That’s the worst advice in the world.
My doctor brother used to make a comment every time he watched Jack Webb’s 1970s TV show about emergency medics. In the middle of a desperate situation, they didn’t go charging in rubbing the plates together and shouting “Clear!” They first talked to the people there and found out exactly what was going on.
My brother has been handling life-and-death emergencies for fifty years now.
He didn’t like the intro to the Ben Casey, MD show that started with the emergency room doors slamming open and a patient being rolled in with a doctor sitting on his chest slamming away at it.
But when he saw Jack Webb’s shows, he would say, “That’s the way a real emergency is handled. You find out what is going on.”
The first thing you learn in a CPR course, STEP ONE, is to look around and find out why the person is lying there with his heart stopped.
If he is lying on a live power line, it won’t do him a hell of a lot of good if you start CPR and end up lying on the ground with YOUR heart stopped.
This same advice is critical in politics. What happened after September 11, 2001 was exactly what I predicted on September 12, 2001.
My brother knows about emergencies because he’s been in the game a long, long time. I know about politics for exactly the same reason.
It didn’t take America long to smash Al-Queda-ruled Afghanistan. Then the Bush Administration had to do something else. All America was outraged at the out-of-control Arabs who had turned to terrorism.
So they had to “Do SOMETHING!”
Well, Saddam was a definite stereotype of everything Americans were up in arms about.
There were two choices, 1) we could do what Bush, Senior did and get out or 2) We could “Do SOMETHING!”
I will never forgive Bush, Senior for his betrayal of the Shiites and the kurds. But selling people out is what moderate Republicanism is all about.
Bush should have pulled out without betraying anybody. But I have been telling moderates that for fifty years.
Now let’s forget all those dying and tortured people and turn to the POLITICAL choices Bush, Junior faced once Afghanistan was taken over in a month or two.
Bush Junior was at the same 90% popularity rating his father had been at after the previous Iraq War. His father lost reelection.
Big time.
Someone restated Lincoln’s saying this way, “You can’t fool all of the people all of the time. But if you can do it once it lasts four years.”
Bush followed the national demand that he “Do SOMETHING!” and it lasted long enough to get him reelected.
Of course it didn’t hurt him that the Democrats nominated ANOTHER Massachusetts liberal to run against him, but everybody screaming “Do SOMETHING!” was his real ticket to four more years.
Sorry, gang. It’s not just the Jews or the neocons.
A democracy is a system where people get what they DESERVE.
And anybody who shouts “Do SOMETHING!” is asking for death.
The people asked for it, and the neocons gave it to them.
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