TARFUSI and Absurdity

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It was a simpler time. Al Gore had yet to invent the Internet. Daringly opinionated people still revered Abraham Lincoln. The godless Communists – not Islamic extremists – were the Implacable Enemy With Whom No Compromise Is Possible. So implacable, in fact, that the CIA for years had been merrily arming, funding and training Islamic extremists – the current Implacable Enemy With Whom No Compromise Is Possible – to repel those same godless Communists from a Muslim nation they had invaded and were brutally occupying. Most notably, negative campaigning, not subtleties positing causative links between freelance terrorism and the National Greatness variety, sparked the heated controversy of the day.

As Libertarian Party candidate, Congressman Ron Paul hardly made a splash in the presidential campaign of 1988, receiving about one-half of one percent of the popular vote. I voted for Dr. Paul that year. I don't remember what, if anything, he had to say about the Willie Horton commercials the George H.W. Bush presidential campaign ran in 1988. For what it's worth, he probably agreed they qualified as negative campaigning.

Willie Horton had killed a 17 year-old Lawrence, Massachusetts, gas station attendant in 1974. He was serving a life sentence without possibility of parole when he was released in June 1986 as part of a weekend furlough program. He never reported back. Ten months later, police arrested him in Maryland after he had raped a woman and stabbed and pistol-whipped her fiancé. He was tried, convicted and sentenced to two consecutive life terms plus 85 years. The judge in Maryland refused to return Horton to the criminal justice system of Massachusetts, citing the lax standards that allowed him to escape.

As you might expect, the 1988 Republican campaign made abundant hay of the Willie Horton debacle, as Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis had been Massachusetts Governor at the time of Horton's release. Dukakis had not signed the furlough program into law, but he had vetoed a bill passed by the legislature in 1976 that would have barred furloughs for first-degree murder convicts. He had supported the program as a means of criminal rehabilitation, claiming it was "99 percent effective." When the Bush campaign ran commercials showing felons parading through a prison's revolving door, Dukakis went on counterattack, calling the ads racist and impugning the Republicans' own lax standards with respect to the release of federal inmates.

What's interesting in this long-forgotten episode from a long-forgotten presidential campaign is that neither side accused the other of transgressing the bounds of human decency. Dukakis never characterized as "absurd" or "extraordinary" the Republicans' claim that Horton's release had something to do with the crimes he subsequently committed. (Of course, he would have been hard pressed to do so: it had everything to do with them.) For their part, the Republicans never questioned Dukakis' patriotism for playing the race card in his counterattack. The question of negative campaign tactics may or may not be an interesting one; at least the parties to this dispute addressed the issue at hand.

Political disputes take on an entirely different complexion when someone dares to raise fundamental questions about the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. Contrast the semblance of logical argumentation surrounding the 1988 Willie Horton ads with the vainglorious moral posturing that confronted Congressman Ron Paul's introduction of the wildly commonsensical notion of what I'll call TARFUSI – Terrorism as Retaliation for U.S. Imperialism – to the May 15, 2007 Republican presidential debates. Readers of this website are familiar with his exchange with New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, but it bears revisiting.

After explaining why he favored the Founding Fathers' noninterventionist foreign policy, Dr. Paul was asked whether 9/11 had changed things. In fact, he answered, 9/11 only bolstered his position, as foreign policy was a "major contributing factor" to the attacks:

Have you ever read the reasons they attacked us? They attacked us because we’ve been over there; we’ve been bombing Iraq for 10 years. We’ve been in the Middle East – I think Reagan was right. We don’t understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics. So right now we’re building an embassy in Iraq that’s bigger than the Vatican. We’re building 14 permanent bases. What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting. We need to look at what we do from the perspective of what would happen if somebody else did it to us.

He was treading on sacred ground, impugning the ways and means of the Benevolent Hegemon. Was the good (or not so good, apparently) doctor blasphemously suggesting "we" "invited" the attacks?

(One wonders here, returning to 1988, why Dukakis didn't ask the Republicans whether they thought the good people of Massachusetts had invited Willie Horton to attack the unfortunate couple in Maryland. The Republicans might then have taken a preliminary page from 2008 presidential candidate Mike Huckabee's playbook: "Yes, as a matter of fact, the good people of Massachusetts did invite the attack, because the Governor and legislators in Boston, the waitress in Worcester, the plumber in Springfield and the pension analyst in Marlborough are all one commonwealth, just as Americans are all one nation and therefore responsible for – and morally bound to rally around – their policymakers' stupid wars.")

With remarkable sangfroid, Dr. Paul proceeded to shed cool light on the heat-seeking, baldly tendentious question:

I’m suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it, and they are delighted that we’re over there because Osama bin Laden has said, ‘I am glad you’re over on our sand because we can target you so much easier.’ They have already now since that time – have killed 3,400 of our men, and I don’t think it was necessary.”

Cool light has its limits, as Oliver Wendell Holmes once noted: "The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract." Giuliani reacted with overwrought – and probably disingenuous – indignation:

That’s really an extraordinary statement. That’s an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don’t think I’ve heard that before, and I’ve heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th.

Talk about an extraordinary statement! Four-year-olds in a sandbox can grasp the retaliation concept – you knock over my sandcastle with your shovel, I'll whack you upside the head with my pail – but Giuliani dismisses it out of hand. His crackpot realism blinds him to TARFUSI reality. Giuliani regards the U.S.' motives as so pure, its methods so gentle, and its aims so transparent and pure that foreigners should get down on their knees and thank God for all the mayhem the U.S. sends their way. Hey, firebombing and nuking the Germans and Japanese uplifted them, didn't it? What's the problem with those rag-heads? Haven't they read our court historians?

Dr. Paul put Giuliani in his place that night. He has not backed off, driving the TARFUSI message home over and over again in debates and interviews, even in the face of sniggering candidates, hostile audiences and journalists who have abandoned all pretense of objectivity. His Golden Rule of Foreign Policy is gaining currency:

If we think that we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem. They don’t come here to attack us because we’re rich and we’re free. They come and they attack us because we’re over there. I mean, what would we think if we were – if other foreign countries were doing that to us?

For this alone we owe Dr. Paul an eternal debt of gratitude. Win or lose, the day is coming – indeed, it may already be here – when Americans will evaluate their federal government's foreign-policy prescriptions using the same standards they apply to, say, the 1986 State of Massachusetts criminal justice system's prisoner furlough program. The scales are falling from their eyes. In increasing numbers, they are coming to recognize the mind-boggling expense, utter futility and very real (as the events of 9/11 demonstrated) dangers associated with the decadent military empire foisted on them by that baleful brood of bipartisan vipers infesting the banks of the Potomac.

Adieu, pox (sic) Americana. I can't say it's been nice knowing you.

January 30, 2008