Posted on 03/12/2003 6:42:01 AM PST by dead
The scandal-ridden Clinton could do no wrong, but Bush made the mistake of being Republican, writes Miranda Devine.
In New Zealand, where the Prime Minister, John Howard, was this week, at least the protesters are creative. Instead of old-hat nudie displays, they donned designer body-bags and adorned a giant Gollum doll, from Lord of the Rings, with an Uncle Sam hat and a John Howard puppet dangling from its fingers.
There were also the tomato-throwing, flag-burning assortment of students, Rastafarians and Greenpeace activists banging drums outside Wellington's "Beehive" while Howard met their Prime Minister, the green, feminist, left-wing Helen Clark.
Wanting to show the world their artistic talents is understandable, but quite why the Kiwi peaceniks got so worked up at Howard's visit is less so. After all, the only person who cares is their own Prime Minister, who has already sold off all her nation's fighter jets and is implacably opposed to any American-led intervention in Iraq anyway.
You can't blame the average New Zealander who is probably living, as we are, on a steady diet of anti-American propaganda. And in this part of the world Australia is the closest to the Great Satan they can get.
With a few noble exceptions, hardening anti-war sentiment around the globe has increasingly less to do with reality than a reflex and dangerously fashionable anti-Bush and anti-Howardism.
Anti-Americanism didn't start with President George Bush, but he sure gave it a kick along. Now a US diplomat who resigned from the State Department this week has blamed Bush for "giving birth to an anti-American century".
It's not just about Iraq. Bush faced the same protests in Europe in June 2001, three months before the September 11 terrorist attacks. He was even mooned by 1000 Swedish bottoms outside his Gothenburg hotel room.
"I am against so many things about him it is hard to explain," 24-year-old student Kiffa Alverfors told The New York Times at the time. "The capitalist system is a way of living that I don't agree with."
Australia's version of Kiffa is Radio National's millionaire announcer Phillip Adams, who last week wrote a column in The Australian laughingly entitled "Why I'm not anti-American". Adams revealed it was "regime change" in America that so alarmed "us, the chattering classes".
"I don't think the 'chattering classes' were virulently anti-American during the Clinton years. It was 'regime change' that detonated the resentments and anxieties that got millions marching in the streets. And most of us were anti-Bush long before September 11," he wrote. To Adams, Bush is the root of all evil.
Then there was ABC's Four Corners on Monday, which built up a picture of a sinister Jewish cabal of "neo-cons" who have stolen Bush's brain, for what it's worth. There was even ominous music to introduce these scary conservatives who are "almost all Jews whose parents had emigrated from Eastern Europe", reporter Jonathan Holmes told us. "Most of [hawk] Paul Wolfowitz's extended family perished in the death camps."
In other words, it's all Israel's fault and Bush can't think for himself.
The antagonistic reaction from Good Weekend readers to a profile of Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, last month is another example of how anti-Bushism fevers the brain.
You would think enlightened people might applaud someone who grew up black and female in segregationist Alabama and went on to be the most powerful woman in the Bush Administration. But, no, they demonise her instead. Rice is a "despot", a "hyperachiever who is emotionally shut down", claimed letters to the Good Weekend last week. She is a "US version of Margaret Thatcher, a person whose lack of empathy for those of lesser ability is chilling".
How different if she had been a Democrat in former president Bill Clinton's White House, where the uses for women were rather less sophisticated. At least she wouldn't have been a conservative.
Just as, if Clinton had been Bush, he could never have got away with bombing Iraq as he did, without UN approval, on the night before he was to be impeached over the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
So tolerant was the feminist and liberal establishment it barely raised a squeak against Clinton for being a serial sexual harasser, and worse. He was one of them, so they were willing to view him through the rose-coloured prism of their bigotry.
But Bush is bolshie on Kyoto, wants to ban partial-birth abortion, prays and, after September 11, 2001, is unwilling to deal with terrorism, as Clinton did, by just "kicking the can down the road".
America has not been blameless in its past dealings with Iraq, as Four Corners pointed out. But if it was wrong to tolerate Saddam's brutal regime in the 1980s, why is it OK now?
C.S. Lewis, in a 1943 essay, The Abolition of Man, wrote of the dangers of extreme cynicism. "You cannot go on 'seeing through' things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see."
We are all guilty of sometimes choosing sides based on personalities. But so many of those who rail against Bush are so busy "seeing through" his motives, which they imagine are oil, or some Freudian cowboy urge to avenge his father, that the act of "seeing through" has become more important than what there is to see, as C.S. Lewis would say.
That's because she is counting on the U.S. (and possibly Australia) to protect her country in case of attack. And who would attack NZ anyway?
(N.B. to the Kiwis: Don't think that you don't have any Muslim extremists to worry about. If they see you as willing to roll over, then you are on their list, big-time).
Exactly. JUST DO IT!
LOL!
Things To Do In New Zealand When You're dead? ;-)
Lord how I get sick of these people. Either we are idiots who apparently picked the wrong side in the Iran/Iraq War by preferring Baghdad over Tehran, or we are isolationists if we turn our back on hellholes like the Middle East or we are cut-and-runners if we do help people out like the Moujahadeen (sp?) in Afghanistan but don't continue to provide aid to them for the next 100 years.
I also wish that non-Americans would figure exactly what attack line they are going to use to describe us. Depending on the particular news report I read, we are either gun-loving, bible quoting, liberty obsessed crazies (Die Zelt or Le Monde), or we are weak-kneed, Oprah loving, money grubbing wussies (Al Jezeera and/or the latest bin Laden audiotape).
Worth the price of the essay all in itself.
And it's a good essay, even beyond that nugget.
Dan
There is the rub. The problem with W is the man actually believes the American way of life is just and good. That makes anathema everything he touches, everything he thinks, everything he approves of. Because he cannot be dragged to global socialism by pressure politics, bad press, raised eyebrows, sneers, or street theater. Why, the man is actually moving things the other way on issue after issue, and isn't even ashamed of it. All commies everywhere have gone ballistic, in consequence.
It would be amusing how blatant, shallow and thoughtless it all is, if they were as impotent as they deserve to be. Since they aren't impotent (yet), it is maddening...
Reminds me of Randy Newman's song "Let's Drop the Big One."
This is so typical of the way lefties all over the world "think" that I'm beginning to wonder if isn't the great deception.
Rastas in NZ? Jamaicans or local converts? Sheesh!
liberal fantasy of peace, love, free room and board and medical care, and BJs from fat girls.
Stop it. You’re making me turn liberal.
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