Getting Bush Whacked

Christopher Hitchens and Doug Ireland duke it out on the war

Comments (0) Thursday, Mar 13 2003

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Duggers, old horse, It’s very nice of you to take me so seriously . . . and so I’d propose a sit-down or phone job with all feet, cards and glasses on the table. I’ll reserve comment on the AIDS material for now, since it’s not my subject and since you make no case that any other president (here or in Zimbabwe or South Africa) would be preferable. That was the point, was it not? Love, Hitch

Hitch, What I can’t figure out is how your public support for Bush’s re-election squares with your lifetime commitment to social justice and the building of movements to try to achieve that goal to the max. I can’t believe you have much respect for the people running this administration — you’ve used your scalpel on so many of them in the past. They’re a greedy, cynical, on the whole uncultivated lot in willing hock to the theocrats, and are hell-bent on removing the few remaining restraints on corporate power. Is it really your view that we should ignore the rest of the package that comes with little Dubya and his handlers? How do you put this cry of Viva Bush together with your past work? Can you enlighten me? Love and kisses for regime change from D.C. to Baghdad, Doug

Dougie, old man, Not to quibble, but I don’t give my crucial swing-vote to Bush in advance of ’04. I would probably vote to re-elect him as president if the election were to be held tomorrow; but that wouldn’t prevent me (now would it?) from voting for all manner of local and congressional progressive and humane and honest and enlightened types lower down on the ticket(s). Except there aren’t any. Worse than this realization is my awareness that many of those who lay claim to be such have also shown a fundamental, nay terminal lack of seriousness about the absolutely salient issue that faces us, which is the defense of pluralist society against both the theocrats and the surviving advocates of the militarist one-party state. This is not a "foreign policy" issue, as our hometown casualties confirm, and doesn’t deserve to be glibly balanced against such "domestic" matters as (oh, take your pick) on which only a fool would have trusted the Democrats in the first place. And you, my dear, have always been among those who warned that such Demoidiocy came from an eternal source of renewable liberal credulity. So don’t try and reinstruct a pupil as willing and eager as myself. Not at this stage, when all your predictions have come true. Where does this leave us? I cringe when I think of one of the few things that I can claim to have learned since the 1990s. This is quite simply that character matters. Why do the Dems now discuss candidates rather than issues? Because it has to be in that order. The "issues" can be spun, as with health care (measurably worse than when Clinton was elected), but the supposedly superficial "personality" cannot. I’ve been in Washington for two decades now, and every time I hear an easy laugh at the expense of Bush’s dimness I wish I could show people the general level of IQ in the Clinton administration, subjected to long division and subtraction for integrity. The collective candlepower of the current bunch, I would say as an objective matter, is noticeably higher. Nor are they as abjectly venal as the previous incumbents. (Difficult, I know, to match the heroine of Waco against the wonder of John Ashcroft. But Karl Rove as against Dick Morris? Colin Powell against Warren Christopher and Ms. Albright?) I have differences with all of the above that are wider and deeper than any quarrel I have with you. Most important to me, though, is a settled resolution to call the new fascism by something like its right name . . . You aren’t going to tell me that you wish Gore and Lieberman had been at the helm all this time. You just aren’t, are you? If not, you might want to see where the logic of this admission will conduct you. I don’t especially like the logic, but I don’t fight it and I don’t remember being offered any respectable alternative. Fraternally, Christopher

Hitch, Now, it’s very clever of the old Oxford debater that you are to try to change the subject to the Democratic Party, because you know I’ve chronicled its sellouts over these last years. But the subject is, how do you square your public declaration of support for Bush with the rest of your life’s work pre-9/11? I see that you are now beginning to squirm away a few centimeters from your earlier statements. But, cher Christophe, your joshing reference to your "crucial swing vote" puzzles me, since as I recall you’ve never seen the merit in taking out citizenship papers (a subject on which I criticize you not) and therefore can’t vote anyway, so all that matters is the idea behind your publicly expressed views. And in that respect, it seems to me that it is your logic which is flawed. If Bush is worth supporting for re-election because the only issue which matters is terrorism, as you claim, wouldn’t that lead anyone following your thought process to conclude that a down-the-line ticket vote for the president’s party flows from your prioritization of that issue? And the president’s party is the antithesis of everything for which you have stood lo these many years. You say your single issue includes "the defense of pluralist society against the theocrats." But what about Bush andhis theocrats, who are quite busy trampling into the dust the constitutional insistence on the separation of church and state through a series of patronage boondoggles for the enhancement of the GOP-labeled "faith-based initiatives"? And as to whose elevator goes to the top floor, we have testimony from no less a credible witness than the former head of Bush’s own White House office of faith-based initiatives, who dropped a dime on the whole rotten gang inEsquire, telling us in detail what we already knew — that Bush and those around him are an ignorant bunch with absolutely no real interest in policy or ideas, and who fashion every decision and prise de position to their electoral strategy. The goal in scrapping the civil-service system and trading its Hatch Act–protected employees for wage slaves of private-sector companies chosen for their political loyalty to the Republicans is just part of the grand strategy for creating a de facto one-party state, in which no opposition can get real traction against the GOP money advantage. And such a state will inevitably be a militarist one, as the pronouncements of Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Wolfowitz, Perle and the rest — coupled with the astronomical military budgets that are indebting the next several generations with an unparalleled deficit — all tell us. Dubya’s is the most deeply reactionary administration to occupy the White House since Calvin Coolidge, and has succeeded where Reagan failed in eradicating the barriers against federal funding of religion-based prejudice. As to your assertion that the mendacious spoiled rich kid Bush is a paragon of character, I can only ask you to pass me the airsick bag; even as a joke such a claim would be rather nauseating. But you’re not joking, are you? As an example of Bush’s "character," I re-pose to you the AIDS question, which you danced away from answering in an earlier e-mail, saying, "It’s not my subject." (Gee, I would have thought that this pandemic, which has already killed more worldwide than the Black Plague, was a subject for everyone.) And let me add that, if Kerry turns out to be the Dem nominee, and it smells from here as if he might well be — despite the many reservations I have about him, if there is one single issue on which there is the starkest of differences between Kerry and Dubya it is AIDS. Kerry has been by far the single most pro-active senator on AIDS issues, not only in terms of legislation but in criticizing both Clinton and Bush for their unconscionable failures and their capitulations to the god crowd. (Richard Gere, by the way, was as right as rain in his criticisms of Bubba on AIDS the other day.) So, it seems to me that your obsession with the theocratic terrorists abroad is leading you to swallow a particularly noxious, deadly, life-taking form of theocracy at home which kills the innocent way beyond our shores. And I can’t recognize the friend whose writings on the Christers, like La Mere Teresa and other revealed-religion frauds, have been so deeply felt and flawlessly argued, with the chap who’s now crying Vote for Bush. Did you read Dubya’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast this week, in which he affirmed that all his policies are based on his religious views? Tell me, cher ami, that you don’t buy this Texas bouillabaisse of superstitions. You don’t, do you? Love, Doug