A Self-Correcting Mechanism

 by Phillip Ellis Jackson  

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Wonder what future historians will say about the presidency of George W. Bush?  It all depends on how far away you live from the blast zone.

History, like sausage, is best sampled after it’s made, rather than while it is being created.  Messy, confusing and self-contradictory, it is often difficult to understand what is really happening while it is happening.

When viewed from a distance the picture becomes clearer, particularly after the revisionists get a hold of it and re-write the past.  The dirty little secret of the academic world is that you don’t make your bones by repeating what The New York Times said about current events, even if you agree with it.  To set yourself apart from the crowd you need a different take, one that stands conventional wisdom on its head. 

That’s why Reagan-the-buffoon of the 1980s has become Reagan-the-visionary of the 21st century.  As the revisionists have suddenly discovered, contrary to so-called popular belief at the time, he was actually a pretty smart guy.  His foreign policies helped bring down the Berlin Wall and with it the Soviet Union, and domestically he ended Jimmy Carter’s malaise-driven stagflation that collapsed the economy and devalued everyone’s life savings.

Now, those of us who remember Reagan while he was in office aren’t surprised by this newfound appreciation for his policies and actions.  Unburdened by the need to gain favor with fellow academics, the liberal press, and the Hollywood Intelligencia (an oxymoron if there ever was one), we saw through the ideological bilge at the time and recognized Reagan for what he was.  Therefore, Reagan’s revised place in history comes as no surprise.

To be sure, the old-guard image of Reagan still persists among the aging ideologues who need a feeble-minded, hate-filled, greed-motivated bumbler for their paradigm in which Gorbachev woke up one morning and toppled his own country without U.S. pressure, and Reagan-Bush presided over the “worst economy in fifty years” — Jimmy Carter notwithstanding.  But like the dinosaurs after the meteor struck, these lingering relics are gradually being replaced by a new breed of political historians.  When they’re gone, so too will their politically motivated analysis fade into oblivion.

As I said before, you don’t get tenure simply by repeating “conventional wisdom.” But this didn’t automatically insure that Reagan would come out better looking after his death than he did during his two terms in office.  Like the nuts on the Left who are already practicing their own form of 9-11 revisionism by insisting that George Bush blew up the Twin Towers — and enjoyed it so much he blew up the New Orleans levees as well — revisionism can go further off the deep end.  However, these people are more concerned with hurting Bush than gaining tenure, so look to a much better view of GWB in the future than we have at present when the real revisionists get a crack at him.

And as an added bonus, this same logic bodes poorly for Bill Clinton, whose administration was seen as the “second coming” (man, can I make some jokes with that!) during his eight years in office.  Little Joey won’t grow up to be Dr. Joey by repeating the mantra that it was all the Republicans’ fault.  Look for Bill to be sandwiched between Warren G. Harding and Ulysses S. Grant as his true place in history is cemented.

Which brings me to another interesting point about the present times.  Thanks in part to the alternative media, we’re already able to glimpse what the future revisionists will draw upon to analyze the last 20 or so years of history.  The same people who condemned George Herbert Walker Bush for not marching into Baghdad in 1992 to “finish the job” against Saddam, condemned George W. Bush for marching into Baghdad in 2003 to finish the job against Saddam.  The same people who said in 1998 that without a doubt Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and voted for regime change, now claim that Bush 43 “made it all up” and lied to the American people.  And the same people who gave Bill Clinton credit for the Reagan Recovery insist that George Bush’s America, which economically outpaces the 80s and 90s, is barely one step removed from the Great Depression of the 1930s.

In short, the hypocrisy of the Left is so close to the surface that it IS the surface, which means that rather than digging through stacks and stacks of arcane information to support their revisionist conclusions, these future historians and analysts can simply read the official historical record (that is to say, the archives of The New York Times).  The contradictions, inconsistencies and blatant manipulations of the truth are already there, just waiting to be gathered and reassembled once the Bush haters assume room temperature, and they ascend to these newly vacated academic positions.

But there’s more at work here today, thanks to the short-sightedness of the Left, that virtually insures that history will treat Bush 43 kindly.  Unlike Reagan’s legacy, which needed the internal logic of revisionist history to re-write the bogus contemporary accounts of his actions, George W. Bush doesn’t need to rely on this or any other such process.  The self-correcting mechanism of history has already been put in motion, and thanks to George Soros, Michael Moore and the Democratic Party, it’s probably too late to reverse it.

What I’m about to suggest is one of those good-news/bad-news things that started off as a joke, but unfortunately like all good parody and satire, has the ring of truth to it.  I’ll let you decide whether to laugh, cry, or be offended, but in any case don’t simply dismiss it out of hand.  I’m afraid we’re all about to receive a practical application of the old Biblical warning about reaping what we sew.

Here's the problem Bush faces today in assessing the very real threat of Iran acquiring a nuclear bomb.

