The New York Post: Prozac for the Left

If, in this dispiriting age of multiple wars and a collapsing economy, you're not reading the New York Post's editorial page as a cost-free alternative to pricey, designer antidepressants (which you probably have no health insurance to pay for anyway), well, you have only yourself to blame. 

But I do highly recommend -- and, as a doctor (of philosophy), kind of legally prescribe -- its immediate intake, once daily, by eye, for all that may be darkly weighing on your mind.

Because the Post, in a word, is a hoot. Yes, it will turn that frown of yours upside down, in a flash. One would think the paper's Australian-billionaire owner would at least pop for some professional writing to compensate for and gussy up its shallowest of thinking. But no. On the other hand, that's part of the enjoyment.  

Take, for instance, yesterday's editorial, "Barack's Iraq Trip." Ugh. Obama bad; McCain good. Ugh. Obama dumb; McCain smart. Ugh. Ditto, respectively, Democrats and Republicans. You think I'm kidding? Read it for yourself.

You see, according to the Post's editorial board, Barack Obama's Iraq "would look far different had Washington adopted the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee's strategic imperatives." Wow, what a mouthful, and pretty impressive, too, especially that "strategic imperatives" part.

Translation: Obama opposed George Bush's U.S. troop escalation because, in line with the preponderance of expert opinion, he couldn't see how pouring more American lives and additional billions of dollars into someone else's bloody civil war was going to help, in the long run, either them or us.

In the long run. That was the key, the operational bugbear from the get-go. Iraq was, and is, consuming virtually all of our military resources -- and "success" in Iraq could not then, nor can it now, be defined.

Except by the Right in general and the Post and John McCain in particular: "The troop surge so vehemently opposed by Obama has clearly succeeded - as GOP candidate John McCain declared [Friday]. 'We have succeeded in Iraq - not "we are succeeding" - we have succeeded in Iraq,' said McCain. 'The strategy has worked, and we now have the Iraqi government and military in charge of the major cities in Iraq. Al Qaeda is on [its] heels and on the run.'"

The Post further observed that "Democrats, with Obama to the fore, predicted a military disaster" as a result of the surge. Odd, because as I recall recent history, most opponents of the surge were predicting it would indeed succeed in tamping down violence -- that the "bad guys" would lay low -- but only as long as additional U.S. forces were manning the streets.

Nevertheless McCain, in the Post's hyperbolic opinion, "went way out on a limb and endorsed [the surge] - indeed, he'd long been pushing for precisely such a strategy." Good grief, one would think we're talking the tactical brilliance of MacArthur's Inchon landing here; but, I'll concede, that's beside the point for the time being.  

Smack on the point is the Post's grand summary: "McCain, a combat veteran who's made repeated trips to the front, knew otherwise" -- which is to say, the combat veteran who predicted in 2003 that "the end is very much in sight" knew better than the surge's naysayers and is now able to declare, "We have succeeded in Iraq. Not, 'we are succeeding.' We have succeeded."

Which is the freshest of right-wing mantras, as bellowed yesterday by the New York Post -- yet bellowed with a peculiar amendment: "This hard-won success is too fragile to be put at risk by a too-hasty retreat."

Whoa! Say what? Or, say that again? Or, as the Post did, let McCain say it: If we were to withdraw, "There would be chaos. There would be an increase in sectarian violence. There would be widening Iranian influence - and we would be facing disaster."

I searched for even a feeble attempt at a logical reconciliation of those irreconcilables -- that we "have succeeded" but are "facing disaster," and that we're desperately needed, although "the Iraqi government and military [are] in charge." My search was in vain. 

But that's what makes reading the New York Post and its representative right-wing views so amusing, if "amusing" can ever properly be applied to a war. It's almost as if the paper is daring its regular readers to uncharacteristically use their brain -- it's a bit like a game of 'Clue'; OK, here's our editorial, now find the logical fallacies, it's not really that hard.

But the editorial's coda was perhaps my favorite part. "So it's a good thing," intoned the Post condescendingly, "that Sen. Obama is headed for Iraq and Afghanistan. He'll probably learn something important about how the war is being conducted ... Something John McCain ... has understood all along."

And what would that be? Why, that it's being conducted mostly through bullshit, of course, which the New York Post just so splendidly demonstrated.