All symbol, no substance.
So apparently being outraged at President Obama for not personally going to Paris to participate in the weekend anti-terrorism solidarity march is going to be an actual thing. While it sounds like something Fox News would cook up to liven up a slow day, we'll go to (sigh) Senator Ted Cruz for his
smart take:
The absence is symbolic of the lack of American leadership on the world stage, and it is dangerous. The attack on Paris, just like previous assaults on Israel and other allies, is an attack on our shared values. And, we are stronger when we stand together, as French President François Hollande said, for “liberty, equality, and fraternity.”
Already Ted Cruz already has done something that Ted Cruz and his fellow conservatives would never let the president get away with, which is to quote a French person, but the overall premise is that by not personally going to France himself to participate in this particular march the president has shown that he is weak on terrorism. As a thought experiment, you can contemplate the criticisms that would have been leveled against the president if he
had gone to Paris—Why Paris, when he did not go to this other, previous thing? Does Mr. Obama's pattern of going to France indicate his affinities lie more with foreign nations than with our own?—and to save yourself time you can imagine all of them being said by Dr. Keith Ablow, the Fox News resident explainer of why every single thing the president has ever done across the Atlantic or Pacific shows something devious is afoot.
For that matter, try to imagine any Obama action in the wake of any terrorism event that would not be met with a Ted Cruz op-ed piece explaining why the president had done the "symbolic" something "dangerously" wrong, and while you try to come up with one the rest of us will trundle forward (below the fold) because we're not waiting for you.
The rest of the long opinion piece—and this is more interesting, in my book—is the usual cut-and-pasted demand that we more properly fight "radical Islamists" via some entirely unspecified program of something-something, and I am going to highlight that part because the ability and predilection of our national politicians to spout off substanceless public bullcrap and have it called "bold" by a collection of the equally vapid hollow-heads who tell us which of these besuited water balloons to vote for has done just as much damage to the cause of democracy as any bullet could ever hope to.
This is where we can find our strength—by coordinating closely with our allies who are fighting this common threat. We can reject attempts to draw a moral equivalence between our friends and those who support or condone the terrorists. Instead, we should condemn and shun state sponsors of terrorism. We should encourage Muslim nations like Egypt and Saudi Arabia to join us and aspire to freedom in their own societies.
Oh, what a bold stance, we are supposed to say. Oh, we should
coordinate closely with our allies and
reject attempts to draw a moral equivalence. We had never thought of this before, we are supposed to say—truly, what a thought leader we see before us, in the
coordinating and
rejecting and
condemning and
shunning and
encouraging realms of Doing Abstract Verbs. If only we had put this previous program in place! If only we had condemned
more, or rejected terrorism
more.
And, we should make it clear to the radical Islamic terrorists that the United States is not going to simply “move on” from Paris in the hopes that they will leave us alone, but rather that we are going to call them out by name as we stand strong and lead the fight against them.
This reads like an attempt by a brilliant writer to write the most substanceless, vapid, insulting, pandering, horseshit-laden ball of nothing that could possibly be worked out onto a page
as a dare, passing it off as the words of a senator only to sweeten the irony when it dawns on the reader that he or she has been punked. Our approach to terrorist acts should not be to "move on," a plan that no human on the planet has yet apparently suggested but which our esteemed would-be strategist here nonetheless demands we not do? We shall make a note of it! Our national anti-terrorism plan will be to
call them out by name, and
stand strong, and
lead the fight? Brilliance—if only any of our past national leaders had thought to
stand strong, we would not be having all these problems today.
Apparently we have been going about this all wrong, and the key to fighting terrorism is not our morally controversial program of drone strikes and targeted assassination and all the other things we have done in the shadows and out of the shadows, nor with efforts to encourage democracy in places notable for their lack thereof, nor with espionage efforts or weapons sales or weapons bans or any of the rest of it. Apparently terrorism could be bested if only we had the courage to confront them with the pronouncements of one moderately well-trained talking parrot. Stand strong, awk. Lead the fight.
Many of our allies gathered together in Paris yesterday in an admirable display of determination. Our President should have been there, because we must never hesitate to stand with our allies. We should never hesitate to speak the truth.
And this I think is where the problem lies, and a demonstration of how so very many of our national "leaders" and thought masters and supposed expert strategic minds of our nation have as their sole skill the ability to say stupid things loudly but happen to live amongst others for whom saying stupid things loudly is considered the very pinnacle of innovative thinking. We will use the Fox News citation of one Ralph Peters, "strategic analyst," to prove the point tersely. This was during
a full six-minute segment devoted to how the president's non-appearance in Paris on Sunday was a contemptible and horrific thing that proves all of the pseudo-psychiatric things Fox News has been saying about him.
The president's a coward! The president's a physical coward, he is a moral coward, he is an intellectual coward! [...] Yesterday President Obama chose the side of the terrorists!
The problem, you see, is that it does not matter even one little damn what substantive polices Obama or any other leader might undertake, because they will be judged explicitly and entirely on the "symbolic" horseshit that the intellectual short-straws make their stock-in-trade. The president not personally attending a single event is the "symbolic" thing that sends little Ralph Peters and the dullard Cruz into spasms, because the Peterses and the Cruzes exist entirely in the symbolic realm, the realm where you can say things like "we must stand strong" and have small-minded little shits clap for you like you have just solved the riddle of the sphinx. This is the realm where questions of morality or efficacy over drone strikes or secret CIA prisons simply do not occur, because all that is necessary (a la Peters) is to recognize that Islam is inherently illegitimate and everything else will fall into place, no muss, no fuss. This is the realm where constitutional concerns or the qualms of international allies or potential military complications or the refusal of supposed partners to cooperate are strategic irrelevancies are not merely unworthy of having their own op-eds written about them, but are clouds of chaff thrown by the weak-willed in order to clutter up the
proper debate over whether or not someone is sufficiently
standing strong or
leading the fight or doing the proper amount of
shunning or attending the right parades.
And they fully mean it. This is indeed the worst thing that their ideological opposite has ever done, at least this for the remainder of this particular day, and if Ted Cruz was in charge he would have done the purely symbolic thing more properly and done, as far as we know, very damn little else, short of standing strong. And if Obama had done the purely symbolic thing, there would be columns written about him doing the purely symbolic thing when he did not do an equivalent symbolic thing for such-and-such on the occasion of such-and-such, or an explanation of why the symbolic thing is the wrong symbolic thing because it merely showed the president sympathized with the victims of a terrorist attack, it did not properly convey his standing strongedness because he did not previously do three other symbolic things that would have made terrorism curl up in a ball and ashamedly roll away before any of this could have ever happened.
All of it is as predictable as the tides because of the vast and well-populated realm of people who demand our political attention and who all fancy themselves experts in the symbolic even though they are plainly ignorant (at best) in the specific. You cannot be wrong when quarreling over the symbolism of things, or at least it is damn difficult to prove, and for a few thousand people whose specific actions in government or in policy-crafting or in opinion-having have not, in fact, "solved" terrorism—I am thinking here of people who made incompetent, stupid pronouncements on the eve of wars or who have scribbled up more than a few speeches themselves in which they proclaimed they were leading the fight or standing strong only to have terrorism still continue around the world in spite of their bold remarks—demanding that the symbolism of things be precisely what they demand them to be is their only proclaimed expertise.
God help us if we quizzed them on any of the rest of it, after all. If there is a substance there beyond stand strong or President Obama is on the side of the terrorists, you will have to go considerably afield from either Fox News or our would-be presidential candidates to get it.