Let’s Role Model
Kevin tells me that good, decent Americans are having prissy fits over last night’s descent into moral depravity in NYC. The shame, the decadence the…political hate speech!!! Dear Gawd, will they ever stop???
When asked this morning about the lewd, hate mongering Democrats, President Bush said solemly, “John Kerry is a major league asshole. Fuck him, we’re taking him out.” Dick Cheney added, “Big time. He can go fuck himself.”
God bless the grown-ups of the GOP.
Promise Keeping
In the spirit of the generous advice David Brooks gave to the Democrats on the issue of our lack of proper religiosity, I’d like to return the favor. I’d like to suggest that if the Republicans want to win this fall, they need to embrace this concept with everything they’ve got. The whole “women should be subordinate to their husbands” idea is one their caucus should run on all across the country. The time has come.
It’s true that this might, on first glance, seem counterintuitive considering that most women would burst into wild gales of laughter at the mere idea, but you have to understand that the idea hasn’t been adequately explained before. Just because the woman is supposed to “place herself under the authority of the man” doesn’t mean it’s a one way street. As Orrin Hatch says, “I don’t think anybody can read this without understanding husbands have tremendous obligations in order to gain the respect of their wives.”
See? It’s not like the man gets off scott free. He has to do a bunch of stuff too. That’s what these bitche…er ladies don’t understand. And that’s what our new federal judge, J. Leon Holmes, is going to help them understand — just like he helps 13 year old rape victims understand that they have to bear their father’s child.
Like I said, I think the GOP has a winner with this campaign theme. If the Democrats bring it up over and over and over again — after all, every single one of the Republican senators voted for it — it will be bad news for them. There are many tens of millions of women in this country who are just dying to vote for a party that thinks women should be subserviant to men. It would be a terrible mistake to try to hang this around Republican necks. Honest. I mean that. Don’t go there.
Wouldn’t You Know It
Talk about your bad luck.
Pentagon Says Bush Records of Service Were Destroyed
Military records that could help establish President Bush’s whereabouts during his disputed service in the Texas Air National Guard more than 30 years ago have been inadvertently destroyed, according to the Pentagon.
It said the payroll records of “numerous service members,” including former First Lt. Bush, had been ruined in 1996 and 1997 by the Defense Finance and Accounting Service during a project to salvage deteriorating microfilm. No back-up paper copies could be found, it added in notices dated June 25.
The destroyed records cover three months of a period in 1972 and 1973 when Mr. Bush’s claims of service in Alabama are in question.
The disclosure appeared to catch some experts, both pro-Bush and con, by surprise. Even the retired lieutenant colonel who studied Mr. Bush’s records for the White House, Albert C. Lloyd of Austin, said it came as news to him.
The loss was announced by the Defense Department’s Office of Freedom of Information and Security Review in letters to The New York Times and other news organizations that for nearly half a year have sought Mr. Bush’s complete service file under the open-records law.
There was no mention of the loss, for example, when White House officials released hundreds of pages of the President’s military records last February in an effort to stem Democratic accusations that he was “AWOL” for a time during his commitment to fly at home in the Air National Guard during the Vietnam War.
Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director who has said that the released records confirmed the president’s fulfillment of his National Guard commitment, did not return two calls for a response.
The disclosure that the payroll records had been destroyed came in a letter signed by C. Y. Talbott, chief of the Pentagon’s Freedom of Information Office, who forwarded a CD-Rom of hundreds of records that Mr. Bush has previously released, along with images of punch-card records. Sixty pages of Mr. Bush’s medical file and some other records were excluded on privacy grounds, Mr. Talbott wrote.
He said in the letter that he could not provide complete payroll records, explaining, “The Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS) has advised of the inadvertent destruction of microfilm containing certain National Guard payroll records.”
He went on: “In 1996 and 1997, DFAS engaged with limited success in a project to salvage deteriorating microfilm. During this process the microfilm payroll records of numerous service members were damaged, including from the first quarter of 1969 (Jan. 1 to March 31) and the third quarter of 1972 (July 1 to Sept. 30). President Bush’s payroll records for these two quarters were among the records destroyed. Searches for backup paper copies of the missing records were unsuccessful.”
I seem to recall that this used to be the kind of thing for which we assigned special prosecutors and held televised congressional hearings. But that was when we had a president who had no honor and integrity so it was different.
