GARNER AGAIN

Name of Blog (via Sisyphus Shrugged) claims that Garner's quote (Bush could have won in Vietnam) shows that Garner is either an "absolute idiot or a shameless shameless sycophant," and then makes a Christian mythology reference that I only thought about after I was safe in bed and 2 miles away from a computer last night--actually, my thought was "Bush walks on water, too" plus the warning from Egon Bahr on Sloterdijk and Safranski's TV show that "American trees don't reach heaven [den Himmel], either".

But Garner is also producing a line that has at least three sources: 1) the arguments made about Vietnam itself by many hawks and military types, during the conflict itself, 2) the arguments made by contemporary Republicans like Lott in praise of GWB's resoluteness, or faith, or something, and 3) the institutional self-confidence of a career bureaucrat. 3) is probably the most interesting. In and of itself, it's not a bad thing to have bureaucrats who believe in the ultimate rightness of what they're doing. Otherwise administration would be wholly inefficient and pointless. The problem is that the mistakes in Vietnam were probably produced, in part, by that sense of rightness. What's needed is a political check on the internal self-evidence of the rightness of bureaucratic power. And we are certainly entitled to wonder whether or not Garner's stance here will indicate a blindness that could be embarrassing, dangerous, and counterproductive to what democratic or humanitarian supporters of Bush have hoped would emerge from this conflict.