[Dean's World] Scott Kirwin: A Republican Goes Home: Terrorism and the Dems' Blind Spot

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Posted by Scott Kirwin:
A Republican Goes Home: Terrorism and the Dems' Blind Spot
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1183661097.shtml


   I've just returned from a brief trip to the ol' hometown of St. Louis.
   For the past three days I've been away from computers, Fox News, and
   other elements of my everyday life that I left behind to focus my
   attention on my elderly mother and my increasingly geriatric siblings.

   The visit went well. The faces were more deeply lined, the hair greyer
   and in the case of my 25 year old nephew: gone - and for the most part
   the family looked more prosperous than it had in the past.

   In fact signs of prosperity were much more common around the town than
   they were a few years ago. New office buildings had replaced strip
   malls. Shopping malls has replaced themselves - getting bigger and
   with better-heeled shops including one with the Wife-favorite
   Nordstrom. Roads had been widened and repaved. Bridges were being
   replaced. In many cases the roads themselves had been modernized to
   improve traffic flow to the point where their familiarity, bred during
   countless drives in my childhood and teenage years, was lost and I
   felt like a tourist in my own hometown.

   It was progress, and as I grow older I recognize that all progress
   isn't good. But I am happy to see it thriving.

   Of course, the prosperity I'm speaking of - and this is a critical
   point in a city with roots in the early 18th Century - was viewed from
   rent-a-car that was never less than 15 miles from the city's downtown.
   I spent the whole trip in the suburbs and "exurbs", with much of it
   spent in places that had been farmland just 20 years ago.

   I doubt that prosperity existed in areas within the city limits or to
   the impoverished sections to its north. However five years ago just
   after the recession of 2002, signs of prosperity were few and far
   between. The place is doing well - at least superficially. While it
   isn't one of [1]America's fastest growing cities like Henderson Nevada
   or Las Vegas, it seemed to be holding its own as the city crept into
   the 21st century.

   My 80+ year old mother is being cared for by my "favorite sister" - a
   public school teacher who somehow managed to always be there for me
   while I was growing up even as she traveled the world in her first
   career as a flight attendant. Her husband works for a manufacturing
   firm as an executive, and finds himself feeling pressured to quit
   before he is eligible for his pension - which he artfully resists. He
   has survived several rounds of downsizing and stubbornly clings on,
   biding his time until he can leave with dignity and a reward for the
   decades spent at a company that now views him as a "legacy cost."

   As happened a lot during my childhood, the talk turned to politics
   over a plate of spaghetti. My sister and her husband are both Michael
   Moore fans, and had just seen Sicko over the weekend. Aware that my
   politics was definitely in the minority around the dinner table, I
   nodded and agreed where I could.

   In fact I share much of their frustration with the inequities of the
   medical system, and believe that we need a national health care
   system. For me it not only makes economic sense but also strategic
   sense due to the threat of bioterrorism. I even kept my mouth shut
   during the Bush bashing that inevitably followed. After all, I can
   bash with the best of them; the President deserves to be criticized
   for a lot over the past 8 years (I still haven't forgiven him for the
   way his campaign ripped up John McCain in the primary state of South
   Carolina 7 years ago.) Add in his divisive leadership style - making
   his early campaign promise to be a 'uniter not a divider' a bitter
   joke - and there is plenty of solid issues to "bash" him about.

   They asked me if I had seen Sicko and I let it be known that I won't
   pay money to someone who compared the Iraqi insurgents to our
   country's Minutemen and produced one of the finest fascist propaganda
   films since Leni Riefenstahl showed German youth glowing with Aryan
   pride. That was the top of the Slippery Slope.

   Over the next half an hour I came out of the closet: I was, and
   continue to be, a card-carrying member of the Republican Party. They
   were stunned, and couldn't believe that someone who had voted for
   Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton x2 and Gore, could conceivably support the
   Republican Party and its de facto standard bearer, President George W.
   Bush.

   "What happened?" My sister asked incredulously.

   "9-11 happened," I answered honestly.

