On Suffering Fools

What do the various WMD arguments for invading Iraq and the Sarah Palin pick for the Vice Presidency have in common?

They both lean on obfuscations to sell short term solutions that lead to long term disasters.

Now I don't think that people who buy into these obfuscations are necessarily stupid, or even uninformed. I think they need to believe that the politicians who they support are not nefarious morons or simple moral retards. This is understandable. They want to believe that the people they have voted for --or are inclined to vote for--are honestly wrestling with the questions of the day and are really trying to get it right.

For a long time, I granted conservatives this basic premise. In part, it was a way of humanizing our debates and arguments and so was important to having a civil discourse. Of late, a series of incidents have made me reconsider how long we are made to suffer such foolishness.

Case in point: Sarah Palin has made it abundantly clear that she is not qualified for the post of Vice President and certainly not qualified for President. This is not to say that she didn't 'act' sufficiently coherent to make it through a debate that didn't allow follow up questions. She did, without a single 'train wreck' moment, but it's fairly obvious to any sentient being that Sarah Palin would be a disaster anywhere close to the oval office. She has a difficult time forming coherent sentences, when she decides to answer in complete sentences at all.

One can understand McCain's desire to choose a running mate that could 'shake up' the race, poach some of the disillusioned Hillary supporters and drag along the far right wing of his party as well. But there were other--smarter and more considered-- choices than Sarah Palin: Libby Dole and Olympia Snowe come immediately to mind. Why didn't McCain choose them? Choosing Sarah Palin may have offered a short term solution to limit the potency of Obama's convention speech, but it was a disaster for the long term health of the campaign--but more importantly--would be an even greater disaster if John McCain were to actually win with Sarah Palin on the ticket.

In many ways John McCain's impulsive and short term decision shows in a nutshell the entire problem with conservative thinking over the last eight years. It really accomplishes nothing more than winning the political moment. Certainly, it doesn't take into account the long term health of the country. Would a nation by better served under a Sarah Palin Presidency or an Olympia Snowe Presidency? That should have been a question that was asked by conservatives and the McCain campaign as part of the vetting process, not an after thought that probably hasn't even occurred to them yet. But if all you are looking toward is the short term political benefit than Sarah Palin must seem like an appealing pick.

Fortunately, I think Americans are starting to sober up after 8 years of 'short term' Republican rule. They are beginning to recognize that almost any 'justification' can be modified to suit the political winds of the day. Under Republican rule, the Iraqi war was fought ostensibly to prevent the use of WMD ( which we supplied to Saddam Hussein originally ), and then to 'liberate' the Iraqis, and finally to 'draw out and fight the terrorists'. All of these justifications are patently ridiculous and completely dependent on the moment in time that they were initially used to have any traction at all. They were all 'short term' political justifications that changed as Republican political fortunes changed with the war. The underlying reasons for the war are apparent to anyone with a 8th grade knowledge of geography: strategic positioning to protect 'our' oil supply.

Why couldn't Republicans say that? Because preemptively invading a country and murdering their leaders, and destroying their infrastructure and consigning a million of its citizens to death or displacement is not something we like to think about doing merely for our convenience. But that's the truth of the Iraqi war. An honest assessment would perhaps have made us more inclined to investing those billions of dollars wasted on a foreign policy debacle into an alternative energy infrastructure. But we were never given the choice.

When individuals defend such 'short term' political decision making processes-- they are defending a process that is specifically designed to limit our choices. And the results, after 8 years of this nonsense are more than obvious. 'Short term' thinking led us to one of the most incompetent Vice Presidential candidates in U.S. history, and one of our worst foreign policy debacles ever.

Isn't it time we started taking a look at the long term health of our nation over and above what the short term political gain might be?