When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Iraqi Information Minister Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf quickly became known as “Baghdad Bob” by declaring on Iraqi television that Saddam Hussein’s military brigades were successfully turning back the invading forces. During the same time the U.S. was handily dominating Iraq militarily, Bob told Iraqis that “We slaughtered them and will continue to slaughter them.” Bob claimed that U.S. soldiers were committing suicide by the hundreds and that American troops were “going to surrender or be burned in their tanks. They will surrender, it is they who will surrender.”

It’s hard to imagine someone making more erroneous statements-that is unless you listen to Senator Lindsey Graham.

WTMA talk radio host Richard Todd asked Graham during an interview last week, “4,427 American soldiers dead, over 34,000 wounded in Iraq, was it worth it?” The senator replied, without hesitation “Absolutely. Saddam Hussein is in the grave. A young democracy is emerging between Syria and Iran. The reason I went there… is to change the world for the better, and Saddam Hussein was a threat… he was a rogue guy…” Appearing three days later on Meet the Press, host David Gregory played a video clip of reporter Richard Engel claiming on NBC’s Today show, that the Iraq War was unnecessary, that Saddam was not a threat and that it was a huge distraction. Shaking his head, Graham accused Engel of “completely rewriting history” and defended the war along the same lines he did before. Gregory pointed out that our current “defense secretary, who’s a Republican says, ‘Iraq will always be clouded by how it began,” adding that “Three-quarters of the American people think it was not worth the cost.” Graham replied, “History will judge us, not by what we did wrong at the beginning, but what we got right at the end.”

And may history judge Graham by his uncanny ability to obfuscate fact with his own personal fiction. There are many different opinions on the Iraq War, but Graham’s inability to even consider something virtually the entire world now sees as obvious-that every reason given for going to war turned out to be wrong-says far more about the senator than the subject at hand. When GOP politicians like Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) can say “Now that we know that it cost a trillion dollars, and all of these years, and all of these lives, and all of this blood… all I can say is everyone I know thinks it was a mistake to go in now,” or Rep. Tim McClintock (R-CA) can now claim of his fellow Republican congressman, that “everyone would agree that Iraq was a mistake,” or even Defense Secretary Robert Gates can cautiously advise that “It really requires a historian’s perspective in terms of what happens here in the long run”-it becomes obvious that Graham’s absolutist defense of the Iraq War is more ideological than logical. In this respect, Graham is little different from Baghdad Bob who also created his own war narrative, formed primarily out of loyalty to his government. As propagandist, Bob’s job was to sell the Iraqi public a myth that would better serve the ruling regime-the humorous part is the extent to which he was willing to continue with the charade.

Graham’s mythmaking and charades are not as humorous. The actions of a nation with the power and military capability of the United States should be weighed and measured rationally, and such calculation necessarily requires acknowledging past mistakes in order to avoid them in the future. Few Americans want another Vietnam and knowing what we know now, few should want another Iraq. Saving face for the sake of national honor or psyche is perhaps understandable to a degree, but the complete dismissal of colossal mistakes by our government-by redefining them as triumphs-almost insures that those mistakes will be repeated. Not so coincidentally, this is exactly what Graham seems to want, or as he told Todd: “I’m glad we invaded the country. I hope we keep troops there after 2011. I hope we don’t withdraw troops next summer in Afghanistan… If we have to use military force against Iran… I want to do it… And at the end of the day we’re at war with a vicious enemy and if they go to Yemen or Somalia we ought to follow them throughout the globe, and follow them to the gates of hell.”

Graham’s case for perpetual war is the same neoconservative vision espoused by the Bush administration when making its pitch for war with Iraq, and in still dutifully subscribing to this narrow vision it continues to blind the senator to anything outside of it. This is not merely the politicking of a statesman assessing a sticky situation and proceeding forward, as Graham pretends-but a let’s-police-the-world ideologue who propagandizes accordingly, creating his own facts as needed.

All propagandists do this, or as Baghdad Bob told BBC News in 2003, his information came from “authentic sources-many authentic sources.” On Iraq, our intelligence sources turned out to be about as authentic as Bob’s, and Lindsey Graham’s refusal to confront or consider this makes him no less delusional than the Iraqi propagandist-though far more dangerous.

