Wahabists = Ku Klux Klergy
Some excellent thoughts today from David Neiwert on his site, regarding the need for Democrats to re-define the war on terrorism and shatter the current dialectic that allows Republicans to "own" the issue and successfully hijack any attempt at meaningful reform:The key to winning any war, whether amorphous, cold, or real, is contingent on one's ability to objectively assess the facts on the ground. When your assessments are constantly twisted by politics, ideology, and public relations, you lose that ability. The Bush "war on terror" is doomed to fail because it has made itself ideologically incapable of recognizing the real nature of terrorism itself....
Some preventative measures are also fairly obvious from the asymmetrical nature of the threat. One of these is a real tightening of our borders and particularly our ports, which remain vulnerable to a scenario under which terrorists place bombs in an uninspected container.....
The problem has been an utter lack of vision from the current Democratic leadership, and progressive leadership generally, including folks like Beinart, Drum, and the TNR. They have bought too readily into the right-wing paradigm of what a war on terror should be about....
Since American fundamentalism is primarily associated with the mainstream right, it probably shouldn't surprise anyone that the Bush administration has assiduously refused to frame the modern terrorist threat (including, notably, Al Qaeda) as primarily a right-wing phenomenon -- even though that is clearly what it is. And the ever-timid "moderate" leadership of the Democratic Party has been too polite to point it out.
Two hundred billion dollars later, we are no safer than we were on September 10, and the Democratic leadership has done little but rubber stamp the Bush administration's "culture of arrogane that flaunts international law" (thank you Steven Colbert). I'll cast my vote right now: Howard Dean for chief cage rattler and clock cleaner at the DNC.
Read more here.
posted by Jane Hamsher @ 12/08/2004 09:46:00 AM
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