This is just one more of the hundreds of felicitous coincidences that have beset our Crusader Codpiece over the years. Just because people have been trying to get ahold of those records for ages and it’s only now that we find out that they were destroyed seven or eight years ago is no reason to be suspicious. I’ll bet Junior is just mad as heck about the whole business. The one thing he really wanted to do was clear this thing up before the election.
Drudge had to put down his little mouse and take a long drag off of Lucianne’s Virginia Slim Menthol 100 after putting that steamy montage together.
Does anyone smell the faint whiff of GOP flop sweat in the air?
Four More Years!
Be a Billionaire For Bush
They’re taking a Limo through the swing states to tell voters the good news …
I love these guys.
I’m Going To Hell
I am against this kind of thing. There really is no excuse for it. However, as I am a red-blooded American, brought up in a certain way at a certain time, I must confess that I sometimes cannot resist a little trip to the dark side.
I hope you all can forgive me. I’m weak.
Fools On The Hill
I would be with all the BigMediaBloggers on this except that I think having BushCo and the boyz spend a couple of weeks arguing about whether to amend the constitution to ban gay marriage makes them look so ridiculous at this particular political moment that it might just be worth it.
If it was 1998 and the wingnuts had the luxury of playing silly culture war games for fun and profit, I’d say it would be best to get the debate out of the way and off the radar screen. But today, I think there’s real value in having the Republicans on the evening news spitting and hollaring about something that ends up at about #733 on the average American’s list of priorities. (This is not to say that I don’t think the issue matters to many people, pro and con, but it just isn’t critical at this moment.)
It just seems to me that the more the GOP is exposed for their deep lack of seriousness, the better off we are. Seeing Inhofe, Frist and “Bowser” Santorum rail about slippery slopes and bestiality on the evening news strikes me as good politics. And it’s telling that at this late date they are still playing to their base when they should be awkwardly clapping and singing “Proud Mary” with african american kids and talking about their support for pre-natal care and puppies. Their necessary tack to the middle is seriously off schedule. Is it in our interest to help them get on course?
Watch What You Say
This is the kind of thing that makes me wonder if Bush, Ashcroft and Company haven’t already screwed this country up so badly that it will never recover:
“How are you?” asked the airport security person who popped up beside me on my way to baggage claim.
“Uh, fine — thanks,” I replied, wondering, why are you asking?
As if she’d read my thoughts, she told me there had been complaints about me on the airplane. Then she asked to see the crossword puzzle I’d been working on during the flight. Huh? I thought. Talk about being puzzled! Still, my grin was smug as I handed it over. I’d just completed the Friday New York Times puzzle, for the first time ever.
But the agent ignored the crossword, turning the paper sideways to read a line I’d scribbled in the margin: “I know this is kind of a bomb.”
She pointed to the sentence, her finger resting on the word “bomb.” “What does this mean?” she demanded.
Suddenly a light went on in my head. I remembered the passenger on my left leaning forward in his seat as I scribbled while we waited for takeoff. Seconds later, he’d clambered hastily over me without apology to make his way to the front of the plane. I’d assumed intestinal complications, but now that I thought about it, he hadn’t used the bathroom. He’d spoken briefly with the flight attendants and returned to his seat. As the security woman looked at me, I now realized the passenger had been about as interested in my puzzling prowess as she was.
“I know this is kind of a bomb” is what I imagine Bucky, my main character, would say to Julie, his love interest, in the critical scene of my novel. I explained to the security woman that this is what happens when a 42-year-old man who is to literature what a karaoke singer is to opera tries to put words in the mouth of a fictional 19-year-old.
I opened my laptop and showed her shining example after shining example of similarly awful dialogue. She understood that that word, b-o-m-b, was no reference to ordnance or terrorist weapons of any kind.
But my explanation wasn’t good enough for the three Dallas police officers who meanwhile had surrounded me — summoned, I supposed, for backup in case the dangerous character tried to write something even worse.
One took my driver’s license to run a fruitless background check (the closest I ever came to being in trouble with the law was accepting a beer at age 17 from the teen-age daughter of the Nantucket Island police chief). A particularly hostile cop asked me a strangely menacing question: “So, how many books have you gotten made?” I started my usual backpedaling answer to that query, honed to perfection in the Dallas bar scene, but he cut me off: “That’s not what I asked.” I told him I must have misunderstood. He responded, “You’re a writer and you don’t understand my words?”
