The Devil and the Messiah

Nick Cohen, a man of the Left (whose book “What’s Left?  How Liberals Lost Their Way” is one of the most incisive critiques of the last few years), writing in The Guardian yesterday:

It doesn’t know it, but the liberal-left in Europe and North America has been lucky to have Bush.

By building him up into a great Satan, the oil man who invades countries to seize their reserves and the Christian who orders bloody crusades, they have hidden the totalitarian threats of our age from themselves and anyone who listens to them.

Bush allowed them to explain away radical Islam as an understandable, even legitimate, response to the hypocrisies and iniquities of American policy.  Even those in the European elites who do not buy the full ‘America has it coming’ package believe that Bush is a cowboy who doesn’t understand that the postmodern way to end conflict is to compromise rather than fight.

In January, Bush will be history, leaving liberals all alone in a frightening world.  Little else will change.  Radical Islam will still authorize murder without limit, Iran will still want the bomb and the autocracies of China and Russia will still be growing in wealth and confidence. 

All those who argued that the ‘root cause’ of the Bush administration lay behind the terror will find that the terror still flourishes when the root cause has retired.

The leading candidate to replace Bush is a messiah with virtually no national experience or legislative accomplishments, a candidate of words whose words constantly shift on Social Security, NAFTA, public campaign financing, FISA, hand-gun bans, abortion restrictions, negotiations without conditions, faith-based initiatives, wearing a flag pin, Reverend Wright, the Iraq surge, an undivided Jerusalem (on which he has had four positions in two months), etc. The complete list (to date) is here.

The first chapter of the Book of Obama has already been written (although the texts have no fixed meaning).  His Sermon to the Germans in Berlin was so amorphous you could not distinguish it from a popular song.  James Lileks captured the vacuousness of the speech (which began with a reference to his skin color and did not mention the names of the two presidents whose prior speeches there actually changed history):

He also called for an end to nuclear weapons. . . . We will never poke the Genie back in the bottle, and Obama knows this. But the words loft well on the breath of the assembled.

The problem, however, is that he didn’t just set forth ideas humanity would be wise to make manifest — he made them moral imperatives that must be done now, because the THIS IS THE MOMENT, and NOW IS THE MOMENT THAT THIS IS, and the moment to come in a few moments is also the moment, but it’s a few moments past the previous moment, which was also now. THIS IS THE MOMENT to do something about Darfur. Fine. What? THIS IS THE MOMENT to do something about Burmese dissidents. Fine. What? . . .

The audacity of hope, change we can believe in (which turns out to be us, for whom we have been waiting), the fierce urgency of now — this is the moment.  All of this is believed with religious conviction by people who think George W. Bush is the devil.