Losing a war upends governance

 

“War is hell,” said General Sherman, and he was winning. It’s worse than hell when you lose, especially for the folks at the top who always promise glorious triumphs when sounding the trumpet to get the war going.

Biden may be old and sick, but if he were presiding over victory in one of his wars, I’m not sure anyone could have browbeaten him into stepping aside. FDR was half dead in 1944 when he ran for his fourth term, and he carried 38 states.

When wars go badly, the disgruntled tend to keep quiet about it even in countries where dissenters aren’t shot. Loyalty to the boys (and girls) in uniform requires that citizens keep “supporting” them long past the point when doubts about the outcome are impossible to ignore.

Unhappiness about the progress of warmaking is therefore likely to be sublimated, channeled into other forms of discontent. I lived through an illustrative episode in my adolescence watching support for LBJ, a wildly popular figure in 1964, collapse.

Of course, there were others factors aside from the Vietnam quagmire. Johnson pushed through major civil rights legislation and alienated racists. Some people disliked the introduction of Medicare and Medicaid although there was a broad national consensus in their favor. He was an effective horse-trader and acknowledged to be a master politician.

But Johnson’s decision to gamble everything on war in Asia did him in. The death toll was unacceptable—of Americans, that is. (After Vietnam, the war party kept the body counts way down.)

Nixon promised to put an end to the war and then, once in office, escalated. It wasn’t for a proud militarist to preside over humiliating battlefield defeat. Eventually, he too was ousted, ostensibly over electoral shenanigans that would be scarcely noticed today.

The unpopular war had undermined two presidents. Young draftees kept dying—until compulsory service ended in 1971. Atrocity tales filtered back home, even before the notorious My Lai massacre came to light. The secret expansion into Cambodia sparked new horrified amazement.

All the while, official discourse was dominated by Kissingerian types promising that things were going just fine, that we should stick with the leadership just a little longer, and that dissent aided the enemy. Extreme militarists continued to denounce grumblers and call for even heavier bombing of North Vietnam’s cities and ports, even for nuking them. Demagogues encouraged blue-collar workers to attack antiwar protests and to hate “draft dodgers” and peaceniks.

But a substantial minority of the population viewed all this as profoundly immoral as well as stupid. Happy talk about progress on the battlefield wasn’t as convincing in 1971, ‘72, ‘73, even as Nixon racked up a historic electoral victory over George McGovern. Nixon’s support was broad but paper-thin. Less than 2 years after his historic 49-state victory, Nixon was out.

Fast forward to today: we’re doing great in Ukraine; Russia is a gas station parading as a country (Nigeria with snow); its soldiers are drunks; and its equipment is all rusty. No one can challenge mighty NATO with the greatest fighting force in history behind it. Any day now, the Ukrainians will bounce back and chase Putin/Hitler’s armies back into Russia, which will then collapse and shatter into various parts, just like in 1991.

And Joe Biden is at the top of his game and not at all senile.

The defeat of the West in its European war of choice will be far more destabilizing than the ragtag departure from 20 years of occupation in Afghanistan. No one will take the blame for the debacle because in this country we don’t do responsibility. But someone will have to preside over it, and a likely candidate is someone expendable, a last-minute placeholder pushed into the spotlight at exactly the worst moment.

In 1974 it was Leslie Lynch King, Jr., who had been shoehorned into the vice presidency just months before after an old-fashioned cash-in-shoeboxes scandal. Leslie was better known by the name he adopted after his mother got remarried—to Gerald Ford, Sr.

Poor Leslie/Gerald was left holding the bag as the helicopters sailed away from the rooftop of the Saigon embassy. Who will get that undesirable job when the U.S. decides that Ukraine is Europe’s problem and walks away from another ignominious debacle?

Welcome, President Kamala.

 

Pending Questions

By coincidence, I just finished James W. Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. It led me to wonder aloud—and comment to friends—about the possibility of assassination—pre-July 13.

Douglass compiled a mass of information about the 2-plus years of Kennedy’s presidency, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Test Ban Treaty, and Kennedy’s readiness for neutrality in Laos and allegedly Vietnam. Everything that the war party hated.

I hadn’t known how eager Kennedy’s military chiefs were to follow up the Bay of Pigs with an invasion and, in some cases (Remember Curtis LeMay?) to launch a nuclear strike on the USSR. They hated JFK’s compromises in Southeast Asia and resisted disarmament.

They weren’t called neocons back then, but the mentality is recognizable in the unified war party of today, those calling always for more escalation, more belligerence, more “force projection,” and of course more spending on all the supposedly necessary weapons.

Today, like back then, anyone resisting or questioning the drumbeat of war was and is quickly labeled a wuss and a softie for starters, followed by accusations of doing the enemy’s bidding, a virtual or actual traitor (a la Russiagate). Back then, you were smeared as a pinko or outright commie; today’s equivalent is “agent of Putin,” someone who fails to see him as the new Hitler and probably has a secret bank account in rubles. Kennedy had a hard slog getting Senate approval of the Test Ban Treaty until it became clear that he had a potent ally: the American people.

