Slip Sliding Away

A nervous populace longs for the days of Saddam

by Alan Bisbort

Source: Hartford Advocate, April 28, 2005.

Some time in the last year or so — in the vague miasma that is the Bush Disaster — some wannabe Bill O'Reilly in my town posted a pro-war screed on the local Republican Party website. In his diatribe, this self-deputized Barney Fife referred to those townspeople who opposed the then-GOP juggernaut — its fangs dripping with Iraqi blood, crude Iraqi oil coursing through its veins — as "neo-Nihilists" who "hate America" and said that we think of Saddam Hussein as a "hero."

Barney's words would have been laughable if 1.) they had not appeared amid a national wave of similarly toxic self-righteousness; 2.) they had not appeared on the site of the town's reigning party, thus sanctioning such characterizations of taxpaying citizens whose kids attend the same schools, play in the same leagues, etc. Somehow I could not see the soccer mom with the "Peace Now" bumper sticker as a "neo-Nihilist" who coddled terrorists. I don't even know what a "neo-Nihilist" is, and I seriously doubt our Barney Fife does either. It's an awful big word that makes him appear smarter than the rest of us who just don't want our kids blasted to pieces in a Republican oil war. Hell, the only Americans I ever saw shake the cutthroat Saddam's hand were paleo-Nihilists like Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie and George H.W. Bush.

While Barney's point was unknowable, one thing was certain: if my otherwise sane and civilized little town was generating and tolerating such bile, there must have been similar, or worse, toxicity bubbling up in burgs, hamlets and towns all over America. The sister of a friend of mine in North Carolina was hounded for weeks after she voiced doubts about the Iraqi war at a church forum; it got so bad that she feared for her family's safety — from members of her own church!

So, what to make of a recent Gallup Poll that indicates 53 percent of Americans say that the war in Iraq was not worth it; only 45 percent say that it was. The 53 percent is probably higher — Gallup errs on the side of conservatism — and it will go higher still, as more copters are blown from the sky, more troop carriers bombed, more soldiers picked off on patrols, more Americans come out from behind the cover of their silence, which made all this possible in the first place.

Two things occur to me about this Gallup Poll. One, where the f___ were you when we needed you?! Two, don't say we didn't warn you.

It's clear now that the Amen Corner of Patriots was never that large to begin with — sustained as it was by fear and intolerance — and it's shrinking by the minute. Bush's approval rating has fallen to 43 percent, the lowest of his dictatorship, and the GOP-led Congress has been groveling in the 30s for months. Formerly "safe" Republican Senate and House seats are now slipping away in the wake of the Social Security and Terri Schiavo debacles; all signs point to the possibility of a Democratic landslide in 2006.

Have the "neo-Nihilists" won? What happened to all that hatred for Saddam "He Gassed His Own People" Hussein? Heck, even Beltway insider the Brookings Institution is passing love notes to the former Iraqi dictator. A recent Brookings report estimates that between 500 and 1,000 Iraqis will be killed each month until, well, they don't say how long this will go on. "Unfortunately, things have not gotten much better for the Iraqi population," Brookings' expert Michael O'Hanlon told ABC. "The economic conditions in the country ... were no better than under the leadership of Saddam Hussein ... the progress here is probably only about back now to where things were under Saddam Hussein." Talk about pulling your punches! ("probably only about").

Further, the State Department has ceased publishing its annual report on international terrorism. Why? With George "Bring 'Em On" Bush leading the "War on Terror," 2004 saw more terror attacks than any year since Reagan's reign of error.

And yet, you'd not know any of this if you dipped a toe in the mainstream media. It's astonishing to me, for example, that on the 10th anniversary of the Oklahoma City terrorist bombing, Time magazine ran a cover story on Ann Coulter, to whom Tim McVeigh is a hero. Coulter once said her only regret about McVeigh is that he hadn't parked his truck outside the New York Times. Coulter's take on liberals is suspiciously similar to Barney Fife's: "Liberals have a preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason ... Everyone says liberals love America, too. No they don't. Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy."

As Walt Kelly put it in Pogo: "We have met the enemy and he is us."

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reprinted from The Hartford Advocate