And the point I’m making is that you are wrong. Who is in power is far less relevant to what people choose to declare, than the personalities of those issuing the rhetoric. I would go so far as to say that it is the attitudes of those who are facing adversity that are a far truer measure of their personalities, than the attitudes displayed when they are in a comfortable position of power.

There are people in these discussion boards who see antisemitism everywhere, and usually where it doesn’t exist. But Nixon was a true anti-semite. Yes, he was a deeply-flawed man who did tremendous good things even as he either ordered or countenanced criminal acts like burgleries.

Here is a sample of the man Nixon really was, available on tape for anyone of you who think the so-called left invented hatred:

They show Nixon talking about selling ambassadorships, railing against Jews and other minorities, complaining about the drinking habits of leading members of Congress, and exchanging conspiracy theories with Kissinger and other top aides.

In many cases, Nixon’s tirades were touched off by news leaks and political setbacks, such as the occasion at the beginning of July 1971 when the Bureau of Labor Statistics released figures showing that unemployment was on the upswing. Concerned that news of the joblessness was hurting him in the polls, Nixon demanded the ouster of the director of the bureau, Julius Shiskin, and asked his hatchet man, Charles Colson, to investigate the ethnic background of officials in the agency.

“They are all Jews?” Nixon exclaimed when Colson listed the names.

“Every one of them,” Colson replied. “Well, with a couple of exceptions. . . . You just have to go down the goddamn list and you know they are out to kill us.”

In a later conversation the same day–July 3–Nixon and Haldeman discussed Jewish penetration of the National Security Council staff. “Is Tony Lake Jewish?” Nixon demands, referring to a young Kissinger aide who went on to become national security adviser under President Clinton.

“I’ve always wondered about that,” Haldeman replies.

“He looked it,” says Nixon, without reaching a firm conclusion. [Lake is not Jewish].

When The Washington Post gave front-page coverage in April 1971 to a survey showing 60 percent support for antiwar demonstrations among residents of affluent District neighborhoods, Nixon complained that the results were loaded.

“Bob,” he explained to a receptive Haldeman, “there’s a hell of a lot of Jews in the District, see . . . The gentiles have moved out.”

The point I am making is that those in power drive the rhetoric. I do not think that it is an accurate characterization of the anti-war side to say that they possess a “self-destructive backbiting and suicidalist nature” (don’t you love copy and paste?).

There is nothing self destructive about avoiding a war that one does not have to fight. I do not think that despite its “explosive possibility as a denouncement that saying those of us who opposed the war are “suicidalist” any more than it would be to say those that went to war did so to commit suicide. Alas, whenever we commit as a nation to a war, the people who oppose the war are going to be critical. I like your use of language since it does emotionally charge every objection you have to your enemies, but my enemy is not you, unless you are an Islamist or other enemy of this great land, and I guarantee you none of us in the anti-war side consider those who favor the war enemies.

I mention Afghanistan in an earlier post because I can show you IN PRINT AT THE TIME a plethora of the anti-war voices who opposed invading Iraq supporting that war.

Analogies are the sign of great intelligence, but to compare anti-war Americans to child molesters seems to me needlessly inflammatory and disappears under the weight of examination, unless you are saying that Americans who oppose the war are unfit to live in the community at large.

There is nothing inherently wrong with peace, and nothing inherently wonderful about wars, especially undeclared wars that are declared over (“The major combat operations in Iraq have ended and the United States and her allies have prevailed”) on May 1, 2003, only to still be raging with more deaths, more civilians killed and wounded, more refugees, and a greater overall likelihood of an Islamic “Democracy” like Iran to be the ultimate government than anything you or I would recognize as a Democracy.

President Bush controls the way we talk about Iraq, not the anti-war factions.

I think a generous response to your last assertion that “someone has to show some judgment” is that it is a non-sequitur. The voices who opposed the war showed judgment, just as President Bush and the self-proclaimed neo-cons did. We disagree with each other on substance.

Why? Do we really need to hand them the reins of power before we can recognize their self-destructive backbiting and suicidalist nature? It’s like refusing to recognize a child molester as such because, while he’s been proven to have molested other peoples’ children, he hasn’t been given a chance to molest yours.

Judgemental? Well, someone has to show some judgement.

1. I appreciate your argument. I condemn anyone who opposes the war, or any policy or event who calls the other side names or creates slogans, even in the case of the jailing of Paris Hilton, where I shudder every time she is called a “skank”).

As you say, we probably read different sources, but Ann Coulter’s “Treason” was a best selling book that indicted Liberals, so I disagree that name-calling is confined to one side or the other. I know The Moderate Voice and several other websites have chastised people for name-calling on their discussion boards regardless of whether the excoriator was a leftie or rightie or independent. But a great deal of our discourse is an attempt to define your opponent out of existence. On this page, and Neo is a literate and moderate woman, one of her frequent commentators, Trimegestus, said in this thread

“[T]he modern American Left consists of nothing but fanatical hatred.”

2. I would accept the argument that the anti-war side has done the most to devise a rhetoric that is “divisive and demonizing” if the anti-war side was in power. By definition I think the President and his allies have the power, the platform, and the responsibility for this particular undeclared war and how we talk about it. If the President who ordered this war were a Democratic President, I would say the same thing.

It is actually extremely difficult for anti-war voices to be heard and harder still to be listened to when war is being planned, imminent, or is in its first few months. If a war drags on, people start to ask questions about why we went to war in the first place.

