Tom Junod is a liberal who finds George W. Bush personally repellant, so “The Case for George W. Bush” is one that he makes reluctantly. The reader can practically hear his feet dragging as he writes. His appraisal of the President as a human being veers toward the nasty:
He has always struck me as a small man, or at least as a man too small for the task at hand, and therefore a man doomed to address the discrepancy between his soul and his situation with displays of political muscle that succeed only in drawing attention to his diminution. He not only has led us into war, he seems to get off on war, and it’s the greedy pleasure he so clearly gets from flexing his biceps or from squaring his shoulders and setting his jaw or from landing a plane on an aircraft carrier – the greedy pleasure the war president finds in playacting his own attitudes of belligerence – that permitted me the greedy pleasure of hating him.
But, unlike a lot of liberals, the ones who just left Boston, for instance, this one perceives that Teddy Kennedy’s formulation, “The only thing we have to fear is four more years of George W. Bush”, is profoundly wrong.
The people who dislike George W. Bush have convinced themselves that opposition to his presidency is the most compelling moral issue of the day. Well, it’s not. The most compelling moral issue of the day is exactly what he says it is, when he’s not saying it’s gay marriage. The reason he will be difficult to unseat in November – no matter what his approval ratings are in the summer – is that his opponents operate out of the moral certainty that he is the bad guy and needs to be replaced, while he operates out of the moral certainty that terrorists are the bad guys and need to be defeated.
That illuminates, as well as I have ever seen, the line of demarcation between the President’s supporters and his enemies. The reason why Mr. Junod finds himself on the same side of that line as the President is simply because his liberalism leads him to take the War on Terror seriously, as a real war rather than a contrived accessory to a political campaign.
We were attacked three years ago, without warning or predicate event. The attack was not a gesture of heroic resistance nor the offshoot of some bright utopian resolve, but the very flower of a movement that delights in the potential for martyrdom expressed in the squalls of the newly born. It is a movement that is about death – that honors death, that loves death, that fetishizes death, that worships death, that seeks to accomplish death wherever it can, on a scale both intimate and global – and if it does not warrant the expenditure of what the self-important have taken to calling “blood and treasure,” then what does? Slavery? Fascism? Genocide? Let’s not flatter ourselves: If we do not find it within ourselves to identify the terrorism inspired by radical Islam as an unequivocal evil – and to pronounce ourselves morally superior to it – then we have lost the ability to identify any evil at all, and our democracy is not only diminished, it dissolves into the meaninglessness of privilege.
Not many readers of this blog will need convincing that Islamofascism must be defeated decisively. The alternative is not peace but passing the war to the next generation, which will then face an enemy with a greater capacity for atrocity. The unconvinced should read Mr. Junod in extenso.
The issues of war and peace have all too quickly sorted themselves along liberal-conservative lines. That division is dangerous, because half a nation cannot easily fight a war on its own. Nor is there much prospect that Blue State America will pay heed to appeals from the Right. Men of the Left like Tom Junod, Christopher Hitchens, Roger Simon and Orson Scott Card render an invaluable service to their country by bringing liberal sensibility to bear against their ideological comrades’ anti-war instincts. After the war is over, God willing, we will go back to arguing with them about taxation and welfare and secularism and a hundred other issues great and small, but I hope that, in those disputes, we will recall with gratitude that they stood with us – rather, their cause was the same as ours – when America’s need was greatest.
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