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Monday, November 16, 2009

Wingnuts just LOVE terrorism
Posted by Jill | 7:25 PM
I don't know what it is about the extreme right and terrorism. I don't know what the feargasm is that they get when they can be really shit-your-pants terrified of Scary Brown Men with Boxcutters.

We're seeing it in New York City, where millions of people are going to work every day, and have been for the last eight years, even walking past Ground Zero every day, while Senators and Congresscritters from red states have made hay over the last eight years whipping their constuents into a frenzy about Scary Brown Men bombing the local Wal-Mart. Here in the New York area, we don't have the luxury of fear. We have to just go about our business.

A funny thing happened after the September 11 attacks. Americans talked tough, especially the bantam rooster-in-chief, about "dead or alive", or "turning their sand into glass." But it wasn't about toughness, it was about fear. We were a nation that had experienced (or viewed on television) something unthinkable, and rather than rally around the documents and laws that have kept us strong for over 200 years, we en masse reverted to the very same lawlessness that the right wing uses to characterize the Middle East.

In right-wing America, fear = strength and respect = weakness. This is why you have people like Karl Rove referring to Barack Obama bowing to the Japanese Emperor as "a gesture of weakness." Of course to people like Karl Rove, respect = weakness. Because after all, look how far the bellicosity of the Bush years got us -- by the time Bush left office, the entire world hated America because we were fool enough to let George Bush and Dick Cheney lead our country for eight years. If Obama bowed perhaps more than was necessary just to show respect (and I would say that a very tall man bowing that deeply to a very short man isn't beyond the pale at all), after the last eight years, perhaps it's warranted.

But there is nothing that the right-wing wants more than another major terrorist attack on our soil. Glenn Beck talks about returning this country to how it was on 9/12, and it's not about good will and helping out. It's about fear -- that blind, shit-your-pants fear that gives the right so much comfort. How fear makes them feel more secure, I have no idea. Perhaps someone can enlighten me how fear = strength while respect = weakness, and how hoping for a terrorist attack is somehow patriotic.

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Anonymous Anonymous said...
The repugs, after being caught on the wrong side of the debate prior to WW2, have embraced every enemy since.

Don't they know that onanism is a sin? It puts a different perspective of Poga's immortal quote: "We have met the enemy..."

Shirt
11/16/09, 11:16 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...
Hi, Jill,

I read your blog frequently, though I've posted only once in several years. Today, I couldn't stay silent, and had to steal some time away from the work that I had to take home from the office tonight, had to stop for a few minutes and let you know that this sentence is the most succinct, spot-on, and (it might sound corny, but here goes) American analysis of our post-9/11 society that I've yet read:
"We were a nation that had experienced (or viewed on television) something unthinkable, and rather than rally around the documents and laws that have kept us strong for over 200 years, we en masse reverted to the very same lawlessness that the right wing uses to characterize the Middle East."
I also have to say that I had the same thoughts about the bow to the Japanese emperor. When did respect toward other people and their customs become weakness? It never has and never will, though there will always be people who are able to convince the boorish, the rowdy, and the ignorant that the contrary is the case.
Thank you.
11/16/09, 11:36 PM  
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