Becoming a conservative isn't as easy as it looks!

A review of Richard Bernstein's Duped America.  

Gentle reader:

I am that ignoble creature, a flaming pinko, nothing but a wretched liberal socialist dweeb, but I have seen the light! I am now repentant for my Bolshy ways, and consequently I seek betterment from conservative sources. Thus, with firm tread I go to the CONSERVATISM GROUP in amazon.com. Perhaps here I will learn which are my grievous errors.

And I'm in luck!

Because a lady has just posted an all points bulletin asking which the best books are to persuade a liberal friend of hers that she has been hornswoggled and that the True Path is that of Conservatism!

And several people have suggested a number of books with promising titles.

Mah-velous! What a stroke of luck! Pretty soon I'll find out how all those snarling Lefties were misleading me all along.

I eventually spot a book that looks promising, called Duped America, by Richard Bernstein. I flip to a chapter about the Iraq war.

Ah, yes the WMDs. In letters of fire Bernstein admonishes us: “He lies who denies that chemical weapons were found in Iraq.” p 36 As a matter of fact a total of 53 “chemical weapons” was found. (He neglects to provide a description of these fiendish devices. Perhaps he does not want to alarm us with the prowess of Iraq’s military research!). On the other hand perhaps they were Molotov cocktails. And the author hurriedly adds “Perhaps there were thousands more that went uncounted, because the 53 were from only a small sample of the 10,000s of weapons caches in Iraq.”

Yeah, that makes sense, the US invaded Iraq under the motto “WMDs”, so after their easy victory, the Americans set about searching for the WMDs. But according to  Mr Bernstein, who is obviously very well informed, apparently they didn't search very hard.

These conservative facts are somewhat disconcerting. They appear to be part of a conservative theme park, a conservative  Wonderland perhaps.

At this point I ask the gentle reader: What is the likelihood -- after all the Bush régime’s ballyhoo about WMDs in Iraq – that the US failed to make a proper search for WMDs?

The answer is NONE! If all they found were 53 and they don't even tell us what kind of weapons they were, this man is obviously lying through his elbows.

Consequently we can calmly assume that for all practical purposes, no WMDs were found in Iraq. (Making a sound spot to make the Bush régime look good is NOT a practical purpose.)

Then it seem that Generalissimo Bush had the right idea after all!  According to Mr Bernstein, thanks to the Surge and our heroic fighting people, we won over the Sunnis and thus triumphed over Al Qaida and brought peace. 

I hate to be a spoilsport, but that narrative does not match what I have read by a noted academic Middle East specialist writing in a scholarly journal. I can look it up some other time. What really happened was that first, in 2003, Bush tried to cut the Sunni community [who had been the top dogs during the Saddam régime] out from power altogether. So he disbanded the army, the bureaucracy, etc. to undermine Sunni power. But the Sunnis fought back.

So Generalissimo Bush hit on a bold stratagem: Just surrender to the Sunni demands! And it worked like a charm!  Caving in to the demands of Saddam Hussein's lackeys was a brilliant tactical move on the part of Bush régime, prevented much bloodshed and preserved the US from the indignity of getting its butt kicked good and proper. The surge was not decisive.

Page 41: ”Democrats lied when they denied all links between AlQaida and Iraq.“

Richard Clark (a Democrat, by the way), in In Search of Enemies, states clearly with his rocket strike against the Shifa plant in Khartoum, President Clinton foiled military collaboration between al Qaida and Iraq in the manufacture of chemical weapons.

However that very same Dick Clark explains that that prior incident did not make it likely that cooperation had continued thereafter. 

In the opinion of US intelligence experts (i.e., Dick Clark) military collaboration had taken place in 1998. And furthermore in his opinion and everyone else’s, in the year 2001  that prior episode was completely irrelevant! So it was a good thing we didn't get an earful of the Al-Shifa escapade. It would have been a complete waste of time. 

I've only read a few pages of this book, and it's full of lies!  Demonstrable lies.

It seems my plan for salvation from the dread limbo of socio-progre-liberalism -- that is my bane – will be  more arduous than I thought. Maybe if I join the Aryan Nations …