Oh, For Fuck's Sake

Jonah Goldberg on Guantanamo and why it's the Democrats' problem (via Kevin Drum):

If Democrats want terrorists to fall under the Geneva Convention let them say so. My guess is most won't, if they're smart.

I am heartily sick of this tactic. What it breaks down to is that the administration will have the military act out whatever depravities rise from the stygian depths of Alberto Gonzales's mind, and whenever anyone calls for a halt, moral idiots like Jonah Goldberg will be right there to say "See, they're soft on terrorism! Ha! Ha! Ha!"

Never mind that every story about torture at one of our little health farms makes our political job of dealing with terrorism that much harder. Never mind that...no, fuck this...never mind arguing the point because what's clear is that, as with education, Katrina relief, Iraqi reconstruction, infrastructure, health care, nuclear proliferation and everythefuckthing else, the Bushites don't take handling the terrorist problem seriously. They don't give a shit about solving these problems, because to them the only problem is how to see to it that their party retains permanent control of all the levers of power. Everything else is just a means to that end. That's why there was no planning for the aftermath of the Iraq war. After they took pictures of Saddam's statue falling in Baghdad and showed Bush landing on the carrier in his flight suit, Iraq had served its purpose. The people who live there? Fuck them. Forget them. Iraqi national treasures get looted? Fuck them. Forget them. Our soldiers get blown away riding around cities in vehicles without armor? Fuck them. There are more where they came from. Our troops need health care when they come back without legs? Fuck them. Cripples in the photo-ops are a bummer anyhow. Why does this administration show such lousy results across the board? Because across the board, they don't give a shit. As long as they've got the people scared and stupid, all they have to do is strike up the band, wave the bloody shirt of 9-11, and say their opponents root for Osama.

Honestly, why would the Bush administration want to solve the problem of terrorism? If they learned anything from Bush I, it's that you don't want the war that made you popular to end. Why bother actually working to shut down terrorists when the terrorists make for such wonderful enemies for staging a new pageant of America the Great/America the Good? Why take Osama out at Tora Bora, when having him out there gives you an excuse to spy on Americans and intimidate the press into accepting your daily bullshit as if it were Holy Writ? Why bother hunting terrorists down, or dealing with the serious political problems of the Middle East, when all those problems can be better used to showcase the Democrats' "weakness".

This War on Terror is a great gimmick, because even if the average American is thousands of times more likely to die from eating too many hamburgers than from the blast of a terrorist bomb, it's so much more delightful for Americans to be afraid of what they can't control than what they can. After all, you can cut down on the ground round, but that's hard because dead cow tastes good. Fearing terrorists, on the other hand, allows you, the consumer, to be as lazy as you want. Terrorism provides all the adrenalin of real fear with none of the responsibility that comes with actually confronting it. It makes crack look like New Coke. The Bush people recognize our national addiction, and they've made themselves the exclusive manufacturers of America's drug of choice.

In exchange for the gladiatorial spectacle that is the War on Terror (in which our heroes march into the arena and triumph over ugly but mostly inconsequential foes, and in doing so symbolically triumph over Terror itself), we pay the administration with our freedom and whatever sense of moral decency we once had. We've given them the license to kill, to torture, to spy on us, to whisk people off the street for no reason and take them to prisons that we're renting out from the KGB, all so that they'll keep us good and afraid. It's a cynical bargain, but what the hell? At least it'll allow us to distract ourselves until the money and the oil run out.

What Goldberg's really saying is "Why mess with such a happy arrangement?" And maybe he's right. As the immortal Eric Idle once sang. "You see it's all a show/Keep 'em laughing as you go/Just remember that the last laugh is on you."