December 15th, 2007
This is a rant: an appeal to emotion rather than reason.
I write to condemn those deeply unAmerican citizens who would sacrifice the greatness of America because of their cowardice. Overcome with fear, they abandon the principles of freedom and liberty to protect their own miserable skins. And their shame is all the greater because they sell out America so cheaply. Fear is their byword; cowardice their vice; and all because they have allowed themselves to be terrorized by the terrorists.
Get a grip, you feckless cowards! America was not founded by weak-kneed, lily-livered armchair patriots who fought from their keyboards in the warmth, comfort, and safety of their homes. The sturdy patriots who made this country great lived in truly dangerous times. They took real risks standing up for liberty, but the warmongers of today who scream for blood have a greater chance of dying by accidental electrocution than at the hands of a terrorist. These bloody-minded fools are all too happy to compromise our Constitutional liberties to gain a microscopic increment in personal safety. These people would have cowered when the call to arms went up in 1776, whimpering in terror that they might suffer injury. They dismiss the ancient and hallowed right of habeus corpus with a snap of the fingers. Patrick Henry famously declared "Give me liberty or give me death!" These sniveling weaklings frantically give away their most precious liberties for protection from a threat of trifling proportions. And they have the towering gall to question the patriotism of the genuine patriots who seek to defend the Constitution.
Their shame is compounded by their ignorance: they scream for war without understanding it. How else could they have supported such an obvious blunder as the invasion of Iraq? Anybody with a basic understanding of history could have seen far in advance that any attempt to establish democracy in Iraq in anything less than two generations was doomed to failure. Yet these idiots equate purple thumbs with democracy, oblivious to the 800 years it has taken for Anglo-Saxon democracy to take root. What do they know of Mesopotamian history? How can they possibly understand the fissiparous nature of a culture that has endured 5,000 years of history by intense clannishness and brutal oppression -- when they know nothing of that history?
And then there’s the fetishism. These people revel in the symbols while denying the substance. They bedeck themselves in flags as they betray the Constitution. The same people who want to give overweening power to the President and throw the separation of powers to the winds -- these same people shoot off fireworks on the Fourth of July and plaster their cars with bumper stickers flaunting an ignorant and ugly monstrosity of patriotism.
They see war only in terms of its paraphernalia, not its function. They love the military patches, the macho vocabulary, the unit banners, the honor guards with their crisp salutes, and all the other flamboyant symbology of the military -- but they can’t tell von Clausewitz from van Halen. They babble the masculine terminology of weaponry, citing technical specifications as if memorization of numbers conveyed understanding. They read of battles and think they know war. They admire Napoleon because he won battles, but are unaware of the fact that the sum of the man’s accomplishments was negative. They can tell you of the great conquerers of history -- Alexander, Caesar, Ghengis Khan, Napoleon -- but they can’t tell you the state of their accomplishments a hundred years after their deaths. They revel in the act of killing and shed crocodile tears for death.
These cowards shame our great heritage. They subvert the greatest experiment in freedom in history.