So the Boy Who Won't Be King Much Longer stood in front of the Knesset in Jerusalem today and tried to tag Obama and the Democrats with the mantle of appeasement. True to form, when the Democrats pushed back and correctly lambasted the characterization as unfair, the Hedgemony attempted to pretend it had never happened while privately admitting both that it had, and that it was, indeed, directed at Obama and the Democrats.
Many commenters in and out of Left Blogistan have ripped the Hedgemony several new ones for the sheer gall of using that metaphor in that place at this time--and I concur with their outrage. However, I'm going to rip the Hedgemony a new one in a different place, for a different reason--namely, that they (and the Boy Who Won't Be King Much Longer in particular) are actually guilty of the crime they falsely attributed to Obama and the Democrats. For instance, there's Donald Rumsfeld's famous meeting with Saddam Hussein five years before Hussein committed the crime for which our puppet regime in Iraq hanged him by the neck until dead nearly two years ago.
But that's also not the kind of appeasement I want to talk about. No, what I had in mind was the way that the Hedgemony, and the Republican Party generally, has spent most of the last 30 years appeasing some of the most radical elements of our society, both spiritually and politically speaking--and in fact has depended upon the success of that appeasement for its political life and the maintenance of its power and influence. Can any rational person deny that both Bush père and Bush fils have been in bed with the likes of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, John Hagee, Pat Buchanan, et aliae? Of course not. Nor, I would argue, can any rational person deny that those people have, individually and collectively, wreaked incredible havoc upon our society, our system of government, our laws, and our national well-being. And all so that manifestly unfit persons like the Boy Who Won't Be King Much Longer, Abu Gonzalez, Michael D. Brown, John Yoo, the cadres of Young Republicans who managed to lose several billions of the taxpayers' money right after the preznit declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq, and dozens of others like them, could perpetrate fraud upon the body politic and pretend to be a legitimate government. At least when Sir Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich to meet with Adolf Hitler, he was doing so out of a legitimate desire to keep the peace and not merely for personal gain and filthy lucre, as is demonstrably the case with the Hedgemony.
That is not to excuse the bad acts that Chamberlain committed in trying to keep the peace, any more than the fact that the Hedgemony thought it was doing the right thing excuses all the dozens or hundreds of bad acts it has committed in the span of seven and a half years of our most recent national nightmare. As both instances of appeasement amply demonstrate, the end really does not justify the means: a lesson that the Shrubbery would do well to remember, especially as it now scrambles higgledy-piggeldy around the globe in a frantic (and ultimately futile) attempt to find some kind of a positive legacy to validate its strutting and fretting upon the stage of the world these last few years.
Do us all a favor, Mr. Bush. Go play golf for the remaining months of your term in office. We don't care that you promised you wouldn't do that while your pet war was still going on--and frankly, we'd vastly prefer to have you wasting your time on something that at least wasn't putting anyone else in danger but yourself. Or else go bury yourself on your fake "ranch" in Crawford. Surely there's some more brush that needs clearing? At least you've gotten good at doing that--unlike any of the actual duties and responsibilities of your office as president.
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