   I tried to detail - as best as I could after having dealt with
   America's dysfunctional air travel system earlier that day - that
   while I disagreed with Bush and the Republicans on many key issues
   including national health care, immigration, and trickle-down
   economics, I wholeheartedly supported the Global War on Terrorism. "If
   we're dead, all that offer stuff simply doesn't matter," I think I
   said.

   What I can best characterize as a stream of liberal half-truths and
   conspiracy theories mixed with the thoughts of intelligent and
   experienced people followed. Vietnam references. The flight of the Bin
   Laden family out of the US immediately after 9-11. The fact that "the
   world hates us" (I noted that their 'love' didn't save the 3,000
   people incinerated at the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and in a
   Pennsylvania cornfield).

   In the end they thought I had been brainwashed. "Who got to you?" they
   asked, only half-joking. When I told my family that al-Qaeda is out to
   kill us and if we don't kill them first, we're going to lose way more
   than 3,600 dead in Iraq.

   The argument continued, and I won't bore you with the details since
   most of you have argued it countless times either here or elsewhere.

   However it became clear that in the view of my Democratic family - all
   of whom lean towards Obama even though they fret about his
   inexperience - the GWOT is a fiction, an illusion cast by Bush to
   distract us from our "real" problems: wealth inequality, Katrina,
   health care, and the like. And in their eyes I had fallen for that
   illusion. Bush wanted to avenge his father, and channeled hundreds of
   billions of dollars away from social programs that benefited the lower
   classes to fund his vendetta. His power extended to me, and his scales
   still covered my eyes.

   I don't doubt the power or importance of fictions. I've always
   believed that one needs to believe in one great fiction - be it
   religion, nationalism or even in one's own potential. Am I being
   suckered? It's possible.

   Let's assume that I am. Aside from the continued death toll in Iraq
   and Afghanistan, there will be no more dead Americans - no more
   collapsing towers or planes falling from the sky into cornfields -
   because terrorism is a fiction or at worst, an overblown threat.

   If they are wrong, however, the result would be catastrophic. I have a
   stepson who is a trained killer in the Marine Corps. I'd rather have
   him face al-Qaeda than the Wife, or Kid, or me. If my sister's
   illusions are wrong, the battlefield will no longer be "over there";
   it will be "over here."

   What are my chances against al-Qaeda? What are the Kid's - or my
   sister's or my mother's?

   The rest of the trip went well, and the subject was avoided like a
   typical Third Rail issue. However I kept thinking about our argument,
   and realized what was meant when I heard some commentator refer to
   terrorism as the "Democrats' blind spot". Could I live under a Hillary
   presidency or an Obama one, and the answer is "of course" - until I
   imagine their reaction to a terror attack.

   Would Hillary be willing to send troops to attack the terrorists at
   the source? Would a President Obama stand up to the supporters of
   terrorism like Syria and Iran and do what is necessary?

   Or would a President Clinton go on media blitz to improve America's
   image, taking the anti-War "high road" as American civilians paid for
   the world's "love" with body parts as the terrorists struck time after
   blood-soaked time?

   Would President Obama call for "We love Islam rallies" to show the
   terrorists that we weren't their enemy, that we were really nice
   people who respected their beliefs? Would he withdraw completely from
   the Middle East and usher in a new era of isolationism?

   America would be loved as the world's TV screens showed our cities
   smoking - as it was in the days immediately after 9-11 - but it's the
   love one sees for a battered spouse who believes she can control her
   abuser by not doing the things that "set him off."

   Machiavelli once [2]wrote "It is better to be feared than loved if you
   cannot be both." Since September 11th we have not had a single
   successful terror attack on American soil. We may not be loved on this
   planet, but we have lived in safety and security. One can bash Bush
   all she wants, but in time that may turn out to be President Bush's
   greatest legacy.

   But if the Global War on Terrorism is a Bush created fiction, there's
   nothing to worry about, right?

References

   1. http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/2003/cb03-106.html
   2. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/n/niccolomac103757.html