In talking up John McCain tonight, the sitting President of the United States said that if the Hanoi Hilton couldn’t “break” John McCain, the “angry left never will.”
Of all the enemies our president could have chosen, of all the external enemies he has fought so hard to convince us we have during his War on Terror, when the moment came to pick the biggest one he could think of, he chose none of them. Instead, he pointed his finger at his own countrymen. He even called them a name.
We live in a time when even our president has forgotten himself, when the biggest threat he can imagine isn’t the radicalized Islam he has been railing about for 7 years; isn’t the economic crisis that our expensive foreign wars, overdrawn Soc. Sec., deficit spending, and housing slump foretell; isn’t the reliance on foreign energy resources that got us into this mess; and isn’t the climate change that—manmade or not—is happening and is having a very real effect on us. No, the biggest threat he could think to name was that another political party might score a victory at home.
The most strategic leader on the planet takes advantage of a national audience to stick his finger in his fellow countrymens’ eyes? He takes advantage of an opportunity to challenge Americans to elect the man he believes can solve the tough issues to give a figurative poke to the guy across the aisle?
God help us!
What you’re reading isn’t partisan. It’s disgust. And disappointment, and hurt, and concern, and a host of other bad feelings.
It’s not about the issues anymore, it’s about power, pure and simple, and Bush’s message tonight, in a very subtle yet very profound way, made it clear that at the highest level, our leaders are no longer pretending that it’s about anything else.
If you want to talk about issues, I can make it real simple: name the country in which the ruling party wants to: cement the relationship between religion and politics; ban books; control the media; impose religious-based social restrictions on citizens; hold prisoners without cause and without due justice; set up puppet governments elsewhere in a sort of faux colonialism; eliminate personal freedoms in the name of national security; and eliminate the opposing political party? Your choices are Russia, Iran, Zimbabwe, the USA.
The answer, of course, is the USA. You may actually have needed to think for a moment before figuring that out. That’s a heck of a group to be thrown into, huh?!
Bush’s comment provided an unintentionally open window into what drives him, and what I saw was disturbing. This whole race is disturbing… as was the last presidential race, the one before that, and so on back, through the Clinton’s to Willy Horton and even further back to before my time. Obama is no white knight; he is an ambitious 1st time senator who is playing the same game.
They say “all politics is local.”
Maybe that’s because we’ve nothing beyond that to believe in right now.
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Wow. That is nothing short of brilliant. Outstanding…and thank you.