[Marxism] The Great Delusion: Kerrycrats and the War

[Mike Friedman <mikedf@xxxxxxxx>]

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn10282004.html

Counterpunch

October 28, 2004 

The Great Delusion

Kerrycrats and the War

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

I asked one usually radical friend of mine, now a Kerrycrat, how she could
support a fellow who pledges a ³better², wider war in Iraq and then a march
on Teheran. ³Oh² she said airily, ³you can¹t believe anything a candidate
will say.²

>From where we sit, here at mission control, CounterPunch hq, (currently a
facility known as the Claremont Inn off Interstate 10 east of LA, where
Jeffrey St Clair is watching three inches of rain sluicing down on the San
Gabriel mountains) voting for John Kerry now is like voting for LBJ in 1964
with full precognition of what he was going to do in Vietnam for the next
four years. By all means vote for the guy if you think your ballot will
really count in keeping Ralph Nader out of the White House, but don¹t do so
with the notion that all along John Kerry has been holding a secret
withdrawal plan close to his chest and that his first three months in office
will see the US Marines haul down the colors from the US embassy in Baghdad,
scoop Ambassador Negroponte off the roof and head for home.

That¹s not what Democrats do when they get into office. When they settle
down in the White House and put up the portraits of Teddy Roosevelt and
Harry Truman in the Oval Office, they settle down to fight the usual good
fight of all Democratic presidents, which is battling the slur that they are
wimps, and less than real men.

Like Jimmy Carter back in the 1970s, President Kerry will be well aware that
what shoe-horned him into the White House was an entirely negative public
emotion, hostility to George Bush. Just as Kerry consistently disdained his
eager and all-forgiving left supporters before November 2, he¹ll redouble
his public and private displays of rejection thereafter, contemptuously
wiping Michael Moore¹s moist kisses from all his cheeks. The constituencies
President Kerry will be eager to placate and to satisfy will be exactly the
ones he has courted the whole of this election year: the Neocons in
Washington, and the bankers in Wall St.

You doubt this, Kerrycrats? Take a look at what realistic right-wingers are
saying. Here for example is Edward Luttwak, no fool. Last weekend Luttwak,
currently ensconced at Washington¹s Center for Strategic and International
Studies, had an article in Britain¹s conservative Sunday Telegraph, whose
editors gave his piece the headline, ³John Kerry will make his adoring
anti-war groupies look like fools².

[continues...]



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