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Glenn Beck is better than most nationally syndicated talk hosts. While right-wing radio mainstays Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity offer little more than Republican talking points, Beck regularly eschews such hackery, instead warning of the “progressivism” that exists in both parties or even the perils of blind partisanship. It’s hard even to fathom Limbaugh or Hannity saying what Beck did at CPAC this year, “I have not heard the people in the Republican Party yet admit they have a problem… I don’t know what they stand for anymore.” But after last weekend, I’m not quite sure what Beck thinks the Tea Party should stand for anymore either.

Beck called his event a “Restoring Honor” rally. Estimates say around 100,000 Tea Party types gathered in Washington, D.C. on Saturday to accomplish, well, no one really knows. Conservative darling Sarah Palin said a whole lot of nothing, as did Beck and a slew of other hosts who seemed genuinely excited that so many people could come together, even if none of them really seemed to know why. Much like Obama’s promises of “hope” and “change,” the platitudes offered at Beck’s event were empty, making the event like a right-wing Woodstock. The New York Times Ross Douthat aptly described why those who attended found it so groovy: “Americans love leaders who seem to validate their way of life… The Obama campaign raised it to an art form, convincing voters that by merely supporting his candidacy, they were proving themselves cosmopolitan and young-at-heart, multicultural and hip. In a sense, Beck’s ‘Restoring Honor’ was like an Obama rally through the looking glass. It was a long festival of affirmation for middle-class white Christians — square, earnest, patriotic, and religious.”

Douthat is correct — Beck’s rally was essentially a self-affirming Tea Party love-in. Contrived and confused, even the title of the event raised the question — what, exactly, does “Restoring Honor” mean anyway? What truly needs restoring is some direction.

As with the Obama phenomenon in the last election, identity politics has been an obvious aspect of the Tea Party, something the Left perceives as racist and many on the Right, refreshing. The idea of so many middle-class whites, many Christian — the traditional Republican base — coming together en masse to question their party and reexamine first principles is a liberating concept, not to mention long overdue. After decades of politicians’ empty promises and cyclical talk-radio bitching, the Tea Party seemed like a grassroots Right finally ticked off enough to demand results, roll some heads, and “take their country back,” with a hard focus on impending economic doom.

As is always the case with populism, any real movement is naturally going to be made up of real people, some of whom might hold wacky signs or become obsessed with conspiracies. The extent to which Beck himself behaved wacky or was prone to conspiracy theories — “politically schizophrenic” is probably the best description — was always less important than his willingness to encourage and aid the Tea Party in general, corralling the masses in the right direction, demanding that they keep an eye on the big-government wings of both parties. So long as anti-government sentiment was the overriding Tea Party narrative, it remained healthy — and so long as the trivial remained such it was tolerable, becoming not much more than irrelevant fodder for the Left.

So what in God’s name — quite literally — was the purpose of the Promise Keepers-lite event Beck held last weekend? It would be one thing if it were simply another trivial distraction — but the overt religiosity on display could spell doom for a movement with the potential to unite more Americans against government spending than even the Tea Party’s harshest critics are willing to admit. Independents and disaffected Democrats, atheists and agnostics, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Eskimos, virtually every political, religious, or cultural category imaginable could feasibly unite under a fiscal-restraint-minded Tea Party banner. But some new Moral Majority? That there is a religious or even Christian subtext to “who” the Tea Party is is a necessary, unavoidable, and perhaps even attractive aspect of the movement. But the moment religion becomes an explicit part of the program — and Beck’s rally was certainly heading in that direction — it negates and severely limits the movement’s primary goal of eliminating government and debt.

A movement born of identity politics (at least in part) must mature philosophically if it wishes to become serious in its limited-government desires. Beck’s rally actually caused me to question the Tea Party’s seriousness. The further embrace of identity politics — which is exactly what Beck’s rally was — is a step in the wrong direction precisely because it’s a throwback to the same old partisanship that has historically comforted conservatives while government continues to grow. This writer has never had a problem with an influential pundit like Beck being all over the place politically so long as he always generally ended up in the right place — but unfortunately, with his “Restoring Honor” rally, Glenn Beck was closer to taking the Tea Party back to the George W. Bush years than any constitutional revival.

