SARCASM: Presidential candidate John Kerry would like to arm our soldiers with flowers instead of guns, and teach them how to talk about their problems instead of fighting all the time. He wants our military to be more tender and generally cutesy. Thank God we’ve got Vice President Dick Cheney to stand up and say, “A sensitive war will not destroy the evil men…” Ignore for a moment the fact that President Bush said “we must be sensitive about expressing our power and influence,” and that Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Wolfowitz, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Richard Myers, and even Cheney himself have all used the word “sensitive” to describe our military actions. Please forget about that for a moment, because you are completely unable to comprehend the concept of hypocrisy, and should focus on trusting everything I say. break SARCASM;
I am slowly being numbed to hypocrisy of this sort, and am becoming more upset by the condescension. Cheney doesn’t care if he’s used the word “sensitive” before, and he doesn’t care if you realize it. He wants you to believe that Kerry is a tree-hugging liberal lunatic, and he’s willing to twist Kerry’s meaning beyond recognition to do it. Of course Kerry doesn’t want our military to be all huggable and soft, he meant sensitive as in sensible, responsive, and able to acutely perceive information available to it. That’s not liberal craziness, it’s intelligence. Cheney thinks so little of the American people that he takes this word, picks a connotation of it that he can attack, and describes an imaginary person that he knows will frighten most voters. How many people would take the time to look up the original transcript for context? How many people would be skeptical enough of Cheney’s comments to think about what Kerry may have meant or to look up the word? After all, isn’t it much simpler to think that Kerry didn’t mean our military should be “tender”, but rather should “have quick and acute sensibility” or be “readily affected or changed” in response to external events?
Now wait a minute, those last interpretations seem familiar. Where did I hear them? Oh, that’s right, today’s announcement by the Bush administration that it would be moving more than 60,000 troops closer to home so that the military could be “more mobile, more available” and more capable of responding to new threats. So it seems that Kerry wasn’t so much spouting crazy ideas, but really suggesting a mentality strikingly similar to Bush’s. Could that have provoked the insultingly patronizing reaction from Cheney?
Kerry’s comment was a simple truth; not particularly profound, but safely accurate. But since each side must childishly oppose the other on every point, the Bush camp was obliged to slam Kerry in no uncertain terms. I don’t think the troop movement is a particularly logical manifestation of that strategy, by the way. It’s not clear to me how moving many of our troops to one place will make them more available “at other places all over the earth,” nor is it clear to me why having them at home makes us safer. Are there enemy tanks thundering through your home town? Enemy jets buzzing your bedroom? I’m no military expert, but I can only conclude that the move was a political bribe to get the families whose children will now be closer to home to remember Bush come election day.
But, I don’t want to suggest too loudly that the Bush administration might be primarily motivated by political factors. They’re very sensitive about that.
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August 20th, 2004 at 8:07 pm
Other than preaching to the already-converted via your blog, do you think there’s more you/we could/should be doing? I don’t mean to be paternalistic, and it would be hypocritical of me to urge you to action while I sip my Napa Valley zinfandel and sit on my ever-widening posterior. But I can’t help but believe that if we simply write out periodic checks to our favorite PACs and vote our respective consciences, that may not be enough.