Bed-Wetter Nation
[posted by Callimachus]
That's what they call the United States over on the left when some of us find some reason to be angry about an Ahmadinejad or a bin Laden.
And it has become de rigueur it invoke Khrushchev's visit in 1959 as a comparison, to recall a time when real Americans had the guts not to be tizzified by a visiting enemy dignitary. They then tend to boast how "we" dealt with the Soviets.
And it never occurs to them to wonder what they would have been writing and saying had they been commenting then. Whose side they would have been on, what they would have been criticizing.
Perhaps it's a clue that even the ones who don't confess to having a crush on the little guy from Iran spend more time laughing along with his Bush lines than standing up to his brand of fanaticism.
There's also a curious tendency to mistake indignation and pride for fear. I don't know whether this is a peculiarity of the left, or what accounts for it.
So, world leaders who lead cheers of "Death to America" as they reach for nuclear weapons are just monsters in the closet of right-wing cowards.
Fortunately, the same Web sites are around to courageously point us to the real threats in the world today, the real and legitimate objects of bed-wetting fear:
And so forth. As ever. Who would these people have been in 1959?
Malkin, natch, has something to say on the topic.
That's what they call the United States over on the left when some of us find some reason to be angry about an Ahmadinejad or a bin Laden.
Now when a bad guy crosses our threshhold, America becomes a pants-piddling mess.
Iran's president speaks at a great American university. That university's president, in the act of introducing his lecture, whines like a baby bereft of his pacifier that his guest is a big meany poopy-head. ... Now they go on cable TV and whine about what a "travesty" it would have been to visit a site which properly should belong to the world. Hundreds of foreign nationals died in the World Trade Center on 9/11 (maybe even some of the Iranian!). Yet we have to systematically repress that — as if our national ego would crack like fine crystal if we were forced to acknowledge the mingling of American blood with that of mere foreigners.
... How cowardly our conservative Republic of Fear has made us. How we tremble at the mere touch of a challenge.
And it has become de rigueur it invoke Khrushchev's visit in 1959 as a comparison, to recall a time when real Americans had the guts not to be tizzified by a visiting enemy dignitary. They then tend to boast how "we" dealt with the Soviets.
And it never occurs to them to wonder what they would have been writing and saying had they been commenting then. Whose side they would have been on, what they would have been criticizing.
Perhaps it's a clue that even the ones who don't confess to having a crush on the little guy from Iran spend more time laughing along with his Bush lines than standing up to his brand of fanaticism.
There's also a curious tendency to mistake indignation and pride for fear. I don't know whether this is a peculiarity of the left, or what accounts for it.
I genuinely don't understand the quaking fear over Ahmadinejad's interview at Columbia. When did America become so weak, so insecure, that we mistrust our capacity to converse with potentially hostile world leaders?
So, world leaders who lead cheers of "Death to America" as they reach for nuclear weapons are just monsters in the closet of right-wing cowards.
Fortunately, the same Web sites are around to courageously point us to the real threats in the world today, the real and legitimate objects of bed-wetting fear:
O’Reilly, Coulter, Hannity, Malkin—we often treat them as jokes, but they are not amusing. They are translators of a vicious language that would not have a place in the public sphere were it not for their careful redesign.
And so forth. As ever. Who would these people have been in 1959?
Malkin, natch, has something to say on the topic.