[…]
…the honcho gravely warned me that while I hadn’t crossed the line, I had walked right up to it. And for that I would be on Homeland Security’s watch list.
Have we all just gotten used to the idea of a “Homeland Security Watchlist?” Do we have even the vaguest clue about who might be on it and what criteria are used? Is this one of those times when sage law and order conservatives tell you that if you’re innocent you don’t have anything to worry about?
Here we have a situation in which some nosy asshole sitting in the seat next to you sees that you wrote the word “bomb,” and reports it. And some person in authority says that you’ve walked right up to a “line” you had no idea even existed and are now on a list which means that if anything ever happens again — you are overheard saying “jihad” or perhaps “fuck Bush” — and you are “questioned” again, you are already in the database as someone who is being watched.
Perhaps this doesn’t happen often. But there are other stories of little things happening that make me begin to have doubts about our ability to withstand this threat of terrorism. For instance, there was this story last month about a British journalist’s dealings with American authorities:
Somewhere in central Los Angeles, about 20 miles from LAX airport, there is a nondescript building housing a detention facility for foreigners who have violated US immigration and customs laws. I was driven there around 11pm on May 3, my hands painfully handcuffed behind my back as I sat crammed in one of several small, locked cages inside a security van. I saw glimpses of night-time urban LA through the metal bars as we drove, and shadowy figures of armed security officers when we arrived, two of whom took me inside. The handcuffs came off just before I was locked in a cell behind a thick glass wall and a heavy door. No bed, no chair, only two steel benches about a foot wide. There was a toilet in full view of anyone passing by, and of the video camera watching my every move. No pillow or blanket. A permanent fluorescent light and a television in one corner of the ceiling. It stayed on all night, tuned into a shopping channel.
After 10 minutes in the hot, barely breathable air, I panicked. I don’t suffer from claustrophobia, but this enclosure triggered it. There was no guard in sight and no way of calling for help. I banged on the door and the glass wall. A male security officer finally approached and gave the newly arrived detainee a disinterested look. Our shouting voices were barely audible through the thick door. “What do you want?” he yelled. I said I didn’t feel well. He walked away. I forced myself to calm down. I forced myself to use that toilet. I figured out a way of sleeping on the bench, on my side, for five minutes at a time, until the pain became unbearable, then resting in a sitting position and sleeping for another five minutes. I told myself it was for only one night.
As it turned out, I was to spend 26 hours in detention. My crime: I had flown in earlier that day to research an innocuous freelance assignment for the Guardian, but did not have a journalist’s visa.
[…]
Finally, after much scurrying around by officers, I was invited into an office and asked if I needed anything before we began. I requested a glass of water, which the interrogating officer brought me himself. He was a gentle, intelligent interrogator: the interview lasted several hours and consisted of a complete appraisal of my life, past and present, personal and professional. He needed information as diverse as my parents’ names, the fee I would be paid for the article I was working on, what it was about, exactly, and, again, the names of people I was coming to interview. My biography was a confusing issue – I was born in one country, had lived in many others: who was I, exactly? For US immigration, my British passport was not enough of an identity. The officer said, pointedly, “You are Russian, yet you claim to be British”, an accusation based on the fact that I was born in Moscow (though I never lived there). Your governor, went my mental reply, is Austrian, yet he claims to be American. After about three hours, during which I tried hard to fight jetlag and stay alert, we had produced several pages that were supposed to provide the invisible person in charge with enough material to say yes or no to my request to be allowed entry. My interrogator asked one last obligatory question, “Do you understand?”
“Yes, I understand,” I sighed, and signed the form. The instant faxed response was an official, final refusal to enter the US for not having the appropriate visa. I’d have to go back to London to apply for it.
At this moment, the absurd but almost friendly banter between these men and myself underwent a sudden transformation. Their tone hardened as they said that their “rules” demanded that they now search my luggage. Before I could approach to observe them doing this, the officer who had originally referred me to his supervisor was unzipping my suitcase and rummaging inside. For the first time, I raised my voice: “How dare you touch my private things?”
“How dare you treat an American officer with disrespect?” he shouted back, indignantly. “Believe me, we have treated you with much more respect than other people. You should go to places like Iran, you’d see a big difference.” The irony is that it is only “countries like Iran” (for example, Cuba, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe) that have a visa requirement for journalists. It is unheard of in open societies, and, in spite of now being enforced in the US, is still so obscure that most journalists are not familiar with it. Thirteen foreign journalists were detained and deported from the US last year, 12 of them from LAX.
