Canada is getting ready for the visit by President Bush and it’s encouraging to note that in addition to the standard Bush-bashing and the knee-jerk anti-Americanism there are many Canadians that support Bush. Not only that, they are frustrated and want express their views and a few have asked me to post their comments. So take a look at Aidan Maconachy’s criticism of anti-Americanism and his informed and very accurate assessment of Bush as a leader. I couldn’t have done it better myself, a must–read for Americans and Canadians alike.
Recently I got into a discussion with a few Canadian friends about the Bush victory in the 2004 Presidential election and the ongoing war in Iraq. These friends are well educated and cultured people with a preference for European wine and movies with sub-titles. I suppose they could be described as middle-of-the-road liberals and made for pleasant company at dinner over a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau ... at least until the subject of George W. Bush came up.
Their reaction to the re-election of the President was unequivocal. Choice of language included adjectives such as "dreadful", "shocking", "appalling" and even "bizarre". Their self-righteousness was more akin to arch inquisitors passing judgement on a proven devil worshiper, rather than dinner companions airing views on a President of the United States.
When I offered a contrary opinion, there was a hush and eyes widened with genuine horror - as though the late hour had induced the first physical evidence of my ‘werewolf within’. One of them even said - "are you feeling alright Aidan?"
You see, I’m one of those anomalies in the Canadian dominion - a Bush backer. A partiality that induces some of my fellow citizens to regard me as ... if not exactly a brown shirt ... then at the very least a tan shirt.
In the majority of Canadian minds the standard Bush caricature reigns supreme; the idiot cowboy with his finger on the trigger of the greatest arsenal of weapons ever assembled in the history of mankind. They buy the stereotype of the phonetically challenged goofy guy with big ears who would seem more at home eating beans under a starry sky than sitting behind a desk in the Oval Office. So why don’t I see this also? Is it possible that an emissary of Karl Rove has slipped a President enhancing drug into our rural Ontario well?
I’ve always been a little suspicious of iconic Presidents. Clinton for example, with his majestic white mane and inclusive body language; master of the language and equally at home with an Ohio pig farmer and the head of the PLO. Reagan with his star appeal and charming malapropisms; shielded from accusations of idiocy by his transcendental belief in "the good" as personified by America. These legendary Presidents almost compelled belief by sheer force of presence. By comparison, Dubya seems human and entirely fallible.
He reminds us of a guy we might encounter at the local sports bar or rub shoulders with in the bleachers during a ball game. Like most of us run-of-the-mill humans he screws up from time to time, mangles his grammar and even chokes on food at inopportune moments. He has daughters who have been known to act out and a wife who holds it all together with a stoicism that is instantly recognizable to those of us with an appreciation for self effacing, strong willed matriarchs. George is simply "that guy"... the only difference being that he also happens to be President of the greatest superpower in the history of the planet.
In internet chat rooms and when talking with friends, Bush backers like myself are constantly accosted with the idiot word. "Bush is an idiot" has probably been recited more times than the Hare Krishna mantra, and yet despite a stratosphere that reverberates with the "Bush is an idiot" echo, I don’t buy it.
My reluctance to give the nod to the ‘Bush as idiot’ consensus doesn’t reflect either willfulness or perversity. When I observe Bush speaking off-the-cuff to reporters I see a guy with a folksy style who addresses the issues in a direct down-to-earth fashion. There are occasional moments of levity when he upstages a journalist or offers a witticism or two. Clearly this is a regular guy talking and not an icon, and therein lies the offence. For some, Bush is simply too human and they wonder how a President who looks and sounds like the guy next door, can ever be relied upon to do and say the right thing. But to leap from that assumption to the conclusion that Bush is therefore an idiot, is facile in the extreme.
After 9/11 he rallied Americans with his down-home appeals to the nation. When he stood on the smouldering debris of the towers with an arm around a fireman and spoke into a megaphone, he was one of us ... a surrogate doing what we all wanted to do most ... reach out to a nation reeling in a time of crisis.
When he made speeches at the U.N. and at military academies around the country, his words were of course scripted ... and yet there was nothing about either his diction or his delivery that was suggestive of an idiot. He speaks well, despite the occasional mangled word, and sometimes even speaks with energized power and conviction. All of which makes the ‘idiot fixation’ such an odd phenomenon.
