"The Essence of True Humanity is Compassion." - Debbie Menon
Imagine the murder and death of non-Americans
It took a matter of weeks in 2001 after the launching of Operation Enduring Freedom for the toll of innocent civilians in Afghanistan to surpass that of those murdered on 9/11.
That was nine years ago. Comparing the civilian tolls now in 9/11, Iraq and Afghanistan is a calculation based on order of magnitude.
"We responded to the worst kind of depravity with the best of our humanity," said President Obama in his weekly presidential address marking 9/11 today.
Not True.
If civilians of all nations be considered human, the tragedy of 9/11 can be seen in one scale as business as usual, inhumanity waged ferociously.
And it didn't take long for American liberal and neocon intellectuals to get back to the business of war in 2001.
As Noam Chomsky wrote then: "(L)iberal intellectuals have lined up in support of the war machine in the familiar style -- discussed, for example, by Randolph Bourne in classic essays--and since they know they do not have the intellectual competence to deal with those who refuse to go along, resort to what comes natural to the educated classes: hysterical tantrums, lies, and abuse. Why become involved? There are more important things to do--such as continue to falsify their increasingly desperate claim that everyone is following them in their depraved subordination to power."
Democratic strategists are enthralled by the 9-12 project, Rep Joe Wilson (R-SC), deathers, birthers and the GOP as the hatred of our black president becomes apparent, branding not President Obama but rather the Republican Party.
The last time the GOP went this crazy, actually impeaching a president after the GOP was trashed in the November 1998 election, President Bill Clinton’s approval ratings spiked upward. Look for more of the same.
Democratic strategists, if they were inclined, do not need to craft a straw man.
The GOP is building its own: Themselves, and apparently are not aware of this development as they scream how much they love America and want America back from the black man who took it a short eight months ago.
Rush, Glenn Beck and company are offending not only the fastest-growing demographics of our electorate, but also are turning off independents and firing up Obama’s progressive base.
And make no mistake. Beck, Rush and Fox are mainstream Republicans.
A Madison business owner with whom I often talk politics — an activist Republican and respectful, old-school politico — assures me that the 9-12 movement is mainstream in the GOP.
This past August, a few months after the 9/11 community finally secured passage of bipartisan legislation that established 9/11 as a National Day of Service and Remembrance, a writer for the American Spectator published an article entitled ‘Obama's Plan to Desecrate 9/11.’
The opening sentence read this way:
‘The Obama White House is behind a cynical, coldly calculated political effort to erase the meaning of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks from the American psyche and convert Sept. 11 into a day of leftist celebration and statist idolatry.’
Add to this bizarre but typical reprise of McCarthyism an even stranger development: The old-time segregationist religion is being openly revived with such enthusiasm that one wonders if the GOP knows that the 1950s-60s civil rights movement actually occurred.
The ignominious gloom of Ronald Reagan who championed foes of the civil rights movement by kicking off his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi — the site of the 1964 murder of civil rights workers Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney (depicted above)— by calling for "states rights" and other anti-civil rights initiatives is casting its fetid vapor today.
The ‘state sovereignty movement’ is not, it's important to understand, just a group of people who think the federal government has too much power. Its central feature is the crackpot nineteenth century theory, revived most recently to resist civil rights legislation, that states have the inherent right to nullify federal legislation and court rulings that fall outside the enumerated constitutional powers of the federal government. And Pawlenty knows its extremist provenance: that's why he identified himself with Rick Perry, who's flirted both with nullification and with secession as part of his high-minded contributions to the ‘state sovereignty movement.’
Most Americans find open displays of racial hate and McCarthyite lies genuinely disturbing and indecent.
But we can watch and enjoy the GOP digging its political grave in one of the most outlandish moments of modern American political history.
"The Essence of True Humanity is Compassion."
