Once again, we think of the tragedy of war. Yesterday, NPR counted up the horrible death toll of WWII. The chill Tyouth describes we all feel. But Belmont Club charts deaths in Iraq; Gateway Pundit observes:
For the last three months of 2007, a Venezuelan was twice as likely to lose his life to violence as an Iraqi.
A pattern we’ve long seen (demagogic man of the people rises and, sure of his own virtues, finds himself driven to kill and torture his foes). In the twentieth century, in only one year did democide not claim more lives than war.
Those wearing Bushitler masks might contemplate that what they fear most is associated with a pattern we’ve seen over and over. Cheap populism not big business scares me. And it is voices like Chavez’s – like so many before – that unleash archetypal greed and violence. Edwards is no Chavez; he isn’t even a Huey Long. He’s simply a rather irritating trial lawyer who is never interested in the general but always the particular, never the reasoning but always the sentiment, less in good science than tender pathos. I wish he appealed to the minds of his listeners a lot more and their guts less, indeed, to their virtues rather than their vices. His rhetoric makes me uneasy but doesn’t, not really, scare me. Unlike those afraid of Bush, I am confident the system works. It can withstand Edwards – it can, actually, withstand a good deal. I just hope it doesn’t have to.
Right you are…and that is why the GOP is so popular these days with the American public.
I suppose I need to take a longer view. Edwards is just beginning to scare me, as I begin to consider that he has an actual shot, should Hillary’s Inevitability Express run off the rails rather than over everyone. Edwards is a deeply shallow man who is only play-acting the demagogue because it’s working for him right now; should it stop, he won’t double down but reverse course and claim he was always consistent. I don’t believe for a minute that he believes this stuff himself.
He doesn’t portend violence but stagnation, invective, and bitterness, and a culture of dishonesty that could make the Clintons seems transparent. He may think he’s smart enough to ride the envy tiger to power, like he rode junk science to great wealth (for a milltown boy), but we’ll all pay when it turns on him.
The system can withstand him, but I really hope it doesn’t have to.
John Edwards is like a secular Post-Presidential Carter
I just wish I could hear one of the Democratic candidates make a speech without repeated promises to “fight” for this or that. Why isn’t Mike Tyson running?