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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: geode00 who wrote (65837)	11/3/2004 6:06:09 PM
From: J.B.C.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Please go play in traffic, the election is over. I gave sound advice to the left, learn or be a forgotten part of history. The election told you that Americans want to fight terrorism abroad not experience it here again. Your attempts at comparisons to 30's and 40's Germany are VERY thin. Jim ******* We have paid a steep price in Iraq, a thousand dead; but if you choose duty, you must choose to pay. Speaking for America, the president has said: We choose duty. What do we get in return? Nothing. Except the privilege of looking at ourselves in the mirror, and facing history and our children. <font color=green> Opposition to Bush's policy in Iraq goes even further than the Kitty Genovese defense.<font color=black> Its real nature finally came clear when I heard about an anti-Bush harangue by a survivor of Hitler's Germany. He was a young boy when he and his family got out, just in time. <font color=blue>"I hate Bush,"<font color=black> this man said--or words to that effect--<font color=blue>"because America today reminds me of Germany then. Bush is on his way to creating a fascist America."<font color=black> Other Bush-haters have said similar things. Notice (it is a thing we will have to explain) that this man hates Bush not because of but despite the facts. Has the Republican Congress decreed a U.S. version of the Nuremberg race laws? Has the administration transformed every American news source into a propaganda machine? Demanded that Jews (or anyone) be fired? That Jewish (or any other kind of) shops, businesses, professionals be boycotted? Propaganda posters everywhere? Students thrown out of schools? Secret police grabbing people off the streets? Children urged to inform on parents? All opposition parties banned? Churches harassed? A "Bush Youth" that every "Aryan" boy must join? Storm-troopers holding torchlight parades, singing hate-mongering war songs? Gigantic communal fines levied against Jews (or anyone else)? State-sponsored pogroms? Massive regimentation and rearmament? A führer cult and special schools to train disciples? Brutal suppression of all regime opponents? No? <font color=green> Actually America under Bush resembles NAZI Germany in no way whatsoever, isn't that so? Then why did you lie and say it did? <font color=black> One hears many similar accusations nowadays. The Bush administration is spending blood for oil, hopes to expand its imperialist reach, intends to dominate and oppress the Iraqi people, is the world's leading threat to peace. Hates Muslims, despises our allies, plans to suppress the Bill of Rights. <font color=green> There is a name for this kind of hatred--the kind that shrugs off reality, loves to mock its targets and treat them as barely human, capable of any outrage, unspeakably stupid and evil. There is a name for the kind of hatred that applies automatically to any member of a designated group--in this case to American conservatives and especially white, religious American conservatives. The name of this hatred is racism. <font color=black> We can't understand hatred like the German survivor's or Michael Moore's or a million self-righteous left-wingers' unless we understand that their Bush-hatred is racist hatred. <font color=green> "Race" <font color=black>has traditionally meant any group that seems like a group, with a recognizable group identity--Americans, British, Jews, Japanese were all called <font color=green>"races."<font color=black> The Oxford English Dictionary says that a <font color=green>"race"<font color=black> is (among other things) <font color=green>"a group or class of persons . . . having some common feature or features."<font color=black> Thus <font color=green>"the race of good men" (1580), "a race of idle people" (1611), "a new race of poets" (1875)<font color=black>. The newspaper humorist Don Marquis once wrote about <font color=green>"the royal race of hicks." <font color=black> Racist hatred has clearly recognizable characteristics: * The hater knows all about his target automatically; no research required. Recall how many leftists were shocked when Bob Woodward informed them, in his Bush book, that the president was an alert, hands-on manager. They had known this to be false a priori. * The hater harbors a stupendous conceit. Not long ago an Ivy League philosophy professor explained the political homogeneity of so many philosophy departments. Pure merit, he said; <font color=blue>you have to be smart to be a philosophy professor, and conservatives are dumb, so what can you expect<font color=black>? * The hater is moved by a terrible, frantic eagerness to set himself apart from <font color=blue>"them."<font color=black> In the spring of 2003, an American pop-singer announced to her London audience, <font color=blue>"Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas." <font color=black> * The hater just knows that his opponent acts not on principle but out of greed or stupidity. At an anti-Iraq war demonstration in March 2004, the actor Woody Harrelson read a poem. <font color=blue>"I recognize your face, I recognize your name. / Your daddy killed for oil, and you did the same."<font color=black> We often hear this <font color=blue>"blood for oil"<font color=black> accusation. After the first Gulf War we had Iraqi and Kuwaiti oilfields in our grasp. If our goal was to steal oil, why did we give them back? Are we that stupid? * The hater has no shame--because he knows (not by reason but automatically) that he is right. Thus a decent and likable retired businessman, rich and with every reason to be grateful to America--the survivor of NAZI Germany I've mentioned--accuses the president of closet fascism.