Defining Degeneracy Downward

Commentary by Greg Lewis / TheRant.US
January 5, 2005

Let me see if I've got this straight: Radical Iraqi Sunni Muslim terrorists spearhead an organized "insurgency" against the democratization of their country. In doing so, they commit atrocities — from car- and suicide-bombings that have killed many hundreds, if not thousands, of their fellow citizens as well as civilian foreign nationals and U.S. and coalition forces working to help the majority of Iraqis achieve their goal of self-government, to beheadings of innocent civilians (whose only crime seems to have been that they had the ultimate wrong-place-wrong-time misfortune to be identified by their radical Islamist captors as infidels) telecast around the world — atrocities that steel the resolve of freedom-loving people on this planet even though, at the same time, they fill those same freedom-loving people with revulsion.

Unless I misunderstand the situation, these same Sunni Muslims then turn around and declare that they will not participate in the scheduled Iraqi elections because their security against violence cannot be guaranteed!

Did I miss something? Since when did carrying out acts of war and then declaring that you won't participate in peace negotiations until the acts of war stop become a legitimate, logically defensible position? (OK, I recognize that Yasser Arafat countenanced similar tactics throughout the Palestinian intifada against Israel of the past five years, but that does not diminish the fact that such tactics will, in the words of comedian Lewis Black, "make you want to stick a pencil in your ear" if you try to make sense of them.)

Let me overlay that on another event that I recently tried to process. Binaca Jagger (I know, her name is "Bianca," but I beg your indulgence on this one; I call her "Binaca" to try to communicate what a breath of fresh air this aging leftist harridan, this degenerate manqué, whose sole claim to celebrity status is, as far as I can determine, that she was briefly married to ur-degenerate Rolling Stone Mick Jagger, somehow has been selected to represent the Left's position vis-a-vis American charitable intransigence)…

Binaca Jagger recently showed up for at least the forty-first time too many on national TV to whine that the United States government's initial commitment of US$35 million in aid to the victims of the devastation wrought by the recent Pacific Rim/Indian Ocean tidal wave was not only downright ungenerous, it should serve to show the world what a bunch of stingy and unregenerate corporate capitalist pigs now run the American government, pigs who in the process deny the deserving citizens of the world the largesse that, somehow, only America seems to be able to provide.

In this sentiment she echoed United Nations Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs (I mean, how awesome is that title, dude?!) Jan Egeland's earlier, though later retracted, criticism. Can you even imagine the ways Egeland and his UN cronies are going to find to divert dollars that anyone is stupid enough to entrust to the UN for the purpose of providing humanitarian aid to any suffering people on this planet? Can you say, "Oil for food?"

Never mind that America (including the American government and the American people, acting as private citizens through private agencies) is, by about an order of magnitude over whoever happens to be in second place this week, the most generous nation on this earth. And never mind that Binaca's finger-in-the-eye whine was based on the leftist principle that only through o'erweaning governmental control can we truly realize the just and legitimate distribution of wealth. "Whines to aging lefties come" (with apologies to Joni Mitchell, whose composition "Songs to Aging Children Come" might at one time have contained something like a grain of truth).

Last I heard, plans for late-January elections in Iraq were still moving forward, despite the mind-boggling obstacles represented by Sunni intransigency. Cooler heads in that country continue to try to involve moderate Iraqi Sunni Muslims (by far the majority) in the electoral process. (This process is, by the way, undermined, notwithstanding Sunni resistance, in no small degree by the fact that when a Shia government is elected and assumes power in Iraq, we will have abetted the establishment of an administration that is arguably tractable where the influence of avowed enemy of democracy Iran's Shia regime is concerned.)

Indeed, no matter which way we turn, no matter what courses of action we pursue, the United States, as represented by the Bush administration, is not only in the crosshairs of the political gunsights of every morally and intellectually corrupt leftist boho who wants to take a potshot, we're fair game for terrorists who seem, along with lefties of every stripe, to be working the liberal American media for all they're worth to mainstream their causes.

As if it's not enough that "The Donald" (Donald Trump for those who have been comatose until recently) and erstwhile rapper "Snoop Dogg" are currently being mainstreamed to American consumers via commercials and "reality" TV programming. Raise your hand, anyone of you responsible parents who would let your teenage daughter spend as long as 30 seconds alone with either of these degenerate pukes.

Which is to say that the mainstreaming of degenerate causes and personalities is not an isolated phenomenon but arguably represents a trend. Despite the fact that in the recent election a majority of the American people (the first such electoral majority since 1988, by the way) made it abundantly clear to anyone who could hear what they were saying that they were tired of politicos who attempted to subvert the values — including, overwhelmingly, democracy and decency — which they recognized as indispensable to the perpetuation and spread to others throughout the world of our wonderfully culturally inclusive and spiritually expansive way of life . . . despite this those same liberal politicians and news-shills and agenda-flaks have continued to snipe at every positive manifestation that the impulse to democratize Iraq and to further America's continued leadership in providing relief to people around the world in dire need of humanitarian aid represent.

On bad days it's all I can do not to wish that the unimaginably wonderful force for good in the world that our nation has become would, say for a few days, somehow disappear and leave all those who seek to undermine it to their own devices. Some days it's all I can do not to wish that Binaca Jagger and her ilk would be left to try to sort things out, to determine where their next meal, let alone sustenance for hundreds of thousands of the world's citizens who are stranded on archipelagos of hopelessness, might be coming from. In case you were still wondering, I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for champagne socialists like Jagger and her ilk.

I can tell you this: Absent the forgiving and unresentful generosity of the United States, absent the spirit that drives the American people to make selfless sacrifices of personal wealth, not to mention the ultimate sacrifice of our lives and those of our sons and daughters, in order to demonstrate to the world the true meaning and value of freedom . . . absent these our world would be subsumed in the abject darkness of the political and spiritual tyranny represented by, among other political influences, the United Nations, American liberalism, and international socialism.

It is against these influences that we persist in the ongoing fight against the forces of terrorism and, unfortunately, the forces of the unrepentant leftists and liberals among us who are blind to the historically unprecedented good that our generosity and the political philosophy that has enabled it to flourish have achieved.