We have Gregory Rodriguez penning a paean to the unity following 911, and suggesting very strongly what we need is to be very frightened about al Qaeda when he asks, “Where is Osama bin Laden when we need him?”
You see, he thinks that we need some of that good old post-911 unity, you know that wonderful stuff that Republicans used to :
- Pass the PATRIOT Act.
- Invade Iraq.
- Illegally wiretap ordinary Americans.
- Become torturer to the world.
- To use the post 911 unity almost exclusively for Republican partisan political advantage.
His conclusion:
In the meantime, we all but ignored Bin Laden’s most recent tape, and attention to the arrest and indictment of Afghan Denverite Najibullah Zazi on WMD conspiracy charges has been surprisingly low-key. Such blase responses to our true enemies set us up for self-destruction, until we once again find out the hard way that we’re all Americans.
The reason that this is low key is because it should be low key, because Bush and His Evil Minions™ are no longer juicing every half baked tyro with half a terrorism plan and multicolored terror alerts.
The reason that this is low key is because it is Barack Obama, for all the complaints about him, is not Karl Rove, and does not see terrorizing the American public into supporting him as a legitimate goal of anti-terror policy.
It’s no wonder that quotes Samuel P. Huntington glowingly when suggesting that there is a need for an external enemy in order to create unity in society.
This is the same Samuel Huntington, whose entire career, and perhaps his entire life, to finding people to hate, whether it was the Arab Muslim (Clash of Civilizations), the brown mestizo Mexican (Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity), a suggesting that civilian (small d) democratic government is undesirable when maintaining a standing military (The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations), that democratic change is generally a bad thing(Political Order in Changing Societies), and advocated the near-genocidal “hamletization” policy in Vietnam.
Seriously, can this man is a moral pygmy.
*I read some of his other articles, and it appears that his guiding principles are stupidity, not Neoconservatism.