Compassionate Conservatism and Fahrenheit 9/11
To the Editor,
I actually am a compassionate conservative who, up until the revelations about the Justice Department being unsure what inalienable rights might be, had Bush stickers on his car.
Fahrenheit 9/11 is definitely, clearly, and profoundly a documentary that provides a needed voice that has been missing from the public discourse. The mainstream media has been lax to the point of negligence in its role of informing the public and has helped take this country to war; we will not easily trust it again and many citizens (especially those for whom the internet is simply an integral part of life) will now follow the foreign media more closely to learn more accurately what is happening here.
In a world that is shrinking, what others think of us doesn't merely matter, it is of strategic importance.
It's not that everything in the film is true; it's that the media hasn't already been a light on these issues and illuminated these possibilities in the collective conversation. It's not that the Administration is this "bad," but that it is so easy to "frame" America in this light. In a country that should understand "branding" very well, we seem to have little concept of how our "appearance" of ill will and self-interest is so pervasive and self-destructive.
I have met a refugee from Iraq and talked with him. He is one of those with a hand chopped off. So no one can say he's not fully committed to a human solution in Iraq. And he's unsure what the best role for America is; he's a realist and his country deeply distrusts some of our ways and hates the price of accepting help from us; it's too widely "known" -- the prevailing myth, true or not -- that we're only there for the oil. Even we are now forced to acknowledge it wasn't for a demonstrable connection between bin Laden and Hussein, or for the demonstrable presence of weapons of mass destruction. And we haven't acted like liberators from day one, when we placed our flag on Hussein's statue ... or in the way we treat the prisoners we sweep up.
If we really went after Hussein because he terrorized his population, we'd have an army in the Sudan right now.
So it looks to many folks (helped by this Administration's numerous connections to oil) like our interest is ... oil.
Taking less than a week after placing our guy (okay, a business friend of the Administration) in charge of Afghanistan to sign a complex multi-billion dollar deal with several countries to build an oil pipeline across the entire breadth of Afghanistan doesn't make it obvious that we were there for only terrorists, either. Who could have imagined that the most important thing to do in that first week was a pipeline deal?
As powerful as it is, our country doesn't yet have the strength of its convictions, and asserts its power in strange, uneven ways that cause even our closest allies to worry about our unstated intentions and strategic interests.
I have an acquaintance at the gym. I recently learned he's from Palestine. He's got a hundred stories of loss. And he's not cynical or angry; nor has he given up hopes for his land becoming a country. What history teaches us, if we can possibly learn from history, is that people never give up and people always win. This is how we got our own country. It's the old fashioned way ... but it is certain.
Right now, three very important agencies -- DoD, Justice, and the CIA -- are discredited and seriously weakened, ironically by the political party that is nominally their most staunch support. As a conservative on foreign policy and philosophically very protective of the institutional instruments and agencies of American power, I am stunned.
And I am deeply worried. If the Administration is willing to cripple these institutions, what isn't at risk? We can't run the country with just Energy (DoE) and Commerce (DoC).
This is an Administration that stands on "born again Christian" ethics and "compassionate conservative" values, yet poll after poll shows that most of the people in the world right now actively dislike America. How many people do you know who are really good guys but have no friends?
Last week, the Republicans pushed for (and passed) legislation that gives tobacco growers an additional $2 billion subsidy per year for the next five years; that's $10 billion of our taxes for tobacco (not energy, not Iraq, not rebuilding the military; not fixing the CIA, but tobacco). That was to buy votes, not to serve the country's best interests or to serve a moral or ethical stance. Ditto the illegal trade barriers on steel; to buy votes. Clinton himself was a more committed advocate of free trade (one of my "conservative" values) than this Administration, and refused to cave in to the steel states (even though the Democratic Party makes less claim to supporting pure economic interests and could have done so without violating its own principles or core voters).
While the country has known for almost four years that something is seriously awry with the intelligence community and infrastructure, the Republicans are wasting everyone's time this week (during the last weeks of session; soon Congress closes shop for the summer) trying to introduce legislation to modify the Constitution and bar gays from marrying.
So we have Mr. Ridge worriedly telling us we should expect a big terrorist explosion before November, and President Bush telling us the real threat is gays might get married, and buy property, and pay taxes, and start a company.
Two gay women live together in an apartment down the hall from me ... and I've yet to have a smiley face plastered on my car or anything ... I should worry about this?
Fahrenheit 9/11 helps me see as nothing else has that this is not a serious President. This is an insincere President who doesn't seem to deeply care or worry how much he breaks in the pursuit of political and perhaps commercial interests.
I've seen Fahrenheit 9/11 and I watched with excruciating pain as my President made endless clown faces in the minutes (it appeared) before he went on the air to declare we're now at war with Iraq. If true, I don't understand how anyone (especially those actually in the military or with a relative serving) who sees this can vote for him a second time. No second thoughts there. No wondering if he'd prayed over the issue enough. No pain from the awareness that this decision will cost a lot of lives (the Army was calculating up to 30,000 deaths in the weeks leading up to the war). No indication of any gravity at all. Instead, an almost studied lack of compassion and painless disregard.
In this week's column Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal pokes fun at Mr. Kerry's physical mannerisms and gestures. I think she needs to find a mirror and aim that frame at the members of her own party.
If the liberals (or Democrats) had misused DoD, Justice, and the CIA as this Administration has, Republicans might already be demanding an impeachment for engaging in such radical experiments in crippling the nation's instruments of power without any public discourse.
The fact is right now the Democratic Party offers a more honestly conservative, rational, ethical, and sound agenda - economically, politically, socially - than the Republican Party, which currently offers a vision that is no more than attempts to justify the mistakes of its previous vision, reduce taxes, and trammel the Bill of Rights
Like anyone, I could use an extra couple of bucks, but not at the price of selling out the Constitutional freedoms of the women down the hall.
Unfortunately, the problems of Republican leadership can't be repaired by replacing Cheney on the Republican ticket. Doing so would simply constitute a clear declaration that the Vice President had been leading the country all along, and that President Bush is simply acting in a titular role.
The ethical, compassionate conservative has no choice but the Kerry/Edwards ticket.
Ernest Johns
Falls Church, Virginia
P.S. I wrote this Letter to the Editor of the Washington Post on Sunday July 11th. It's very unlikely this will get published, but I want my voice out there. I ask you, if you are comfortable in doing so, to forward onward. Thank you.