The Liberal Amphisbaena
August 11, 2005
From Greek mythology, we rediscover the amphisbaena...a mythical serpent having a head at each end of its body. WAIT...don’t run screaming. You are about to see that the serpent is alive and well. It is disguised as a liberal and resides at Time Magazine.
Time Magazine, that august member of the unbiased MSM, recently ran an article, The Condi Doctrine, which purports to be “An intimate look at Rice's world”. Far from an intimate look at Rice’s world, the article is another instance of twisting facts and logic into a round peg that is forced into the square hole of liberal dogma. It’s a continuation of the MSM’s lace-curtain whispering campaign to dishearten America.
Like any good piece of propaganda, the article starts innocently enough. It’s almost a dollop from a 1950’s issue of Good Housekeeping. The article’s tone is harmless in its description of State Department furniture, wall hangings and Secretary Rice’s depiction as “a glamorous, globe-trotting operator with first-name-only cachet.” But never trust a MSM writer. Their sweat glands emit knives.
By the end of the first few paragraphs, the article morphs from “an intimate look at Rice’s world” to a not-too-subtle liberal diatribe of hopelessness, i.e. a hatchet job on the Bush administration.
The Time writer let’s us know that Ms. Rice, “by assuming the mantle as the chief exponent of the Bush foreign policy...has also inherited responsibility for cleaning up its biggest calamity: the war in Iraq.” Please note that the war in Iraq has, without question, already been declared a “calamity”. This is in contrast to a 2001 Time article that, without any proof, asserted that stem cells “hold the secret to treatment — even cures — for some of our most baffling diseases”.
I hope you are following the logic here. The same editors who have declared the war a “calamity” before the war has ended...have declared embryonic stem cells a panacea before the research has really begun. And, if the truth be known, the biggest “calamity” of the Bush administration is Norman Mineta.
Of course, what good would “an intimate look” at Secretary Rice be without a recent tally of our war dead? Almost as if by cue, Time gets right out front with the fact that the war in Iraq “last week claimed the lives of 29 U.S. service members, bringing the total number of American dead to 1,829.” I wonder if this had been “an intimate look at Mineta’s world”...would Time remind us that last week 816 Americans died on highways bringing the annual total to over 40,000?
Pardon me for the long quote, but the following is, at best, bizarre. By some sophistry of reason, Time has concluded that “Although trained as a foreign policy realist who has argued the U.S. should act based on a cold calculus of national interest, rather than to advance ideological goals, Rice has more recently embraced Bush's gauzy belief that pursuing the ambitious aim of bringing political reform to the Arab world represents the best possible salve against the threat of Islamic terrorism.”
This somehow escapes the possibility that the “cold calculus of national interest” might best be served by “bringing political reform to the Arab world”. Personally, I believe that America’s national interest could best be served by performing transgender surgery on all captured insurgents and rehabitating them to the Arab streets as part of the 72 virgin contingent. But somehow I bet that idea wouldn’t fly with the liberals.
And, if using political reform in the Arab world as a weapon against terrorism is “gauzy”, what would you call Time’s 2001 assertion that turning away from embryonic stem cell research “would be tantamount to turning our backs on a bright, sustaining light because we are terrified of the shadows it creates.” Talk about “gauzy” prose.
In a paragraph that should have been subtitled “Dumb and Dumber”, when Rice states that “...the insurgency has a problem, which is that as the political process matures and the Iraqis every day accept the political process as their future, [the insurgents] become more and more isolated from the population and they become nothing but a destructive force”...Time proclaims “But that's a hope, not a strategy”.
Although this might be too complicated for a Time writer, a simple definition of strategy is an “adaptation important to evolutionary success...a behavior, structure, or other adaptation that improves viability.” Time would have you believe that Secretary Rice is sitting around all day with eyes closed and hoping that something improves. This completely ignores the Iraqi elections and the on-going drafting of a constitution. Oh, that’s right, sitting around and dreaming with eyes closed is the liberal strategy for the 40 years war on poverty.
Crediting President Bush with some kind of Svengali-like power that has not inhabited the Oval Office since Clinton used Monica as a human humidor, Time actually wonders if Secretary Rice’s “commitment to the Bush doctrine is impairing her judgment”. Time is worried “about the wisdom of pinning so much hope on the idea that bringing democracy to societies that have never known it is the best strategy for making Americans safer.”
For once, Time is correct. The best way to make America safer is to: close our borders; deport all Muslims; carpet bomb Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan; nuke Iran and North Korea; dissolve the United Nations and the ACLU; exile all liberals to Elba and take Teddy Kennedy’s drivers license away. But, in the meantime, I guess that political reform will have to do.
Time, and the rest of the MSM, is a serpent that speaks from two mouths. When it fits the liberal dogma, one mouth views the promise of iffy pet projects like embryonic stem cell research as worth any investment. But, if national security could best be served by profiling or something “gauzy” like political reform of the Arab world the other mouth must slay the message and all the messengers.
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