Too late, Bush’s lovers finally get it

Finally, though way, way too late, neocons, Jews, and friends of Israel who have been staunch supporters of President Bush are waking up to how terrible this man is with regard to Israel. I say: WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?

Thus Melanie Phillips writes:

Rarely has a moral compass been so completely and publicly destroyed by its owner. George W Bush’s presidency has been defined by the moral position he took, under the impetus of 9/11, to repudiate the amoral realpolitik of his predecessors in appeasing and rewarding aggression…

With Bush’s visit to the Middle East this week, however, any such residual excuse is blown away along with the last shreds of his claim to moral integrity….

Bush’s position is tantamount to pushing Israel to surrender to an enemy still hell-bent upon Israel’s annihilation

In this context, some of what Bush said in Israel was deeply shocking and, in the implications of such moral and intellectual obtuseness, very frightening….

In that known context, the damage done by Bush’s visit to Israel is incalculable as a signal of surrender to the whole Arab and Muslim world….

Philips seems to realize this now for the first time. WHERE HAS SHE BEEN? As I’ve been repeating for the last five years (see, for example this), Bush blatantly violated his own principles of June 2002 and began pushing for a Palestinian state in June 2003 at Sharm el-Sheikh, and has been continuously doing so ever since. None of the neocons, none of the supposed friends of Israel who were supporters of Bush pointed this out at the time, nor did they do so for several years. Only now, when Bush has gone completely off the rails and is demanding that Israel negotiate the right of return, i.e., the destruction of Israel, do they finally get it that Bush has betrayed his own principles and betrayed Israel.

I’ve say it before and I’ll say it again. Had the friends of Israel not been so sycophantic to Bush all these years, had they responded with shock and indignation to his resuming the peace process in violation of his stated principles of having nothing to do with the Palestinians until they had decisively abandoned terror, they might have dissuaded him from moving further and further along this route. But nope, they thought they were being “realistic” by staying on good terms with Busherino. And now look where their realism—and their sycophancy—have brought them.

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And speaking of realists, consider the supreme realist, the self-styled political warrior supremo himself, David Horowitz, the man who has justified every single one of Bush’s leftward turns over the last seven years as something dictated by political realism, and, in many e-mail exchanges with me, dismissed my concerns about Bush as mere Ivory Towerism. And where is Horowitz now? He’s lashing out at Bush because of his unbelievable statements in Israel. But as I said, what Bush is saying now is continuous with his entire career of appeasement of Israel’s enemies since June 2003. Horowitz, Mr. Reality, didn’t want to see it.

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Sage McLaughlin writes:

I think the bottom line with Bush’s apologists over the years has been the desire to associate themselves with power. Couple that with Bush’s endless promises that he and his allies could totally remake the world in America’s image, that there was virtually no limit to what American might could achieve, and the brew was simply too intoxicating.

This is not strictly a phenomenon of neoconservatives. I think rank-and-file self-described conservatives, your average Limbaugh listeners, after spending eight years watching Clinton run circles around the Republicans, have been desperate to reclaim the scepter of American leadership, and haven’t been disposed to ask many more questions about Bush’s suitability for that role than the talking heads were.

We’re seeing it all play out again with McCain. His myriad betrayals of conservatism (which, at a certain point, hardly qualify as “betrayals” anymore) are to be shelved so that the editorial board of National Review can feel that it’s backing a strong horse. This has been a very, very bad decade for conservatism, and I wish I could say I wasn’t in some part complicit in it.

James W. writes:

It’s called hostage syndrome. It is the rare individual indeed that can stand into that wind and not, over time, turn with it.

That is not how we are made. To discover the truth of what we are doing, we often must experience it to the full.

LA replies:

I’m surprised that James W., who likes quotations, does not quote Blake:

“If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.”

Or, not quite as pertinent, but James is not the only one who likes quotes: “The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 15, 2008 10:11 AM | Send