Washington — The nation’s pundits are surmising in their
whiz-kid way that retired general Wesley Clark’s candidacy for the
Democratic presidential nomination has been instigated by some
mysterious stratagem devised by the Clintons. I suppose the thing
is possible. Yet a more plausible explanation for this glamorous
candidacy is that the telegenic general has been inspired by the
California gubernatorial campaign of Arianna Huffington. She is an
inspiration to all such luminaries of the Kultursmog.
Watch for the General to come down hard on SUVs, as Arianna has,
and to sniff at “big money in politics,” as Arianna has from her
Hollywood redoubt.
When it was discovered a short while back that Arianna had only
paid $771 in federal taxes over the past two years, despite having
taken her former husband for millions in divorce court, I had
expected her to plead that such was the plight of a single-parent
mom under kapitalism — and she did. In his first week as
Democratic candidate General Clark has shown himself to be a ham on
the same sublime plane as his model Arianna Huffington. Out there
in California when Arnold Schwarzenegger announced his candidacy
Arianna, then already a candidate, wandered dreamily up to him and
knocked his microphones over. My guess is that it is only a matter
of time before Dr. Howard Dean is similarly accosted by the
drop-dead beautiful General Clark. On cable news the other day one
of New York magazine’s taste potentates confided that one
of General Clark’s imperishable political assets is that in “small
groups” he is “funny.” It is an indication of the essential
frivolousness of the Kultursmog that its intellectualoids
recommend a general who is “funny” for the presidency. Did anyone
ever say General Grant was funny, or Ike, who, by the way, was the
rare general who proved to be a tolerably good politician.
The Kultursmog is the media culture that dominates
American politics and tastes except when elections are held. It is
polluted by liberal politics and values. It allows for such
politically negligible figures as General Clark to become persons
of moment. Come to think of it, Arianna’s eminence owes much to the
Kultursmog.
My guess is that the air is going to go out of the General’s
candidacy rather soon. Perhaps it will be reported that the
handsome general served briefly after his retirement from the army
as an underwear model Calvin Klein. Or he will bomb on the Bill
Maher television show trying to match his exemplar Arianna’s
hairstyle.
Seriously, General Clark like most generals has a low opinion of
politicians, which he has already demonstrated to the peril of his
brief campaign. Generals are usually impatient with the tug and
pull of politics and the dissimulations. Clark, who reportedly once
voted for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, has had a fleeting
friendship with Bill Clinton. Now he seems to think all politicians
are liars. He has taken the measure of the Democratic field (which
has a large number of liars) and concluded that he can compete with
it easily in terms of posturing and mendacity. Within a matter of
weeks he has told at least three lies and been caught out every
time. Clinton can get by with that kind of a record, but not a
retired general.
There was his false claim that the White House importuned on him
to link the September 11 terrorists to Iraq. Then he revised his
assertion, claiming that it was a Canadian “think tank” that
importuned on him. The think tank could not be identified. Then he
told supporters that he would have voted for entering the Iraq war.
When that upset some of them he reversed himself, saying he “never”
would have voted for the war. Finally there is the flap over Karl
Rove. Clark claims after September 11 Rove repeatedly failed to
return calls to him from the General. Rove has no record of such
calls.
What are we to make of the fantasy that is the presidential
campaign of General Wesley Clark? My suggestion is that the
liberals have finally found their very own General Douglas
MacArthur. That “old soldier” who told us that such venerable
figures “never die; they just fade away” aroused derision and
horror from the liberals in the early 1950s. This one wanted to put
massive numbers of troops in Kosovo in the 1990s and to fire on a
Russian contingent a decade after the Cold War had ended. Now he
tells us we have acted imprudently in liberating Iraq and sobering
up the Middle East where terrorists not long ago thought they could
attack America with impunity. He would have us act there today as
President Bill Clinton acted in the 1990s, setting the stage for
more fury against America in the future. He will in time fade away,
but his mighty rise in the liberals’ esteem demonstrates their
desperation.
