Tired ... of war

The editorial page of the Wall Street Journal is rightly known as a repository of conservative thought, which is fine because even though many of the ideas presented there are straight out of the H.R. Haldeman Political Manual and borrow heavily from the Chicago School of economic thought, often the pieces are well-written and reasonably well argued.

On occasion, however, OpinionJournal.com spits out some truly bilious dreck that offends even hardened sensibilities. Brendan Miniter, assistant editor at OpinionJournal.com, used the Journal’s space on Dec. 20 to puke upon the paper’s readers what can be described only as the most twisted kind of a pep talk to rally the weary troops around our New Reality, the perpetual “War on Terror.”

Miniter’s basic point is that the U.S. public is tiring of the unending beat of the Bush Administration’s war drums, and that this fatigued condition has led directly to compromises in lawmaking and policy fortitude that have weakened the government’s ability to fight the terrorists. For example, there was delay in approving the defense spending bill, which of course pays for the gas that fuels the U.S. war machine; television gave expanded talk show and news coverage to Sen. John McCain’s anti-torture campaign and Rep. Jack Murtha’s proposal for immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq; extension of certain Patriot Act provisions was held up on Capitol Hill amid wrangling over civil liberties concerns; and Bush was forced to defend an indefensible policy of domestic spying.

In Miniter’s eyes, each of these represents an ax chop at the base of the domestic security tree trunk. Enough chops and the base will weaken and the tree will fall, presumably leading to a terrorist attack.

Then Miniter begins the inevitable conservative lubing up of the executive powers penis, preparing for the blowjob du jour. Bush, he said, reminded citizens on his weekly radio address (does anyone listen to those anymore, or are they just recorded so that snippets can be played on the evening news later?) that two of the Sept. 11 hijackers communicated with Al Qaeda members outside the United States prior to ramming planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

“Had the National Security Agency been running its secret program then, the authorities might have known that the two were planning to board a plane and ram it into the Pentagon,” Miniter wrote.

Which is fine, and maybe true. But it’s equally true that if about two dozen other things had happened or not happened the hijackers’ plot might have been foiled either in the planning stages or early in the execution phase. To pin the blame for Sept. 11 on the fact that the NSA was not eavesdropping on American’s phone conversations at will and without review by the judiciary branch is telling much less than half the story. It’s telling 4% of the story. To Miniter’s way of thinking, we should be grateful to have the NSA listening in because they’ll catch the evil-doers. Benjamin Franklin said something about people willing to give up liberties to gain security deserving neither liberty nor security. The Indignant Citizen trusts Ben’s thinking more than a mid-level editorial hack at the Wall Street Journal.

Then Miniter gets really offensive, essentially calling for an end to debate about how we’re waging the never-ending war on terror. “The real danger here is that such debates will exhaust all of us, sapping the energy we need to fight a long and broad-based war,” he wrote.

Oh please, fuck him. Just Fuck Him. In dispensing this knob saliva in writing, Brendan Miniter disclosed something remarkable. He doesn’t think the American people have the stamina to wage war and scrutinize the waging of war at the same time. We’ll get too tired, he thinks, and lose focus. And so by all means, let’s advocate ending scrutiny of the war, not the war itself.

Who are these people? There are a damn lot of them out there; there must be for someone like Miniter to get prime space in the Journal. But there are signs that more Americans are discovering the stamina to be vigilant and critical at the same time, and they’re even applying extra brain power to considering the possibility that running the war machine 24 hours a day, seven days a week forever may be a bigger drain on energy than discussion.

Sometimes exhaustion produces clarity in thought.