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Posted June 30, 2003

Fire George Big

Wirkman Virkkala

It's no easy to task to perform the world-historic role of U.S. President.

Say you are Rutherfraud — I mean George W. — Bush.

You have finally finished off a war to topple an old family and national enemy, Saddam Hussein.

Your explicit excuse for mounting that final onslaught had been pretty flimsy — weapons of mass destruction indeed! (After over a decade of bombardment and harassment, few could exist.) Your tacit excuse (we gotta kill more foreigners than those we can find in Afghanistan to make up for the unprovoked 9/11/01 terrorist strike) couldn't even be mentioned by the ruling class — that task was better left to taxicab pundits, barstool mavens, and nouveaux redneck commentators like Dennis Miller.

But you knew how the country (if not the world) worked, and you had learned a great principle from your predecessor in office: almost any lie can succeed if you stick to it, play innocent (or, in your case, play dumb), and pay no heed to qualms that might arise from fear of that outmoded notion, effrontery.

So: you do all this, stick to your guns, win the war, bear up against recalcitrants and an upward spiralling body count far away in the conquered province, and then — when the mythical weapons of mass destruction remain mythical, as anyone with a lick of sense might have guessed — what happens? Some conservative pundit wants to bring out the long knives and have you fire a few underlings for simply doing their job!

So goes Robert A. George's recent New York Post column. He asks a decent question: How come nobody's been fired yet? But its very decency shows the naivety that remains at the heart of American political discourse:

The mission was a success, but one thing can't be ignored: Whether or not weapons are found, blatantly false information still got into the president's State of the Union Address this year.

O, Mr. George! The presentation of blatantly false information and the wilful misinterpretation of our enemies' values were evident at least as far back as 9/11/01. The stuff George ably recounts is only the most recent. Savvy readers and newscast watchers had caught dangerous whoppers much earlier.

In fact, we knew something was wrong as soon as George W. Bush opened his mouth and talked about faceless cowards, a brain-dead frat-boy charge if ever there was one. Then when our president gave the Official Explanation for our enemies' motives — that they envied our success — anyone with an inkling about power knew that America's diplomatic missteps and perversities were going to be swept under a very large, non-Persian rug. And when Bush took up the phrase war against terrorism as his battle cry, we knew to expect the worst: a continuation of the perpetual war for perpetual peace, with no limits, no sense of proportion, and a Constitution made conveniently obsolete.

So to complain, as Mr. George does, of only the most recent lies and propaganda, and to worry that the public may begin to doubt the accuracy of the advice and information the president is receiving, and become increasingly skeptical of the support and sacrifices he asks of them, well, this is to cast one's eyes at the wide panorama of contemporary neo-imperial politics and insist on viewing with opera glasses. For Mr. George, it is imperative to narrow our vision.

Here's the big picture he missed: The American republic is long dead; the current Bush administration has merely made its historical mark by pounding nails into the republic's coffin. But because a fairly large segment of the American population still thinks happy thoughts about some old notions of limited government, the betrayers of that vision can't do their work honestly; they must, instead, lie and lie often: in no other way can they maintain the support of a plurality of voters, so to continue the selling off of American liberty without hindrance.

Long ago, republican-turned-anarchist Lysander Spooner argued that those who buy into the con-job of politics are either dupes or knaves. It's easy to see that Mr. George merely acts the dupe while our new king George inhabits the role of knave. But for once I have a bit more sympathy for our knave-in-chief than I do for all the little naive georges. In the bigger George we see a man too caught up in a net of tit-for-tatting to see through the massive immorality that is American crony capitalism and neo-imperialist grandstanding.

But the little georges, whether conservative or moderate or even (alas) libertarian, well, it's hard to sympathize. They've ignored the logic behind Lord Acton's maxim that power tends to corrupt. They've thrown in their lot with those who wish to centralize power. And that they do it in the name of liberty seems almost as much knavish as dupish.

And now, for a little george to insist that George Big fire the men and women who gave him exactly what the situation required — misinformation to back up the lies that would allow the American empire to roll along, shovelling money at the oil and financial cronies at the heart of the GOP — well, this maintains a pretense that decent citizens must abandon. Massive untruths were what Bush, Cheney, and company wanted, and that's what they got from their hirelings. Inconvenient information was thrown out each link up the chain of command, because command only wanted what met command's interest, and that interest was clear to all. It's not the foot soldiers who need firing, it's the chiefs.

The next word on our lips should be impeachment. And after impeachment, a complete reversal of American foreign policy.

It may be that nothing less can take back the republic from the Republicans.

Trouble is, that's a hard job to pull off. So much work, so much thought, so much courage ... and from so many people! Apparently it's not only difficult being a president; it's difficult being a good citizen, too.

Wirkman Virkkala is a writer and editor living in the Pacific Northwest of the continental American empire.