AUSTIN, Texas -- When in the course of the usual reasoned, civil
debate on public affairs -- conducted always with courtesy and good cheer --
one finds one's self snarling, "Oh, shut up!" one has, I fear, been reading
too much George Will.
Being instructed what to think by the peerlessly pompous Mr.
Will, perched upon his superiority and apparently in a permanent state of
dudgeon over everybody else's stupidity, is reminiscent of being bullied by
a snotty teacher. One is tempted to respond with the classic, frozen-faced
Texas inquiry, "No bull?"
Will is often worth reading if only so you can figure out why
you disagree with him. Lately, he has been leading an entire phalanx of
right-wing commentators in full cry over President Bush's loss of "moral
clarity" in the Middle East. The sheer implausibility of finding moral
clarity in the Middle East does not deter them. Better minds than Bush's are
defeated by that challenge, but the moral-certainty crowd admits no shades
of gray.
Since Bush himself is fond of moral certainty -- it's good-doers
versus evildoers in BushWorld -- he must be uncomfortable with what Will
magisterially dismisses in a recent Newsweek essay as the "intellectual
confusion and moral miasma ... that now permeate U.S. policy and media
coverage concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."
Personally, I think Ariel Sharon is a continuing, shattering
disaster for Israel. If it is not clear to all by now that his policies --
leaving aside their morality -- don't work worth a damn, how much more
evidence is needed?
Ah, but the Middle East is so notoriously slippery -- except to
those with the moral clarity of Will -- so let's leave it and skip to a
place where everything is crystal clear. Latin America ... a simple place.
Regard the 18-hour coup that took place last weekend in
Venezuela. The elected president, Hugo Chavez, was overthrown by a military
coup, and a new president representing the plutocrats of the nation promptly
issued a decree ordering the closure of the country's Congress, the
suspension of its Supreme Court and the dismissal of all locally elected
government officials.
Bad nooz: Every other country in the hemisphere, as per our
treaties, promptly denounced the undemocratic takeover. But the United
States kind of lost its grip on moral clarity on account of we don't like
Chavez, who likes Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein, for pity's sake. And who
is he to like people we don't like? The elected president of an independent
country or something? And besides, he was about to mess with the national
oil company, which happens to be our biggest foreign supplier.
Since the coup failed, the Bushies have been disowning it as
fast as they can, even though "senior members of the Bush administration met
several times in recent months with leaders of the coalition that ousted ...
Chavez, and agreed with them that he should be removed from office,"
according to The New York Times. And it turns out that our own assistant
secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs, Otto Reich, was on the
phone with the head plutocrat during the coup, giving him advice.
Reich is an interesting study in moral clarity himself. He was a
recess appointee by President Bush for the simple reason that he could not
get confirmed by the Senate. Reich, a former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela,
is an anti-Castro zealot. While heading a State Department office in the
1980s, Reich ran covert propaganda effort against he Sandinistas. Before his
latest government appointment, Reich was a lobbyist and right-wing
television commentator.
He is also believed to have helped get Orlando Bosch, a known
terrorist, asylum in the United States. Bosch, himself a study in moral
clarity, now resides peacefully in Miami after being convicted of terrorism
in both the United States and Venezuela. Among his other acts was blowing up
a civilian Cuban airliner with 73 people on it. Bosch was pardoned by Big
George Bush -- I suppose indicating some lack of moral clarity there, too.
Columnist Paul Krugman found irony in Condoleezza Rice's
post-coup advice to the restored President Chavez to "respect constitutional
processes." That would be the same constitution Chavez's opponents had tried
to throw out, of course. But my favorite quote of the Venezuelan coup is in
this passage from The New York Times: "Asked whether the administration now
recognizes Mr. Chavez as Venezuela's legitimate president, one
administration official replied, 'He was democratically elected,' then
added, "Legitimacy is something that is conferred not just by a majority of
the voters, however."
How true. Sometimes a majority of the voters lose out to a
five-to-four vote on the Supreme Court.
Are we all morally clear now?
To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other
Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web
page at
www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2002 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
