The Enemy At Home Read Free Page A

war for political purposes—using the war as a tool to win elections,” which is “an affront to the men and women we are sending to fight and die in a foreign land and without good reason.” Moreover, Byrd charges Bush with “a political gambit to keep the American people fearful” through a strategy of “silencing opposition” and diverting people’s attention toward the war on terror and away from “the country’s festering problems.” 7 Now, if these charges are true—if Bush has concocted an unnecessary war that causes the deaths of American citizens for no reason other than to benefit himself politically—then he deserves impeachment and everlasting disgrace. Indeed, in some ways Bush would be worse than Goering because at least Goering believed in a cause larger than himself.
    By these accusations, Byrd forces us to revise our interpretation of his earlier words. He shows, by implication rather than outright suggestion, that he
agrees
with Bush that some people are fundamentally evil and they deserve to be treated as such. Only, in Byrd’s analysis it is the Bush administration and its allies, rather than the Islamic radicals, who are the genuinely evil force in the world. Thus dividing and inflaming, which Byrd thinks a harsh and self-defeating strategy in dealing with Islamic fundamentalism, is precisely Byrd’s strategy in dealing with the Bush administration.
    These examples show the wrongheadedness of the insinuation of liberal treachery. Holmgren and Byrd don’t hate America. What they hate is
conservative America
. The two are fiercely loyal to the American values that they cherish, and it is in the name of those values that they are ready to take on the Bush administration. The lesson of these examples is that the cultural left is unwilling to fight a serious and sustained battle against Islamic radicalism and fundamentalism because it is fighting a more threatening political battle against American conservatism and American fundamentalism. The left cannot support Bush’s efforts to promote liberal democracy abroad because it is more important for the left to reverse the nation’s conservative tide by defeating Bush and his socially conservatives allies at home. In other words, the left’s war is not against bearded Muslims who wear long robes and carry rifles; it is against pudgy white men who wear suits and carry Bibles. While the left is certainly not comfortable with Islamic mullahs, it is vastly more terrified of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Antonin Scalia, James Dobson, and Rush Limbaugh.
    Why? From the vantage point of many liberals,
our
fundamentalists are as dangerous as
their
fundamentalists, and President Bush is no less a threat than bin Laden. Author Salman Rushdie, who should know something about this topic, asserts that “the religious fundamentalism of the United States is as alarming as anything in the much-feared world of Islam.” Columnist Maureen Dowd accused the Bush administration of following the lead of Islamic fundamentalists in “replacing science with religion, and facts with faith,” and creating in the process “jihad in America…a scary, paranoid, regressive reality.” Author and illustrator Art Spiegelman asserts, “We’re equally threatened by Al Qaeda and our own government.” Pursuing the analogy between Islamic fundamentalists and the Bush administration, columnist Wendy Kaminer described 9/11 as a “faith-based initiative.” 8
    But if the left sees Christian fundamentalism in the same way as Islamic fundamentalism, why doesn’t it fight the two with equal resolution? If Bush is as bad as bin Laden, why not expend equal effort to get rid of both? In reality, the cultural left is more indignant over Bush’s Christian fundamentalism than over bin Laden’s Islamic fundamentalism. Activist Cindy Sheehan makes this clear when she alleges that “the biggest terrorist in the world is George W. Bush.” Other leading figures on the left endorse the view