The Beautiful Struggle

Via our blogfriend the Rude Pundit, we see that the Vice President addressed the military order of the Purple Heart yesterday.

We are definitely Democrats at the Blasphemy Blog, but we try to refrain from ad hominem personal criticism, even of public figures. We make an exception, however, for the Vice President, because we think he is a human being completely devoid of a moral core.

In his speech, the Vice President compared the current fiasco in Iraq to the American Revolutionary War, and suggested that, just as then, the odds are long against our success, but, then as now, we need to tough it out.

This is a ridiculous argument. After Mussolini invaded Greece, and it wasn’t going so well, he could also have said, Well, you know, when the United States was fighting its war for independence from Great Britain, things were hard then, too, and things are also hard for us, but they stuck it out, so we should, too.

Not all wars are created equal, you see. (They’re all awful, but some are less awful than others.) We are sure that the Vice President knows this, but he pretends not to, because the lie is in his political interest.

He also reminded the crowd that, after 9/11, the President’s speechwriters warned us all that the war against terrorism would be a long and difficult campaign. The Vice President has never stopped saying that the war in Iraq was a way of protecting our country from more 9/11-type terrorism. He doesn’t actually believe this, either, but once again the lie is in his political interest.

Politicians tell many lies for political reasons. Most of these we can forgive, because politics is a difficult business, and when things get difficult human beings tend to start lying. We understand that.

However, we at the Blasphemy Blog hate lies about why we need to keep fighting wars. Dishonest justification of wars results in unnecessary suffering and death, and is inexcusable.

The depth of our disdain for the Vice President’s words descends still lower, however, because we know our cultural fascism at the Blasphemy Blog. By telling us, with his serious grown-up face, over and over again, that we need to buckle down for this annihilating struggle against an abstract concept, the Vice President is just priming the pump for continual war. By comparing an invasion to a revolutionary struggle, he's married himself to the idea that Yeats' Terrible Beauty can be born and reborn under any circumstances, never mind that in 1776 we were the underdogs and today we are the most powerful nation on earth.

Does he really love war so much? We think he really, truly does. We think that the Vice President of the United States believes the violence and carnage will purify us as a nation, as a people, as a world. He wants us to be killed.

This is not to say that he wants any individual person to die; he just thinks that a little war-fighting will straighten us all out. He believes that 9/11 was our finest hour, not because we “came together as a nation” or any of that touchy-feely horse manure, but because we resolved as a nation there to kill and be killed as much as was necessary.

And, for the Vice President, the necessary amount of killing and being killed is a very large amount.

We don’t think this has anything to do with the well-documented and commented-upon fact that the Vice President has never served in the military. We believe that he’d be the same way if he were a gunnery sergeant in Tikrit or a Vietnam Veteran Centcom general. We think that he loves war and wants lots more of it.

We can’t forgive him for that.