A Big Failure

A Small Victory - Nothing to Fear

I won't leave public comments on Michele's site or even ping it, because it bugs me enough when people who obviously don't regularly read my site leave comments that bug me and the readers--it's tres tacky.

But I will address this post here, and I'll start off by calling the woman dishonest.

Fear is exactly what Republicans are running on--while Kennedy wasn't exactly being statesmanlike when he co-opted FDR's words, Michele didn't invoke 9/11 just to discredit Kennedy. She contradicts FDR completely. "No," she's saying, "we have a lot to fear. Fear it."

And it's bullshit. We can't live our lives based on fear so intense that it leads us to make irrational decisions (like, say, voting for someone who isn't doing anything much to improve national security just because he's a Republican).

One choice quote:

Republicans also believe in a "true enemy." No, we have a range of enemies, from suicide bombers to dictators to corrupt CEOs. And all of them have their own motivations and agendas (sometimes complementary, sometimes in conflict) that we have to try to understand--the answer does not boil neatly down to "kill." The answer involves keeping up good relations with our allies, trying to help oppressed people (not by bombing them when they already don't trust us) so they learn to love America and love democracy, being able to tell which threats are so imminent to require military action and which would be better left to diplomacy, and not leaving more messes behind than were already there.

The answer is also not to confuse political rhetoric with declarations of war. Michele thinks that Kennedy has called Bush the enemy. What line is she referring to?

"The only thing we have to fear is four more years of George W. Bush!"

In other words, we have to fear (a) incompetence, (b) intolerance, (c) disregard for precedents that have served us well, (d) regressive tax policies, (e) blah blah blah. Did he say "enemy?" "War?" What quote did he allude to? FDR's line about the Depression. People were afraid, but it wasn't of an enemy--it was a general fear that American life would never improve. Doesn't sound like an unreasonable comment to me, and that Michele would cite it in the face of countless examples of Republicans using words like "traitor" is an unbelievable act of hypocrisy.

I increasingly think that Republicans are genetically incapable of understanding that complex problems have complex solutions. Or maybe they aren't: I have a well-to-do friend who says he hates Bush, more than ever after he endorsed the FMA, but will vote for him because he likes having low income taxes. (Hmm--wonder how well Michele is doing these days?) And, of course, it took a lot of thought to come to the conclusion that someone outside the administration should investigate how 9/11 was allowed to happen in the first place.

This makes me unbelievably angry. How dare she. How dare they. 9/11 is sacrosanct. It is not the property of those who want to make war on the whole world. And I will not be afraid because some little nitwit with an inexplicably popular weblog tells me I have to be.

But if I were to be afraid, I can think of a good reason: George Bush has paid little attention to improving homeland security beyond agreeing to the Democratic demand to form a department for that purpose. He's refused to provide the funding to fully secure our ports, or address security holes near nuclear power plants, or provide funding to safeguard airplanes against shoulder-mounted missle launchers, or any of a zillion little things that would really make us a lot safer. Our safety is not this administration's priority--and that's the dirty little secret that the warbloggers are, for some insane reason, refusing to acknowledge.

Have your fun, Michele. We are going to win, if for no other reason than we are so determined that you should lose.