After my luggage search, the officer took some mugshots of me, then proceeded to fingerprint me.
Keep in mind, this was last month, not November 2001.
OK, maybe it’s silly for me to get so white hot, angry when I read these stories. It’s just one female journalist and she was in technical violation. It was only a misunderstanding about the word “bomb” written on a newspaper. Perhaps these are isolated cases. That petty bureaucrats use language that is remarkably similar to that used by our president and his political allies in comparing the wonderful treatment under our police state as compared with that under really awful police states is surely just a rhetorical coincidence.
But, after seeing the Justice Department issue opinions that the president has unlimited powers in wartime and that anything, including torture, is justified to “defend the homeland” it doesn’t really seem so silly after all. The stories begin to accumulate, each one a random intrusion by dumb, underqualified government authorities who seem to have watched too much television and have very little common sense.
If this keeps up, sooner or later we will all end up, in one way or another, on the “Homeland Security Watchlist” where anyone from a professional rival to a vengeful neighbor can be the instrument of terror in a way that bin Laden and gang can only envy. In fact, these little people with too much power scare me a hundred times more than the Islamic terrorists. The threat that lives among us is ourselves.
Kerry/Edwards — It’s Got A Ring To It
I’m busy today, so I won’t be able to post much, but I did want to weigh in and say how glad I am that Kerry picked Edwards. It was the obvious choice and Kerry handled the mediakids’ anticipatory meltdown like the political pro he is. This is a good ticket — and we know it’s a good ticket by the fevered, hysterical reaction of the GOP. (And whoever duped the Post deserves to be put in the Democratic Hall of Fame.)
Last year right around this time, before the Dean phenomenon took off and before my choice, Wes Clark, entered the race, I posted a piece about John Edwards. When I went back to read it, I was a little bit surprised at how much he impressed me and I was reminded of what I liked about him. If it hadn’t been for the fact that Crusader Codpiece was being hailed as a Warrior King by every press tart from CNN to The National Enquirer, I would have easily supported his candidacy. He is very, very good.
So, in the spirit of welcoming John Edwards to the ticket without reservation, I’m republishing my thoughts about him of a year ago:
6/22/03
“Equal opportunity for all, special privileges for none.”
I just read something that blew the top of my head off and has me reeling with appreciation and awe. Maybe everybody in Blogovia has already discussed John Edwards speech of last week, but I just got to it.
This is the single most creative re- framing of issues I’ve seen in many a year. In fact, it is so audacious, it might just work.
Do you want to see a wing nut’s head spin around like Linda Blair’s in the Exorcist? Try comparing Bush’s economic policies to socialism:
This is the most radical and dangerous economic theory to hit our shores since socialism a century ago. Like socialism, it corrupts the very nature of our democracy and our free enterprise tradition. It is not a plan to grow the American economy. It is a plan to corrupt the American economy.”
Damn. That is just beautiful.
Edwards gets it. It’s about changing the Left/Right paradigm and putting the Republicans off balance, without moving further to the right. This is new and it has the potential to seriously shake up the dynamic, particularly if the economy continues to sputter. This is just great — a truly new way of coming at the Republicans, using all of their patented propaganda tags against them. It’s awfully smart and I would hope that every Dem candidate keeps this in the back of his mind.
I’m not signing on to any particular campaign this early in the race. But, I think the Democratic candidates are all good people and I wouldn’t be unhappy with any of them (although Lieberman, with his moralizing and religiosity, would be very hard to take.) I am partial to Clark because I think he neutralizes a potent issue for the GOP, has a great Q rating and it would be nice to catch a fucking break like that for once. Earlier, I mentioned that Dean has a fiesty attitude that I find refreshing and inspirational and John Kerry is a good man with a fine mind and a lifetime of experience to prepare him for the job.
But, Edwards is the natural of the bunch. He’s the one who has the talent to really communicate with average Americans and get them to recognize that the Republican Party does not have their best interest at heart. Like Clinton, he is very, very good at explaining complicated issues in understandable terms without being condescending. 20 years as a litigator will do that, and from all reports he was an extremely effective advocate before a jury.
Our economy, our people, and our nation have been undermined by the crony capitalists who believe that success is all about working the angles, working the phones, and rigging the game, instead of hard work, innovation and frugality.And these manipulators find comfort in an Administration which, through its own example, seems to embrace that ethic.
