You know, if U.S. foreign policy under the Bush administration were a high school kid, it would be the formerly meek, pimply faced weakling who bulked up, learned how to defend himself and walked around talking shit, looking to start a fight - with anyone - to prove his
manliness. How else, other than our insatiable need to bathe ourselves in the world's oil, do you explain the anti-Hugo Chavez rhetoric that has been coming from the administration and its supporters, including Pat Robertson, who called for Chavez's assassination - not
once, but
twice.
Now joining the parade is Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. From MSNBC:
"I mean, we've got Chavez in Venezuela with a lot of oil money," Rumsfeld added. "He's a person who was elected legally - just as Adolf Hitler was elected legally - and then consolidated power and now is, of course, working closely with Fidel Castro and Mr. Morales and others."
This is ridiculous, irresponsible behavior. And I'm tired of people defending the actions of this administration. Whenever anyone on our side of the aisle points out this government's
creeping slide toward totalitarianism, the right brands us as alarmists quick to throw Adolph Hitler's name around. Where are you, however, when it's
your guy playing the H card? And doing it far more irresponsibly?
What amuses me about the ever-so-tough right is how that collection of self-styled badasses bristles like a pack of whiny infants whenever liberals put the administration in the same league as the fascist regimes they're so closely emulating. The truth hurts. And just because the inconvenient facts we lefties point may make conservatives uncomfortable in their own skin, that doesn't mean that they're not true.
But we're not allowed to make simple criticisms. If we do, we're branded as defeatists whose only agenda is to break down, not build up. Meanwhile, the right can make irresponsible, reckless attacks like Rumsfeld's and Robertson's with impunity and get away with it. All the while, this cheap posturing only helps spawn the next generation of the very enemies this administration has so tremendously propped up. And it will be the next generation of Americans, not the Rumsfelds of the world, that must deal with the repercussions.