…was the vote in the Senate against shutting down Guantanamo, however Obama won’t stop lobbying his case. Perhaps Obama is not so realistic as many think.
Obama Speaks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Cheney Speaks
The force you must exert to survive is defined by your enemy, in this case, an enemy that views civility and individualism as weakness and infidelity. So the dilemma is to uphold your own civility and be harmed or killed, or do what’s necessary to defend yourself so that you can survive and perhaps achieve civility. Our enemies impose this dilemma on us, fully cognizant of what such dilemmas do to our media-enhanced national discourse. Under the conditions we must accept as targets of the Islamist war, we cannot have both absolute civility abroad and guaranteed survival at home. Pretending that we can is a prescription for our own annihilation.
Cheney is right to draw attention to the progressive’s redefinitions of terms related to the war, as if a few semantic adjustments on our part will make us materially safer. The progressive’s fallacy in this case is to assert that because we must use barbarous tactics to defeat a barbarian enemy, we also do not value civility. Of course we continue to value civility. Why else would we do whatever we must do to reestablish conditions where we can enjoy it again?
Ironically, the progressive message–that Americans don’t value civility–is likely to come from a 20-something between sips of a hot latte’ at Starbucks with their Prius/mobile bike-rack parked in the lot. Today, national policies issue from brains washed clean of analytic capacity, the naive graduates of America’s progressive universities who march in lock-step conformity and smug superiority in Ward-Churchill-inspired fantasies of the perfect present we could have had if only Bush hadn’t stolen the 2000 election.
Obama readily throws much of what America did in response to 9/11 under the bus to garner the approval of this or that 3rd world dictator or European socialist. But consider the many people we’ve met in Asia who are amazed at the restraint shown by America in response to 9/11 when we didn’t drop nuclear weapons on the countries harboring, sponsoring, and emulating Islamic terrorism. Had China been attacked the way the U.S. was on 9/11, the crater where Afghanistan once stood will still be smoking.