Idiocy From Fred Kaplan

Over at Slate, Fred Kaplan's written a stupid article claiming that recent positive events in Iraq and the Middle East bother liberals. Or, to use his words:

A question is haunting the blue states of America: Could George W. Bush be right? Is freedom indeed "on the march"? Did the war in Iraq uncork a white tornado that's whooshing democracy across the region and beyond?

No, that doesn't mean anything, and no.

I'm sure you've heard this senseless argument before: liberals hate George Bush and everything he does. When he does well, and things improve, liberals therefore get upset because they've been proved wrong.

There's a few things wrong with this theory. First off, George W. Bush never does anything "right." If positive things happen as a result of his policies, it's merely accidental, and surely unintentional. He governs by mad whim, like King Lear. Except King Lear only had one Fool traveling with him, and Bush has literally hundreds.

Secondly, I don't think liberals would mind if things got better in the Middle East. I'm not saying that they'd excitedly embrace G Dubs if his policies wound up working for the best. But I don't think opposing the president means wanting America to fail, or wanting more people to die, or praying for civil unrest in a large section of the world. Because it's dumb. Kaplan pretends he's responding to every liberal, every member of the Democratic party. But of course, the only people who think this way are a very narrow group of Washingtonians whose careers depend on George W. Bush's failure.

The rest of Kaplan's article is a far more sane look at the harsh realities facing the Middle East as it struggles towards some kind of stability. So why choose to begin the article with such a stupid sensationalized thesis, one that plays right into the right-wing blogosphere's script? Why not open it with a statement that's, I don't know, true or based in reality? Like "though a lot of people credit Bush's diplomacy with Libya's decision to give up a nuclear weapon's program, it's just a coincidence and he had nothing to do with it. And now, on to an article."

One more thing I've got to add...let's stop using the phrase "freedom is on the march." It's offensive. See, what it does is connect the concept of "freedom," an intangible positive quality that everyone reasonably wants, to a military action. "The March." What does it mean to say that freedom is on the march? It means that our troops are going around the world, marching. But troops don't just march - that's the one non-violent thing they do. Once they get where they're marching to, they blow it up. So, implicit in the phrase "freedom is on the march" is the idea that we will force freedom on the people of the world through violence. Which in itself negates the true idea of freedom (for how can we be free if we are having something forced on us by outsiders?)

It's now obvious to me that the rest of the world doesn't wish to be free in this way. If they are to be free, whether good or bad, it will have to stem from self-determination. That's how it went in this country - a group of American decided they were sick of foreign oppression and fought a violent, bloody war for independance. And we're barely even free! So how can we expect to "gift" freedom to others by attacking their countries? The very notion, like phrase "freedom is on the march," is absurd.