to imagine any other President using a combination of carrots and sticks to bring the UN around to supporting his policy and providing an additional framework of support for securing and rebuilding Iraq. "This President can fly to the moon under his own power and could best a rhinoceros in single combat! If Bush can't do it, it not only can't be done, it's wrong to think about doing it!"

And I find it interesting that someone who would complain about outsourcing peevishly notes that we hired HALLIBURTON to do the work instead of throwing buckets of billions to French and German contractors who sold them the jets and built the bunkers.

I’ve been hearing this shite for years! That’s why I can’t stand the debates! ENOUGH WITH FRANCE AND GERMANY!


Lileks, you ignorant slut, it's about more than France and Germany.

(pause; huffing into a plastic bag to restore blood chemistry)

Uh, dude...there's no spray paint in blood.

OK, the next six paragraphs are so relentlessly stupid, and were so obviously written in that fog of incoherence and lunacy that comes in the immediate aftermath of a really big hit of spray paint, that I'm just going to skip them and move on, because it's not fair to pick on a man in the midst of spray paint fever. That, and I have things to do today.

Ask yourself this: you’re a dictator who has violated the terms of a peace treaty over and over again, and frequently shoots at the planes enforcing the treaties. Who do you fear the most? A) The magnificent concert of allies in the UN, some of whom you’ve bought off, who are desperate to prove their legitimacy by prolonging the process into the 22nd century

B) The United States, Britain and Australia, who have several hundred thousand troops on your border and frankly are in no mood to put up your crap any longer

What would you want in this situation? The answer starts with “S” and ends, five letters later, in “T.”


Wow. Lileks has managed to provide a rationale for the war in Iraq that actually incorporates none of the usual suspects: no mention of WMDs, nor of the capacity to develop WMDs, nor the possibility Saddam was thinking about WMDs, or even my favorite, the half-assed human rights argument that argues the same baseline "no Saddam" condition that has existed since April 2003 is not affected by increasing violence and chaos in the streets that's a direct result of Bush's incompetence in planning and executing the occupation.

Also, does the description of the coalition as consisting in the United States, Britain, and Australia mean that Poland doesn't count? Or that the other nations in the coalition were window-dressing, making minimal and easily reversible committments and contributions to provide a slender shade of cover for this administration's inability to keep the alliances it made?

So, I get it. We are wrong and bad and stupid and stupidly wrong-bad. We failed to make France act as though it wasn’t, you know, France, a militarily insignificant nation that is understandably motivated by self-interest, and we haven’t convened a summit so we could be castigated for ignoring the extralegal use of Israeli helicopters to turn Hamas kingpins into indistinct red smears. You’d think we nuked Paris and converted everyone to Lutheranism.

That, or that we'd gone to war without anything resembling plan for what to do after we won, or the resources to get the job done properly, and that as a result the country we said we were going to liberate has watched that promise of freedom unravel into a nightmare.

Here’s the thing. I’d really like to live in John Kerry’s world. It seems like such a rational, sensible place, where handshakes and signatures have the power to change the face of the planet. If only the terrorists lived there as well.



Right. John Kerry's whole life is about nothing but rationality and handshakes. That's what he did in Vietnam: Go around shaking hands with the Viet Cong. The Purple Hearts were for carpal tunnel, and the Silver Star was because he hurt his back stooping over to shake hands with this one Viet Cong guy who was very, very short.

Who does Zarkowi fear the most - France, summiteers, or Marines?

"These are THE ONLY OPTIONS, people! France, summiteers, or Marines! No chance a summit would put more Marine-like people on the ground to actually, like, find him or anything!"

Let's play parallel universe: If a Gore or Kerry administration had passed up an opportunity to nab Zarkawi so it would have his continued presence in Iraq to bolster its paper-thin case for going to war with Iraq, how many pages of screeding would Lileks subject us to?

If the rightness of a cause is measured by the number of one’s allies, would Britain have been right if the US had stayed neutral in World War Two?

"Hey, have you seen the new Apple G5? If Bush's tax cuts go away I might have to save up before I get it or something!"



You know, I used to enjoy Lileks, particularly his genius for pop culture detritus, back before he became a disingenuous shill for the administration. As a political commentator, though, he's a hell of an expert on pop culture detritus. I should look on the bright side: Every time he writes about politics, at least he's not writing about taking his kid to Target.

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