If you read that into my post, then you've pretty much missed the boat. I don't take any pride whatsoever in having been wrong. It angers and upsets me. It only makes things worse when someone comes along and twists the knife. I think that people who do that pretty much suck.
What I read into it was a superficial resemblance to a woefully common bit of stabbing I've seen directed from the other direction: the thesis that Joe Median couldn't
help but buy into the war case, which inevitably couples to an insinuation that those who (say they) didn't buy into it are either (a) ivory tower idealists who would be still peaceniks even if there
was a clear threat, or (b) just plain lying — deep down, we 'all' believed in the WMDs, yada yada.
I read a
lot of those posts, and I've heard a lot of it live and direct. And the sentiment that criticizing IWR support is equivalent to moral masturbation has become a red flag for me that I'm about to run into the same old apologism. You realize, a lot of people far less bothered by the war than you are still
no less fond of exactly that mode of derision — it plays to one of the
favorite propaganda images of the system: the liberal cocktail-party snob, spooning out his contempt for all the peons beneath him with dirt under their fingernails.
Hence, as I'd said, for the bulk of my post I was responding towards a
plural "you" to which you apparently belonged (i.e. the demographic of those who would have signed the IWR and/or believe that any given Congressional rep "had" to). Hence, not everything I wrote was directly aimed at you, personally. For instance:
I never implied that "no such creature really exists." Not once, snidely or otherwise. I really don't know where you get that. Look, I'm glad you were against the resolution. I'm glad that millions were.
I got that from AZBlue, thanking you, one post just above mine. It is, by a long shot, not the first time I've heard this sentiment: that any given person (not
everyone mind you, oh no, just everyone who happens to be talking
now...) criticizing past war support is just expressing 20/20 hindsight.
For
that part — using you as a tee-off point to talk about a broader group to which you are by far not the most vicious or extreme example of — I apologize. That was just freaking sloppy writing (I'm not even going to bother hiding behind the "oh, but it's 3 in the morning" -- I live on a graveyard shift schedule, so this is my "daytime").
I do
not apologize (yet) for my basic distaste for the persistent accusation that criticism of IWR support is done simply for ego stroking. It's not about promoting myself. It's not even about promoting "us", some group to which I belong. It's about promoting the proposition that
giving Bush war powers against Iraq was always an obviously bad idea. If at the end of the day, I have a choice between someone walking away thinkig "Man, that Mecha-T ought to be President! No, wait, Pope!" and "Man, there was NEVER a time when giving Bush war powers was rationally defensible, was there?" ... I know I'm picking the second one, and I have yet to see someone arguing this context who sounds like they're aiming for the first. I
have repeatedly seen the second goal characterized as if it
were the first ...
There is a rational reason for (still) promoting this proposition: because the people who made that exact mistake are still in charge today — not just in charge of the country, but in charge of this party. And they're still making the mistake, in a dozen different guises. (I dub this the "call on" fallacy — any time you see a Democratic politician "call on" the WH to do the right thing, you have to think they're either just making noise for the press or they're bonkers — at this juncture there is
no room for a rational belief that Bush is sincerely attempting to faithfully discharge the duties of his office for the good of the nation, and is just "misguided" about how to do it.)
Not a good metaphor, because you're painting a nice little "with us or against us" picture. Wonder where I've seen that attitude before.
Conversely, your metaphor fails in precisely the only thing my off-the-cuff snark didn't: rain just happens, it's nobody's fault, and once the flood is started everyone knows it has to be stopped in toto. But somebody
wanted this mess to happen (and other somebodies made a conscious decision not to stop it); like it or not, human will and intent is part and parcel
of the mess, and that makes it both relevant and fair to raise questions about what intents are now. I agree, I obviously shouldn't want to spurn a pair of willing hands — but willing to do
what? It's not there are Unacceptable People (Fie! Shun them!) who I won't allow to lay sandbags with their unclean hands. It's that there are people who were calling
me Unacceptable (Fie! Shun him!) yesterday, and I think I get to worry over the prospect of them starting to tell me (again) how and where to put the bags. (Again: all the power in the party seems to lie in the hands of people who not only disagreed with me, but don't seem half as sick about it as you do, Dawg.)
This is something I can't stress enough: we're not talking about a quiet procedural debate here. There is bad blood to be found in the anti-IWR crowd. Of
course there is. They've been accused of at best being pansies, naifs, or oversheltered deludees, and at worst of being traitors or terrorist sympathizers — all of this when, at every moment, the facts on the table said "Hey, these guys are right, and Bush is full of crap."
And they get it from both sides. (And of course, at the final brink, when no charge has panned out ... well, they're just so full of themselves!) And they didn't deserve any of it. (
I might, but most of them didn't.)
Believe me or not, but I'm not really sitting here at my computer saying, "Man, I'm going to make Dawg feel bad, so that I'll be able to feel powerful and validated!" The odd thing is, beyond this last post itself, it sounds like I've got no reason to be bothered by you. You say you've never supported a pro-war candidate (mind you, by this I mean pro-IWR), never voted for one, and never demeaned a IWR-opponent? But it still makes you feel sick, just to know you emotionally backed this one resolution momentarily, that you could be taken in even a little? Then you sound a lot closer to sainthood than I'm ever going to be, and I say that without sarcasm. But if
everyone was like that — if they just were swayed on the inside, and never voiced it ... there wouldn't have been any political expedience to cater
to.
In summary, one last time: I (and I believe most people) don't bring up early IWR opposition to laud myself, but (a) to emphasize how
ordinary and unexceptional it really should have been, and (b) to prevent any fig leafs from growing over the issue — so long as large numbers of people are still actively saying "see, it wasn't really bad that people did that", someone needs to be saying "yes, it frickin' was." That's how you keep the lessons of history from
being forgotten.
Postscript, In Re Bad Logic:So anyone who wasn't against the war from day 1 shares in the pile of bodies. That is an unfortunate truth. But tell me something: did you stop paying your taxes? After all, it's taxpayer money that funds the war machine. What? You say you'd lose your house? What about your commitment to justice? Point blank: if you're a United States citizen and you've paid taxes or paid any money to any individual, business, or corporation that pays taxes, you have helped to fund the war machine and your hands are bloody.
By this chain of logic, I'm also responsible for every crime committed by the Mafia and cocaine cartels, since the laws of circulation eventually puts my money in their hands; you're conflating the act of
offering funding for the event of having it robbed from you. If I stop paying taxes, all I'm doing is increasing the risk the war machine scores a twofer by Norquisting public works — screwing over Granny's pension and medication payments only
compounds the injustice. This war machine isn't
even being funded directly by our taxes — if it was, it'd already have gone bankrupt long ago.
The thing is, you had a much better rebuttal available to you than this
tu quoque nonsense, because I
was in the wrong here: I unfairly lumped you into the wrong group ("collectively, all of those who supported the resolution, and thereby made it clearly acceptable for Congress to"). It's not "not being against the war from Day 1" that buys a share of the bodies; it's actively promoting the war resolution as necessary, or ridiculing, disparaging, or otherwise seeking to discredit those who said it wasn't. If that's not you? Then that's not you — and again, I refer to the above apology about conflating the personal and plural "you", tarring you with the brush of unrelated people associated only by the coincidentally shared focus on the peacenik "high horse".
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