DIANA WEST: WHO IS TO BLAME?
http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/3058/Who-Is-To-Blame.aspx
The Blame Game is not a game. It is serious business, particularly at this point of implosion. We still have the capabilities to think and speak and even act, but they should no longer be regarded as an open-ended proposition.
At this perhaps precious moment, then, it is important not to waste the opportunity to assess blame (and, best case scenario, regroup) in yet another aerobic exercise of venting at the Left (self-congratulation). Especially not when we — our side, not the Left — are to blame.
I refer to … everything.
That’s right. Whatever it is, it’s not really Obama’s fault, the DNC’s fault, Al Sharpton’s fault, even (gasp) the media’s fault, etc. Not entirely, to be sure. After all, like Tiggers, Obamas do what Obamas do best. The DNC, Sharpton, the media do what they do best. The Right Wing, however, fails to do what it should do best — fails to behave according the principles that define it.
With such a notion in mind, blaming the Left for chaos and decline becomes not only illogical and unsatisfying, but also, most important of all, a distraction. Take the current wave of scandal rising out of the stinking corruption of Clinton Inc. Is the Blame Game complete on ranting about the Hill and Bill’s dirty money — even about Hill’s sellout of US uranium to Russia?
Clintons do what Clintons do best, after all. And we all of us know it.
What about stepping back a little and asking how it could be that Hillary, with the foreign donors to Clinton Inc. well known in 2009 as giant conflicts of interest (at least), was confirmed as SecState in the first place? The Senate voted to confirm her, 94-2 (GOP Sens. Demint and Vitter were the “no” votes). That leaves a lot of responsibility for Clinton Inc./State conflicts of interest/corruption to go around, and very particularly on the Republican side of the aisle. By the way, almost exactly ten years earlier to the day, the GOP-controlled Senate acquitted her husband of charges arising from his impeachment in the GOP-controlled House. (Majority Leader Trent Lott’s first words to House Impeachment Manager Rep. Henry Hyde: “Henry, you’re not going to dump this garbage on us.”) More GOP co-dependency, if not responsibility, for the peculiarly disgraceful and unceasing public life of the Clintons.
We can continue this exercise. For the Clintons’ post-impeachment “second” act, we owe everything to the Republican Establishment’s Establishment Bush family — H.W., W. and Barbara, too. It was the Bush family, after all, that lifted Bill from his political nadir where he belonged, joining “charitable” forces, inviting him to Kennebunkport. Remember “the Three Amigos”? The Bushes took Bill in like the second president-son I hope they never have. They made appearances with this sexual predator/probable rapist at their sides — he, who traded away US military secrets to Red China for campaign contributions (which he also should have been impeached and convicted for), he who discussed US troop movements in the Oval Office, one hand presumably on the phone, the other on his intern … .
Gross. You bet. He is. They are. But what does it say about the Bush family, rinsing this rancid reputation in their Yankee-Texas respectability and jetting off together to pontifical funerals, earthquakes and elsewhere? Without the Bushes, Bill Clinton might well be selling autographs at political memorabilia conventions. Hillary would surely be divorced. Angry. Bitter. But maybe heading up a women’s media company, instead of a despite-all viable presidential campaign.
Another question. What does it say about the American people who don’t see through this elite con game — or who don’t want to? Hey, but congratulations; we sure fixed 2012 Senate candidate Todd Akin.
The need to open up the Blame Game began to crystallize some years ago as I was coming to grips with my own case of “Bush derangement syndrome.” This was (and is) a very right-wing strain, to be sure, something quite different from the common MoveOn.org variety.
I will tick off only a few triggers: Bush’s “Islam is peace” mantra and policies; his failure/hostlity regarding secure borders and drive for amnesty; his COIN defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan (yes, Bush’s see-no-Islam policies were doomed before Obama came along); and (what sent me over the edge) his no-clemency-ever callousness to the suffering of American troops brought up and convicted on battlefield “murder” charges in his own COIN defeats in Iraq (and, later Afghanistan, too). I knew the syndrome was in full flush when a news photo of President Bush in a bike race with US soldier-amputees — victims first of Bush’s “Islam-is-peace” ROEs and “nation-building” COIN strategies — flashed by and I saw red. I imagine most conservatives saw a president who cared.
I do digress, but I was reminded of all of this on reading that George W. Bush has himself entered the Blame Game: “Just remember the guy who slit Danny Pearl’s throat is in Gitmo,” Bush recently said of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who 2002 beheading was videotaped. “Now [ISIS is] doing it on TV.”
As if —
Staying on point, I will note that this is supposed to lead a conservative-leaning person to nod grimly, feel nostalgia, pride in Bush for supposed “victories” that Obama supposedly turned into defeats, and blame the American wreckage all around us on Obama.
Certainly, it is the case that Obama is taking us down, is a Third World revolutionary with hatred of the West at heart and, don’t forget — although zero elected Republican officials (8-time elected Sheriff Joe Arpaio excepted) and 99.9 percent of conservative pundits won’t mention it to save the country — claims facsimiles of identity documents as his own that wouldn’t pass an FBI investigation or even E-verify. This is something that in Normal World would concern a former president or two — and lawmakers, judges and newspaper editors by the score.
Step back a little. Who cleared the way for Obama to the presidency in the first place? In GOP silence on the matter of Obama’s identity docs, in the party’s failure first to seek to settle the matter in the US Senate (where Sen. John McCain, another responsible party, was asked to document his “natural born” eligibility but not Sen. Barack Obama), at the RNC, in the Electoral College, in the House, Senate and elsewhere since, in conservative media silence all along (and worse, derision and enforcement of silence) is death — the death of the Republic.
Remember, Obamas do what Obamas do best. That is, what should we expect of someone mentored by arch Communist Frank Marshall Davis? What should we expect of lock-step Democrats who, mafia-omerta-style, always keep mum to gain power?
But law and order Republicans? Officials who swear to defend the Constitution? Pundits who echo the same? The all-but-certain crime of the centuries — the extremely strong appearance of identity fraud in the Oval Office — has been enabled first and foremost by Americans on the right side of the political spectrum who failed to require or conduct a most basic investigation of Obama’s papers.
And that was just the beginning.
Seven years later, the fact that Obama and the Left Wing are still in control — no checks, no balances, ever — has everything to do with the abandonment of defining principle of the Right Wing. Indeed, GOP responsibility and support for the wreckage solidifies every day that goes by without GOP-controlled Congress drawing up articles of impeachment.
I could go on but that’s probably more than enough blame to go around for now.
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