Americans with Disabilities: The Reality Challenged

It is impossible not to listen to Joe Lieberman, both during his campaign and since, and not be convinced that he is sincere. He refers to his pro-war position as having a "robust" foreign policy.

Here are some of his more vivid quotes:

"I'm worried that too many people, both in politics and out, don't appreciate the seriousness of the threat to American security and the evil of the enemy that faces us -- more evil or as evil as Nazism and probably more dangerous than the Soviet communists we fought during the long Cold War,"

"If we just pick up like Ned Lamont wants us to do, get out by a date certain, it will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England. It will strengthen them and they will strike again."

"How the heck can we be in a battle in which we are fighting as Democrats and Republicans against each other when these terrorists certainly don't distinguish based on party affiliation? They want to kill any and all of us."

"What we are fighting for in Iraq and around the world is freedom. What we are fighting against is an Islamic terrorist totalitarian movement which is as dire a threat to individual liberty as the fascist and communist totalitarian threats we faced and defeated were in the last century."

When Dick Cheney says things like this we suspect that he may be cynical and manipulative, that he's waving the bloody flag for political advantage and since the Republican Party runs well on fear, then fear it will be.

Joe - and I don't think I'm being too generous - doesn't seem that outright cynical. Nor does he seem to be a madman. He's just ... 'reality challenged.' He's been living in rhetoric land too long. Or he's got a genetic disposition to see the world in bi-polar apocalyptic terms. He's not alone. Lots of people are there with him.

But really, to say that we are in Iraq as part of a fight against an Islamic terrorist totalitarian movement is... reality challenged. Saddam Hussein was our guy because he was a secularist. Because he stood up to Iran and suppressed Islam in his own country. Who knows why we invaded Iraq. The people who led the invasion were clearly not telling valid reasons. We don't know if they were lying - and therefore had other secret reasons - or if they were simply confused, or they were... reality challenged.

This is not meant to trivialize the problem. Rather, I think, it leads to an important insight. Even if you think of Cheney as an evil, authoritarian, crypto-fascist puppet master, or if you think of Bush as a smiling, dry alcoholic with sadistic tendencies, the question remains, why would they pursue policies that were pretty obviously doomed to failure?

Let me name just three. That 'taking out' Saddam Hussein would lead to a bucolic, happy, dancing democracy. That encouraging real democracy in Palestine would not lead to the election of an even more radical and more Islamic government. Then thinking that the way to deal with it, was to try to starve the people to death.

Whatever their ambitions are and however ruthless they are and however amoral we might think they are, surely, successes would have been better - for them - than failures. Unless, they really thought the world would operate in different ways than it does. Unless they thought their dream world - take out Saddam, girls throw flowers at the troops, a democratic government is elected, it's friendly and secular, it sells all the state enterprises to private companies for a vast free market experiment with no taxes on the rich, the rest of the Middle East is so swept away with admiration that they all convert to the neo-con way, the world happily sings the praises of the New American Century and Bush-Cheney go down in history as the saviors of us all - that all that would actually follow from Rumsfeld's discount theory of warfare and occupation lite. Unless, in short, they were ... reality challenged.

It's not hard to be reality challenged. The reality challenged people are running the government. They convinced virtually all of our media that their view of the world was real. They got plenty of voters to vote for them. It was a disability that crossed party lines.

Nobody stood up for reality. We've had to wait for reality to stand up for itself. Which it's doing. But that's the most painful way to go about things.