It's The Decider, Stupid!
I watched The Agenda on TVO tonight. I like watching that show because I am really quite appallingly ignorant for someone who writes a fairly political blog - BUT - Janice Stein was once my Professor of... something... at the University of Toronto and I remember... I think... getting a fairly good mark in whatever course it was she taught. Something political... And she always kicks ass on the show. Which by extension makes me feel pretty smart.
Smarter'n that dumbass David Frum, at any rate. And last I looked, he makes about 10 zillion times more'n me wherever he's clerking.
Because yes, on tonight's show he actually shouted at the smarter, female half of the show, something like, "What would you do, then?! What would YOUR plan be?!" in regards to Iraq and in defence of Bush the Junior's decision to invade it, liberate it, and zip off back home to the good ol' U.S. of A before nightfall.
I mean, he was a speechwriter for Bush the Junior, ferchrissakes. No wonder he was fired. If the best you can do by way of defending a decision by the President of the United States to invade a sovereign country with no idea what to next is to implore of a couple of university professors on public television, "What would you have done?!" - you pretty much suck at defending the President of the United States when it comes to his decision-making capabilities.
And lest we forget - the President calls himself "The Decider". Which is why he needs his supporters to come up with better defence arguments for his decisions than, "What would you have done, then?!"
To be honest, both Professor Stein and the other academic, an Associate Professor at... York(?) with an East Indian name I can't recall, looked a little embarassed for him. I know *I* had to watch the segment from the under the bed. Especially when the camera panned back to the Associate Professor while David Frum was in full flight about the Islamic menace (in a frantic attempt to haul the argument back over to more familiar territory, I guess) and she was sitting back in her chair, arms crossed, and smiling. Not tightly, either. Merrily.
At one point I actually opined to my viewing companion, "My goodness, does he realize how racist he sounds?" Because he did. He was saying, essentially, that Arabs don't want democracy, which is pretty appalling in itself, but he seemed to go that big bad step further and say that they didn't want democracy BECAUSE they are Arabs.
My viewing companion, by the way, thought not. That he didn't realize how racist he sounded.
I'm not kidding. And I don't think I'm misunderestimating what he said, either. Because Professor Stein, in the final moment of the show, put the lie to his argument (which tells me she heard the same thing what I heard) by pointing out the historical reality that the Arab states, in the 20s and 30s and 40s, were well on their way to democracy - implying that the detour probably had more to do with extraneous influences than anything else. (And I'm taking her word for it that it's a historical reality and not just a big fat lie she made up on the spot to make David Frum look like a bigger idiot than Bush the Junior, even.) This followed on the heels of her pointing out that, in talking to people from all over the world, she'd never met anyone who didn't want democracy in their country. (And I guess David Frum didn't notice that she didn't say "Arabs and people", just "people" or he would have had a fit and punched himself in the head, or something.)
Oh - and at a juncture earlier in the show, the Associate Professor pointed out that Imperialism didn't result in democracy, that democracy pretty much had to evolve from within a country. It was the counter argument to David Frum's argument that Iraq wasn't working out as planned because it was all messed up on account of the UN and sanctions and there weren't enough... uh... democracy receptors? in place to hold the freedom the United States was trying to fit into the country. He seemed to even say, at one point in his tirade, that the United States, and ONLY the United States - was "The Great Democratizer".
Ooh. Oh dear. Wrong title. Bush the Junior calls himself The Decider - NOT - The Democratizer. Not that he mightn't have meant to say, "The Democratizer". Still, he didn't. He said, "The Decider". "I am The Decider."
And let's face it. Invading a sovereign country rich in oil reserves with the noble intention of liberating it - is quite a decision to take. It's also a really hard sell. Especially to people of reason. People of reason are going to think, however politically incorrect it may seem, that you are behaving more like an Imperial power intent on... well... you do the math - than just a run-of-the-mill "Decider".
Anyway, the whole segment was a wake-up call for me. I'd been stumped by those rightwing whackjobs all over the internet these days, posting wildly, "Well, EINSTEIN - what would you have done?!" as if it was the fault of all of us non-Bush-lovers that the President had proved himself to be a really bad "Decider". I mean, if you try to answer, "Well, for starters, I wouldn't have invaded Iraq" - they just post louder, "BUT WHAT ABOUT THE KURDS?!"
And there's almost no point in arguing, "Well, I wouldn't have gassed the Kurds, either" because they have no sense of irony. None. I mean, David Frum actually threw up his hands at the point made by the Associate Professor that Bush the Junior invaded Iraq with no real intelligence (and I wrote that sentence that way - deliberately - double entendre intended) to say pretty much, "that's WHY he invaded Iraq. Because he DIDN'T have any intelligence."
"Duh."
Unfortunately, one drawback to having to female academics on the show was to curtail the debate somewhat because they both seemed a bit taken aback by David Frum's punditry and gesturonics. They were, I think, confused. I would have just shouted at him, "Shut up, Stupid!" but I'm kind of... well... not fully informed, either. And, of course, then he would have just shouted back at me, "You shut up, Stupid!"
Until Steve Paikin shouted, "You both shut up, Stupids!" or something.
There was another person on the show, some guy who wrote a book called, "Electing to Fight". It was the result of a couple of decades of research into emerging versus non-emerging democracies. Professor Stein and the Associate Professor took issue with it, from an academic viewpoint, but I wasn't really following by that point. Then David Frum flung poo at him, or something. I dunno. It went on a bit too long, I guess. Either he, or I, was tired and not really paying attention.
Oh - one last bit. I remember David Frum accusing the Associate Professor of not arguing right. Of being too precise in her language, or somesuch. But my viewing companion said it was the opposite. That he accused her of not being precise enough.
Weird, eh? How two people can be watching the same program and hear the opposite sounds? We both agreed, then, that defending Deciders is hard.
Luckily, it was time for Family Guy, anyway.