Of course, these detractors will argue that going into Iraq was idiotic and will predictably cite the non-discovery of WMD as proof positive of idiocy. According to them Bush was acting from the most venal of motives; indulging his appetite for a personal vendetta and sacrificing young lives on the alter of his ego. For some reason these detractors feel more inclined to call Bush’s motives into question, rather than examine the despicable nature of the Iraqi regime and the long term consequences of leaving Saddam in power.
Even though the entire world, and maybe even Saddam himself, believed that the regime was in possession of proscribed weaponry, the non-discovery of WMD was seized upon as evidence that Bush had launched a war without justification. The compelling information that has surfaced concerning links between Saddam’s Baathist regime and Al Qaeda is simply disregarded by the President’s detractors. The genocidal excesses and expansionist tendencies of the Iraqi regime are similarly overlooked. Saddam’s funding of suicide bombers is disregarded, as is the presence in pre-invasion Baghdad of that most sinister of terrorist godfathers ... Abu Nidal.
In her book The War Against America, Laurie Mylroie claims that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who was captured in Pakistan, may not in fact be Kuwaiti as he claims, but rather an Iraqi agent. Since Mohammed was an Al Qaeda operational leader, this information could well create direct ties between Iraq and the 9/11 New York attack, and so has important implications. Yet even such potentially damning information fails to move the die hard ‘idiot brigade’ who see in the person of Bush an atrocity that far exceeds even the rape room activities and genocidal excesses of the Baa’thists.
This odd fixation with Dubya’s inner idiot is compounded by the latter’s candid admission that he is a man of faith. Liberals by and large become alarmed at the prospect of God insinuating his way into the affairs of state. Some like Ann Coulter, have argued that this aversion is due to liberals’ devotion to the 'golden cow' of political correctness - something akin to a secular religion in and of itself. Coulter points out that while hundreds of references to the "Christian conservatives" and "religious right" occur in the New York Times, a Lexis-Nexis search of the entire New York Times archive did not succeed in unearthing even a single reference to "atheist liberals" or "the atheist left". Her not unreasonable conclusion, is that demeaning references are reserved for entities to the right of center.
Unlike his predecessors in the Oval Office who kept matters of personal faith in the closet, Bush has the temerity to refer candidly to God as if He actually exists and doesn’t hesitate to characterize terrorism and the states that support it as "evil". Such candor is deeply disturbing to those liberals who view God as a type of quaint metaphor that nobody in the final analysis, takes seriously. Such Presidential utterances shocks them deeply - in much the way the psychiatric nurse was shocked by the ravings of the Jack Nicholson character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
In attempting to get to the roots of the knee jerk tendency to characterize the President as an idiot, I must also make some reference to ‘the line’.
There are some lines, such as union picket lines, that right wingers cross at risk of death and dismemberment. Even though all of the evidence and the call of destiny might necessitate the crossing of a non-negotiable line, the actually crossing of it brings unforeseen consequences. Bill Clinton knew this very well. So while he was prepared to make shows of American military power by bombing a factory in the Sudan and ordering an air campaign in Kosovo, he was too much of a liberal to cross the scariest line of all. When Al Qaeda began testing the American will with bombings in the Middle East, most notably the attack on the USS Cole, the Clinton administration declined to act. Even when Dick Clarke, the former counter-terrorism czar, counseled a bombing campaign against terror camps in Afghanistan, the administration twiddled its thumbs and deferred. Opening a front with Al Qaeda was a scary line to cross and Bill Clinton wasn’t about to fire up the Arab world and ruin fun times at home, let alone turn himself into a potential target for assassination.
The task of crossing that line fell to George W. Bush, and once he stepped over the line with the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq - all hell, as they say, broke loose. The Iraq attack in particular, in the eyes of many liberals was the act of an idiot. To others, it demonstrated tremendous courage and a willingness to defend the United States at any price. The jury is still out, debating the final verdict. As Jacques Chirac recently remarked ..."history will judge". Of course, it’s easy to play the proctor when you are comfortably ensconced on the sidelines sipping a pernod.
The reflex tendency to dismiss Bush as an idiot trivializes the very real threat of international terrorism. The demonizing of the USA and its President simply provides a pillow for the enemy who are greatly comforted by the sight of the western media reducing America to a loathsome caricature.
In the final analysis, war polarizes and compels people to choose sides. The Bush detractors in N. America are operating in shrinking neutral territory. When the final verdict comes in, they may well find themselves further out to sea than they had ever dreamed possible.
