The Great Disconnect
By Nancy Greggs
After reading David Horowitz’s recent piece...
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http://www.frontpagemag.com/blog/BlogEntry.asp?ID=676)
... I was prompted to respond – not because Mr. Horowitz or his ilk are persuadable from their position, and certainly not because he is worthy of comment, but because the disconnect that exists in these people’s minds is so glaring in its magnitude, it is becoming increasingly difficult to fathom how anyone with an IQ above a house plant can continue to be so blind to its proportions.
Mr. Horowitz writes that there is a war going on in this country, and on that point we are in total agreement. Where we differ is his assessment that the “aggressors in this war are Democrats, liberals and leftists who began a scorched earth campaign against President Bush before the initiation of hostilities in Iraq.”
As seemed obvious at the time, and is even more apparent when viewed in hindsight, there is the fact that this president and his administration, with full support from their party’s politicos, were the aggressors in a war on the American citizenry and our well-being as a nation. And it was, and still is, a war premised on division of the populace, pitting one citizen against the other on every issue from gay marriage rights to flag burning. It was the simple concept of divide and conquer, because a divided citizenry invariably stands on shaky ground and are thusly easier to manipulate than a unified populace.
Bush at el wasted no time, once securely ‘placed’ in office rather than having been elected to same, in dismantling every policy that might interfere with the bottom line of corporations, or the accumulation of wealth by the already wealthy. And they did so at the expense of hard-working citizens, and to the detriment of what once existed as “the American Dream”.
That, my friends, is a declaration of war in no uncertain terms.
Mr. Horowitz goes on to state: “The initiators of this war were Al Gore and Jimmy Carter who attacked the president's attempt to rally the world against Saddam's defiance of international law in September 2002 just after his appeal to the UN General Assembly.”
There again is that great disconnect. Mr. Horowitz simply chooses to ignore the fact that while Bush had not only the majority of Americans, but the majority of the citizens of the world at his back after the events of 9/11, he chose – deliberately and, some would say, with malice aforethought – to launch the invasion of a country that had no connection to the recent assault on US soil. And that he did so based on cherry-picked intelligence, questionable methods of obtaining said information, and outright lies, falls by the wayside in the arguments that the Horowitzes of the world continually raise.
“Coming from national leaders of the opposition party these were attacks unprecedented in the history of post-Civil War American politics.” I can only assume that Mr. Horowitz was out of town when the Republicans attempted to bring down the peace-and-prosperity Clinton presidency, a slam-fest which consisted, for the most part, of that disconnect between a politician’s personal and private life – a gap which the GOP scurries to narrow when it is someone else’s private life being discussed, and broadly widen when it is their own.
“The campaign began in earnest with Nancy Pelosi's attack on the liberation of Iraq as ‘too costly’ on April 13, 2003, the day American troops pulled down Saddam's statue …” Yes, Ms. Pelosi, like many Americans, looked down the road at the potential cost of Bush’s ill-advised little misadventure in the Middle East and foresaw a cost which, at the time, the country was being assured would consist of a minimum of dollar expenditure (as per Paul ‘This War Will Pay for Itself’ Wolfowitz), a war whose only casualties would be severe allergy attacks suffered by US soldiers exposed to too many flowers and sweets conferred by grateful ‘liberated’ Iraqis as they sauntered into Baghdad surrounded by cheering crowds.
Of course, we all know that little scenario didn’t quite pan out. But for the David Horowitz crowd, there is always that great disconnect between what really happened and their ongoing “Greeted as Liberators” dream which persists, at least in their own narrow minds, to this day.
Horowitz goes on: “… (this) was raised to the level of political sabotage of our troops in Iraq and America's war on terror when a Democratic chorus began hammering the commander-in-chief as a ‘liar’ over the 16 words about Saddam's effort to purchase fissionable uranium in Niger.”
Again that great disconnect between proven history and the Horowitz fairy-tale rears its naïve little head. He fails to acknowledge that the thinking person would view sending our military into battle without sufficient body armour and vehicle armour as being ‘sabotage of our troops’, a sabotage which carries far greater consequences than the failure to put a yellow ribbon on the front door and a picture of a smiling George ‘Mission Accomplished’ Bush action-figure in the living room curio cabinet.
