opinion

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What Democrats and Republicans are saying about the Iraq War
N. Jackson, Court battles loom over military tribunals
E. Jackson, Driving scoundrels from their last refuge
Stimson, A nation of swine?
Weisbrot, Ecuador on the cusp of change?
Carpio, Canal expansion from a Caribbean perspective
Amnesty International, A call to bloggers to stand up for freedom
Leis, Defenseless citizens or a vigilant citizenry?

Bernal, It doesn't matter to them

Driving them from their last refuge

by Eric Jackson

If, as James Boswell reported that Samuel Johnson said, "patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel," it can nevertheless be a strongly defended lair.

Generally you can distinguish a scoundrel's patriotism from the genuine article by reference to the traditions of the nation in which the scoundrel operates. Usually the scoundrel grabs ahold of traditional symbols and uses them as a screen behind which he or she attacks traditional values and ways of life.

Hitler called up the willfully ignorant lynch mob within a highly civilized and well educated German nation and called it patriotism.

Joe McCarthy masqueraded as a war hero while smearing the US Army when it was at the height of its prestige because it had drafted his vicious legal counsel Roy Cohn's homosexual lover.

Richard Nixon attacked the much venerated US Constitution while wearing an American flag lapel pin.

Augusto Pinochet, pretending to be the savior of his nation, brutalized Chile and, as we are now learning in ever greater detail, looted it.

Najibullah, pretending that it was a defense of his fiercely independent if fractious Afghan nation, "invited" the Soviet Red Army to invade his country.

Osama bin Laden, wrapping himself in the green of Islam, leads a movement that kills Muslims more than anyone else and systematically violates such strictures found in the Quran and hadiths as toleration of Jews and Christians, leaving it to Allah to settle religious disputes, the inviolability of diplomats and so on.

And George W. Bush, complaining that the enemies of the United States act the way they do because they can't tolerate American freedom, has for some years now been dismantling American freedoms at home and swelling the ranks of Osama's jihadis abroad.

Are you an American who objects to this? Then you are branded by the ruling Republicans as some sort of traitor, and probably queer to boot. Your patriotism, your ethics, your religion and your sanity are called into question. If you are a military veteran, your service to the country is denigrated and defamed.

The party of Mr. Abramoff and Mr. Reid, the backslid Orthodox Jew and faux born-again Christian respectively --- men who while feigning piety took money from casinos to rile up gullible Christians to attack rival casinos --- is in trouble this year.

The party that claims to defend American freedom but has by statute attempted to abolish the right of habeas corpus and legalize torture is now seen by most Americans as a failure in Iraq and in dealing with the likes of Osama bin Laden.

The self-proclaimed super-patriots who have led America to defeat in Iraq will themselves experience the sting of defeat in a more personal way. Some of them will lose their elected offices, probably enough of them so that their party loses control of one or both houses of Congress. Should that come to pass a major share of power and many of the plums of political patronage will also be lost.

However, Bush will still be president, GOP appointees will still dominate the federal courts and a whole lot of people who have been brainwashed into equating "Democrat" with "unpatriotic" will still be out and about in the USA and among Americans abroad. American students will still be taught from textbooks effectively censored by the religious right members of the Texas Schoolbooks Commission. The corporations that financed the Republicans' rise to power and gutted America's industrial might will still hold the levers of "globalization" and the think tanks that spun the Bush administration's arguments will continue to set the tone of national and international discourse.

The scoundrels will only be driven from their well defended last refuge by clear and attractive alternatives. The Democrats may well gain ground in an off-year election marked by defeat in Iraq and incompetence in the wake of Hurricane Katrina by simply running on a "we're not them" platform. However, without an alternative to the surrender of American industrial power, without a new foreign policy to restore American leadership in the eyes of people around the world, without a more powerful and honored role for working men and women in politics and society, without a strong and positive restatement of the concept of common human decency as an alternative to pseudo-religious hypocrisy, the defenses that the scoundrels have thrown up around their last bastion will probably hold.

What Democrats and Republicans are saying about the Iraq War
N. Jackson, Court battles loom over military tribunals
E. Jackson, Driving scoundrels from their last refuge
Stimson, A nation of swine?
Weisbrot, Ecuador on the cusp of change?
Carpio, Canal expansion from a Caribbean perspective
Amnesty International, A call to bloggers to stand up for freedom
Leis, Defenseless citizens or a vigilant citizenry?

Bernal, It doesn't matter to them