Rightist rhetoric makes a disturbing turn into their conscious thinking.

It's a funny way that those on the right define 'American.'

Last week, Sarah Palin made the comment that she thinks that some parts of the country are 'more American' than others. The exact quote, made in North Carolina last week is that she praised areas where she was as the, "pro-America areas of this great nation"

That sentiment is not confined to Palin however.

On MSNBC's hardball, Chris Matthews asked Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann about Palin's comments and about Senator Obama in particular. Not only did Bachmann agree and say that Obama may have 'anti-American views,' but she went farther, calling on the media to look at members of Congress to "find out, are they pro-America or anti-America."

Then Republican congressman Robin Hayes of North Carolina last week said that liberals hate real Americans that work and accomplish and achieve and believe in God. Hayes originally denied saying that until he was confronted by an audiotape of the speech.

It's even gone to the state level. McCain advisor Nancy Pfotenhauer said that Northern Virginia is 'not the real Virginia.' She said that "I can tell you that the Democrats have just come in from the District of Columbia and moved into northern Virginia....But the rest of the state, 'real Virginia,' if you will, I think will be very responsive to Senator McCain’s message "

This view shows the elitism of the right. After years of listening to cranks on the radio scream that anyone who disagrees with their narrow view of America is actually anti-American and trying to destroy, not change, America-- this view has permeated the minds of otherwise rational people. They actually believe (or why would this attitude come out four times within a week) that liberals or anyone else who has a vision for America that doesn't agree with their doctrinaire conservative view is actually anti-American, or at least not sufficiently pro-American.

To some degree this is nothing new. The GOP has regularly been questioning the patriotism of people who don't happen to agree with their schemes since at least the days of McCarthy and Nixon. But the offhanded and casual ways in which these comments have rolled off the tongue recently makes me think that this whole way of thinking (i.e., 'traitor out to destroy the country' replacing 'American with whom I have a disagreement') has reached the point of being taken for granted by people in positions of responsibility on the right, that they sound like Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage without even thinking about it.

Well, I have to tell you something, jerkfusses on the right.

Because I'm an AMERICAN, I want to see people in AMERICA be able to go to a doctor without being afraid of going broke if they get sick.

Because I'm an AMERICAN, I want to see a country where when people do have to go to the hospital the focus is on getting them well, not on whether they have insurance.

Because I'm an AMERICAN, I want to see our military ready to respond immediately to any challenge, not bogged down in a stupid war that we started years ago in a small country thousands of miles away.

Because I'm an AMERICAN, I want to see war-- as costly and ugly as it is-- considered only as a last, not as a first, resort to future international problem spots.

Because I'm an AMERICAN, I want to see a country where people feel safe from their own government, and don't have to worry that someone is listening in on their phone conversations.

Because I'm an AMERICAN, I want to see the land that we live on, the air that we breathe and the water that we drink preserved and kept clean for the next generation of AMERICANS.

Because I'm an AMERICAN, I don't want to see any young person who is capable of going to college and earning a degree denied that opportunity because they are too poor to be able to afford it.

Because I'm an AMERICAN, I want working people in AMERICA to feel secure in their jobs.

Because I'm an AMERICAN, I want to see the degreed professionals that we hire to prepare our own kids to go to college, to earn enough to send their own kids to college.

Because I'm an AMERICAN, I want to see people staying in their homes, not moving into homeless shelters in record numbers because their homes are being foreclosed on and their credit is too poor to even qualify for a rental contract.

Because I'm an AMERICAN, I want to see my country respected-- not just feared but respected and trusted and listened to again in the world.

Because I'm an AMERICAN, I want to see us take the lead again in scientific research.

Because I'm an AMERICAN, I want to see us develop renewable sources of energy so that we don't need to use all that oil anymore (and therefore, not have to pay for it.)

Because I'm an AMERICAN, I want to see us go back to the budget surplus we enjoyed a few years ago.

Because I'm an AMERICAN, I want to see other Americans, in Louisiana and Mississippi, get the help rebuilding their homes that was promised but more than three years later has still never been delivered.

Because I'm an AMERICAN, I want to see a country in which we quit trying to divide people against each other and start looking at how we can all work together for a better AMERICA.