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Sometimes editors like to have fun with their writers — like this week when my editor at the Charleston City Paper declared that controversial Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and yours truly are actually the same person. Explains Chris Haire:

“You want proof? Well here goes: As you know, Rauf is the guy behind the so-called Ground Zero mosque. Not surprisingly, Sean Hannity doesn’t like him. On his Monday afternoon radio show, Hannity played an audiotape of Rauf, one which Sean believes proves just how anti-American the imam is … The funny thing is, the main point that Hannity offers as an example of Rauf’s virulent anti-Americanism is more or less the same point that the City Paper’s own Jack Hunter has been saying for years now … . Namely that the United States has killed more innocent Muslims than Al Qaeda has killed innocent Americans.”

This is true regardless of who says it. Rauf specifically cites “the U.S-led sanction against Iraq [that] led to the death of over half a million Iraqi children” in the 1990s, a death toll confirmed by the United Nations, approved of by former Secretary of State Madeline Albright (who said it was “worth it”) and apparently deemed irrelevant by Hannity. Using math over emotion, the Iraqi death toll due to U.S. sanctions equals about 170 9/11s. Despite Hannity’s outrage, the imam is absolutely right.

Trying to get Americans to comprehend the weight of the damage their government sometimes causes overseas is comparable to how some wives react upon learning that their husband is a child molester — many simply shut down, emotionally and morally, refusing to believe it even against overwhelming evidence. The very thought is so traumatic that they go into denial, preferring to ignore or endure the tragedy rather than let it upset their worldview. There are other, similar examples of such denial: many now ask about the decades-long sexual-abuse allegations against the Catholic Church — did they not know or simply not want to know? Some question whether Germans during World War II were aware of the death camps in their own backyard — did they not know or simply not want to know?

A half-million dead children is not insignificant, in Iraq or anywhere else — yet did Americans not know or simply not want to know? Separated by an ocean from the situation and captive to a media that barely reported it, for most Americans it was probably a mix of apathy and ignorance, but the degree to which that ignorance remains willful is worth noting. Writes Haire: “for both Jack and Rauf, this simple stat — that 500,000 innocents died as the result of American actions — is proof that the U.S. has blood in its hands too. But for Hannity, to point out this fact is to commit chicken hawk heresy. It is a challenge to Hannity’s unchallengeable worldview, and as such, it must be wrong.”

Naturally, most Americans want to believe their nation acts in a largely benevolent manner abroad — something conservatives hardly ever believe about their government domestically — and any stark evidence to the contrary is often too heavy to absorb or to hurtful to consider. Pundits like Hannity spends hours keeping their audiences focused on relatively trivial controversies like whether some random mosque should be built next to Ground Zero, but consider it heresy even to consider that overseas the U.S. puts ground zeros next to mosques all the time. In an audio clip Hannity features on his website, intended to condemn the now-famous imam, Rauf makes a more salient and valuable point than any of his critics: “What complicates the discussion … is that the fact that the West has not been cognizant and has not addressed the issues of its own contribution to much injustice in the Arab and Muslim world. It’s a difficult subject to discuss with Western audiences, but it is one that must be pointed out and must be raised.”

Many Americans might dismiss, as Albright did and Hannity does, the death of a half-million children as an unfortunate, yet necessary fact of war. Funny enough, this is exactly what many in the Islamic world consider 9/11. Racking up deaths with government approval does not excuse it in the minds of Muslims whose children perished, any more than those children perishing excuses 9/11 in the minds of Americans. There is no excuse for either. Blood is on the hands of both parties, something that too many Americans still refuse to acknowledge, weigh, or even consider, and now Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is being attacked for merely pointing this out.

There will continue to be reasonable arguments on both sides of the Ground Zero mosque controversy — but what is most detrimental is the extent to which its central figure has become even more controversial simply for making a perfectly reasonable argument.

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Denouncing libertarianism as not true conservatism is like saying The Rolling Stones somehow dethroned Elvis Presley. There’s no questioning that both acts sound very different-there’s also no questioning that both are rock n’ roll personified. The philosophies of libertarianism and conservatism are no doubt particular and distinct, as the loudest voices for each will eternally argue; but both brands have also been virtually inseparable in the history of American conservatism. Perhaps Ronald Reagan said it best in 1975: “I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism… The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.”

