Bitter, Bitter
Alright, here's something most of you don't know about me:
Back in the day--really, back before I could actually vote, but that's neither here nor there--I was a fan of Reagan, a supporter of the death penalty, and a devotee of William F. Buckley. No, it's true. I was openly conservative. I relished the humor of P.J. O'Rourke and delighted in bashing hippies.
Nevermind what changed, but when I turned 18, I voted for Bill Clinton. Yes, Clinton.
I still read O'Rourke and Buckley and loved them (I actually still harbor admiration for O'Rourke's earlier work and for Buckley in general--dude had class) and I often read George F. Will, but something changed during those Clinton years. (Besides, Buckley was really a libertarian, and his analysis of why we end the War on Drugs was spot-on).
O'Rourke stopped being funny. Not just O'Rourke. The right in general lost its shit and went off some kind of invisible edge that apparently leads to instantly becoming a bitter old loser. I couldn't really tolerate the way the right reacted to the Clinton presidency. The Kenneth Starr thing--all of it, but especially the probing into Clinton's apparently consensual sexual relationships--really pissed me off. The general disrespect the right suddenly showed to the office of the president pissed me off. Conservatives are supposed to be all about traditional values like respect. But in every red quarter, from the National Review to the increasingly abrasive Christopher Hitchens, absolute disrespect was the order of the day. This offended my conservative nature, really and truly, and I gradually abandoned all things Republican.
Now, as you're aware, I've hardly become some kind of Berkeley hippie (sorry, electric firefly!). I still have a lot of things in common with the right, including my extreme tendency toward libertarianism and my general conservatism as regards social and cultural values. As we say in country music, I still say "yes, ma'am" and "no, sir" and call men "sugar" and "honey" even if I don't know them. I know, I know, the retrograde gender roles drive you nuts, don't they?
Anyway, this is all leading somewhere. While most of the right-ish commentators went through an extremely ugly period during the Clinton years, the more serious ones have recovered and become readable again (I don't even bother with the wingnuts on talk radio or Fox, not at all), the Hitch has not.
Listen up, Hitchens ('s if, right?): YOU WERE WRONG, AND ARE STILL WRONG, ABOUT IRAQ. None of your arguments are consistent or logically coherent--they hardly constitute arguments anymore. You're scrabbling around for any reason for the waste of life and resources and money (did we mention the 3 trillion or so dollars this shit is costing us? did we further mention that we're in a recession, the dollar is weak, and we could probably find better, less fatal things to spend a trillion bucks on? finally, for a laugh, did we mention that that is apparently twice the GNP of Canada! LOL Ah, Canada always makes me chuckle--but I digress). And you're not coming up with anything solid. Yeah, Saddam is out of power. Woo-freakin-hoo. Beyond that, though--uh, nothing. There's nothing. No other good has come of this. (I know the Hitch would ding me for being overly flip about Saddam being out of power. If the overthrow of Saddam Hussein eventually leads to some good for the people of Iraq, then fantastic. I shall at that time eat my fucking shoe, OK? So far pretty much all they've got in return is death, terror, and chaos. At least under Saddam, they only had the first two. Damn! I'm being flippant again!)
If you're not concerned about the monetary toll--although that should be the first consideration of a true Reagan conservative--and maybe you don't care about what we're actually doing to the nation and people of Iraq, let's talk about our own soldiers for a minute. Let's remind ourselves how many of our own young men and women have died so far (nearly 4000 with close to 30,000 casualties). Then maybe we should have a sit-down about what this is doing to families all over America, families whose sons and daughters and mothers and fathers are deployed for looooong stretches of time--many of whom were in the freakin' National Guard and NEVER expected an overseas deployment. See, conservatives are supposed to care first about money and second about the troops and about families. But we're not caring about any of those things anymore, are we? We are abusing our soldiers by reneging on our obligations to them; we are abusing their families the same way. A good soldier probably wouldn't say that, but I'm only a (ex-)soldier's daughter, so I can get out of line. We are abusing the trust that our troops and their families have in us, to only risk their lives when it is going to serve some goddamned purpose. Perhaps we should remind ourselves that, once our soldiers do finally get to come home, many of them are returning in no condition to participate in society again. Thanks to the damage war has done to many of them--physical damage and psychological damage--they, like other generations of soldiers before them, are having a difficult time reintegrating (it doesn't help, no doubt, that there are no jobs here waiting for them; it helps somewhat less that many of them are stop-lossed). Some portion of these people, we can be reasonably sure, due both to the failing economy and to the psychological damage I mentioned earlier, will end up on the street corner near your local Wal-Mart with a sign offering a blessing from God and a plea for any change you can spare. People who have risked their lives to defend the "American dream" and our constitutional rights (not that either is actually at stake in this particular conflict, but they haven't *really* been in most of the wars we've engaged in) deserve better, man.
