“The chainy snake will get you if you don’t watch out…”
When I wrote that line back in the final year of W’s presidency, I wished I had thought of it a few years earlier, because I expected the resulting song to soon lose relevance. Little did I know that in the final year of the next 2-term president, who would be a Democrat, the song’s subject would still cast a long, dark shadow in D.C. In fact, when that Dick started tossing around his pronouncements against Obama’s historic nuclear agreement with Iran, I truly wished that my song had lost relevance. Even if the song had some kind of hit potential, I would, for the good of the country and the future possibility of peace, gladly give up any chance of personal gain from it. Please let this man become irrelevant, and I’ll happily let my song go down into the dust with him.
But what would you call a man who’s been so wrong about so many things? For about a decade, beginning in the late ‘70s, he raised and spent a lot of money trying to convince the U.S. defense establishment and the general public of the threat posed by a super-secret and incredibly-advanced Soviet Union anti-missile system. The CIA could find no proof of its existence, but he said that this just showed how well the Soviets had hidden it. I saw a Committee for the Present Danger video on TV, and at first it impressed me, but the more I thought about the premise, the less believable it seemed. I soon decided that no such system existed, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 proved me right, and proved the CIA right, while proving Dick wrong.
Does that remind you of anything? Like, maybe, Iraq’s phantom WMDs? I had concluded, after Colin Powell’s presentation to the U.N., that Iraq had no WMDs. People with a logical thought process, looking at the Iraq invasion, quickly concluded that the military action had more to do with oil and U.S. regional hegemony than it did with possible WMDs, but what would you call someone who really believed Iraq had WMDs, despite the complete lack of evidence?
Many people have also wondered how Dick could possibly have sounded so smart when he spoke in 1994 about the reasons for not invading Iraq, and then could have shortly pulled a full 180 to advocate for the deeply-foolish strategy he had previously opposed. At first it mystified me too, but then I concluded that in 1994 he had recited, as the official position of an administration he had worked for, a memorized script written for him by someone much smarter than himself.
So what would you call a man who can’t tell the difference between a 1% threat and a 100% one (the famous 1% doctrine)? How about a man who utters a simplistic phrase like “We don’t talk to evil” in response to a genuine offer of diplomatic cooperation? Or someone who could believe that Saddam was behind 9/11, despite all evidence and logic to the contrary? What word would describe someone who remains convinced that removing Saddam was the right thing to do, despite the huge expense, the death and destruction, the resulting chaos and the ongoing civil strife, because otherwise Mr. Hussein would have become the modern-day equivalent of Hitler? Can you think of a word for someone who could link Saddam to the 1993 World Trade Center attack, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the 1998 African embassy bombings and the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen as well? What if that person speaks in a seemingly-rational manner, but in doing so, presents nonstop irrationality in the content of his speech?
HW reportedly referred to the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz circle in his administration as the crazies, but I think there’s a word that better describes them — it starts with an s and rhymes with cupid. The sometimes laughable phantoms that haunt their simple minds don’t exist, though it’s hard to prove it to them because their minds don’t respond to logic and facts. The good news is that this contingent of our political adversaries are not malevolent, but just dumb, and sometimes even very dumb people can be persuaded to go along with smart policies, but the bad news is that they can be extremely dumb, which can make the job of persuasion to smart policy an extremely difficult task. The first step to success, though, is to correctly understand the nature of the challenge.