The net that shall enmesh them all
Edited, Written, and Published by Josh Nossiter
Thursday, August 9th, 2007
Like Hezbollah, Republicans are prepared to sacrifice any or all of their neighbors for the causes they believe in. Well, not exactly their neighbors, because the kind of folks they’re prepared to sacrifice don’t live in gated communities or belong to the country club like they do. But those who don’t are fair game, be they drowned in New Orleans, buried alive in a Utah mine, or blown to smithereens in Iraq. The GOP believes that sacrifice is good, the more the better, as long as it’s not their sacrifice. That’s why drug addict Rush Limbaugh wants to toss all drug users in jail and throw away the key, gambling addict Bill Bennett comes down so hard on gamblers, and sex-harassment king Bill O’Reilly really really hates libertines like William Jefferson Clinton.
Indeed, as with Hezbollah, hatred is the core value of the Republican party. Members in good standing hate Jews, Muslims, gays, blacks, Hispanics, poor people, liberals, vegetarians, environmentalists, academics, unmarried mothers, most movie stars, and everything French. They also don’t like Asians, but following the lead of Rupert Murdoch they kiss Chinese hiney whenever possible because 1.5 billion people can buy an awful lot of Chevrolets and Marlboros.
No self-respecting Hezbollahn would be caught dead, or alive for that matter, without his AK 47. We’ve all seen them on TV wearing designer ski masks and joyfully firing their weapons in the air. Republicans too believe that all should be armed, preferably to the teeth. Assault weapons for everyone is a party motto. Guns don’t kill people, Democrats kill people, at least decent people, is the corollary. The fine Republican state of Virginia so believes in universal re-armament that a frothing at the mouth lunatic like Seung-Hui Cho can acquire enough firepower to kill 32 people and wound 25 more in a single morning without altering state gun laws in any significant way.
Of course the GOP hasn’t always been this way. In last Sunday’s New York Times, historian Michael Beschloss reminds us that President Eisenhower refused to give way to cold war hysteria over a fictive US – Soviet missile gap, and vetoed the huge military spending increases urged upon him. He also “scoffed at warnings that the free world would be in peril unless we immediately went to fight in Vietnam.”* Ike was a Republican, at least in party affiliation.
But that was then. Dan Froomkin in the Washington Post today reports on a chorus of GOP voices calling for an assault on Iran. He cites the blog of Anne-Marie Slaughter, Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, forecasting the bombing of Iran in order to bolster the GOP’s re-election chances in ’08. What more proof do we need that the party of Lincoln has indeed become an American Hezbollah? Like their Middle-Eastern brethren in Lebanon last summer, our own party of God wouldn’t dream of letting a few thousand casualties stand in the way of a good power grab.
* http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/books/review/05besc.html?_r=1&oref=slogin.
* * * * *
A NOTE TO READERS
There was nothing new at The Nossiter Net between March 3rd and April 26th, nearly eight weeks. The reason: tech sabotage. Yahoo Geocities, the host for this site, denied access for the entire period. At one point, they even managed to lose all the files. In many discussions with Yahoo staff, no clear explanation was forthcoming. No one seemed able to fix the problem. Ruling out the possibility of Dubbya’s revenge, I finally wrote to Mr. Terry Semel, Chairman and CEO of Yahoo! Inc and described the ordeal the page had undergone since the beginning of March. A week later, a helpful Yahooo engineer named Jason called. He had my letter before him. Though he couldn’t do the repairs on on the spot, he promised a fix by the next day. That was April 26th, nearly two months after shutting me down in the first place.
The Nossiter Net apologizes, which is more than I can say for Yahoo Geocities.
©Joshua C. Nossiter, 2007