Judge Andrew Napolitano’s FOX Business program “Freedom Watch” now brings to a wide audience this integral conservative ingredient that has long been missing in the right-wing media-pure, unadulterated libertarian philosophy. Sure, there are conservative hosts who spend hours explaining the many different ways in which they don’t like this president or his party. There are even right-wing hosts who claim to be libertarian yet enthusiastically support unprecedented civil liberty intrusions so long as the intruder is Republican. But what talk radio or FOX News “Reagan conservative” actually consistently advocates for the Gipper’s basic concepts of both conservatism and libertarianism: less government interference, less centralized authority and more individual freedom?

At precisely the moment the Tea Party is raising questions related to these concepts, particularly concerning the practical limits and sustainability of our current government, Napolitano’s show is a custom fit for what’s brewing on the grassroots Right. In April, a Tea Party poll conducted by The Politico showed the movement split evenly between the more socially conservative Sarah Palin and libertarian hero Ron Paul. The television debut of “Freedom Watch” was billed as a “Tea Party Summit” and featured both figures, as Paul suggested that the gap was exaggerated and Palin reinforced this point by surprisingly agreeing with the Judge on marijuana legalization and the unconstitutionality of government snooping. Predictably, the largest divide was on foreign policy, where Paul and Napolitano advocated a strict and thorough non-interventionism and Palin subscribed to Reagan’s “peace through strength” axiom, keeping the details of her position vague. But no matter-where else are such issues being raised, before mainstream conservatives, Tea Partiers and people like Palin? It’s hard to imagine changing the conversation on the Right from partisanship to principle without first starting conservations about said principles, and Napolitano’s program shines a much needed libertarian light on the Republican darkness that has become mainstream conservatism.

Compare Napolitano’s efforts to get conservatives to think outside the GOP box to his fellow FOX host Sean Hannity’s most recent effort to stuff the Tea Party back in it. Reviewing Hannity’s new book, Conservative Victory, the Charleston City Paper’s Chris Haire writes: “Hannity has nothing but disdain for the Tea Party’s No. 1 goal: to vote all the bums out, Democrat and Republican alike. Hannity wants to keep those bums in power, as long as they’re members of the GOP and their last name isn’t Paul… Even worse, like many of his talk radio and Fox News brethren, Hannity pays lip service to the Tea Party movement, but only for so long. For the talking head, there’s nothing more disastrous that could happen to the GOP than for the Tea Party to become a true force within the Republican Party.” Hannity’s partisanship and Napolitano’s principle paint a stark-and new-contrast for FOX’s conservative audience. Hannity closes his radio show each day promising a “conservative” line-up of regulars like Karl Rove and Mitt Romney, where these men do little more than nitpick Democrats and excuse Republicans. Napolitano closed his program’s television debut with the following: “The American public needs to know and understand that the government that serves best is the one that serves less.”

First debuting as an exclusively online program, then moving to weekend TV, and just recently graduating to weeknight, prime time programming, Freedom Watch is poised to become a powerhouse of conservative and libertarian thought, providing a mainstream forum on the Right where viewers can reexamine what they believe and why they believe it. For former Bush Republicans who’ve now become Tea Partiers or are at least trending toward a more substantive conservatism, such a reexamination is not only overdue but necessary-particularly considering that such intellectual travelers won’t get any help from the Republican spokesman who pose as conservative pundits, most of whom want their audiences to reexamine nothing. Refreshingly, on Freedom Watch there’s no reflexive support for war, big government and loss of liberties simply because a Republican is in charge-and neither is there a distaste for each simply because a Democrat is doing the damage. Almost alone among his FOX brethren, the Judge has always been comprehensive in his critique of the state, reminding us that hating liberals is no substitute for loving liberty-and he now has his own, prime time show on which to prove it.

