I can't believe Duncan Hunter really just said we shouldn't question General Petraeus' credibility because, in fact, he stands in the same tradition as General MacArthur.
« A Surge of Wackiness | Main | A Surge of Random Links »
The New MacArthur?
10 Sep 2007 01:03 pm
Comments (17)
Awesome. So if Bush really wants to live up to the legacy of Harry S Truman he should fire Petraeus, right?
I'm telling you, if the pygmies in the GOP presidential race divide the field and Giuliani leads, but does not corral a decisive lead (and a third party bolt is in the offing) - watch for a draft for Petraeus as the nominee after the primaries (nothing legally prevents it - the delegates choose the nominee) - the GOP is dying for a knight in shining armor to appear.
Oh, and Huckabee would be his running mate.
"I can't believe Duncan Hunter really just said we shouldn't question General Petraeus' credibility because, in fact, he stands in the same tradition as General MacArthur."
You can't?
I'm just going to assume your question was a rhetorical device.
I had the same reaction. To a great many people, MacArthur was a byword for self-promotion and mendacity. I strongly recommend William Manchester's biography of MacArthur. Manchester's memoir of serving in MacArthur's war is also a great book.
The other two named in the passage were Eisenhower and Schwartzkopf. I'll buy Eisenhower as a symbol of credibility and duty, but could someone remind me why Schwartzkopf is supposed to be so great?
Maybe Hunter - and his audience - have seen some of the biopics about one of America's great insufferable Mama's Boys. There are a few (pics), and one of them stars Tom Selleck. Lots of books too, of course - well thumbed-through and throughly fetished.
The GOP is a Play (a 'teleplay' really). It has a script, and this line had to go to somebody. Duncan got it.
It was inevitable that someone bring up MacArthur. When Truman did fire Mac, it was a very big political deal - the aforementioned fans still read Mac's speech before congress - and the whole thing cost Truman bigtime. In fact, it must have contributed substantially to Truman's downward political trend in the second term. In another boring overdose of irony, Bush likes to compare himself to Truman.
Rudy wants to be MacArthur, BTW. Crazy crazy crazy.
Maybe the new Eisenhower some years down the road.
Despite the fact that he has a Ph.d from Princeton
in counterinsurgency (Buetler, looks askance at it; then again he thinks Greenland's ice melt can flow into tectonic faults enough to cause
earthquakes) He doesn't seem arrogant o or preposessive as MacArthur was. One recalls how 50s intellectuals derided Ike so readily; a habit
they were weaned off by Robert Greenstein's research
General McArthur, David Petraeus and Martin Feldstein.
You are not fit to lick their boots.
The only thing that Hunter knows about McArthur is 'I shall return'. In other words, the supposed triumph of will over adversity. No need for silly facts.
If he really is going on Hume as part of an exclusive, he really should be fired. The military is not to be partisan.
Hunter's comment gives new meaning to the phrase "Old soldiers never die".
The general he most reminds me of is Colin Powell. Both trot out in front of the world and lie for Bush.
"Awesome. So if Bush really wants to live up to the legacy of Harry S Truman he should fire Petraeus, right?"
Sure: If Petraeus insists on attacking China, like MacArthur did, then Bush should fire him.
The whole Bush-Petraeus relationship reaches a new level of military-civilian incestuousness; it really is a signifier that we've crossed the Rubicon into military Empire.
And yes, William Manchester's _Goodbye Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War_ is splendid, terrifying, fantastic, and deeply wounded. If only the war-lovers would read it....
No, we're no where near that; the Jugurthan War where Marius and Sulla began their political careers is a closer fit. So that's at least two civil wars, & two triumvirates away. It's interesting that you reference the Pacific War; the last time we were at war with a theocratic totalitarian philosophy. Iraq in this view is
the island campaign against the mainland which
is Saudi Arabia. Afghanistan is like the New
Guinea campaign by comparison. The posters here
would be bringing up the 1920s anti-Japanese
exclusion laws as motivation rather than the Shinto militants plans.
"Dreyfous etait coupable!"
Duncan Hunter is like that Japanese soldier they pulled out of the Jungle on Guam in the 1970's, still fighting for his emperor. He is still fighting the John Birch Society era crusade to vindicate General Macarthur against the false accusations of that known communist Truman.
Near the end of "Z", when the Greek general who engineered the assassination of the Yves Montand character has, amazingly, actually been indicted by the prosecutor whom everyone expected to whitewash the case, and is being led away, a reporter confronts him in the hallway. The general maintains that it's all a put up job, that he's been framed. The reporter says, "Like Dreyfuss?". The general, completely forgetting the debacle of his own situation in his all-consuming passion for this turn of the century case that everyone not driven insane by reactionary politics has long since ceased to care about, shouts, genuinely losing himself in anger for the first time in a film in which he has people cold-bloodedly killed, "Dreyfus was guilty!"
Duncan Hunter deserves special recognition at the very least for reminding us of a great moment in a wonderful film. For anything to do with reality, not so much. For that aspect of his lifetime achievement he deserves maybe an indictment. And please, as he does his perp walk, somebody ask him if he's being framed or persecuted for his political beliefs, and please, someone else be there with a video camera to record the results. The man deserves to be remembered for what he's best at.
Well that was probably a projection by the French minded production staff. The country that gave us Boulanger, Petain, De Gaulle and quite nearly Salan; doesn't have to lecture another about men on horseback. The death of Lambrakis was a much less clear thing than Costas Gavras suggested; as commentators like Bayard Stockton pointed out
(what a shock, as he also whitewashed the murder of Dan Mitrione by the Tupamaros) What this has to do with Petraeus;
It takes this kind of diversion to ignore Osama bin Laden's statements about how Beirut and Somalia had encouraged his determination to extend
his attacks to the mainland. The idea was clearly
to crush our will; going back to notes of Ali Mohammed who Fitzgerald didn't get to indict until after the African Embassy attacks; that he saw the 1st attack as part of "Project Jerusalem"
to drive us away from Israel and the Middle East;
an idea they cribbed from Thomas Harris's Black
Sunday.
Comments closed September 24, 2007.
| 
Heads in the Sand
So perhaps the "Petraeus Coup" title of a few days ago was prescient rather than innapropriate, Monsieur Yglesias.
Posted by Ben Cronin | September 10, 2007 1:12 PM