I Shouldn't Read This

But when people take on FDR, I get defensive. via Digby, Jonah Goldberg says Bush's lies are no big deal:

What if Bush did lie, big time? What, exactly, would that mean? If you listen to Bush's critics, serious and moonbat alike, the answer is obvious: He'd be a criminal warmonger, a failed president and — most certainly — impeachment fodder. Even Bush's defenders agree that if Bush lied, it would be a grave sin. For example, the Wall Street Journal recently accused Harry Reid & Co. of becoming "Clare Boothe Luce Democrats" for even suggesting that Bush would deceive the public. Luce, a Republican, had insisted that FDR "lied us into war." And this, the Journal editorialized, was a "slander" many paranoid Republicans took to their graves.

My friends at the Journal are right to suggest that some Bush critics are paranoids, but here's the thing: Luce wasn't slandering Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Indeed, the evidence that FDR lied is far greater than the evidence that Bush did.

What an amazing discovery Jonah's made! Apparently, we have more evidence of a President's lies sixty years after his death than we do while those lies - and the conspiracy around them - are ongoing. The world thanks Goldberg for his brilliant deduction.

Up next: Jonah reveals that some historians have uncovered evidence that President Jefferson may have had an affair with his black slave!

But of course, Jonah doesn't stop there:

Does this make FDR a bad president? No. While I have my problems with FDR, most historians are right to be forgiving of deceit in a just cause. World War II needed to be fought, and FDR saw this sooner than others.

I think I see where this is going...

Now, you might say that Iraq was no WWII, Saddam was no Hitler, and 9/11 was no Pearl Harbor. Those are all fair arguments with varying degrees of merit. But WWII wasn't "the good war" in our hearts until after Pearl Harbor and even until after the Holocaust, and a lot of Hollywood burnishing.

The Bush Doctrine is not chiefly about WMD and never was. Like FDR's vision, it balances democracy, security and morality. Still, the media and anti-Bush partisans have been bizarrely unmoved by the revelations of Hussein's killing fields, his torture chambers for tots and democracy's tangible progress in the Middle East.

If Bush succeeds — still a big if — the painful irony for Bush's critics is that he will go down in history as a great president, even if he lied, while they will take their paranoia to their graves.

Of course, Bush has compared Iraq to Germany, Saddam to Hitler and Stalin, and 9/11 to Pearl Harbour. Does Jonah think that his President's arguments are without merit?

More broadly, the whole comparison to WWII is absurd (though you don't need me to tell you that, I hope.) The US declared war on Nazi Germany because... Hitler had declared war on the United States following Pearl Harbour. Now, note that Iraq had not declared war on the US in 2002-3. Nor had Iraq invaded Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, or remilitarized the Rhineland.

More seriously, Baghdad did not control large parts of Iraq (the no-fly zones, a rough analogy to the demilitarized Rhineland in the 1920s.) The invasions of Iran and Kuwait had been repulsed years ago, and Saddam's primary foreign policy seemed to consist of a) haranguing his people about the crusaders and zionists, and b) compensating families of suicide bombers. Fine, B isn't exactly Boy Scout behaviour. But compared to what the CIA does on a regular basis throughout the world (see Chile, Guatemala, Vietnam, etc.) it's chump change.

If Goldberg wants to paint Bush as the new FDR, then Hitler would have had to be contained in Germany, without the control of the provinces on the Polish, Czech and French borders, having been repulsed from his invasions of those countries in 1932. Can you spot the difference?

On top of all that, as if more were needed, it's worth pointing out that FDR lied to get the US in to an ongoing war, not to start one. Nations that were friendly to the US (albeit not allies at the time) were already engaged in the struggle against Fascism in Europe and Japanese imperialism. If Turkey and Saudi Arabia had been at war with Iraq, Goldberg might have a point.

But he doesn't. He's an idiot and a liar, and neither I nor you should read him.