The Discerning Texan
-- Edmund Burke
Thursday, July 03, 2008
The Fourth of July, from the "Progressive" View
The quotes in italics below are from Matthew Rothschild, editor of The Progressive (the use of that term in itself is an insult to reason...).
In this case, seeing is believing: it is well worth the effort just to attempt to get your arms around the mindset of such a twisted mentality. This is the guy writing on behalf of the "true believers", the most ardent supporters of Barack Obama. They are the reason that Obama was nominated in the first place. Because Obama is one of them:
This is the voice of the American Left. These are the forces behind Obama, Pelosi, Waxman, Leahy, Reid, et al. This is what they think of our country. (My advice is to read it all--this is a fairly lengthy excerpt, but there is much more.)The left wing buttheads who run The Progressive magazine have their HQ in Madison, shocking I know. Their Whiner-in-Chief managed to puke this bit of dog vomit out before running back to his medicine cabinet for a double dose of turbo anti-depressants. Fisking blade attached.
By Matthew Rothschild, July 2, 2008
(In memory of George Carlin.)
It’s July 4th again, a day of near-compulsory flag-waving and nation-worshipping. Count me out.
Spare me the puerile parades.
Because the freeing of an entire nation from Royal tyranny is hardly worth commemorating
Don’t play that martial music, white boy.
Because except for ending slavery, Nazism, Fascism, Japanese Imperialism and Soviet Communism, War has never solved anything. Kudos to the Protest Warriors.
And don’t befoul nature’s sky with your F-16s.
How contemptuous you are of those who protect your right to snivel.
You see, I don’t believe in patriotism.
What about the tooth fairy?
It’s not that I’m anti-American, but I am anti-patriotic.
Love of country isn’t natural. It’s not something you’re born with. It’s an inculcated kind of love, something that
is foisted upon you in the home, in the school, on TV, at church, during the football game.
Yet most people accept it without inspection.
No Douche most people accept it because America and it's citizens who have gone before us have earned that respect. You can whine all you want about the horrors of American hegemony, any sentient being whose brain is not befouled with Progressive ideology can see what a force for good we have been and continue to be.
For when you stop to think about it, patriotism (especially in its malignant morph, nationalism) has done more to stack the corpses millions high in the last 300 years than any other factor, including the prodigious slayer, religion.
And obviously the Bush crime family has so distorted our values that feeeling patriotic about this America is akin to Satan worship.
The victims of colonialism, from the Congo to the Philippines, fell at nationalism’s bayonet point.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't we help them recover from Spanish colonialism as a US Territory and the grant them independence in 1946, and even left the country when they asked us to in the '90s.
World War I filled the graves with the most foolish nationalism. And Hitler and Mussolini and Imperial Japan brought nationalism to new nadirs. The flags next to the tombstones are but signed confessions—notes left by the killer after the fact.
And somehow you can equate three tyrannies we destroyed with the free democracy that took them out.
The whole world almost got destroyed because of nationalism during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The whole world almost got destroyed because our young, charismatic, muppet of a Democrat President decided to go face to face with Kruschev and convinced Kruschev that Kennedy was out of his league. Does that remind you of anyone there Mr. Rothschild?
The bloody battles in Serbia and Bosnia and Croatia in the 1990s fed off the injured pride of competing patriotisms and all their nourished grievances.
And then those evil patriotic Americans came in and stopped all the massacring.
At times, the appeal to patriotism may be necessary, as when harnessing the group to protect against a larger threat (Hitler) or to overthrow an oppressor (as in the anti-colonial struggles in the Third World).
But it is always a dangerous toxin to play with, and it ought to be shelved with cross and bones on the label except in these most extreme circumstances.
So if a group of messianic, obscurantist religionists declared war against everyone who doesn't accept their God and began a world-wide campaign of killing non-believers, that wouldn't qualify for a call to patriotic arms Matt?
When Americans retort that this is still the greatest country in the world, I have to ask why.
Are we the greatest country because we have 10,000 nuclear weapons?
No but the fact that we have managed to avoid using them is a great country factor.
No, that just makes us enormously powerful, with the capacity to destroy the Earth itself.
And the restraint not to.
Uncle Jimbo never has been one to beat around the bush; if only could have confronted Rothschild personally--on video. Now that would have been fun to watch...
ps - Rothschild has dishonored George Carlin in dedicating this disgraceful, inflammatory anti-American piece to him, regardless of what Carlin's personal politics may have been.
