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Friday, September 08, 2006

Um, much of our reasoning ability?

[W]e've seen hubris beyond imagination. We've watched an unbridled executive-branch power grab, warrantless wiretaps, the curtailing of privacy rights; a pervasive smog of secrecy descended to obscure our government. Outrage about torture, rendition and secret prisons here and abroad is dismissed with a flippant "We don't torture" from the president. And all of it has been shellacked with an ugly culture of bullying in which dissent equals treason, shamelessly, five years after the attack. Last week it was Donald Rumsfeld comparing war critics to people who appeased Hitler; this week we had Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice saying they're the sort who would have ended the Civil War early and let the South keep its slaves. Their intimidation is meant to say that the very freedoms worth fighting for -- the right to dissent, the right to question our government -- might have to be abridged while we fight. Politically, that truly is more than we can bear. - Joan Walsh, "What We Lost," Salon, September 8, 2006
I'm sorry . . . those historical analogies from Rumsfeld and Rice are her examples of bullying and intimidation? And those analogies are a coded assertion that "the right to dissent, the right to question our government" might have to be abridged?

Here's how the blog might read if I reasoned like Joan Walsh:
"Joan Walsh belittles the use of World War Two metaphors, which is meant to say that all who criticize Joan Walsh will be summarily executed by her agents."
Except the next day and every day after that, there would be the blog and there would be me writing in the blog, full of life and whimsy and vigor, without so much a hint of summary execution to make my earlier claim vaguely credible. Just as Joan Walsh and Salon will still be there, registering dissent, questioning the government, despite all the bullying and intimidation from cabinet officials meant to quash dissent. The difference is that I have an appreciation for irony, and have indeed just demonstrated that, whereas Joan Walsh is oblivious to the ironies of her continued ability to publish front-page stories in Salon attacking the administration for its crackdown on dissent.


posted at 10:05 PM

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