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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
David Frum says Bush "surrendered to the radicals" by hiding behind security in London; Gen. Franks predicts another terror attack could dissolve U.S. Constitution; Coulter bashes "pandering" Dems who just discovered their Jewishness.
Nov 26, 2003 | President Bush hid like a coward during his pivotal visit with Tony Blair in London last week, laments former Bush speechwriter David Frum in the National Review Online. Frum applauds Bush's major foreign policy speech on the Middle East last week as "important, splendid, and brave." But he says that the president, by hermetically sealing himself off from the British citizenry behind some of the most intense security ever seen, allowed his critics to win the day and failed to reach out to ordinary Britons.
"Despite my fears, there were no clashes between protesters and police: In fact, the anti-Bush protests were surprisingly small and unenergetic compared to the last British protests I witnessed, back in October 2002.
"But -- and here's the catch -- the reason for the comparative quiet was that Bush and Blair surrendered the streets of London to the radicals. The original plan for the visit contemplated that Bush would drive in a royal coach down the Mall from Buckingham Palace to Whitehall. It contemplated an address to Members of Parliament. Tens of thousands of cheering schoolchildren waving British and American flags would also have been nice ...
"By agreeing to let the President be bottled up inside the palace, the trip's planners reduced the risk of confrontations -- but only by broadcasting to the British public their tacit acknowledgment that the visit was unpopular and unwelcome.
"By eliminating from the president's schedule events with any touch of spontaneity or public contact, the trip planners made the president look as if he could not or would not engage with ordinary British people. Unless you see it, you can hardly believe the incredible feebleness of the American communication effort in the UK. The US ambassador is nowhere to be seen, and nobody else seems to have the mission to speak up for this administration and this president. The cocooning of the president has demoralized even those who ought to be America's friends."
Frum should tell it to his old colleague Karl Rove, whose election strategy clearly does not include TV footage of Bush confronting protesters in the streets.
Minneapolis-based syndicated columnist and blogger James Lileks ("the Bleat") rips the "ignorant" producers at ABC's "Nightline" for skipping over Bush's big foreign policy speech in London in favor of the Michael Jackson pedophilia melee last Thursday. Citing a "Nightline" electronic newsletter to its viewing audience saying that "the staff was split" about which story to cover, Lileks is incredulous:
"You know what? Michael Moore is right. There are many Americans who are ignorant of the world around them. And they're all TV news producers. Two big bombs in Istanbul, and what's the big story of the day? Following around a pervy slab of albino Play-Doh as he turns himself into the police. I was stunned to discover last [Thursday] night that Nightline not only covered the Jackson case in detail, but bumped coverage of the Whitehall speech, which was the most important speech since the Iraq campaign began and arguably the most important speech of the war, period.
"Nightline, supposedly the Thinking Person's Late Night Show, was split about whether a repudiation of 50 years of foreign policy was slightly more important than the arrest of a washed-up, crotch-grabbing yee-hee! squeaking nutball who was probably the horrid pedophile everyone already thought he was.
"The question is whether this reflects the mood of the country, or whether it reflects the mood of our Olympian betters who hand down the news from their lofty aeries. I think it's the latter. I hope it's the latter. Of course Jackson is an item of interest, but it's a below-the-fold story. It's an artifact of the noisy empty 90s, the Jerry Springer era, the time when the networks sought out the people pasted to their sofas shoveling in Doritos and watching hapless fools throw folding chairs at their ex-lovers. Watching the [networks] fall over themselves covering Jackson makes you suspect that they yearn for those days, because they are profoundly ambivalent about the conflict in which we are engaged.
"They fear Islamic terrorism, but it's an abstract fear now. Their distaste of Bush is much more tangible and immediate; it's part of the atmosphere in the newsroom. This is his war, not theirs. If it is a war at all."
In an early salvo in what is certain to be a crucial debate over whether Bush's invasion of Iraq has actually made terrorism worse, Lileks blasts war critics as spineless appeasers prepared to sell out America and Israel.
"'It's going to take another attack to convince the fence-sitters': I hear this all the time. I don't think that's the case. I think the next attack on American soil will jolt those who've moved on, who've forgotten the aching, clammy dread we all felt after 9/11. But others will believe that we brought it on ourselves. You already read it around the web -- the bombings in Turkey were a response to Britain's assistance for toppling Saddam; what did we expect? In other words: if we fight back, we get what we deserve. If we do not fight back, and we are attacked again, you can blame it on the crimes for which we have not yet sufficiently atoned. The only proper posture for the West is supine. Curl up and let them kick until they're spent. Give them Israel and New York and perhaps they'll go away.
"This is either going to end on their terms, or ours. Which would you prefer?"
For his part, Gen. Tommy Franks, who retired in August 2003 after commanding U.S. forces during the invasion of Iraq, takes a darker view of another catastrophic attack on U.S. soil. According to NewsMax.com, a right-wing news site based in Palm Beach, Fla., Franks says such an attack could result in the U.S. government being dissolved in favor of a military state. (NewsMax quotes from an interview with Franks in the Dec. issue of Cigar Aficionado magazine.)
"Gen. Tommy Franks says that if the United States is hit with a weapon of mass destruction that inflicts large casualties, the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military form of government ...
"Discussing the hypothetical dangers posed to the U.S. in the wake of Sept. 11, Franks said that 'the worst thing that could happen' is if terrorists acquire and then use a biological, chemical or nuclear weapon that inflicts heavy casualties.
"If that happens, Franks said, '... the Western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we've seen for a couple of hundred years in this grand experiment that we call democracy.' Franks then offered 'in a practical sense' what he thinks would happen in the aftermath of such an attack.
"'It means the potential of a weapon of mass destruction and a terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event somewhere in the Western world -- it may be in the United States of America -- that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event. Which in fact, then begins to unravel the fabric of our Constitution. Two steps, very, very important.'"
Gen. Franks divines such sinister intentions in Saddam's anti-American speeches:
"'I, for one, begin with intent ... There is no question that Saddam Hussein had intent to do harm to the Western alliance and to the United States of America. That intent is confirmed in a great many of his speeches, his commentary, the words that have come out of the Iraqi regime over the last dozen or so years. So we have intent."
But perhaps because of the missing WMD, the general's rhetoric and logic get all tangled up when it comes to Saddam's capacity to carry out attacks:
"'If we know for sure ... that a regime has intent to do harm to this country, and if we have something beyond a reasonable doubt that this particular regime may have the wherewithal with which to execute the intent, what are our actions and orders as leaders in this country?'"
In the annals of clear and inspiring battle cries, "We have something beyond a reasonable doubt that a particular regime may have the wherewithal to strike" is not among the finalists.
