21 Oct 2004 |
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Referent Article:
London Times October 18, 2004 www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=15547 I read Sarah Baxter’s piece of the above title, published in the October 17, 2004 edition of The Sunday Times of London and couldn’t help wondering why she expended that much ink simply to tell us that she and some three other Democrats or Democratic party-leaning celebrity voters are planning to plunge headlong into the Bush camp. She has just only registered as a “Democrat”, has never voted Democrat in her life and here she is making a loud noise about being a member of the Democratic Party while about to jump ship! More worrying though is her attempt at justifying her decision to go Bush. Andrew Sullivan who is her friend and colleague and whose opinion I respect greatly has proclaimed his admiration for her “intellectual honesty” - that is for looking squarely at Bush’s spectacular failures and still preferring him to Kerry, but I have also considered this same fact and have come away feeling intellectually swindled. No one in good conscience should underplay those terrible errors she herself admits to just so they can vote Bush back in to continue dishing out more of the same. I can’t imagine what is intellectually honest in a well-travelled, well-read and supposedly well-informed American of her standing gleefully declaring that she’s “a single-issue voter” in this election. From the beginning to the end of the piece, the idea that stands out is that she’s evidently going Bush simply to have the pleasure of sticking up her finger at the “designer Democrats” and “millionaires in tuxedos with their Botoxed and bejewelled wives, graceful daughters with flawless skin in evening gowns” etc who, by the way, happen to think Bush is a philistine. For the record, Baxter confesses to being “irked by the Massachusetts senator’s personality”, even though she tendered no evidence nor made any claim of knowing Kerry at all. “With his patrician ancestry, going back to the Puritans on his mother’s side, he acts as though he is born to rule”, she declares. Until I read Sarah Baxter, l didn’t know John Kerry has been contesting the presidency since 1789! Truly, when I picked up a copy of the News Review section of The Sunday Times with this huge half-page Sarah Baxter picture smirking mischievously in a provocative hands-on-the-hips pose, a huge stars and stripes by her right and an “I’M A DEMOCRAT FOR BUSH” sign emblazoned just under, I couldn’t help noticing that this plastic exhibition of joie de vivre couldn’t successfully conceal the strain of her own very existence under a Bush presidency! Then, for a moment, I thought I saw the shadow of the angelic Ann Coulter peeping through; but even she couldn’t have written a better (but ultimately senseless) one-issue justification for throwing our future into the hands of the failed Bush! Of course, under normal circumstances one would have had no bones to pick with a single-issue voter; but with today’s realities, it is worth asking whether such a decision is as simple as Baxter tries to make out. Is it that simple or indeed reasonable to be a single-issue voter in this election widely regarded as one of the most crucial in our lifetime? Is Baxter comfortable being left on her own to elect the President of Terror Inc, while the rest of America soberly and wisely choose a president that is ready, able and willing to sensibly and calmly consider all the issues at stake for America and the world, a president that will take the required decisions –domestic or foreign - based on facts and reason, rather than intuition, reckless confidence and blind faith? From her pronouncements, it would seem Baxter cares less. Kerry can have the better or more agreeable ideas about anything from tax cuts to health insurance, but her decision to vote Bush is based on her single-minded devotion to save him from the celebratory guffaws of a particular class of vicarious voters. Hear her: “My decision is based on a straightforward proposition: I do not want the global jihadists and women-hating fundamentalists to be celebrating Bush’s defeat. They do not deserve to win, even if Bush deserves to lose, a position I am not quite willing to concede”. Now, how do you begin to make sense of this kind of fear? Since when did the jihadists become the deciders of who sits or does not sit in the White House? How more miserable can your voting experience be than to base such a great historical decision on the putative celebration of some jihadists in the face of all that is at stake in this election? And, why does she think they would celebrate anyway? Except of course Kerry harbors a suicidal wish and a maniacal disdain for America, I fail to see why any terrorist should celebrate, no matter who’s in the White House. If anything, just to prove he’s more focused and determined than Bush, Kerry might actually make life more miserable for them. After all, it is perfectly reasonable to argue that the terrorists aren’t doing badly under Mr Bush’s watch. With the death of over a thousand American soldiers in Iraq, the daily bombings, beheadings, the breach of the Green Zone in Baghdad, the stratospheric oil prices, the growth of the fear factor in everyday American life and the non-capture of the spiritual and military leader of the cult of death himself, Osama Bin Laden, why would the terrorists want a change to a new administration that will almost certainly come at them with renewed force and impetus, act under new political pressures and most likely try out new ideas on how to succeed against them where the Bush administration has failed? And, by the way, why is this imagined celebration by jihadists of Bush’s defeat such a big issue with Sarah Baxter? Is Mr George Walker Bush synonymous with the United States? How much damage did the celebration of Jimmy Carter’s re-election defeat by the ayatollahs, mullahs and the Islamic revolutionaries in Iran and the Middle East do to the Reagan