Douglass’s thesis is that the war party—what we have begun to call the Deep State now, headquartered at the CIA—hated JFK and had him whacked. They then covered up the inconvenient facts, threatened and harassed skeptics and witnesses, and quietly eliminated any who wouldn’t shut up. (That list is extensive.) He marshals disturbing evidence to support his conclusions.

Douglass shows through 400 pages how a conspiracy at that level can work with relative ease once people realize the power of the forces determined to impose their official narrative. Many people had important facts that undermined the Oswald-as-assassin story, but they quickly saw how dangerous it was to stick to their stories, even for the first autopsy pathologists who clearly saw the front-entry bullet wound in the president’s remains and later allowed themselves to be misinterpreted.

There’s a lot we don’t know about the July 13 shooting, and old-fashioned incompetence should never be dismissed as an explanation. Why should the Secret Service function any better than the rest of our crumbling institutions?

That said, in piecing together the truth about the attempt on Trump’s life, we should be alert to stonewalling, crazy claims of easily disprovable facts, and especially pressures on eyewitnesses to unsay what they’ve already stated on the record and on camera. We should watch the composition of investigative bodies, check the members’ connections to the intelligence and Homeland Security agencies, and pay attention to the handling of forensic evidence.

We should listen carefully for news of the dead shooter’s recent movements and contacts and an explanation of his curiously opaque past.

Meanwhile, I am frankly shocked by how many people close to me find the attempted murder worthy of kinda-sorta jokes about how close the shooter came. Spare me your sick humor—assassination is no substitute for politics, and also, be careful what you endorse. What goes around, comes around as  Trump—himself the proud assassin of an Iranian general—should recall.  

2024: A Space-out Odyssey

 

 

Joe Biden’s debate meltdown exposed the lies we’ve been systematically fed for months—probably years—about his health and mental capacities.

That’s one set of lies. There are others.

Narrative management is a useful skill, perhaps more highly developed here given our foundational relationship to the art of selling. We really know how to establish a story line and pitch it relentlessly.

At the same time, all those generations of commercial culture have induced in us a certain degree of skepticism. Growing up as consumers, caveat emptor comes with our mothers’ milk. We know how the game is played: you paint me a fantastical picture, and I discount two-thirds of it. We expect to be hustled and fed a line by everyone—peddlers of cars, toys, stocks, or flood insurance, office-seekers, and now modernity’s latest curse, paid “influencers.”

But while we understand that success isn’t dependent on a pitch’s attachment to facts, that doesn’t mean we like being cheated. Plenty of Biden sympathizers are royally pissed off that the party pooh-bahs shepherded rickety Joe through rigged or non-existent primaries to keep him carefully screened off from anything that would have exposed his disqualifying frailty.

Our cowed and complicit news outlets played along even though they must have known. Announcing that the emperor not only had no clothes but no working mind meant professional ostracism at least, as experienced by Axios reporter Alex Thompson, one of the few who dared to go off script.

The debate debacle leaves the Democrat establishment with no pleasant options. Early polls are predictably bad and set to get worse as safe blue states—New Hampshire, Colorado, Minnesota, Virginia, New Mexico—move into the toss-up column, and that’s after just one week. More are likely to follow. Dumping Biden might stop the bleeding—or make it worse. At this rate Trump could pull off a Nixon- (1972) or Reagan- (1980) level landslide.

All the horserace talk, while amusing, obscures the other acts of narrative massage that are about to blow up messily. For example, we’ve been promised that our mighty (and expensive) military machine would power noble Ukraine to victory against Russia.

I remember an early panel discussion featuring Axis-of-Evil speechwriter David Frum (now a Democrat since it’s the war party). Frum confidently predicted that the Russian army would collapse as the troops were offered pleasant lives in Barcelona in exchange for deserting. Biden himself crowed that the Russian ruble would soon be “rubble.”  

Two years later, Russia is dictating terms of surrender, which become more humiliating with each iteration. That one will be harder to spin, and the panic over Biden’s Madame Tussaud act will pale in comparison.

Like the Biden dementia taboo, no one was allowed to question the fairy story about Ukraine’s imminent triumph. No one could doubt that Russia was a gas station parading as a country, “Nigeria with snow,” a failed, beaten state with drunk soldiers and rusty weapons. No one could suggest a compromise settlement or question the ongoing war and slaughter. That was all considered naïve Putin-enabling, the equivalent of cheering the Munich surrender of 1938.

We will pay a high price for the successful suppression of critical engagement, the homogenization of permitted speech, and the proliferation of bogus “disinformation” monitors, a.k.a. censorship boards policing our public debates. Like feeble Joe wandering off the public stage, we have been reduced to repeating stock lines and expecting rounds of stormy applause.

Reality has begun to bite. It won’t be pretty.