The Mice That Squeaked

After Obama’s comments last night confirming the perpetual war in Afghanistan, pouting neocons are still whining about how right Bush was, or not. They struggle to attack Obama, who has embraced Bush’s policies. Unsurprisingly, intelligent words fail them.

More than anything else, this jejune claptrap reflects how brilliantly Obama has cleft the GOP in twain, and hung on it the ball and chain of Bush, which is how he won in 2008 and continues to be his best chance for winning in 2012. Naturally, the GOP is playing into his hands.

War-lusting neocons still live and breathe the Trotskyite dialectic, and it has served them surprisingly well. DoubleSpeak rules. Thus they both attack Obama and baptize him as a “born-again neocon.” Their goal is not domestic victory by any particular party, but endless foreign wars, whether they are conducted by McCain, Obama, or any of the gaggle of Republican presidentials (other than Ron Paul) whose combined familiarity with the world and, especially, foreign policy, adds up to that of, say, Paris Hilton.

But the neocons have met their match in Obama, who knows the dialectic better than they do — and has the power to use it. All leftists want war, of course, and Obama is waging several, on domestic as well as foreign fronts. We must bear in mind that, to leftists, lovers of liberty are merely the competition; their real enemies are their fellow leftists — observe, please, Stalin’s purges, or re-read Darkness at Noon. Undoubtedly Obama intends to deal with them, in due time.

But not yet. The neocons manipulated the poor addled “W” with such insouciant ease that they thought their magic was indelible. Not so. Obama — surprise! — is manipulating them, and wielding them as a dull razor to slice and dice the GOP into confused little shards, all of whom flurry around the feet of the lumbering Leviathan like the proverbial blind men and the elephant. Meanwhile, they perform the proper bellicose obeisances — demanded by the neocons — that will relieve them of having to address foreign policy intelligently. Nothing good will come of all this.

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8:37 am on June 23, 2011