Monday, August 05, 2013

Irrational Discourse

I don’t hold a lot of truck with today’s Republican Party but, as those who read my work regularly know, I don’t spend waste any of my time and energy bashing them either. I have not voted for any of them lately, do not consider myself part of them, and I don’t think I bear any responsibility for whatever power they hold in governance.

I do pay attention to the policies and actions of Democrats because that’s how I have been voting until recently, I helped put them in office, and I am in part responsible for them being in office. To a large degree, I regret that.

Most Democrats do not focus on what their party is doing, but spend an enormous amount of energy declaiming on the evils of the opposition; writing at great length about not only how evil Republicans are, but about how crazy they are, how little contact they have with reality and what a total disaster it will be for the nation if they were to achieve a position of power.

Republicans may not be entirely rational, but Democrats have become utterly insane on the subject of how evil and insane Republicans are. I think that many of them may actually believe that Republicans invented AIDS and the Bubonic Plague. Paul Krugman actually wrote recently that “the madness of the GOP is the central issue of our time.”

Really? It’s not Republicans who are telling us that we are fighting in Afghanistan in order to “deny them space in which to plan their attacks.” It’s not a Republican administration which is executing American citizens without due process of law and defending their actions in court by claiming that executive review is “due process.”

Several writers have claimed that the current closing of embassies is a political ploy to distract the public from recent disclosures of the Democratic administration’s violations of our constitution, but Juan Cole at Informed Comment claims today that the blame for this alarm actually lies with the Republican Party.

After condemning the embassy closures as being harmful both to this nations image and its mission, which I think he exaggerates rather significantly, he then says that, “…the GOP is inadvertently pushing the US into a posture of dangerous diplomatic weakness.” The weakness is displayed, he claims, by the “unprecedented closing of 21 US embassies in the Middle East,” reportedly due to a “vague terrorist threat.”

“The Obama administration most likely took this weird step to insulate itself from any further witch hunts of the sort the Republicans launched over the tragic attack on a CIA safe house doubling as a US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2011.”

That’s an interesting piece of mind reading, but how he can say this and think that he is insulting Republicans rather than describing a craven and utterly feckless Democratic administration escapes me. This, though, is the sort of thing that Democrats do these days. Whatever the government does, it’s the fault of Republicans, and they don’t even think about the words that are coming out of their mouths.

First, it’s the Democratic administration that shut down the embassies due to a “vague terrorist threat,” not the Republicans and, second, if they did it out of fear of what their opposition might do, then that is an act of almost unbelievable cowardice on the part of Cole’s precious Democratic administration. Does he not get that?

Cole says that he “can’t rule out” that the Obama is “playing that kind of politics,” that is to say that the embassy closings are being used as a distraction from the administration’s abrogation of the fourth amendment to the constitution, but he closes with his conclusion that “I think the story is a different and sadder one.”

“The Republican Party is now so Raptor-like that it is preventing an entire Department, the one first headed by Thomas Jefferson, from doing its job at a time of turmoil and danger in a strategic part of the world.”

If Eisenhower had reacted to the German army the way that Juan Cole thinks that Obama is reacting to the Republican Party, we would never have invaded Europe and would have lost World War Two. Cole’s assessment is a remarkable and utterly riduculous insult to the Obama administration and is about the silliest thing that I have read in a long time.

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