The Maclean’s Cover and General “Betray Us”

I've kept quiet about MoveOn.org's silly New York Times ad about "General Betray Us" because, frankly, I think it's small stuff compared to the more urgent matter at hand: that most Americans don't know what the fuck the "surge" is, how it's being conducted, or what the true consequences of it have been thus far. (As ever, the president has only himself to blame for failing to articulate his own war policy, and for using an impressive soldier and military strategist in the worst possible capacity, as a public relations man.)

Anyway, here's the latest tenderloin the witless right has tossed to the ravening left*. You can expect the usual cycle of nonsense to commence, from the talking heads and the post-structuralists alike, to how this image represents North American society in chaos, the death of sanity and reason, blah, blah, blah. Salman Rushdie nailed it on Bill Maher this week: Talk about Iraq has been supplanted by talk about talk about Iraq.

I have to say, as someone who's trudged through a few pages of Tariq Ali's Clash of Fundamentalisms, I think this is lightweight Photoshop work. Bush as Osama, Osama as Bush — now that must have taken dozens of man-hours at New Left Review to pull off.

Evidently, the cover and title are the most provocative things in this issue of Maclean's. And are you surprised?

We can be grateful for one small accomplishment here: At least most people now know just how really, really, really bad of a guy Saddam Hussein was if he's become evil's gold standard of moral equivalence. Hitler's ghost must be going green with envy.

Indeed, on that same episode of Bill Maher, Janeane Garofalo, who always looks like she's being broken up with, said that Saddam was a war criminal, Bush is a war criminal — hey, war criminals happen, man. Janeane should be more careful. Glib tongues wag and before you know it, a whole cottage industry of Sieg Hail-ing Dubya t-shirts teeters on the brink of insolvency.

* In my original post, I had it the other way about: witless left… ravening right. Terry Glavin, my Canadian comrade, was kind enough to point out that, like our own American Conservative, Maclean's is one of those reactionary mags whose politics these days is indistinguishable from that of the far left. At all events, there's enough witlessness and ravening to spare on both sides of the spectrum. You should see Thanksgiving at the Weiss household.