perfidy

Crackwhores, indeed.

Such shameless political pandering should be criminalized.

If they weren't just pandering to the presumed rubes in their constituencies, and actually believed there was a risk here worth abrogating all free trade principles, then profound stupidity should be criminalized.

But, dammit, something here was done way wrong.

FUCKING-A.

FUCKING-A.

I swear dude, the President's been allowing xenophobia to break his way for so long on policy issues, he's forgotten there's two edges. He's mashed on that button so long, it's beginning to press itself.

FUCKING-A.

Fuck.

Huh? Could I politely ask for an example of how he's allowed xenophobia to break for him?

Not saying it hasn't, mind you, I just fail to see how he's "allowed it" to do so.

I'm kind of thinking there are a lot of hard core nutbags to my extreme right who think he's not been xenophobic enough. (Think "skinny blonde loudmouthed rabble-rouser with prominent Adam's Apple")

Well, Patton, I'd start by arguing that the beadamappled rabble rouser you mention is treated as much as an actual opinionmaker as she is a trained monkey, as entertainment and as validation that one's own opinions are moderate enough to be legitimate. E.g. if she's on Fox ranting about "towelheads," then it must be okay for viewer Rita in Chicago to not quite trust the brown people that live two blocks over.

Not that there aren't a lot of nutbags to your right, but I think that in a LOT of situations, the President is more of a triangulator than people generally accept.

Underpinning a great many of his big initiatives is the implicit argument that this group or other of [Arabs/Muslims/terrorists, depending on the situation] are a threat that cannot be allowed to stand. And while I certainly don't think that Bush, Cheney and Rove are as Orwellian as my friends at The Daily Kos think, I still think that the events of the last few years have proven that 1) in the minds of a lot of Americans, the difference between Arab, Muslim, and terrorist is murky at best, and 2) The President has been more than willing to let the fluidity of those categories work to his advantage. He might carefully say, "a small subset of Iraqis loyal to Saddam Hussein and largely belonging to the Sunni sect of Islam," and it comes out of the speakers as "Muslim terrorist Arabs." I'm pretty ready to blame Bush for anything from acid rain to the continued existence of the Alternative Minimum Tax, but I have to give him his due here for often, if not always, being careful about who he is talking about.

Take the Iraq thingy. Whatever you might say about what the reasons ACTUALLY were for libervading Iraq, it's true that a large slice of the American populace, on whose behalf the President and Congress ostensibly act, had and probably still have some vague idea that Iraq, if not behind 9/11, was Arab, Muslim, AND a terrorist state, therefore a threat.

Now, I'm not indicting the President on this (I just don't want to get into it), but I really think that people got behind Iraq because it fit with just a little persuading into the Arab/Muslim/terrorist=threat matrix.

And since this dynamic helped smooth the way for Bush to act the way he did, I think he's taken it for granted that Americans (barring those who dissent vigorously enough to call their patriotism into question...) are on the same page as he a lot of the time. This actually might help explain why he feels he doesn't have to explain himself very often on most issues. He just assumes that all reasonable people are with him already.

But that same slipperiness that lets say, Butch in Kankakee think the Pakistani guy at work is an okay dude with some strange lunchtime habits and ALSO think that a rabble of religious fanatics in love with death half a world away speak for everyone who prays to Mecca, is of a piece with the isolationism that occasionally bubbles up in American history. see Richard Hofstadter's "Paranoid Style," and the subtext of pretty much everything he ever wrote.

I can see this is turning into an idea salad, so I'm going to quit before I lose. Basically, my point is that a populist politician will eventually always forget that he/she is riding a tiger.

Finally, my using the world "allowed" probably assigns too much agency to Bush & co. What I mean is, they've mistaken luck for skill as regards the sentiments of Americans as a general whole being in line with their current policy needs. And now it's gonna bite them and us all right on the fleshy part of our ass.

J:

With the exception of the first sentence contained therein (because, no, it's not an idea salad), your last two paragraphs above perfectly answered the question I asked. The rest was like "the surprise inside", a welcome bonus.

In the same">http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110008067]same BOTW I quoted for my post earlier today, there's a reference to NYPost piece by John Podhoretz that says:

The public reaction to the ports deal indicates that the American people are still very much committed to the War on Terror. They understand that Arab nations of the Persian Gulf cannot be and should not be deemed reliable colleagues in our struggle against militant, extremist Islam. . . .

If that's not a left-handed way of his unintentionally supporting your original point, then I don't really know what is.

Strange lunchtime habits, indeed.