3. I agree with you that people on my side should admit the possibility that the people who planned and executed this war did so for noble and good reasons.

4. I agree with you that we are in a struggle with a virulent branch of Islam. We may disagree on how we can wage that struggle, but that disagreement should bring us closer and would if we had a few beers and admitted we are all amatures in the root sense of the word (amo as you know means I love) and are motivated by a great love of this even greater land that an awesomely impossible to limit God gave us to care for and love while we tended to each other and valued every single individual and the idea of individualism itself.

Thank you for speaking with me and giving me something to think about; it is my fervent belief that I have responded in kind.

If you will forgive a joke, I hope you aren’t in pajamas because you have insomnia, but isn’t the internet the one place we can waste athousand lifetimes?

First, I was a teacher as well, and it is amazing how little people are interested. At the same time, we have so many conflicting experts, and each side denies the worth of the other side’s experts, so it can be incredibly frustrating figuring out which information is good and which isn’t. That takes a lot of time, and there are no clear guides; if you don’t start with a position (and so inherit a group of experts to believe in), how can you develop an intelligent position? I think that causes many people to just give up.

My answer has been looking at original sources and first-hand accounts as much as possible, but the amount of information is overwhelming, and even then, people write their sources and tell their stories with a bias. I have been quite disappointed with the media coverage; for some reason they seem to take a ‘get one person who says X and one who says not-X’ view towards reporting instead of actually doing research to figure out which view is supported by the facts (or, as is more often the case, which facts support which view, and which view seems more coherent).

Anyway, on to my argument.

In my experience (and we all see different media, read different articles, etc.), it has been the peace movement that has been most divisive. We can all quote some of their slogans:

NO BLOOD FOR OIL
Bush = Hitler
Bush Lied, People Died

Those demonizations have become well-recognized memes over the last six years, and they started well before the invasion of Iraq.

Other signs in peace rallies, and other things I’ve been called in discussions, include ‘imperialist,’ ‘fascist,’ and just simply ‘murderer.’

There are no similarly well-known, often-seen memes from the pro-liberation side. Yes, accusations of treason have been leveled, but not with anything like the regularity or mass of the anti-war slogans above.

What is more, the anti-war slogans change to include any characteristic the pro-liberation side pins to the foreign enemy.

Islamofascist became Christofascist. The Taliban are derided as a theocratic regime, and suddenly the anti-war side claims Bush and the right want to establish theocracy here.

And it goes on.

In the end, my own conclusion, again from my own experience, is that the anti-war side won’t even give the benefit of the doubt for sincerity. It can’t possibly be that Bush and the neo-cons were sincerely trying to do what they thought was best. No, it’s ‘Bush lied, people died.’ The anti-war side has consistently devised the most divisive, demonizing rhetoric they could come up with, and they bear the main portion of responsibility for dividing the American people.

I think we should go to war when we are attacked. And if President George W. Bush had asked for and received a Declaration of War against The Nation of Iraq, a declaration that a state of war existed between our amazing and wonderful country, The United (UNITED!!!) States of America, and Iraq, then whether I favored the decision or not, I would have fully embraced it.

But we go to war casually and half-heartedly without a Constitutionally-mandated Declaration that a state of war exists between us and whatever nation we are opposing.

At first, people watch the war on television as if it were the Olympics and the US is winning every event. However, after that initial euphoria of winning and being number 1 fades, the reality of a long and sustained fight sets in and Americans lose interest.

Wars are used by our leaders to position one group against another and to “control the message” and to “triangulate, divide, conquer, etc.” THAT division kills a part of our soul.

I teach. My students have NO idea what my political views are because I think politics is too divisive. Politics are a way to define each other out of existence. One group is the good guys and one group is the bad guys.

That is destructive of our soul whether the good guys are supposedly “peace loving” and the bad guys are “war mongerors”. That is also divisive and part of our soul dies if the good guys are supposedly “hard nosed patriots” who reluctantly send others to fight in an undeclared war and the bad guys are “leftist haters and traitors”.

We define our common bonds as being unimportant and our differences as being paramount. That is why I say we lose part of our soul.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, I wished I could have gone to the Mountains of Afghanistan myself and tried to strike back against the people who attacked my country. I flew my Flag, as my family has always done. Then I discovered that the argument had been positioned such that only Republicans were “patriotic”.

As this war drags on, my college students could not care less. Those who are Republican claim to love this war and all the Republican wars we fight (as opposed to Kosovo and Democratic–in Young Republican parlance Democ/rat–wars), and those who are Democratic Party members claim to hate this war (but want us to intervene in Darfur).

Those in the apolitical and uninformed middle are happy to be able to pursue their careers and the ubiquitous College Lifestyle (party, hook-up, party). They don’t know who Cindy Sheehan is, they don’t know who Joseph Lieberman is. Once we stopped winning and there were no more statues pulled down and presidents flying jet planes onto aircraft carriers, they lost interest.

That is why I say that a war fought without an actual Declaration and as close to a total commitment on the part of the nation as a democratic Republic can muster, without a shared sacrifice, must be won quickly and completely or ultimately part of our soul dies.

Thank you Sally! Your point was well taken and I appreciate the opportunity to talk with you and to clear up what I meant. I agree that we cannot walk away from a fight; I disagree on the nature, definition, and conduct of this undeclared war.