We will never turn this country around until we put our economy and our government back in line with our values.”
[…]
It’s time for a new approach that trusts people to make the most of their own lives and gives them the chance to do so. It’s time to stop emboldening entrenched interests and start empowering regular people. Above all, it’s time to end the failed conservative experiment and return to the idea that made this country great: Instead of helping wealthy people protect their wealth, we should help working people build their wealth.”
The President and I agree on one thing: this campaign should be a debate about values. We need to have that debate, because the values of this president and this administration are not the values of mainstream America, the values all of us grew up with – opportunity, responsibility, hard work.
There’s a fundamental difference between his vision and mine. I believe America should value work. He only values wealth. He wants the people who own the most to get more. I want to make sure everybody has the chance to be an owner.
That is progressivism turned inside out. PoMo populism. As with the flag and God, the smart Democrat (and the one who will beat Bush) will take those “bedrock American” advertising symbols and use the patented GOP rhetorical stylebook to his own purposes, because whether we like it or not, that stylebook defines political speech in this era so we’d better start finding ways to use it to our own ends.
(And, through this whole speech he very subtly digs at Bush’s pedigreed sense of privilege. Junior is a spoiled little fucker and although nobody wants to admit it, it’s something everybody knows. Maybe in 2000 when everybody asumed that they too were going to be rich and privileged, it didn’t matter so much. It could have a little more relevence this time around.)
Look at the choices they make: They have driven up the share of the tax burden for most working people, and driven down the burden on the richest few. They got rid of even the smallest tax on even the largest inheritances on earth. This past month, in a $350 billion bonanza of tax cuts on wealth, they couldn’t find $3.5 billion to give the child tax credit to poor people who work. Listen to this: They refused to cut taxes for the children of 250,000 American soldiers who are risking their lives for us in Iraq, so they could cut dividend and capital gains taxes for millionaires who were selling stocks short until the war was over.
[…]
It is wrong to reward those who don’t have to work at the expense of those who do. If we want America to be a growing, thriving democracy, with the greatest work ethic and the strongest middle class on earth, we must choose a different path.
If Junior ever had to debate a trial lawyer like John Edwards, he wouldn’t stand a chance trying to defend himself against a charge like that. What in the hell can any Republican say to that argument? They’ll scream class warfare, but in light of the charges it starts to sound like sniveling defensiveness. They really have gone to far and all it will take is for somebody to find the right way to educate the American people about what has been done to them.
Third, I will cut taxes to encourage savings and wealth creation for the middle class and working poor, not take away their tax cuts. I believe ordinary Americans are taxed too much, not too little. As a direct result of this President’s policies, all across this country people are seeing their property taxes, their sales taxes, their state and local income taxes, and their college tuition bills go up. Now some in my party want to take away their federal income tax cuts, too. That’s wrong. The answer to Republicans who have made middle-class incomes and nest eggs go down should not be Democrats who make middle-class taxes go up.
I know this President wants to make the next election about taxes. That’s why I’m going to tell America the whole story: “This president is the reason your taxes are going up. I’m going to cut them.”
Woah Nelly. Walter Mondale, take a look in the funhouse mirror. He’s saying that Bush is making taxes go UP for ordinary Americans. That is brilliant. Paula Zahn will pop a vein trying to wrap her mind around that concept. It’s also true, of course, but rather than get into some long winded discussion of tax rates and the state budget crisis’ Edwards just says bluntly, “Bush is making your taxes go up. I’m going to cut them.”
Eat shit Grover.
I care deeply about this, because it’s the reason I’m standing here. My dad worked his whole life in the mill. When I was young, my mom folded sheets on the second shift. Both my parents started out with nothing, except a blessing that was worth more than diamonds and gold – the chance to live in a country whose dream belongs to anyone willing to work for it.A country where the sweat and toil of mill workers can give a boy the chance to one day run for President is a far different place than a country that says how you’re born, not how hard your work, is all that matters. I owe everything I am to the America I grew up in. I hope you’ll join with me and fight with all we’ve got to save it.
The fucking American dream, baby. The immigrant, the working stiff, the self-made man putting in the hours and sweating the blood so that his kids can have a better life. Being the first in your family to go to college and going on to become one of the most successful lawyers in the country, a US Senator and a presidential candidate. It’s not quite as inspiring as a rich, alcoholic playboy sobering up at 40 and allowing his daddy’s rich friends to buy him a codpiece so he can eliminate the inheritance tax for himself, but it might have a chance.
