Monday, November 25, 2013

WHY EVERYTHING THE RIGHT DOESN'T LIKE IS "MUNICH," "SOCIALISM," OR "AMNESTY"

Yeah, yeah, I know -- the Iran deal has critics in both parties. But Democratic critics such as Chuck Schumer, while maddening, are at least relatively measured in their tone -- Schumer says he's "disappointed" with the deal, which, he says, "does not seem proportional." He and fellow Democrat Bob Menendez are part of a group of senators threatening further sanctions at the end of the current deal's six-month window, if certain conditions aren't met -- but it seems to me that Schumer and Menendez could be playing bad cop to their former Senate colleague John Kerry's good cop, waving the stick even as Kerry offers the carrot. It may all be part of the process of getting to a permanent deal. So they don't seem to have gone off the deep end.

By contrast, on the right we have this, from the Heritage Foundation's James Jay Carafano, at National Review Online:
Munich II

No, that's not a facile, partisan jab. What just went down in Geneva is, in fact, a replay of the greatest diplomatic tragedy of the 20th century.

The Munich deal rested on the ridiculous notion that Hitler could be satiated. The new pact builds on the equally ludicrous idea that Iran would give up the means to build a nuclear weapon that will serve as the tip of its foreign-policy spear....

The British think the deal with Iran makes sense. Then, again, it was a British government that believed Munich meant we could all get a good night's sleep now.

The Russians laud the deal. But it was a government in Moscow that believed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact solved all its problems.

Our White House likes this deal. But, our White House also thinks its policies in Iraq, Libya, Egypt, and Syria have been just super....
And then there's this, from Power Line's Paul Mirengoff:
It doesn't take Sigmund Freud to develop a working hypothesis that explains this behavior. The presumption should be that Obama and Kerry like to grant concessions to regime that don't like America because they themselves don't like America all that much.

We know that Kerry didn't like America in the days when he compared our army to that of Genghis Khan. We know that Obama didn't like America in his student days, both high school and college, when his mentors were Communists.

Time presumably softened their dislike of America, converting it, perhaps, into ambivalence — the kind expressed by Michelle Obama in her more candid moments. But the byproduct of their dislike -- the desire to accommodate America's enemies -- remains manifest.

In my opinion, it provides the unifying theme of Obama's foreign policy and the main motivation for making such a bad deal with Iran.
It isn't just that Democratic critics of the Iran deal are more measured in their tone. Democrats are generally more measured in their critiques, especially of Republican opponents. Senate Democrats just curtailed the filibuster, but I don't recall any of them saying that the filibuster was a tool of jackbooted fascism. (It was Republicans who compared a Democratic filibuster-curtailer to Mussolini.)

To the right, every Democrat operating in the foreign policy sphere is Neville Chamberlain. Every Democratic policy that affects the economy came straight from The Communist Manifesto. Every liberal or moderate immigration is sovereignty-destroying amnesty.

Well, no surprise there. Right-wingers aren't grown-ups. They're overgrown children who are heroes of their own political fantasy stories. It's not enough for them to oppose a policy -- they have to persuade themselves that they're the only ones preventing the destruction of civilization as we know it. So every foreign foe is Hitler, every deviation from laissez-faire is the brutal crushing of economic freedom, every immigration proposal is the takeover of America by vicious globalists. Red Dawn isn't a movie -- it's what happens every time any non-conservative obtains any power whatsoever and dares to use it. The appropriate response to everything done by the center or right is "Wolverines!"

I don't know why the grade-school hero fantasies of conservatives are allowed to et the terms of all of our political debates. But that's how we do things.

10 comments:

ladyblug said...

Well said!

Greg said...

Right-wingers aren't grown-ups. They're overgrown children who are heroes of their own political fantasy stories.

Ayup. QOTD.

Philo Vaihinger said...

Both Hitler and Stalin refused to accept the verdict of Versailles.

Hitler wanted to complete Bismark's work of national unification and Stalin wanted to get back as much of the territory lost at Brest-Litovsk as possible.

The Brit error was to go to war to prevent their joint partition of Poland, an essential part of their project to undo territorial damage done to Germany and Russia at Versailles.

As for June, 1941, Britain was not at that time allied with Russia and could have stayed out of that, too.

In the end, unless it was for them really only about getting rid of Hitler, Britain got nothing out of WWII that it was supposedly aiming at.

Dave said...

"Democrats are generally more measured in their critiques, especially of Republican opponents."

"Right-wingers aren't grown-ups. They're overgrown children who are heroes of their own political fantasy stories."

Hmm.

Jazzbumpa said...

Dave -

You really need to be thinking a little more deeply than that.

On second thought, make it A LOT more deeply.

Ten Bears said...

So every foreign foe is Hitler, though what we have become would make him smile.

Dark Avenger said...

He did think we were a society of cowards and gangsters with no real unity or purpose other than ourselves.

Or as we call them now, "Republicans".


Victor said...

One of the biggest problems we have in this country, is that in MSM punTWIT land, and Wingnut Welfare, there are no penalties for being wrong.

No matter how badly wrong, or how many times you’re badly, they’re never censured, never written-up, and certainly never fired.

Somehow or other, being wrong, badly and often, makes you more of a “Serious Person.”

But you kinda almost feel a bit sorry for the NeoCLOWNS and punTWITS.
No more USSR.
China no longer an enemy, but a competitor.
Saddam dead.
Castro's at death’s door.

And now, potential peace with Iran.

Where are the new bogeymen?

Who do they have to keep scaring the kiddies and the rubes?

E.A. Blair said...

I usually characterize right-wingers and teabaggers, not just as children, but as toddlers stuck in their terrible twos.

Batocchio said...

Spot on.

Hell, this stuff was even directed at St. Ronnie back in the day:

1985: Gingrich calls Reagan's upcoming meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev ''the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Chamberlain in 1938 at Munich.''