presidency or, indeed, to Carter himself? Such hollow justifications are simply baffling! I believe it is the result of ingesting too much Republican propaganda claiming that a victory for Kerry is a victory for the jihadists. I am therefore not surprised that Baxter is now spewing that congealed ignorance as some fundamental truth. Now that Vladimir Putin is her philosopher of choice and Dick Cheney her guiding light, shouldn’t we be reminding her that there is more on the ballot for Americans and the world than jihadists and their imagined celebrations? Frankly, I’m surprised that Baxter couldn’t see the folly in such reductionist expectation of her own electoral responsibility as an American citizen simply because of this so-called war on terror or war in Iraq. Doesn’t she feel that she’s indeed declaring these jihadists winners already by basing her decision about America’s whole future on whether or not they would be celebrating the loss or the victory of one American or the other in an election for the American presidency? And if her own critical mind can pick out and admit the failures of the Bush post-war plan for Iraq; his being captive to the neoconservatives and the shame of Abu Ghraib, what then is she voting for really by voting for Bush? What does she expect to happen thereafter? Or, is she just content with more of the same? And no matter how far-fetched one considers Kerry’s plan to involve other countries more in this effort, he certainly would get better international cooperation than the instinctively unilateral Bush. Any American president that needs help and shows the desire to consider and appreciate others’ contributions to the well-being of the international system would get that help. America needs the world as much as the world needs America. All the world has asked of Bush is to truly lead, not stonewall in the cocoon built around him by some ideologically driven intellectual midgets. For four years, Mr Bush presided over the worst foreign policy failure since Vietnam, yet the supposedly intellectually honest Sarah Baxter would prefer talking about the Democrats’ “unconvincing foreign policy” as the huge impediment preventing her from voting Kerry. Perhaps, Baxter needs to be reminded that not very many people had confidence in Mr Bush’s foreign policy credentials or ideas four years ago. And that is not only because he didn’t know his Greeks from his Grecians! Yes, Mr Bush depends on Tom Clancy novels for his foreign policy ideas and now that his beloved house of cards is crumbling relentlessly under the weight of its internal contradictions, he has no other ideas but to keep pretending it’s all cool. Kerry and the Democrats need not do much to bring this farce to the attention of the American people; all you have to do is listen to the news and other people around the world and you’ll just about get the idea of how much muck Bush has plastered on America. But, there is one thing Mr Bush does very well, and that is implanting fear so convincingly in the consciousness of America. It is a measure of his success that Baxter would now gladly refer to herself as a “security mum”, thinking only of the jihadists as she casts her precious vote. Baxter insists that on September 11, 2001 “a global wave of anti-Americanism was unleashed”, even as most sober people admit that there was nothing “global” about Mohammed Atta and a handful of nutcases choosing suicidal attacks on specific American targets and taking many innocent people of different nationalities along with them to their untimely death. We can’t remind her enough that September 11 provided America with the greatest international goodwill in our lifetime, which Mr Bush quickly squandered under the direction of the neoconservative Svengalis whose perfect pretext for their own pet imperialist project has become known to us today as the Bush war on terror. In her desperation, Baxter even made a convoluted comparison of the recent “elections” in Afghanistan, which she considers a Bush success story, to the one that ushered in Nelson Mandela as South Africa’s post-apartheid president! And not without assuring us that her belief in human rights and democracy is still very much intact! Maybe so, but her standards are now clearly suspect. The problem with people like Sarah Baxter is that they dream for too long – they are still sleepwalking from the ruins of the Twin Towers when they should be awake to the realities of today. Yes, 9/11 changed America and the world, but the world and America did not just stand still after then. On voting day, to the chagrin of single-issue voters like Sarah Baxter, most Americans who have done more critical thinking of what is at stake in this election will be making a choice. They will not be wishing, like Baxter, to have Tony Blair on the ballot nor would they have the luxury of picking and choosing what to accept in one candidate or reject in the other. They will only have that choice of one candidate as he presents himself. These Americans won’t be thinking only Iraq or the general war on terror; they’d be thinking which candidate has a better plan for healthcare, the elderly, education, saving American jobs and turning the economy around amongst other things. To vote for Bush solely because of what you think he represents in the minds of some jihadists, while conveniently ignoring the glaring failures and the wider issues beyond the war on terror or Iraq on the ballot, is the height of self-deceit. Baxter, for some reasons, does not like Kerry and, to be fair, she’s come clean on this point in her piece; but her attempt to couch that personal dislike in the language of a principled disagreement over the direction of America rings very hollow in the face of the facts. She will first need to be something better than “a single-issue voter” to be credible. There are a whole lot of other things at stake besides her preference and faddish sentiments. Kennedy Emetulu London kenn@nigeriavillagesquare.com
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