Collecting the Bush/neocon war slogans

Based on my comment that “in the Age of Bush and Podhoretz, unchallenged nonsense reigns supreme,” I think it might be both instructive and fun to make a collection of the slogans—insulting to the intelligence of anyone who has not given away his brains for Bush—that the Best and Brightest have been using constantly for the last four years and have popularized among Bush’s supporters generally. The Bushites may not have succeeded in spreading democracy in the Mideast, but they sure have succeeded in spreading rank irrationality and intellectual escapism in America. I’ve listed some of these fake argument here, and here they are again:

• “We can democratize Iraq, just as we democratized Germany and Japan.”

• “If we don’t fight them there, we’ll have to fight them here.”

• “Iraq’s problems are overstated, since things are going well in most of Iraq.”

• “Iraq’s problems are overstated, since mistakes are made in all wars.”

• “Iraq’s problems are overstated, because we forget the terrible losses we took in the Pacific in World War II.”

• “Iraq’s problems are overstated, since it took a long time for America to achieve democracy.”

• “Iraq’s problems are overstated, because people keep forgetting our great three-week victory in 2003.”

Whenever you happen to see in print or hear on tv or radio one of these flagrantly false statements or one like them, copy it, along with the link, author, article title, and date, and send it to me, with “war slogans” in the subject line, and I will post them in a cumulative blog entry. Don’t hesitate to send slogans similar to what others have sent, since it is the repetitiveness of these slogans that is the most significant thing about them—the fact that an entire political movement, extending from the White House to the conservative journals to the talk radio programs to blog discussions, is repeating the same nonsensical statements day after day, year after year. The point is to get a picture of what is being said and who is saying it. It will be a running catalogue of Bush/neocon war rhetoric.

I wish I had kept such a record in 2003-04, when triumphalist democracy rhetoric, spoken with all the intellectual gravity of a 12-year-old playing a video game, appeared constantly in the columns and articles of various “conservatives.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 20, 2007 10:59 AM | Send