[Marxism] John Hess on the "debate"

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Counterpunch, September 22, 2004

Faking a Difference
A Serious Debate?
By JOHN L. HESS

The Times says hurrah!--we've now had "the start of the kind of serious
and useful debate the American people deserve."

Well, goody, but how did the two opponents differ?

We've been here before, in another war that everybody now admits to have
been--to put it kindly--a mistake. In 1968 the contender, Richard Nixon,
implied that he had a plan to get out. Four years later, he said he WAS
getting out, by degrees. Today, neither guy has any plan but to stay the
course.

Dubya Bush should be in bad trouble, but he's so cocky that he went to
the United Nations -- that house so hated by the far right--to tell the
whole world off. Kerry's backers are in a panic--for good reason. Paul
Krugman prays that he won't let himself be trapped into neo-con
fantasies -- which of course he has done when he talks of enlisting
foreign and Iraqi support. He says that winding down our occupation and
letting others work it is probably the best we can hope for. Nixon call
that Vietnamization. He didn't mean it, and it didn't work.

David Brooks takes on the neocon side. Typically, he begins by praising
Kerry for finally taking a stand. He asks a keen question about drawing
down our forces -- what do you say to the last man who dies before you
finish pulling out. His column is typical of Brooks -- pretending to
look at it sympathetically from our side, while slipping in a dart now
and then. Only a year ago, Brooks was caught faking a political portrait
of a redneck county in Pennsylvania. That didn't keep him from getting a
fat job at the Times. Poor Dan Rather bit on a forged memo that was
essentially true, and he's being made the villain of the day.

When does the serious debate begin?

John L. Hess is a former writer for the New York Times, a career he
chronicles in his excellent new book My Times: a Memoir of Dissent. Hess
is now a political commentator for WBAI. Hess's blog can be read at:
johnlhess.blogspot.com


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