Bush’s slogans triumphant

A couple of points of interest in the FrontPage forum on Sam Karnick’s article. First, here’s a commenter, named Northern Steve, who shows how completely the Bush/neocon line has taken over people’s brains. Every idea, every turn of phrase, every example used by this commenter comes directly from the Bush playbook. It is absolutely remarkable that President Bush, a man capable of speaking only in pre-formed slogans himself, has succeeded in turning literally millions of Americans into his intellectual clones. As Churchill might have said, never in the field of human debate have so many minds been influenced so much by so little.

And here’s an e-mail by VFR reader Sage McLaughlin that I posted at the FP forum, but it’s so good I’m reproducing it here as well:

Perusing your correspondence with Sam Karnick, I have to say I’m just stunned. At no point does Mr. Karnick appear even to be listening to himself, or even acknowledge the unprecedented scale of his and Bush’s proposal. The idea that the post-Christian West could, through a combination of military and diplomatic initiatives, actually reform an inveterate enemy faith—indeed an entire enemy civilization—such as Islam, is so preposterous that I have difficulty imagining anyone really believes it.

This is naked fantasy, delusion, madness. The same people who would (rightly) fight the ERA tooth and nail will tell us that a cross-civilizational reform project of this magnitude is at all credible? This is the grand project what they would have us commit our grandchildren to accomplishing? A war to reverse a millenium and a half of Islamic cultural history? Can he be serious?

Incredible.

Thanks for the illuminating discussion.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 26, 2005 02:19 PM | Send