And we haven't even talked about what we're doing to Iraq or to the Middle East in general. Or to our long-term relationships in the world. Sorry, but these ain't the Reagan years anymore. This isn't the dread Communists we're fighting, and we are no longer the world's only superpower. We're throwing the future of our country down the drain, mainly to appease a bunch of elderly, rich white men who talk daily to God--oh, and to appease hawkish pundits like you.
As a former conservative, frankly, it makes me pretty sick. As the proud daughter of a Marine who went for two tours of duty in Vietnam, it makes me quite ill. As an American who is not especially interested in being the world's only superpower (nice syntax, eh?), it just disgusts me. This is not where we need to be going.
Not to mention--Hitch, lay off God, alright? Your self-assured self-righteousness and bitter bigotry is no better than that of the Christian fundies you despise. You make me sick, man. You used to be witty and have a decent head on your shoulders, but Clinton seems to have screwed you up, bad. Maybe you have some kind of political PTSD? Maybe you're just jealous that Monica didn't blow you. Whatever. I can no longer even pretend to take your shit seriously.
That's right. Henceforth, Christopher Hitchens is DEAD TO ME.
P.S. Speaking of infiltrating sovereign nations to overthrow their governments, does anyone actually know why the CIA infiltrated Australia? Was it because of Elvis? Also, why aren't Aussies more bitter about it?
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Elvis Presley. Please tell me you know who that is.
Sorry--there's no connection. It's an inside joke having to do with conspiracy theories. If you mention that the CIA overthrew (or attempted to--I'm not clear) the Aussie government, people think you're a paranoid conspiracy theorist (I thought so the first time I heard someone mention it), so the obvious thing is that you're going to say that Elvis is still alive. Or, well, obvious to me and about two of my friends, but it might be extremely obscure to everyone else.
I happen to share your absolute dislike of Hitchens, and for the same reasons. I think he ditched his Trotskyist credentials and became a willing stooge for the right purely because of his pursuit of the almighty dollar. He's now trying to re-establish some credibility with the left and salve his conscience by trumpeting his atheism, while continuing to line his pockets in the process, of course. Just another boring hypocrite who sold his soul to corporate America.
Makes me nod my head in understanding respect, though. You've been there, done that, and have seen the light, sistah!
Speaking of sistahs, I wish mine could see this post. She would be cheering.
Haha. Yeah, I think Hitchens is somewhat less famous than Elvis. He has a long history as an "intellectual" and writer, started out, as snowy mentioned as a Trotskyite, then he started moving right. He used to write the Minority Report column in the New Republic, if I'm not mistaken, which criticized the sometimes bungled thinking of the Left, as he was moving rightward. As I said, the Clinton scandals sort of made him a little crazy, and then 9/11 made him utterly freak out and lose all sense. He writes for Slate.com now, and his last column was about why he was not wrong about the Iraq war (he's a hawk, that one). I find him unhinged.
He has also written some controversial books, including one about Mother Teresa called "The Missionary Position" and his latest book called "god is not Great." I haven't actually read that book, but he's posted some commentary in various places regarding his atheism and how evil religion is and all that, which I have unfortunately read.
I thought that you could have seen my socially conservative nature, and certainly the libertarian bent. That's why I do those posts from time to time about where liberal and Democrat arguments go bad and fail to convince those of us who are socially conservative. The arguments that get most commonly bandied about for the biggest liberal causes are not the ones that won me over, for the most part. Many of them are bad arguments and very many of them are based on emotion, and emotion doesn't pull a lot of weight with me. I was trying to convince liberals that if they don't want to lose "the Heartland" for good, they need to at the very least change the rhetoric and make better arguments, because there are a lot of social conservatives out here.
