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Spinning Out of Control
12/16/2003

With Democrat Congressmen stating that the capture of Saddam Hussein looks conveniently timed to help the Bush administration, it hits an odd note, to my ear, to hear Sheila Lennon trying to spin it a different way:

Why is the capture of Saddam Hussein by the U.S. Army considered good news for Republicans?

The Iraqi people deserve to cheer the end of fear: Saddam was a butcher, and deserves to face his fate, but anyone who thinks his capture is a political bonus for any American party has been inside the beltway too long.

Actually, I'd say "anyone who thinks" as Lennon suggests has just been paying attention to what's going on "inside the beltway." Ms. Lennon criticizes Tim Russert (whose show is entirely about American politics) for trying to "hijack, abstract and trivialize the end of a despot" and to claim that the "news gods of yesteryear" would have left such questions for later, asking instead:

Who was Saddam Hussein? Why did we want him? Are we going to prosecute him for 9/11, since so many -- thanks to Fox News -- think he was involved?

The odd note that this sounds for me relates to the fact that it is only because Democrats and liberals have politicized the war and the war on terror generally that events are of political interest. Indeed, Lennon herself hijacks, trivializes, and politicizes what's going on through her inability to resist the Fox News quip. (By the way, did the Providence Journal's New Media gal miss this story?) Moreover, she goes on, within the same blog entry, to link to two theories that she calls "strange," but that keep with the U.S.-politics theme, only in the direction that a liberal blogger would prefer.

The second strange theory makes a suggestion that illustrates the degree to which domestic politics are inextricable from how we handle the topic:

What can Saddam do? He just needs to open his big mouth. After a shave, a good brush and gurgles of Listerine, he will recount all those scummy collusions with the US, which, went right through the Kuwaiti occupation. Why were those Shi'ites betrayed? Who talked to whom? What was the deal? What about the other deals? Clips of exhumed bodies from that bloody crackdown more than a decade back were shown alongside Saddam's ignominious capture on BBC. Another pictorial blunder for the coalition! Was the BBC acting sneaky again? Those bodies incriminate Saddam and the Anglo-American alliance. In fact, the incriminating evidence will be immeasurable. Civilian deaths, supply of arms, the semi-proxy war on Iran, will all come out of the horse's mouth. For every allegation, Saddam can retort Tu quoque – You too!...

...How are they going to answer their former ally, when every meeting with Donald Rumsfeld alone is going to be recounted in detail? Bribe and intimidate all those who can corroborate those shady minutiae? One possibility but a lot of it is already out in the public domain. If the dictator was ever that good in understanding power, he would have prepared for this day long back, with stashes of documents secreted away for his eventual defense.

See, from the perspective of Mathew Maavak, who penned those words, this information is all there to be found; there is no debate, and if Saddam fails to highlight the culpability of the evil Americans, it is because he wasn't "that good in understanding power." As with Lennon, for all of the complaints about politicization, the rhetorical questions presume a different reality self-spun by personal politics — one in which the U.S. was the main supporter of the Ba'athist regime, rather than a slight and periodic ally-of-necessity, and questions about a link to al Qaeda and September 11 are laughable.

And so, I can't help but hear the chords of frustration and a developing melody of delusion as, once again, liberals argue to each other that the Bush administration, in its stupidity, has walked right into a lighted room that will reveal its, and its predecessors', evil, thus fulfilling the mystery of liberal faith that Republicans are at once too stupid to lead and ingenious in their diabolism.

Posted by Justin Katz @ 02:19 PM EST