I’ll freely admit it. I’m a lowly sycophant to Chris Floyd. He’s like my rock in the storm. I’ve probably linked him in about a third of all the posts I’ve ever written, and I’m about to do it again.
In his latest, he offers up his own acronymical neologism: “WIBDI”, short for “What If Bush Did It?”
This user-friendly analytical tool provides a quick and easy way of determining the value of any given policy while correcting one’s perception for partisan bias. Simply take a particular action or proposal and submit it to the WIBDI test: If Bush did this, would you think it was OK? Or would you condemn it as the act of a warmonger, or a tyrant, or a corrupt corporate tool, etc.? The just-concluded campaign has already shown us how our hordes of our quondam dissidents have signally failed this test, excusing, countenancing, defending or even embracing the actions and positions enumerated below by Chris Hedges:
Sen. Barack Obama’s vote to renew the Patriot Act, his votes to continue to fund the Iraq war, his backing of the FISA Reform Act, his craven courting of the Israeli lobby, his support of the death penalty, his refusal to champion universal, single-payer not-for-profit health care for all Americans, his call to increase troop levels and expand the war in Afghanistan, his failure to call for a reduction in the bloated and wasteful defense spending and his lobbying for the huge taxpayer swindle known as the bailout…
To which we could add his bellicose saber-rattling at Iran, his promise to roll back “Russian aggression” and extend war-triggering treaty protection to an aggressive Georgian regime (which cluster-bombed its own people, as we learned this week), his advocacy of destabilizing and civilian-shredding military strikes in Pakistan, his opposition to gay marriage (and campaigning with gay-bashing preachers), and his support for extending the death penalty to cover non-fatal offenses, and so on.
Any one of these positions would be roundly condemned by “progressives” if they were taken or advocated by George W. Bush — as in fact many of them have been. Indeed, one of the most remarkable things about this campaign is how Obama has managed to embody the deep and desperate thirst for change among millions of America — hence the genuinely moving scenes of jubilation and revived hope that have greeted his victory — while his actual positions in many if not most key areas track very closely with Bush’s, if they are not actually identical with them.
I’ll certainly be applying WIBDI myself in the future, and I hope it ends up gaining some currency in wider progressive circles. It’s a great reality check. I want liberal ideals to succeed, too– and to my mind, anything that helps us positively identify our own hypocrisies to ourselves can only make us stronger.