MAYBE THEY SHOULD TRY AN ALARM CLOCK, IT COULD WAKE THEM UP:

REVIEW ESSAY: Preempting the truth (Walter C. Uhler, Sep/Oct 2004, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)

Paul Waldman's book, Fraud, fuels the fire of those who have a hard time believing any of Bush's words. Waldman excoriates the news media and focuses on Bush's lies because "when George W. Bush realized that his alleged lack of intelligence in the eyes of the press gave him the opportunity to lie without consequence, he knew he had struck political gold." The book is worth reading, if only because it yields one extremely relevant nugget concerning Iraq that speaks volumes about Bush's religious piety and character.

In a supposedly private moment just before his national address announcing that war had begun, Waldman writes that "a camera caught Bush pumping his fist as though instead of initiating a war he had kicked a winning field goal or hit a home run. 'Feels good,' he said." Readers may have seen the Associated Press photo of Bush's tasteless fist-pump.

Given all of the above, the words of former U.S. Chief Justice Robert H. Jackson, speaking as chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials in 1945, seem especially appropriate for the Bush administration: "Any resort to war--to any kind of war--is a resort to means that are inherently criminal. War inevitably is a course of killings, assaults, deprivations of liberty, and destruction of property. An honestly defensive war is, of course, legal, and saves those conducting it from criminality. But inherently criminal acts cannot be defended by showing that those who committed them were engaged in a war, when war itself is illegal."

You probably have to be of a certain age to recall this publication, which one might have thought would have the decency to close its doors after it lost the Cold War--having consistently sided with the Soviets against the U.S. They're the ones with that inane doomsday clock which they infamously moved closer to midnight when Ronald Reagan was elected and then again when he started developing Star Wars. Their failure to comprehend world affairs is nicely summed up in their own words: "The fact that the United States and the Soviet Union eventually signed an Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in December 1987--which eliminated all such weapons (including Pershing IIs and SS-20s) rather than merely cutting their numbers--struck many people, including the editors of the Bulletin, as near-miraculous." Of course the miracle worker was the Ronald Reagan they'd sought to undermine.

At any rate, they're apparently still a going concern and have learned not a doggone thing from their own past errors if this review is any indication. The whole thing is pretty noxious but that closing paragraph is priceless: "...the words of former U.S. Chief Justice Robert H. Jackson, speaking as chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials in 1945, seem especially appropriate for the Bush administration..." Oddly enough, Mr. Jackson wasn't prosecuting President Truman and the American Administration but Nazis, despite the inherent criminality of our unilateral war to impose regime change on Hitler's Germany. You can't ask for a much clearer indication of the Left's moral blindness than that Mr. Uhler and the folks at the Bulletin are confused about which side represented totalitarian evil in the Iraq War.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 2, 2004 11:00 AM