Patriotism is not blindly following your leaders. It is questioning them and where necessary opposing them.

Memo to the right: there are more than 300 million Americans spread out all over the country. So quit trying to claim that only those who happen to support you are 'real Americans' or are 'pro-America. We are all Americans.

What is Patriotism anyway?

Today Barack Obama fought back against charges that he is not sufficiently patriotic.

He and his wife have recently been accused of this by the right wing, citing three main pieces of 'evidence', 1) a photograph taken last year at Tom Harkin's steak fry in which Obama stands at attention but with his hands clasped in front of him rather than with one over his heart during the playing of the national anthem (Harkin and fellow candidate Bill Richardson are in the photograph as well in a more traditional pose;) 2) the fact that Obama last year during the campaign stopped wearing a small American flag button on his lapel, and 3) the statement that Michelle Obama made last week saying that 'for the first time in my adult life,' she was proud of her country.

Obama responded forcefully today, saying,

"The way I will respond to it is with the truth: that I owe everything I am to this country."

But more to the point, he said that his choice not to put his hand over his heart would 'would disqualify about three-quarters of the people who have ever gone to a football game or baseball game.'

In regard to his wife's comments, he said that she meant to say for the first time she was proud of the way politics was conducted in this country, and had misspoken. Well, that's what he said, and either you believe it or not, but it's not like people never say anything they regret later. That's why I rarely pay attention to political gaffes (even President Bush's frequent ones) unless they are clearly well thought out and repeated and thereby give one a window into the soul of the person who says it (i.e. 'macaca.')

His point (and the reason he removed the lapel pin) is this: Patriotism is something that a person holds in his or her heart, and it should not be measured by counting the number of American flags or yellow ribbons or whatever other outward signs someone displays.

I have a tattered flag in front of my door that I put there on Sept. 11, 2001, and haven't taken down since. That is my choice. But it would be just as much my choice if I chose NOT to have it there, and it would make me no less patriotic if I did not.

I consider patriotism to be fighting against attempts to cut funding for veterans programs or deny disability for disabled veterans coming back from Iraq.

I consider patriotism to be trying to create a nation in which all Americans have a stake in the country.

I consider patriotism being to fight for the rights that our Founding Fathers fought for, including the right to NOT be compelled to say anything (or by failing to display any symbol, be assumed to be saying anything.)

Surely it would have been politically easier for Barack Obama to do the 'safe' thing and keep the lapel pin on and put his hand on his heart during the pledge. But lately that has become a requirement instead of an option, and a requirement like that is in effect tyranny. And expecting it as 'part of the drill,' frankly cheapens its value for those who DO choose to wear a flag pin or otherwise follow the 'expected' rules for 'patriots.'

Is Patriotism a reason support something you know is wrong?

I read another editorial today about how supporting the troops means supporting the mission (and the President.)

I beg to differ.

And I don't just mean differ by the standard liberal response of pointing to cuts made by fiscal conservatives in veteran's programs or the lack of support that some severely wounded vets have received once they were no longer useful to the military. True, supporting the troops means supporting them after they return home, and true that we should continue to call conservatives on their lack of support for veterans where we can point to it, but that argument used by itself as a definition of 'supporting the troops' becomes a dodge of the main issue that is front and center today, which is whether to support the war in Iraq as it is being fought today.

Supporters of the war (who in many cases honestly, though wrongly, believe that fighting it is the right thing to do) want, it seems, for people who now question the war to just 'sit down, shut up and wave a flag.' They will claim that any dissent is undercutting the troops. And if we don't confront that argument head-on, then we end up making their point for them, looking weak, cowardly and stupid no matter how much we might suggest be spent on the V.A.

What it really boils down to is whether, if we believe that our country is wrong, we should support its foreign policy anyway.

