DragonFlight

Regardless of which side, or even extreme, of the political spectrum one identifies with, the continual lies, misrepresentations, sound bytes and "bull____," as Senator Joseph Biden so eloquently phrased it, employed in political campaigns, get quite exasperating and terminally weary. There is a nation to run, a citizenry to take care of, a world to improve, and there is no time, nor should there be the inclination, to continually listen to the self-serving rhetoric of political snake oil salesmen, whose main concern is neither of those aforementioned needs, so much as their own aggrandizement and accumulation of wealth and power.

It’s hard enough to discern truth when we have artificially labeled values such as liberalism and conservatism to deal with. The fact is, most of us lie somewhere between the extremes, leaving the true radicals and even nutcases to occupy those niches. I would imagine that most of us are not interested in allowing the extremists of either nature to actually run the nation in our name. Most of us still have more common sense than that.

President Bush last Thursday, while speaking before the Israeli Knesset, decided to drop an inappropriate political bomb by mentioning that there are “some” desirous of talking to terrorists in a fashion similar to the way Nazi appeasers dealt with Hitler before World War II:

“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

The White House was later quick to deny that Bush was in any way referring to Barack Obama in his remarks, but one really needs an IQ short of triple digits to believe that.

Senator John McCain, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, was quick on the uptake (some speculate that it was suspiciously “too quick”). In a remark to reporters he stated, “Yes, there have been appeasers in the past, and the president is exactly right, and one of them is Neville Chamberlain.'’

When McCain was asked if he believed Senator Obama was an appeaser, he stated, “I think that Barack Obama needs to explain why he wants to sit down and talk with [Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] who is the head of a government that is a state sponsor of terrorism, that is responsible for the killing of brave young Americans, that wants to wipe Israel off the map, who denies the Holocaust. That’s what I think Senator Obama ought to explain to the American people.'’

The remarks by The President and Senator McCain were in themselves bad enough, mixing (purposely in my opinion) the meanings of, or implying a similarity between, the words talk and appease, but the icing on the cake was to come later on Chris Matthew’s TV program “Hardball” on May 15, 2008 during an interview with right wing talk radio host Kevin James. This exchange perfectly exemplifies the dangers of how political misinformation is so easily disseminated when such implicitly agreed upon misuse of words and concepts are allowed. It became quickly apparent that James neither knew the meaning of appeasement, nor had any clue exactly why Neville Chamberlain was guilty of it. And yet, this in no way deterred James from repeatedly and erroneously painting Barack Obama with the label of appeaser.

What is the real danger here? Just as we have experienced in recent elections, there are all too many voters in the United States willing and able to pick up on sound bytes to use as political campaign mantras, even when they are clueless as to the factual content of that information. I praise Chris Matthews for becoming exasperated enough to repeatedly nail Kevin James to the wall for his misstatements and accusations towards Senator Obama. It’s about time that more in the media started taking their job seriously, and not allowing faux pundits to simply blather on with impunity. As Matthews stated, referring to James’ remarks:

“You don’t know what you’re talking about…And the problem is that you don’t understand that there is a difference between talking to the enemy and appeasing. What Neville Chamberlain did wrong, most people would say, is not talking to Hitler, but giving him half of Czechoslovakia in `38. That’s what he did wrong, not talking to someone… Appeasement is giving away things to the enemy… This is pathetic. He doesn’t even know what Chamberlain did at Munich. He’s as bad as the White House Press Secretary that doesn’t even know what the Cuban Missile Crisis was. We are talking about people with blank slates in terms of history.”

In the meantime, let’s demand that words be used as they are defined, and in the proper context. America faces the consequences of beginning the 21st Century on the wrong foot, compliments of the Bush Mob, and can ill afford any continuance of the same nonsense. Ultimately, you and I will determine America’s ability to cope with the challenges of this century; we are after all, the electorate…still…I think?!?