Horowitz points to the ‘sixteen words’ as though they were the only little ‘fib’ the administration was caught in (and in retrospect, a fib which led to a larger fib, which led to the outing of a covert CIA agent, which led to the indictment of a White House insider … all appearing soon at a courthouse near you.)
As someone who has loathed Bush, his administration, and all they stand for since day one, I will openly admit that if the ‘sixteen words’ were the ONLY untruth uttered by this cabal, I would be begging my fellow Americans to cut them some slack. But there are those other pesky untruths that have surfaced unabatedly throughout this debacle, apparently all uttered and reiterated beyond Mr. Horowitz’s hearing.
I guess he, like many of the sheep who graze in the same field, has been out of earshot every time an administration spokesperson has had to backtrack on what was said not twenty-four hours before. So let’s just ignore the Curveballs, the aluminium rods, the mobile chemical labs, the drones that could deliver weapons in forty-five minutes, the weapons of mass destruction that were known to be located to the north, the south, the east and somewhat to the west. Apparently, those things were never announced, discussed, proffered to an unsuspecting American public – and damn that liberal media for playing fast and loose with exact quotes!
As Ari Fleischer once so eloquently said in answer to a journalist’s question about a presidential announcement in the first days of the war, “What the president will have meant is …” In other words, this is the truth until proven otherwise, at which time the truth will be subject to revision.
“The campaign to sabotage America's war against the Islamo-fascist enemy has continued unabated through Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, Haditha and the two intelligence programs that the New York Times exposed.”
Once again, Mr. Horowitz fails to connect the all-too-obvious dots. If you want to talk about fascism, you might want to take a look at a government that suspends what, under our Constitution, are defined as inalienable rights. A government that spies on its own citizenry, and then gets huffy when caught; a government that declares time-honored wartime rules of engagement as “quaint” and no longer valid. You might even take a closer look at a self-declared Christian president who not only sanctions but embraces torture – and, on that note, you might even question the mental stability of a leader who claims to hear the voice of God on a regular basis.
“Its agenda is to force an American defeat in Iraq using the model of Vietnam ("Bring the troops home," while the battle is in progress).” Yeah, you’ve got us there, David. What kind of an ‘agenda’ is it when Americans want to bring their troops home before even more of them die, or are maimed physically or psychologically to the point of no longer being able to function in their role as defenders of our nation?
What kind of madness is it that does not see the fruitfulness of continuing a battle that was lost the first time an innocent Iraqi was tortured at Abu Ghraib, the first time a blown-to-bits Iraqi child was written off as ‘collateral damage’, the first time the Iraqi people saw a billion-dollar US Embassy being constructed in their midst while, simultaneously, they were being told that our forces would leave their country as soon as requested to do so?
But Mr. Horowitz is not alone in having fallen into that great gap between fact and Admin-spin, between reality and rhetoric, between the story as it has unfolded and the fairy-tale we, as a nation, continue to be told.
Unfortunately, the great disconnect continues to be a black hole that swallows groups of people whole.
There are the Fundamentalists who do not see the disconnect between the tenets of their Christian faith and a president who endorses torture and the gutting of social programs that feed the hungry, house the homeless, and tend to the sick.
There are those who are blind to the disconnect between Republican policies that cut benefits to soldiers in combat and veterans who have already served valiantly and the admonishment to ‘support the troops”.
There are those who refuse to grasp the disconnect between a war that is costing US taxpayers billions of dollars per month and the fact that there are soldiers dying for want of a few hundred dollars worth of body armour or helmet inserts that could save their lives.
There are those who fail to see the disconnect between an administration that scolds its citizens to be vigilant against would-be terrorists in their midst, while negotiating the handing over of control of our ports to the very countries that have funded and shielded terrorists from abroad.
There are those, like Horowitz, who just choose to be the perpetually oh-so-blind, simply because they refuse to see.
As for Horowitz’s parting shot, “Let's hope the American people wise up and stop it in its tracks,” I can only impart the good news that the American people ARE wising up – and will eventually stop this war, and those who perpetrated it, in its tracks.
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