Can Americans actually learn to accept reality? [icopyright one button toolbar]
I think we know the answer to that. Many Americans want life to resemble a movie. Tell us a story! We want bombs bursting in air (preferably on Fox), winners, losers, heroes, villains, great endings, satisfactory solutions.
So what’s with this Obumble business of political and military coitus interruptus? Just airstrikes? Saving some civilians’ lives but not standing on the carrier deck, sock jammed in crotch, massive flag in the background, claiming victory?
Whether or not the public will accept this remains to be seen. But we do know that Republicans are not prepared to accept it. Many of them plainly hunger for glorious military crusades, where we sweep in with all those fancy toys we spend hundreds of billions on every year, and save the day to the cheers of the oppressed populace. This was the spirit that animated the Bush years, when the same people now criticizing Obama were convinced that we’d be “greeted as liberators” in Iraq, then quickly set up a thriving and peaceful state that would spread the light of democracy throughout the region.
The fact that they were so spectacularly wrong about that, and the result was so much death and chaos, doesn’t seem to have diminished their desire for that glory, nor their faith in the ability of American military power to solve problems anywhere and everywhere. Whatever course Obama chooses, in this and every conflict, their position is always the same: we need more. More force, more bombing, more toughness is always the answer. …Waldman,WaPo
And we wonder where our honor and money were tossed, where America’s self respect went missing.
Well, we’ll never know about all the money that couldn’t be traced. ($20 billion — remember? — in one plane, in cash!). But the honor and self-respect were dribbled away over the years by a pretty big group on the political and corporate right who have little or no use for reality. By the time George W. Bush and Dick Cheney got dug in, they were saying — quite openly — that they would tell us what reality was and we’d better listen. There’s nothing like “terrorism,” WMD’s, all-out warfare, torture, and the Patriot Act to shut up an entire nation.
Oh, well. It made quite a few large corporations very, very rich and kept some Americans quite happy when they got their monthly investment statements. Money, in the end, is a great substitute for freedom and reality. I guess.
Cross-posted from Prairie Weather
graphic via shutterstock.com