CSotD: The Federalist Fakers
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There have been a lot of political cartoons on the topic of a web ad from the Obama campaign in which Bill Clinton discusses the decision to go after bin Laden in Pakistan. I like John Branch's take because it goes beyond the immediate and addresses the overall topic.
First, here's the ad, which I hadn't seen and which I suspect a lot of people haven't seen. It's typical of political discussions to yak up a storm over something that either played only in the Beltway or that, in any case, wouldn't be getting all the attention if it were left to its own devices.
This is nothing new:The famous "daisy ad" that suggested Goldwater would touch off nuclear war only ran once.
Anyway, here's the cause of the current hand-wringing:
The biggest criticism from the right seems to be that Obama is grandstanding, and a couple of cartoonists have pointed out that these same people didn't have a problem with Bush flying out to an aircraft carrier to declare Mission Accomplished on national television, at national expense.
There has been criticism from the left, as well, mostly based on the idea that you don't brag about killing someone, though I think that applies more to "GM is alive and Osama bin Laden is dead," which is kind of a cheap, quick take on a serious subject.
The video isn't overly triumphalist, though I could have done without the shot of the New York firefighters, and you can argue that it's unfair to show Wolf Blitzer asking the question without showing who he's talking to or showing any part of the answer.
Still, I think this is a fairly restrained approach to a serious subject, and I don't have a problem with pointing out that Romney was on record as saying that going after bin Laden was not good policy, especially given that Obama had declared his intention of doing so — it's not like he had remained silent until the opportunity fell into his lap.
Romney will take bigger lumps over his monumental shift on health care, and I hope nobody finds it inappropriate to dole them out.
But getting back to John Branch, what I like about his cartoon is how it demonstrates the conflation of national and personal issues under the category of patriotism, the assumption that there are properly American religious views and properly American views on family and society.
And that they are all wrapped up in the American flag.
I've been trying without success to find an article from the early 1970s that I came across a few years ago, about the controversy then over adding the US flag to police and fire department uniforms.
In that era's flurry of flag-worship, the flag meant that good Americans supported the war in Vietnam and people who opposed the policy were unpatriotic. This was about the same time that hired goons posing as construction workers from the World Trade Center were sent to beat up antiwar protesters on Wall Street, launching hard-hat chic as part of Nixon's "Silent Majority" campaign.
The article, however, didn't get into whether patriotism required lock-step loyalty to conservative policies and values. The dissenters were police officers and firefighters, mostly veterans, who felt that displaying the national flag on a local uniform was inappropriate.
They had been employees of the federal government. Now they were employees of a city, county or state government. They felt that not only did it misstate their own chain of command, but that it was disrespectful to the soldiers who were going into combat under federal authority.
I agree with them, and I'll take it further:
Why is it that the people who are most adamant about putting the national flag on city, state and county uniforms, and making it mandatory for school children to pledge their loyalty to the federal government each and every morning, seem to be the first to declare that the federal government has no role in state and local affairs?
In nearly every stance they take on education, on safety standards, on equal rights, on voting rights, on environmental protection — on everything except waging war early and often – they renounce the federal government and all its works as if it were Satan … but they sure do glory in its pomps, don't they?
How on earth can you be a states-rights hardliner while wrapping yourself in the federal flag?
It is a political contradiction of such breathtakingly unconscious stupidity that it doesn't rise to the level of hypocrisy.
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