Judy Bachrach: O Contraire

Long before last week’s latest gaffe, I was contemplating a blog with the provisional title “IS MICHAEL STEELE AN IDIOT?” And not because he called the ugly and incendiary Rush Limbaugh “ugly and incendiary.”

No, the reason Steele might be worthy of that epithet is because after hurling these perfectly accurate adjectives at Limbaugh and receiving predictable blowback from the blowhard (“Michael Steele you are the head of the Republican National Committee. You are not the head of the Republican Party! Tens of millions of conservatives and Republican have nothing to do with the Republican National Committee … and when you call them asking for money, they hang up on you!”), Steele scampered away like a scalded cat.

He said: “I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh.” Yes, he did. And he also said, “I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. … I realized what I said wasn’t maybe what I was thinking.”

Well there aren’t many of us as dexterous and supple in the thinking-versus-talking department as the supreme head of the RNC. But you know how it is: sometimes you say Rush is ugly and incendiary, when what you really mean is he’s a soothing softie. Sometimes you tell the Washington Times that the Republican Party needs to appeal to “everyone including one-armed midgets” by relocating “to urban-suburban hip-hop settings,” and if anyone disputes such an imaginative strategy they can “stuff it.” When what you really meant to say is the Republican Party, even devoid of limbless midgets, is divine just the way it is.

And sometimes you say, “I’m very introspective about things.” And that if by chance some remark looks or sounds like a gaffe, “There’s a rationale, a logic behind it.”

And guess what? He’s right! When Steele said, as he did the other day, that Barack Obama was the real author of the war in Afghanistan, there was a rationale behind it. He didn’t want to blame a disastrous conflict on W. Bush, now did he? That’s rational. When Steele compounded his party’s distress by arguing “that’s the one thing you don’t do, engage in a land war in Afghanistan … because everyone who’s tried over a thousand years of history has failed” — that too was logical.

Because it so happens that “everyone who’s tried” in Afghanistan has failed (cf. the Soviet Union). In fact, the United States has quite a history of adopting failed wars from other imperialists (cf: France, a country that had a time of it in Vietnam); of aiding hopeless monarchs in tandem with other imperialists (cf: the Shah of Iran, bolstered by Britain). And maybe we should after all this time and all this failure start taking our cues from the defeated.

And that’s the problem with Steele. Sometimes, invariably the first time around, he gets it right. Michael Kinsley famously wrote that “A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth.” That makes Steele a truth-teller. And within the Republican Party, I’m afraid, his non-hip-hop home, that also makes him an idiot.