The future is intimidation and fear

The tell-tale line in E.J. Dionne's sloppy and less than honest attempt to synthesize a foreign policy in the Washington Post today.

A Foreign Policy Based on Moral Balance

"But these are the days of European second thoughts: Obama is still interesting, he's still not George W. Bush, but what can he show for his efforts? His Israeli-Palestinian initiative has gone nowhere. The fruits of his new overtures to Iran, Russia and North Korea are far from obvious. Where is the climate change legislation that was supposed to get through Congress?

And why did Obama skip the anniversary celebrations of the Berlin Wall's fall? OK, Europeans say, we understand he sees that the future lies in Asia, but did he have to rub it in? And can't he find at least one European leader to bond with?

In the midst of such complaints and questions, I sat with a group of Americans and Europeans to listen to a live broadcast of Obama's Oslo speech before the opening of a conference organized by the French Institute of International Relations. For me, the address was Obama's answer to his critics, both American and European.

To begin with, the president reminded us why he had seized the imaginations of so many in the first place. The speech was commonly described as a defense of "just war," and it was -- a rigorous, unblinking argument for why violence and the threat of violence can be necessary on behalf of the right and the good."

First of all, if the President thinks that the future lies in Asia, I certainly hope he's referring to Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and the other genuinely strong economies and liberal democracies in the region. If leftists really think that the future lies in China, they have another think coming. And the world will not only watch that situation unravel until China goes democratic. The world will remember what self-indulgent, self-righteous shitheads in the West rationalized that brutal regime for their own ideological purposes for the rest of our liberal history. If there is anything that leftists could do, right now, to undermine confidence in their ideology, rationalizing the totalitarian impulses of their ideological brethren ranks right up with the list of "what bonehead moves put left-wing ideology in the trash bin of history."

Secondly, and most importantly, if E.J. thinks that violence and the threat of violence are the wave the future, he has a lot of history that he might consult on where that thinking leads us. Because it's been responsible for more bad than good, on balance, by far. And rationalizing that bad in the name of good is exactly what has fucked humanity since it's inception. Might makes right is a line to caution against such thinking, not to reinforce it.

And if E.J. thinks that he has done an endrun around such wisdom because he found the right cause, history will undoubtedly offer a cold shower dose of reality for that kind of arrogance.

In fact, it has.

The unfailingly failing agenda the Obama Administration is exactly the kind of cold shower leftists could use, right now. If they could get honest with themselves, that is.

And the fact that they can't is exactly what Acton meant.

This is why Orwell wrote those books. To help us see through this bullshit.

And we will continue to get the governments we deserve until we do exactly that.