On the Debates and Other Stuff

I don't know why it's taken me so long to post something about the Kerry/Dumbya debate of last Thursday. The polls tell us that Kerry's performance excelled that of what appeared to be a mean-spirited, irritable, ignoble, arrogant supposed public servant, the ultimate public servant; the President. Dumbya appeared as though he was highly disturbed that anyone would question his temerity and mendacity with regard to Iraq, or anything else, for that matter.

I'm sure Karl Rove will reshape the great Dumbya into what Rove believes the American people want from their President for the next debate.

I am very interested in watching the Edwards/Cheney debate tonight.

I happened to be rereading "Odyssey of a Friend -- Whittaker Chambers letters to William F. Buckley," which was published by Buckley in the National Review in 1970.

Chambers wrote to Buckley that: "Senator McCarthy never understood Communism or the war on Communism. Hence he never evolved a strategy, but only a tactic which consisted exclusively in the impulse: Attack. That could never be enough, could end only as it did..."

May I paraphrase: "Dumbya never understood the Islamic fundamentalists which he calls the insurgents or the war on the insurgents. Hence he never evolved a strategy, but only a tactic which consisted exclusively in the impulse: Attack. That could never be enough, could end only as it has..."

Chambers would later write that: "Hungary merely focuses a feeling against Americans that goes much deeper and farther, and is much older. What the rest of the world misses in Americans is something a little different. It misses in them the tragic sense of life. ...How can the rest of the world look, without wonder and a certain pity, at a nation who believes that one of man's inalienable right is the pursuit of happiness? Tom Matthews told me last year about coming on a magnificent Spanish beggar woman, vestida de negro, enlutada [dressed in black,mourning], dirty, wretched, but speaking impassionedly to several others. Tom asked what she was saying and was told: 'She is talking to them about the evil of life.' The pursuit of happiness, the evil of life. How can peoples who have as a catchphrase, 'No hay remedio' [There is nothing to be done about it], help seeing [Americans] as, to some degree, children? We think they are looking at our power, wealth, ease, and envying them, and we are right about that. But they are also looking at our minds, our souls, and these baffle them, and their bafflement baffles us."

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Dumbya pursues his tragic course believing that freedom, American-style freedom is the great salve, the great pill, the great gift that will bring Islam to our side; that will bring the insurgents to a fundamental understanding of his belief that Islam can embrace the concept of an inalienable right to pursue happiness.

Ah, we stumble into oblivion.