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Friday, March 05, 2010

Apparently Republican Public Pants-Peeing Is Such a Ferocious Tactic That It Can Make Democrats Cave on Public Trials for Suspected Terrorists

Everything the Republicans have squawked in whomping up their pet terror-panics about public civilian trials for suspected terrorists has been palpably false, hypocritical, and absolutely counterproductive. And everybody knows it.

And all their paranoid freakout ad-spots and cable-show fulminations on this topic have amounted to a dangerously destructive ongoing megaphoned mis-education of the American people as to the indispensable constituents of a secular civil society and the rule of law at a time when few Americans have the benefit of civics education anymore given the ruin of our defunded undefended schools, and so soak up their civics mostly from the high-hairdos on the tee vee at this point.

Given the fact that even mainstream (as it were) Republicans have taken on the coloration of the Teabaggers and burgeoning militias always at the edges of the American Right, their public repudiation of taxes (by the way, the yoking of taxation to representation is one of the reasons it is possible to keep governments accountable to their citizens, but hey, by all means opt instead for feudalism in your angry idiocy, Republicans), their distribution of weapons to whiny old white guys and their public pledges not to follow orders they dislike from public officials (by the way, the Founders these flag-wrapped phonies claim to venerate wanted a Republic of Laws and Not Men, but hey, by all means opt instead for gangland warlordism in your angry idiocy, Republicans), this means that what they are doing is also profoundly unpatriotic.

When Samuel Johnson warned us that handwaving patriots were indulging in "the last refuge of the scoundrel," and Wilde warned that their "patriotism is the virtue of the vicious" they weren't whistling Dixie. We all should have known -- and some of us did -- that these loudmouthed patriots were all just traitors waiting for their chance to destroy their country's definitive institutions or secede upon failing.

When I say that it is not only true that Republican protests about civilian trials are full of hypocrisies and falsehoods, but that everybody knows this is true, I do mean to say that both sides do indeed know all this to be the case, since so many of the Republicans now barking in the limelight made completely different arguments when their politics didn't entirely consist as it does now of calling President Obama an Islamocommienaziblackpantherkenyafascist, while of course the Democrats are palpably eye-rollingly disgusted by the nonsense these right-wing tools are spewing.

That, of course, is what makes the Democrats' willingness to cave on this issue in which they know themselves to be in the right and the Right to be both in the wrong and weak as well all the more appalling.

The Democrats know they are right and they know their opponents are not only wrong but shabbily cynical in this (an inherently weak argumentative position as it happens), and yet their ferocious fear of being accused of being "weak on terror" apparently is so damned epic that they prefer to literally be weak, they prefer to fold on their righteous convictions and sensible policies, and in a way that will of course look weak to everybody because it obviously is weak, thereby playing into and consolidating the very stereotypes they so fear and in a way that is fully deserved because their cowardice in this is literally harming the country's indispensable civic institutions by allowing the different deeper opportunistic cowardice of the Republicans to pass for strength to the cost of us all.

When Eric Holder declared last November that Americans "need not cower in the face of this enemy. Our institutions are strong, our infrastructure is sturdy, our resolve is firm, and our people are ready," he offered America a different version of strength than the bed-wetting panic-stricken playground-bully phony-cowboy lawlessness of the Bush Administration.

I'm not exactly a big fan of the whole USA as planetary heavy vision nor a law and order fetishist myself, but it is easy to see that the world is a safer and more secure place when grownups talk like Holder than when they talk like the Cheney family does. The liars, hypocrites, militarists, torture-enthusiasts, swinging dicks and pants-wetters are winning and literally everybody loses when they win.

This is a stupid, weak, nonsensical, frankly evil cave-in to the worst of the worst among us, and anybody who thinks this will pacify rather than hyperbolically embolden the right-wing authoritarian bully-brigade really needs to have their head examined.

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