Next thing you know, the Texas board of education is going to be hiring J.D. Hayworth to write the state's history curriculum. Because he has the right attitude for them, happy to create his own history.
While speaking last week to a local GOP organization in Phoenix, Hayworth was asked by an attendee about America's failure to formally declare war in our modern conflicts. Hayworth defended the modern-day authorizations for the use of military force. "But I would also point out, that if we want to be sticklers, the war that Dwight Eisenhower led in Europe against the Third Reich was never declared by the United States Congress," said Hayworth. "Recall, the Congress passed a war resolution against Japan. Germany declared war on us two days later. We never formally declared war on Hitler's Germany, and yet we fought the war."
The questioner then responded that he thought the United States did declare on Germany, and he would check it. Hayworth responded: "I think we should check it. Perhaps we made the rationalization -- since there was the Axis alliance -- that the attack of Japan was tantamount to the attack of the Third Reich. But as I recall in my history, Germany declared war on the United States, not vice-versa."
Of course, as Kleefeld points out, the U.S. and Germany made mutual declarations of war on the other on the same day, December 11, 1941.
But hell, rewriting history is just how it works for these guys. It's part and parcel of how they operate in the present day, as well. Let's take the time machine back to 2004 when Ron Suskind explained for us exactly what kind of world Republicans had created for themselves.
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
This is an extension of creating your own reality in the present--it's easier to justify the new alternate reality if you can also reshape the reality of history. That new historical reality apparently also includes FDR being too weak to reciprocate in declaring war on Germany. FDR created a reality which the Right utterly rejects--one that includes Social Security and that paved the way for Medicare and, yes, the Civil Rights Act.
Hayworth and Rand Paul are actually doing a tremendous service to the reality-based community, should we recognize it as such. They're just saying out loud what the Right truly believes, but are politically savvy enough to keep their mouths shut about.