Ultimately you have to look at yourself then and ask what is 'right.' Nations make mistakes, or worse, calculated decisions to do what might be considered wrong or morally indefensible for reasons of pure greed or aggrandizement (though they will always have some spurious logic to justify it at the time), and the United States is neither immune nor historically devoid of such decisions. Right now I am sitting in territory that was ripped away from Mexico after what amounted to an outright war of conquest between 1846 and 1848. Do I believe we should return it? No, and frankly if I did then it would be about returning it to the Native Americans and not the Mexicans anyway. The reason why I don't support returning it is that the people who live here now had nothing to do with whatever wrong was perpetrated in 1848 (or before that), and ultimately to return it in order to repent of the sins of the country which elected James K. Polk would mean displacing people who are here now, from their land where they may have grown up and perhaps have several generations of their family buried on. And as we look at events like the Trail of tears, the abrogation of the treaty Thomas Jefferson signed with the Nez Perce and the pursuit of Chief Joseph, the Bosque Redondo or Wounded Knee, it is hard to argue that the United States was in the right on any of these cases. And I do believe that we should do a better job of providing to Native Americans the same benefits that most other Americans enjoy (see my last post) and rectify where we can find them the direct consequences of such past injustices, but I don't believe that as people who live today, we should try to undo the past-- the past is the past and trying to recreate history differently is bound to fail. But Iraq is not a matter of history. It is here and now. The history is whatever we make it, both as a nation and as individuals against the war. Believing that we should not be in Iraq, we can stand for what we believe or we can allow people who will virtually always challenge the patriotism of any war opponent to make us so afraid of being called unpatriotic that we acquiesce and do what they want us to do. OK, fine. Call me a name. I don't care. The war is still wrong.

So then the next question becomes, does Patriotism trump our essential knowledge and recognition of right and wrong?

Let's answer that by supposing (a purely hypothetical scenario) that the U.S. President were actually ordering the unthinkable. Suppose that the President (not necessarily this President, but assume it was a President of your party and who you had voted for) announced that he wanted to unilaterally (with no provocation at all) launch nuclear warheads at every major city on the planet, because he has evidence that terrorists hide more often in large cities(or some other equally irrational reason.) Obviously, the man would be daft, but the question is, if you were such a supporter of the President in our scenario, would you support him even when he made what was obviously a disastrously wrong decision?

If you answer that yes, then you are in effect saying that you have replaced your own ability (or perhaps your ability enhanced by the spirit of God) to decide what is good and what is evil and act on it, with the chief executive's decision which you will follow blindly. Maybe then the anti=Christ is closer than we think, he'd just have to arrange to get himself elected President and he'd have his hordes of followers. If you answer no, that you would not, then you have at least acknowleged that it is at least possible to conjure up an (admittedly very extreme) scenario in which you would refuse to support the policy that the President was pushing forward.

Now, the question becomes, what if you see your country doing something less wrong than that, but still wrong? Do you still refuse to do it? And therein lies the rub. During the Nuremburg trials, several defendants tried to excuse their actions by saying they were 'just following orders.' All of them were found guilty, because they knew what they were doing was wrong, but they did it anyway. The only clear line is between right and wrong, not between two different levels of 'wrong.'

If you believe, honestly, that starting a war was the 'right' way to handle the situation that then existed in Iraq (say for the sake of argument, that no one questioned the intelligence at the time-- which would be about 95% accurate-- only Jacques Chirac and a handful of others publically questioned it in early 2003) and proceded on that assumption, then you might not buy my belief that actually going to war was still the 'wrong' way to handle the situation, but even if that is the case, understand that there are many people (not just liberals) who believe that war should always be a last resort, only after all diplomatic or even covert options have been tried and exhausted, and that even then it should be carefully measured by weighing the continuation of the status quo against such considerations as how many lives it will cost and what the consequences might be of losing (history is replete with nations ranging from the Greek city-states who had to unite to fight the Persians to the more recent example of the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, who lost wars they by all accounts should have won.) We should not be rushed intoa war by ratcheting up the rhetoric to try and stampede the public into supporing it (which Iraq, quite frankly was).Many people also believe that starting a war is a moral wrong (as opposed to, for example, the war in Afghanistan, which was a necessary and unavoidable self-defense consequence of 9/11, which in effect is when it began.)

How much choosing 'wrong' can be excused by blind patriotism? If you see your country doing something which you believe is wrong, then I would posit that you still have not just a right, but an obligation to speak up in opposition, no matter what the transgression is. Even if you believed at one time that it was right but come to the realization that it is wrong, you have to speak up (as some of Bush's generals have.) Because if you know it's wrong, and you continue to support it anyway then you deserve to be called a coward, not a patriot.