By Isaac Schorr
Monday, February 08, 2021
Max Boot is more machine than man. His Washington Post
column is a space not for a writer with a distinct or coherent worldview to
make arguments about varied political and cultural topics but for a
contradictory and single-minded robot to try to make the same point over and
over and over again. It’s the journalistic equivalent of “we programmed a bot
to write 1,000 columns about how Republicans are bad™ using headlines from the
previous two days and disregarding any previous arguments it’s made.” Democrats
cancel Abraham Lincoln? Republicans are at
fault for pushing back. Trump-skeptical Republican senator announces he’s
retiring? Good riddance, he’s worse
than Marjorie Taylor Greene. Highly regarded former Republican statesman passes
away? Use his memory to bash
the GOP.
This last, most recent example makes for the perfect
specimen of the Boot Bot at work — the platonic ideal of its remarkable
willingness to adapt and improvise in the service of its ultimate aim. The
great George Shultz, President Reagan’s second and final secretary of state
passed away on Saturday at the age of 100 (do yourself a favor and read National
Review’s editors
on Shultz’s remarkable life). Naturally, where most of us saw an opportunity to
celebrate a uniquely American life, Boot — a sincere adherent of the old “the
only good Republican is a dead Republican” adage — saw a hook for his next
column.
Most of the piece is Boot’s typical fare: simplistic and
incomplete arguments conveyed awkwardly. He includes a throwaway line implying
that the worst portion of today’s GOP can trace its roots back to Barry
Goldwater, a founding member of the Arizona NAACP. He calls Shultz an advocate
for “progressivism.” He even asserts that Shultz and Reagan represented a
bulwark against the “far right” because of their willingness to sit at the
negotiating table with Mikhail Gorbachev during Reagan’s second term. His
evidence is that a single New York Times article from 1988 quoted a
conservative activist who accused the president of being “a useful idiot for
Soviet propaganda.” That Reagan’s hard line on the “Evil Empire” during his
first term, a posture decried by Democrats at the time (Walter Mondale called
his support of the Strategic Defense Initiative “madness”), was what brought
the USSR to the table goes unmentioned.
His typically superficial treatment of history aside,
this column is remarkable because it represents the final evolution of Max Boot
from Bush-era, flag-waving, third-wave neoconservative to beliefless machine.
In the penultimate paragraph, while lamenting the end of responsible (again,
dead) Republicans, Boot writes: “Republicans such as [Dick] Cheney and [Don]
Rumsfeld, once seen as sensible conservatives, were radicalized by the Sept.
11, 2001, attacks and sent the United States blundering into ‘forever wars’
that discredited the Republican elite much as the Vietnam War had discredited
the ‘best and brightest’ Democrats.” This comes from the man best known for
writing an October 2001 cover story for the late great Weekly Standard called
“The
Case for American Empire,” in which he argued that “the September 11 attack
was a result of insufficient American involvement and ambition” and that “the
solution is to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their
implementation.” More specifically, he submitted that the solution was the
“invasion and occupation” of Iraq. Once his wish was granted, Boot became one
of the war’s most outspoken defenders, telling anyone who would listen that it
was not only justified but necessary. It’s no crime for Boot to have changed
his mind, but his (again, simplistic) explanation of how Republicans (not him,
though) were “radicalized” by 9/11 is not just uncharitable but dishonest. So
too is his dismissal of his previous policy preference as “forever wars,” a
buzzword used only by the most unserious of isolationists.
Boot had his reasons for arguing that the United States
should wage an ambitious war on terror in the aftermath of the attacks, and I’m
not fully convinced he was wrong. It can certainly be defended. Indefensible,
though, is his buzzword-quality smear of everyone else who backed it, which
included George Shultz, by the way. His use of Shultz’s memory to execute the
smear is indefensible, indeed downright ghastly. It’s not the first,
and I’d venture to say won’t be the last, time Boot makes moral compromises to
fill his quota.
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