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Obama-loving liberals are goofy. Despite their once fierce — and warranted — hatred for George W. Bush, Democrats now make every excuse in the book for a president who behaves just like him. Obama first burst on the national scene promising to reverse the Bush policies most unpopular with the Left — quagmire wars, warrantless wiretapping, extraordinary rendition, torture — yet he has not only continued each, but expanded them. Leftist Noam Chomsky noted, at the beginning of this president’s first term, “As Obama came into office, [former Secretary of State] Condoleezza Rice predicted he would follow the policies of Bush’s second term, and that is pretty much what happened, apart from a different rhetorical style.” Obama Democrats continue to confuse that style for substantive difference, exemplifying the same sort of mindless partisanship that characterized the Bush Republicans they once abhorred.

Mistaking style, or mere surface differences, for substance is by no means exclusive to the Left. When Michelle Obama took a trip to Spain recently, a man called in to the radio station where I’m employed to voice his anger over it. Puzzled by the caller’s rage, I sort of dismissed him, only to learn that talk host Rush Limbaugh had also harshly criticized the first lady for the same reason. Standing in a restaurant later that day, I overheard a group of old men having a political discussion. “Barack Hussein Obama,” said one man, repeatedly. Another declared, “If the Republicans don’t win the next election, there’s going to be riots.”

In their hatred for all things Obama, I’m quite sure all of these men consider themselves patriots of some sort, who might “save” this country if they could only get rid of the current administration. They think they’re valiant, but they’re not.

They’re completely useless.

If conservatives want to know how Obama and his party are currently able to get away with creating colossal debt and an even more monstrous government they should look no further than the last administration. Where was the Right — as the Left often asks, and justifiably so — when Bush doubled the size of government and the national debt during his eight year term? Where was the caller who is so angry about Michelle Obama’s vacation when Bush created the largest entitlement expansion since Lyndon Johnson, with Medicare Part D? What was Limbaugh complaining about the same week Dubya was enacting the federally intrusive education disaster “No Child Left Behind”?

I can tell you where today’s Republican House Minority Leader and Obama-critic John Boehner was — the man whose party winning in 2010 might prevent “riots” — he was standing right next to Bush as he signed NCLB, heartily endorsing the legislation as one of his “proudest achievements.” It has been reported that some Republican outfit, apparently nostalgic for pre-Obama America, has erected a billboard featuring Bush with the caption, “Miss me yet?” Are they kidding? Hell no, I don’t miss him — and any serious conservative shouldn’t either, as our current president simply continues to build upon the last one’s statist achievements.

And “building” is exactly what it is — regardless of which party is in control, when was the last time a president departed office, leaving behind a federal government smaller than he found it? Not even Ronald Reagan did this, as each successive administration piles on new and massive bureaucracy. Imagine this — what if there had never been a George W. Bush, and America went straight from Bill Clinton to Obama in 2000. Now imagine Obama did exactly everything Bush did, in terms of policy, programs, the whole works. Would the Right be beating up a Democratic president for doing exactly what they either defended or ignored Bush doing? Of course they would. “Why is President Obama on vacation down at the Crawford Ranch in Texas?” an angry talk radio caller might ask. Limbaugh would have probably asked the same, incessantly. “Barack Hussein Obama” would have been accused by conservatives of bankrupting the country with his Medicare expansion, and “riots” might have been predicted over No Child Left Behind. It would certainly not go unnoticed by Republicans that Obama had doubled the national debt. And the GOP would be promising voters they would never do any of this stuff — and a vote for them come November would be the surest way to stop it.

This week, I have the honor of speaking at Young Americans for Liberty’s national convention in Washington, D.C. YAL is a relatively new but rapidly growing conservative student activist organization. These younger conservatives give me much hope, in that they instinctively understand that America’s ever increasing statism is the fault of both parties, and they seem far more concerned with this addressing this primary problem than getting bogged down in the partisan minutiae of bitching about nonsense like where the first lady vacations or what the president’s middle name is. If Michelle Obama stayed on permanent vacation or if the president’s name was Barack “Hussein-Osama-Adolph Hitler-Mel Gibson” Obama, this would not matter more than the fact that the next time Republicans are in charge they will probably not dismantle any of the government monstrosities the Democrats are now erecting, and if history is any guide, will likely add to them. Perhaps there should be “riots” — and they should be bipartisan.

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