Naman Crowe Dices the Red Meat from the Sarah Palin, John McCain, Fear and Slam
Fest
What a nasty pit of vipers, the Republican National Convention, starring the
vice presidential hopeful, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin on Wednesday night in St.
Paul, Minn. Happily they did not consider themselves as vipers, nor nasty.
That’s what made it so fascinating and creepy, watching their joyous smiles
with every cruel and unjustified stab into the back of Barack Obama by Palin
and a host of supporting players, including three presidential contenders that
didn’t make it this time.
One might think that it would be easy to proclaim the virtues of the Republican
presidential hopeful, John McCain, and present a tasty feast of his
presidential plans for America and the world, without having to resort to
fibbing and impugning the character and motivations of the Democratic
candidate, but one would think wrong. These are Republicans. They are stirred
by the red meat and the smell of blood. It encourages them. It confirms them.
It unites them in a wonderful feeding frenzy and makes them feel swell, as they
wipe their mouths and squeal in laughter.
God bless them. Their feelings of rapture and happiness are as real as anything
they ever felt in church. It’s a little tough to be hard on people who do not
know what they do. These people truly believe in what they’re doing and how
they’re doing it. That’s what makes them so fascinating and spooky. If they did
not believe that McCain and the Republicans put their country first, implying
that Obama and the Democrats don’t, why would they have made it such a drumbeat
of their convention?
That Palin believes what she believes, there is no doubt. In an address in June
to students of the Wasilla Church of God’s School of Ministry, a church that
she was a member of for many years beginning as a teenager, she told the
students that the Iraq war was a part of God’s plan and “a task that is from
God” that our national leaders are sending our soldiers out on.
That belief is in perfect agreement with President George W. Bush’s statement
some years back that God told him to attack Iraq, as well as another statement
that he later told a reporter about talking to a higher power about the subject
rather than discussing it with his father, the former President Bush.
This is the buckle of the belt that holds the Republicans together and unites
them as the party that puts America first, the belief that they have been
chosen by God to carry out God’s war on Islamic terrorism in just the way they
have conducted it and will continue to conduct it, even if they have to do it
on credit and regardless of how many nations we have to attack or how many
innocent civilians have to be killed in our crusade against evil.
On a giant screen the night before Palin’s speech, President Bush gave the
unifying charge by telling everyone that the most important thing to remember
was 9/11 and that America must stay on the offensive and be willing to take
preventative measures to keep from being attacked again. He didn’t have to
explain the preventative measures. He meant the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
and whatever new wars we need to wage in order to protect America.
Palin’s speech was considered as very good, even by the media commentators,
despite the fact that it tasted like a cookie laced with arsenic. It’s a
wondrous thing that arsenic laced cookies are considered good and worth eating,
even if half-baked, so long as they are delivered with a smirk and a smile to
an audience starving for every crumb they can get into their mouths.
One of the most delicious moments for the Republican audience was when she
sweetly ridiculed Obama’s experience as a community organizer in comparison to
her executive experience as mayor of Wasilla and her 20 months as governor of
Alaska. This was a recurring theme throughout the evening, with claims that she
had more executive experience than Obama and his running mate, Joe Biden, put
together.
Why were these people laughing so hysterically? Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. got
his start as a community organizer in the Montgomery Bus Boycott which led
eventually to the March on Washington and his “I have a dream,” speech and the
Civil Rights Movement, which changed this country for the better forever. And
he didn’t have a day’s worth of executive experience. Neither did John F.
Kennedy or Abraham Lincoln before they were elected president. So why were
these people laughing? One would think that Obama’s ability to win the
Democratic nomination for president, as compared to Palin being picked by John
McCain to be his running mate, would carry more weight than her executive
experience. But she was feeding this poison cookie to a Republican audience and
they loved it.
The main thing that all these poison cookies have had in common throughout the
Republican National Convention is that the Republican way is God’s way and the
path that George Bush put us on after 9/11 was God’s way and that the path that
John McCain will keep us on is God’s way, which is the American way for anyone
with the desire of putting their country first.
Ironically, the major fault or flaw in Obama’s campaign is that he has not
distanced himself enough from the Republican way or even the Democratic way
regarding our use of war in dealing with the terrorists and our misguided
belief that we have the right to invade other nations in pursuit of terrorists,
and that Israel must always be considered right when it comes to any conflict
between them and the Palestinians or any other Arab or Muslim nation, and that
America is always right regardless of what any other nation or the world might
think, from the Russians and the Chinese to the North Koreans and the Iranians.
Of course, if he had taken the stance that America’s foreign policies and
actions and non-actions in this world that we all live in had a great deal to
do with the attack against us on 9/11 and the bloody mess that we’ve gotten
ourselves into in the Middle East and the march that we’re on towards more war
and more killing in the world as our way of leading the planet Earth to peace,
prosperity and justice for all, he would never have achieved the Democratic
nomination for president.
The reason we’ve not had another 9/11 is because it’s already been done and
cannot be repeated in that same way again. The idea that we’ve kept it from
happening that way again by keeping our enemies tied down in wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq is plain old-fashioned nonsense, but Obama has not said
that.
Another reason that we’ve not had another 9/11 is because that attack provoked
us into doing more harm to our own country than Osama bin Laden could have ever
hoped for in his wildest imagination. It didn’t just result in the deaths of
nearly 3,000 of our innocents, it led to us taking the lives of hundreds of
thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians that didn’t have anything to do with it
and cut us off at the knees in terms of our standing in the world of nations.
It resulted in us sitting by while the Bush regime gutted our Constitutional
liberties and freedoms and turned us into torturers and villains on the world
stage. It put us on the march toward world domination through war. It led us to
the very moment that we’re at where the Republicans believe that God is guiding
our footsteps and the Democrats are not quite sure enough to dispute it with
the vigor and righteous indignation that they should.. But Obama has not said
that.
We should give Osama bin Laden his due. Devil that he may be, he has managed to
turn America into the big Satan walking to and fro across the world in the
insane belief that we have been chosen by God to make the world right and
ourselves energy free, sitting on our own throne on the right side of Jesus,
despite the fact that God has distributed the oil reserves where they are and
where they will continue to be, regardless of how loud the Republicans yell,
“Drill, baby, drill!” “Full steam ahead.” “Damn the torpedoes!” And “God bless
America!” And the only way to put “America first” is to be a Republican in the
mold of George Bush and John McCain.
We’ve been given the choice between a blind man in McCain and a man with one
eye, in Obama, to lead us. Will we select the man with the most vision? What
other choice is there? God help us.
###
Naman Crowe, a combat veteran of the Vietnam War, is an award winning
journalist who has been practicing his craft since 1971, working first with The
Chattanooga Times and later with various North Georgia newspapers including The
Summerville News, The Dalton Daily Citizen and The Catoosa County News, as well
as numerous other publications.
A poor boy, born in Atlanta and raised and educated in the Chattanooga area
where he still resides, Naman Crowe is - in the words of the late, great John
Popham, the legendary Southern correspondent for The New York Times - "a
delight in today's world. His background is something you can't get every time
you study the masses."
Naman Crowe, continues Popham in his tribute, "Is an excellent writer and
thinker and is committed to the best world he can help create on his own
terms."
What you will find within the columns and writings of Naman Crowe is just that,
a commitment to the best world possible, on his own terms, which is the right
to stand up and talk back. The tools of his craft are the thinking mind and the
written word.
We are in agreement with Popham's conclusion. "You will like him."
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