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by Dave Zweifel
I got a chuckle out of a letter to the editor that appeared in the Wisconsin State Journal last week.
The author, a conservative friend of mine, was up in arms over a debate among the multiple candidates for the Democratic nomination for president.
"Not one of them had anything positive to say about anything," he lamented. "... If the current Democrats running for president and the liberals in the media were around during WWII, there is no doubt in my mind that we would all be speaking German or Japanese today."
He conveniently forgot, of course, that the granddaddy of all liberals - Franklin D. Roosevelt - was the president when the United States fought Germany and Japan during World War II. Far as I know, neither he nor his successor, Harry Truman, cowered, because they happened to be liberals, from the good fight that had to be fought.
But calling one's patriotism into question because he or she criticizes the president has long been a tactic used by those who think Americans ought to automatically fall in line behind their president, no matter how abhorrent they view his policies.
In the '50s if you criticized our nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, you were obviously anti-American and no doubt a communist to boot. In the '60s and '70s if you questioned the Vietnam War you again were anti-American and told to leave the country if you didn't like it.
Now, those with the temerity to question George Bush and the way he misled this country into a war that threatens to bankrupt our government are being called unpatriotic, not just by the likes of the letter writer, whom I can excuse, but by high-ranking members of this administration and their soulmates in Congress.
Frankly, they are the unpatriotic ones. They forget that it is the duty of Americans to argue and question the government's policies, to agree or disagree, to praise or criticize. To insinuate that because one disagrees is tantamount to treason is arrogance at its worst.
No one has a monopoly on the love of our country. There are far more combat veterans in that group of Democratic presidential candidates than there are in the hierarchy of this administration, for example.
As former U.S. Sen. Gary Hart said this Fourth of July, there appears to be a new First Amendment in America, at least according to the right-wing. It goes like this:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, except to encourage attendance in Christian churches, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, except to require prayer in schools, or abridging the freedom of speech, except for those questioning the Bush administration, or of the press, except that not owned by Rupert Murdoch, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, except those protesting pre-emptive wars, and to petition the government for a redress of grievance, except those we don't like."
Reprinted from the Madison, Wisconsin Capital Times
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