The virulent attacks against John Murtha sadly echo another dark time in American history.
This is politics at its worst; what it evokes is not even the McCarthy era, but the years just before the Civil War.
We may have entered, in fact, a new Civil War. A Civil Cold War.
(More under the fold...)
It is obvious that the other side, some uniquely American brand of fascism and corporatism, propelled by a racist, imperial ideology, does not understand the notions of compromise, negotiation and working together, which they associate with weakness and defeat. For them, it is all or nothing, and if we do not realize that, we are on our way to losing already.
They are not like the Nazis, but in that respect, similarities are real. The only thing they understand is totally crushing their opponent for a thousand years. At Munich, Chamberlain and Daladier thought they offered a reasonable compromise because they thought peace was better than war. To Hitler, war was better than compromise, anything less than the totality of what he wanted.
Also keep in mind that, in the minds of such people, the possibility of them being annihilated, defeated, crushed through war, never enter their conscious minds -- until maybe the very end, Gotterdamerung. Defeat is for their enemies, the weak ones. They can only go from victory to victory, even when to the rest of the world it looks like a defeat.
You cannot negotiate with people for whom there is no "worst case scenario."
They are, in effect, sociopaths, like serial killers. You can't reason with them, you can only crush them, lock them up and either kill them or throw away the key. But you will never ever "redeem" them.
America has been suffering from what I would call this "cancer" since the Civil War.
Sherman's march didn't crush the South (we all know what I mean by "the South"), and nothing will do it either this time. They are indeed like a malignant tumor on the Republic, back and back again throughout our history.
In fact, one may argue that, not having ever been excised properly (the way the Germans or the South Africans appear to have dealt with their own "demons"), the tumor finally metastized from Wallace, McCarthy, Nixon and Reagan to GW Bush, the all-too-predictable stage where it's now in control and, like all tumors do, is going to kill its host.
I want to stress that the problem is not just limited to Bush, Cheney, Rove, and even the "politburo" of the neo-cons -- we obsess too much on Bush here -- but it includes the "Rich," the top business circles of America who hated Teddy Roosevelt, hated FDR, hated the 60ies and today, funds and sympathizes with the leadership.
Again, Hitler was nothing without Krupp, and the same goes here.
How can we rescue the country? Can we rescue the country?
Let us bear in mind that we are not alone in this game. Right now, I wouldn't want to be a top US executive in charge of a US subsidiary in Germany or Italy. Our behavior has turned us from the somewhat unsavory bulwark against communism to the new USSR and we, all of us, have now become legitimate targets in the eyes of much of the world.
Soon, it is not, it will not be, just Iraq and Muslims, but the next red brigades or baader-meinhoff... Our enemy will set the course of retaliation, not us.
Domestically, read the recent articles about the dead of the poor left to rot in their houses in NOLA. If the poor aren't torching cars like in France right now, it's because that anger is being bottled up somewhere. Another potential flashpoint that could become a Reichstag fire anytime.
I fear we're only one attack away from becoming a softer, blander version of Chile under Pinochet.
The recent revelations about Ohio voting show that the system itself may no longer be adequate enough to regain lost ground.
After the Civil War, the SCOTUS helped true democracy to take root in the South. With Roberts and Alito, we may no longer be able to count on that.
Could war have been averted at Munich? Understanding Hitler's mind set, the answer seems no, because there was nothing but total surrender that Chamberlain could have offered him that would have satisfied him. And of course Chamberlain couldn't and wouldn't do that.
My point is that, for us to believe we can effect a preaceful regime change, we have to believe that the enemy will meekly surrender power, assuming they don't use various shenanigans to cling to it illegitimately.
How realistic is that, I ask?
As I said, I fear there will be more "war" overseas as increasingly America and Americans and American businesses become justified targets, and because that will provide fuel for the fascists, there will be a new, heated civil war on the domestic front, because ultimately that will be the ONLY way to defeat them.
Perhaps that is the only way out of the tunnel, as the First Civil War may have been the only way to put an end to slavery.
We are tottering on the edge of a very dark abyss, paying the price of past generations' complacency.