This is a very interesting direction that Edwards is going. There is some salience to the shame factor among the rich, as well. I happened to listen to a group of Republican ladies discussing politics the other day (don’t ask), and they were quite uncomfortable with the idea that their leaders were saying that poor people shouldn’t get tax cuts and particularly the fact that some were left out of the recent tax cut bill. One of the gals said, “That’s really not right. It makes me feel embarrassed.”
I wish that we didn’t have to use rhetoric of religion, values and tax cuts. It’s tiring to hear it. But, we do. It’s what people’s ears are trained to hear in this era. And, there is no use pretending that reversing Bush’s tax cuts is going to be a simple matter even if we win the presidency. It makes sense to begin laying the groundwork, however, for reversing the outrageous tax cuts on the rich, which will have to be done. This is a very effective way of beginning to make that case.
And, Edwards is using some language that I think has been too long neglected by Democrats and speaks to something that is an undercurrent of discomfort amongst average Americans who don’t follow politics in great detail — the oddly unamerican nature of our current leaders relationship to wealth and power.
“Here in Washington, we like to think we’re important. But what’s great about America is that whether you’re a senator or a bus driver doesn’t make you a better person. You just have different jobs. America is not a nation of kings and commoners, masters and servants. We’re a nation where every person has equal value, every dream deserves an equal chance, and every soul should be as equal in the law of the land as it is in the eyes of God.”
That’s a Democrat talking, there, and everybody knows it.
Bush can spout bullshit like “soft bigotry of low expectations” and “I care about the working people”, but every poll shows that most most Americans do not believe he cares about or understands people like them. There’s power in this message. It’s worth keeping an eye on.
Don’t Tread On Me
“If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”
Samuel Adams
Ye olde civil discourse in action.
I’ve always loved the Fourth of July. It’s not just because it’s in the middle of summer and fireworks and picnics are fun, although those are good reasons. It’s because I’ve always loved the feelings that American patriotism at its best inspires. Phrases like “all men are created equal” and words like “liberty” are concepts that run deeply in my American soul.
It makes me sick to see those words turned into cheap advertising slogans by people who believe in exactly the opposite, but it has ever been thus. Those words are emotional words, they make you feel things, and good advertising men know that’s a key to making a sale. So, I understand. But, I still hate it.
As a Democrat I fall into the liberal category more than the progressive, I’m afraid, although I’m comfortable in each of those camps. I do believe that society needs government for more than defense, policing and contract disputes and I don’t have a strong emotional attachment to property rights above all else. Reasonable taxation seems like common sense to me and certain necessary functions don’t seem to respond well to the market, so I’m not a libertarian.
But, I am a liberal in much of the classical sense. I have a visceral mistrust of power so intense that all intrusions against civil liberties and individual rights are suspect in my mind until proven otherwise. The idea of innocent men being imprisoned with no due process, people being unable to marry who they choose or have dominion over their own bodies, censorship, forced religion and any other use of power against individuals is something that I believes requires a huge amount of deliberation, debate and thought before it should ever be implemented in the name of security, community or anything else. Indeed, in my mind, humans are such unreliable and incompetent creatures that it’s best if we just don’t go there at all.
It’s a strange form of democracy we have because of its dual purpose of fulfilling the desire of the majority while protecting the rights of the minority. It creates a tension between the two pillars of the American system: freedom and equality. We are always measuring our progress between those two poles and it’s never easy. But, to be an American is to hold both of those ideas as ideal. Indeed, America will cease to be America if we don’t.
I have never agreed with this manifest destiny, American exceptionalism crapola. We come up so short, so often, within our own country that it is folly of the highest order to believe that we have a right to evangelize to the rest of the world. But, that doesn’t mean that we haven’t got something fine going here that deserves to be preserved, defended and respected.
There are many reasons to love our country, of course. But, most importantly, I think, it’s that it is the repository of a bunch of great ideas about those words that move me so much — freedom, equality, inalienable human rights. We are very far from achieving the perfection of those ideas, and we do have a bad habit of being most disappointingly willing to toss these concepts aside when it suits us. But, for the most part, we still manage to go one step forward for every two steps back and that’s worth a lot.
If you have a chance today, read the Bill of Rights. It’s our single greatest political contribution to the advancement of mankind.
Happy Fourth of July, my fellow imperfect Americans.