|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
Nickalous Aldrich. Carl Anderson. Aaron Holleyman. Edgar
Lopez. Nicholas Skinner. Names we should all know, yet few of us have ever heard
of them. In fact, these five young men, all in their early 20s, were blown to
bloody smithereens in Iraq on August 30. On September 6, seven American
Marines were similarly obliterated by a car bomb, and on September 7, five
more Americans, including two from Hampton Roads, died fighting near
Fallujah. But it is the group who died on
August 30 that intrigues me, since it was on that same night that we heard
the Bush-hugging, self-proclaimed arbiter of political rectitude, Sen. John
McCain, conflating the war on terrorism with the war in Iraq and praising
President Bush for the diabolical concoction. Ironically, McCain did not name
the five men listed above. Nor did he recall the names of the 1000 other
Americans who have died in this totally unnecessary war that President Bush
has called a “catastrophic success.” Indeed, the hypocrisy embedded in the
speeches of both McCain and Rudolph Giuliani, who similarly swooned sanguine
for the president’s war against non-existent WMDs, left one wondering if
these two men were living on the same planet as those young Americans who are
all too frequently surrendering their guts to the marauding religious
fanatics now running amok in Iraq. Our word “hypocrisy” comes from
a Greek word meaning, metaphorically, “pretension” or “dissembling,” and
especially in speech. It is also the word
for “actor.’ Like, for instance, Dixiecrat Zell Miller, who gave his keynote
address two nights after McCain spoke. Miller, who remains a Democrat
for reasons known only to his fellow quislings, sallied forth, scowled
ominously, and proceeded to shred Kerry to bits. The Democrats, he twanged,
are tearing this country apart with their attempts to bring down President
Bush. And Kerry is the worst of them, since he failed our troops in Iraq by
voting against all the weapons and protective gear they needed to win the
war. In his total commitment to dissembling pretentiousness, Miller failed to
inform his audience that these weapons requests were only a small part of
huge budget-busting, omnibus appropriations bills that any senator who wasn’t
totally brain dead would have voted against. But the salient point is that
this is the same John Kerry whom this same Zell Miller introduced at a
Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Georgia in March, 2001. And this is part of
what he had to say about the good senator then: “My job tonight is an easy one:
to present to you one of this nation’s authentic heroes. In his 16 years in
the Senate, John Kerry has fought against government waste, and he fought for
balanced budgets before it was considered politically correct for Democrats
to do so. John has worked to strengthen our military, reform public
education, boost the economy and protect the environment.” Miller closed his remarks by praising
Kerry for his service in Vietnam and for the medals that had accrued to him
as a result of his heroism. And that, I suggest, is what
hypocrisy is all about when it’s in the hands or on the tongue of a master. As for the Democrats, their
association with hypocrisy lies primarily in the fact that they’re pretending
to be a viable opposition party to Bush and the Republicans. At their
convention, the only speaker who went off script and sailed into Bush was the
Rev. Al Sharpton. The other speakers rarely, if ever, mentioned Bush or the
war in Iraq. It was as though they were operating in some political vacuum
that simply didn’t require lighting a fire in anyone’s belly. And that’s about the way it’s
been ever since. While Bush, Cheney & Co. have been tearing the skin off
Kerry and smacking him about the head with Swift boat abandon and other half
truths, Edwards has virtually disappeared, and Kerry has been issuing nuanced
opinions about social and economic matters while agreeing with the president
about the war in Iraq. One can only hope that recent
revelations about Bush’s questionable service in the Texas Air National Guard
will spur the Kerry campaign to go after Bush on other issues as well. As the
Democratic governor of Michigan said, “We should not be answering a tuba with
a piccolo.” And so say local Democrats, as
they scramble to hold on to whatever pretensions they had about a Kerry
victory in Virginia. As Ralph Bresler, chairman of the James City Democrats,
noted recently, “We need to work harder to keep John Kerry competitive in
Virginia.” And that’s fine. But it’s hard to keep someone competitive in a
state in which he’s never been competitive to begin with. Perhaps what Virginia Democrats
should be focusing on now is not the losing cause of Kerry, but a strong push
to do away with the Electoral College. When commentator Pat Buchanan, a
resident of Virginia, was asked whom he would vote for, he responded that he
didn’t have to vote at all, since Virginia would automatically give its
electoral votes to Bush. And so it is that the best of
all examples of political hypocrisy lies in the Constitution itself. We
pretend to be a democracy, when in fact the only votes in this election that
will really count are those in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
lewleadbeater.com Copyright 2002 All Rights Reserved
email: LWL@lewleadbeater.com |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||