Jingoism v. the Rational

Jonathan Turley is a law professor at George Washington University and is about as strict constitutionalist as can be found in public discourse today. I read his blog regularly, even though it has mostly deteriorated into meaningless trivia, because he still has pieces from time to time about the ongoing shredding of the constitution by all branches of our government and the efforts by him and by others to prevent that.

He can also be a bit of a jingoistic pain in the ass, for instance beginning his Independence Day post yesterday with, ”This holiday has particular meaning for many of us as we fight those who wish to destroy liberty and to terrorize people into submission.”

For one thing, he isn’t fighting terrorism even at a keyboard, let alone on any field of battle, so his “we fight those who, blah blah blah” was a little bit hyperbolic.

I responded with a comment,

Yeah, right, “They hate us for our freedoms.” They do not wish to destroy freedom and they don’t care about our submission. They are fighting to get us to take our boot off their necks. They want our armed forces out of their countries. They want to stop the terror drones from killing them and their families without warning.

If somebody was raining Hellfire missiles down on Phoenix and Denver at the rate of several a week and killing more than a thousand of our wives and children per year, how would we react?

Their terrorist attacks are not by any means righteous, but neither are ours, and self-righteous posturing is not contributing to the solution.

Interestingly, of the many comments not one was critical of what I had to say, and no few of them specifically agreed with me. One even went so far as to say, “Thank you for summarizing my thoughts.”

There is still rational thought in this nation after all.