December 11, 2003
MEGAN THE AGGRESSOR
Every Saturday, Megan Gressor presents a column for The Sydney Morning Herald in which she reviews the first page of a book. Apparently this brief frees her from the normal journalistic constraints of accuracy and truthfulness. This week’s Gressor column (no link available) examined Wesley Clark’s Winning Modern Wars:
This page isn’t just about war, it declares war [on George W. Bush]. It’s the opener to a book-length election manifesto by the man most likely to be the next US president, so it behoves us to lend an ear.
It behoves me to tell Megan Gressor she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Clark’s next book could be Losing Modern Elections. He’s been floating belly-up in the Democrat pond for months.
That hemorraging US economy could prove as lethal to Junior’s re-election hopes as it was for his dad’s; as lethal as taking on Saddam could be.
The US economy is surging. Read the financial pages often, Megan? You should. Lotsa information.
A four-star general, Clark was supreme allied commander during NATO’s Kosovo campaign, which was conducted with international co-operation, a clearly-defined mission and exit strategy, all signally lacking in the Bushites’ adventurism.
The Kosovo war wasn’t approved by the UN and, as Clark himself has acknowledged, would have been vetoed by China and Russia. In fact, he says it was “technically illegal”.
That scene of a US armoured vehicle pulling down Saddam’s statue is “richly symbolic” all right; symbolic of an arrogance as endless, disingenuous and counterproductive as the war on terror itself.
Leaving Saddam in power, then, would represent the opposite of arrogance. Humility, perhaps. But you’ll never get that from the land of the not-so-free, a place afflicted by the “US culture's peculiar mix of puritanism, greed and hypocrisy”. As Hitchens observes, people like Gressor are overwhelmed by “feelings of guilt allied to feelings of impotence.”
UPDATE. SMH Webdiary doofus Harry Heidelberg writes:
As I've said before, I'll be in Washington on January 20, 2005 when President Dean is inaugurated. This is a must do for me. It's not a nice to do, it is a must do!
Whatever that means. But how will Dean defeat the man most likely to be the next US President?
Posted by Tim Blair at December 11, 2003 01:50 AMPerhaps Megan could also enlighten us American observers of the situation:
What IS the exit strategy for Kosovo? The folks at Camp Bondsteel might like to know....
Posted by: Dean at December 11, 2003 at 02:37 AMShe reviews the first page of a book? Megan must have picked up some of my old tricks from high school. That's probably more than Wesley Clark has read of it, though.
Someone might want to mention to Megan that besides the surging economy, a new USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll shows that support for Bush and the war in Iraq are both on the rise again. The man most likely to be the next US president is George W. Bush.
I'd say that positive news travels slowly from the U.S. to Australia except that it seems to take a long time to reach most of the American media as well. It never does seem to catch up to the Democratic candidates on the campaign trail.
Posted by: Randal Robinson at December 11, 2003 at 02:43 AMthe man most likely to be the next US president
If so he'd better get with it. Here in the U.S. I haven't heard his name mentioned on the big media news in weeks.
Posted by: Wallace at December 11, 2003 at 02:48 AMAl Gore was introduced as the "elected President of the United States" and the crowd cheered. Every single time I see him I think of what may have been. I suspect I am not alone.
Every single time I see Al Gore I think about what it would have been like to wake up on 9/11 with him as President.
Posted by: Donnah at December 11, 2003 at 03:22 AMAl Gore was introduced as the "elected President of the United States" and the crowd cheered.
Thereby demonstrating their ignorance of what it takes to win an election to the US Presidency. The popular vote is irrelevant. The vote of the electoral college is what counts.
Bush won the vote that counts, Gore won the vote that doesn't matter. Hmmm - there's a lesson in there somewhere.
Every time I see Al Gore, I too think of what may have been. And then I take a nice seltzer to quell the nausea.
Posted by: R. C. Dean at December 11, 2003 at 03:46 AMI'm originally from Illinois. There, if you don't steal enough votes to win, you gotta clam up and try again next time. This constant whining of the losers probably means they have no strategery for stealing enough votes to win in 2004. Unlucky for them.
Posted by: JorgXMcKie at December 11, 2003 at 03:51 AMThis is the beauty and wisdom of the electoral college: You have to steal votes in many states, not just Illinois.
But I have to admit, Chicago is a national leader in getting out the vote: population 2.9 million, registered voters 3.2 million (give or take a few stiffs)
Posted by: Ken Summers at December 11, 2003 at 04:56 AMAs a native Chicagoan, I can vouch for the cities' ability to get out the vote.
Where do you think the phrase, "Vote early and often," came from?
What the Dems STILL don't get is that the US is a Constitutional Republic. If popular vote counted, rather than the Electoral College process, we'd have the morass of crappola that's called France.
To RC's point, seltzer--a double--indeed.
Posted by: joe at December 11, 2003 at 08:23 AMClarification--if the popular vote was counted, **without** the Electoral College process, we'd have the morass of crappola that's called France.
My apologies for any confusion.
Posted by: joe at December 11, 2003 at 08:28 AMI laughed out loud when I read this one on Saturday. It reads like a high-schools student's political essay. No half-informed person could take it seriously. Surely the editors job is to pick this up?
You're really shooting fish in a barrel here Tim.
Posted by: PK at December 11, 2003 at 10:21 AMI imagine her standing around in indignation while Bush accepts his second term. "I say, I say! Well, this is a nice to-do!"
Posted by: Amos at December 11, 2003 at 12:37 PM