And, honestly, on a lot of the liberal "issues" I'm not really with you. I'm either indifferent or actually completely not with you. I don't like the identity politics, I'm sick of hearing about whose ancestors came over how and how hard they had it, I believe strongly that children are best raised by two parents--their natural ones wherever possible--and I'm very pro-Forest Service. I could go on.
How to put this? My default position is for tradition and conservatism. If I'm going to overthrow some aspect of tradition, I need to see some good arguments for it. If I'm going to go for this so-called "progressivism" I need to see some evidence that progress will occur, or is even possible. Progressives tend to take for granted that every new change that they trumpet is going to be progress and is going to make life better. A lot of the time, I just can't drink that Kool-Aid.
That's what I love about debating this kind of stuff--that it is an opinion after all, and changes from person to person.
It pains me to have to pay attention to these conservatives idiocy, but it's a necessary chore; if anything, just to ensure that I'm up to speed on what lies are being peddled on the day... and which one of them I choose to scud down.
Given a choice, I'd tune out their crap like squashing a bug. But sometimes, you have to be in the sewers to understand their mindset.
Keep swinging that sledge GB.
Actually, the lies coming from the left have been bothering me rather more lately. I shouldn't say "lies" but the often contradictory worldview--at least on the American left. There is some talk about communitarian values, but actually in practice many liberals are extremely individualistic. There is a focus on happiness and "rights" (that frequently do not exist) instead of--or, rather, at the expense of--duty and responsibilities. There is the pretense of being more open-minded and unprejudiced, but as I have repeatedly pointed out to no avail whatsoever, if you're a liberal who also owns guns and uses them to--gasp!--kill animals for food, you're just something most liberals cannot conceive of and will not pause to consider--and of course the anti-Christian bigotry runs quite deep in some circles.
The right has its own hypocrisies and problems, certainly. But the left isn't really better or less fascist or even less bigoted. The right is accused of bigotry against minorities and gays, and the left pats themselves on the back for their "inclusion." But the identity politics and intense hatred and fear, even, of Christians and, really, anyone who doesn't keep in lockstep is--well, it's quite upsetting to me.
Eh, I could list a thousand examples, but the fact is that most of the time, if I am discussing sociocultural issues like parenting or hunting or racism, there is so little common ground between me and liberals that I just say "feh" and give up. Once someone has bought into an ideology--and most of the left has, just as much as the right--you cannot persuade them. The pity of it is that you can't even discuss it because everyone nowadays just says, "whoa, that's your opinion, and that's cool that you have a different opinion, but I feel differently." And the discussion is over.
If people in ancient Greece had thought that, we would not have been blessed by the Socratic dialogues. Or by the writings of the Enlightenment thinkers who were arguing amongst themselves. The idea is to have a discussion, present arguments, and possibly even rethink the positions you hold. I have rethought my positions several times. On the death penalty, for example, I have gone from being strongly pro, to strongly anti, to the place I now am where I can understand and even agree with some of the theoretical underpinnings but have to disagree in practice because I no longer believe that, even if it is permissible and good in theory, it can be implemented justly. Not that I talk about it with liberals, generally. I can have a better, more thoughtful discussion with my "independent (but often Republican)" stepfather than I can with most "open-minded" lefties.
These are sad days for public discourse. This is GinBaby, disillusioned.
Did they get a lot of child abusers? Because that would be a project I might go ninja for.
I want to forcibly sterilize convicted child abusers, too, but everyone thinks that's too harsh. Like, if they are known child abusers, it's a good idea for them to have more kids? Maybe people who object to my inhumanity should spend more time reading Parents Behaving Badly and see if they think these people really deserve to live, let alone have more kids.
I think they did, together with drug dealers, total gangsters... your typical nasty bastards who play the system because they have rich lawyers. Bang! Gone.
As to the CIA infiltrating Australia, I'd heard that they had a role in the overthrow of the Whitlam government. Whether that's true or not is anyone's guess. I wouldn't put it past them, but that doesn't mean it happened. The Whitlam government was left-wing in Australian terms (ie. completely bloody communist in American terms) so I'd guess any CIA involvement would be to ensure a continued happy right-wing subservient relationship with the US. There was an allegation that Whitlam wanted to close all US military bases in Australia, which I guess would provide enough incentive during the Cold War for America to want to change the government. Not many people believe it though. There was enough dissent in Australia to explain Whitlam's removal from office. There isn't really any reason to go looking for a conspiracy theory in the absence of any real evidence.