If you take every statement made by that whack job in Iran, and all the other Islamo-fascists who threaten us, and use these statements to justify pre-emptive military action against Iran, the liberals/Democrats/press will have Bush impeached and put in prison for crimes against humanity.  Their refrain will be something like this:  "You should know these people are just playing to a domestic audience and don't really mean what they say.  You killed a lot of innocent people for nothing, and made even more of the world hate us."

On the other hand, if these nut-cases go ahead and massacre a few hundred thousand Americans (or Israelis) with the A-bomb, the liberals/Democrats/press will have Bush impeached and put in prison for ignoring the flagrant, connect-the-dot signs that were clearly in front of his face.  Again, you can almost hear their words:  "They repeatedly telegraphed their plans to you for God's sake!  They made their intentions as plain as day [insert 1000+ direct quotations].  How much more did you need to connect the dots!  You got a lot of innocent people killed through your negligence."

Such is the state of political discourse in America today, thanks to the liberals/Democrats/press who'd rather regain political power at any expense than try to do the right thing for the people of this country. 

Had the Left not succeeded in the 2006 mid-term elections, I thought that Bush would have gone ahead and acted (with or without the Israelis) to eliminate Iran’s nuclear threat.  If you’re going to be condemned either way for acting or not acting, then you might as well act.

But now that the Dems have taken over both Houses in Congress, I’m not so sure.  Bush won’t pull out of Iraq, that much I’m certain of.  But it’s less likely now that he’ll expand any action to remove other threats.  With the first movement against Iran, Syria or Korea, he would be impeached — and convicted — with unprecedented haste by the Democrat majorities in both Houses.

But the yin-yang of political life also tells us that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and so we’re left with an interesting situation.  Iran will go nuclear, and as a nuclear power, it will not simply stockpile nuclear weapons and wage conventional war.  Just as the logic of the early centuries of Christianity made the Crusades inevitable, so the logic of Islam at a roughly contiguous point in its history makes the logic of jihad inevitable. Iran will use all its resources to fulfill its holy mission just as the Crusaders used theirs. But King Richard didn’t possess nuclear weapons to smite his enemies and please his God, and therein lies an important difference.

So what is Bush to do now in face of present realities?  If he tries to act and remove a threat, he’ll be removed himself.  Moreover, the threat will remain, and be emboldened.  If he doesn’t act, at some point we’ll lose New York and Washington, and perhaps LA too if the terrorists really want to show their prowess.
 
History will then crucify Bush for inaction.  Or maybe not, which brings us to the self-correcting mechanism I spoke about earlier as historians look back on the Bush administration. 

Consider the yang to this yin.  If we wait for the mushroom cloud as "proof positive" of Iran’s hostile intentions before we act, two things will happen. 

(1)  We’ll all have another 9/11-like Kumbaya moment and the U.S. will retaliate with full force to completely eliminate the problem (including some "collateral damage" in adjoining areas of the world that need to be taken care of too.)  No more terrorist threats from Iran, Syria, the mountains of Pakistan, and North Korea just for good measure.  After all, if you’re going to nuke one enemy, why not nuke them all?  Sure Russia and China will get mad, but they’re not going to launch against us because we took out ‘Lil Kim.  We’ll pay reparations to the radiation victims along their borders and offer some additional foreign aid.  Then Putin can go back to poisoning his enemies, and China can go back to stealing our military secrets and planning to invade Taiwan, and all will be well with the world.

(2)  And, since the terrorist blast against New York and Washington will undoubtedly vaporize all the liberals/Democrats/press who congregate along the East Coast, there won't be anyone of any consequence left alive to start tearing down Bush (and with him, U.S. national security) for their own personal political gain.  It will also, shall we say, diminish the influence of certain academic elites who also live/lived there and go up in the same mushroom cloud.  Without their wisdom and the cheerleading from the liberal press that goes along with it, that particular point of view will be rather severely diminished.

Yes I know this is a perfectly horrible thing to say and I’m a perfectly horrible person for saying it.  But then again, I don’t live in New York, Washington or LA, and I haven’t made a history of simultaneously condemning Bush for acting and not acting on the same issue.  These numbskulls are in the most logical blast zone, yet their hatred for Bush is so compelling they’d rather ignore a real, tangible threat to their lives than support Bush’s efforts to obviate it, for fear that any Bush “success” would elevate him in the history books.

So let the chips fall where they may.  If they’re right, and Bush created terrorism, then he should be stopped from provoking peaceful Iran, Syria, and Korea (not to mention the greatest non-threat of all, Al Quada).  If I’m right, and these thugs pose very real threats to our national security, then when the next attack comes I at least have the comfort of knowing that I’m not living in the most likely target area.  I’ll continue to write my essays, while Dan & Katie, The New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, and Nancy and the gang will have considerably less to say on the subject. 

One final thought.  If Iran does get The Bomb and decides to use it, the same self-correcting mechanism at work above will also produce a couple of additional effects we all can take advantage of.  Without New York City and Los Angeles, New York State and California will more than likely go Red in the next election.  And, if you invest wisely today in the surrounding blast zone areas, there will be a lot of new oceanfront land for development in about 20 years when the radiation levels drop to an acceptable range.

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