GOP: Its Unpatriotic To Criticize Bush-McCain-Republican Policies? I Think the Opposite Is True!

[Median Democrat]

The latest news on the economy underscores just how badly Bush has managed the economy. The bailout was finally passed after McCain's little stunts delayed the passage. However, notwithstanding the passage of the bill, we still face tough economic times"

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-econ5-2008oct05,0,3369735.story

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Even if the financial bailout plan begins to work, the nation will be lucky if all it experiences is a bad slowdown. The alternative, economists say, is something much worse -- a contraction that might go on for years.

The latest sign of trouble came Friday when the government reported that American employers sliced September payrolls by 159,000 jobs, the ninth straight month of losses and one that puts the country on track to shed a million jobs this year.

But jobs are only part of the trouble; almost every major player in the economy -- which had been growing until recently, if only slowly -- is now beating a hasty retreat:

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However, right at the time that Americans should be questioning their government, and asking what is wrong, and what can be done to fix our nation's problems, Republicans are saying that such questions are unpatriotic! In other words, true patriots would never criticize the policies of the Bush administration.

I, of course, disagree. I think it is unpatriotic not to point out and try to fix the severe damage that the Bush administration has done to our Nation and its people. If patriotism is loving your country, then the Republican's embrace of the policies that damaged America's image abroad and its economy at home, is utterly unpatriotic.

Nonetheless, Republicans are not trying to push the meme that patriotism means supporting Bush's policies.

First, on CBS’s Face the Nation, Rep. Heather Wilson (R-NM) noted that Obama has criticized “American policy”:

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WILSON: Well, he has talked down about America. You know, we’ve always had this history of saying, “Well, you know, politics ends at the water’s edge.” It didn’t for Barack Obama. He’s been critical not only of the President but of American policy and hence has kind of a negative view of America in the world. That’s not unusual frankly among liberals in kind of post-Vietnam America, to say that America is the problem.

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Second, in this article in the LA Times, the author traces the history of Republicans of defining patriotism as supporting Republican policies:

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-gabler5-2008oct05,0,3727511.story

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The real Americans: Forget red and blue, the real battle is over the allegedly authentic and the allegedly inauthentic.

McCarthy's equation didn't really take hold until the Vietnam War, when opposition itself would be cast as un-American. This was Richard Nixon's major contribution to our political taxonomy. For Nixon, America was cleaved between the vast Silent Majority (real) who agreed with him, supported the war and detested protesters and pointy-headed academics, and those protesters and academics who disagreed with him (unreal).

Republicans have been feasting on this division ever since, and so have the media, most likely because they fear being stigmatized by the same elitism. Everyone wants to be real, even if being real Americans looks suspiciously like being a hidebound conservative.

It is a neat gambit -- to conflate "real" with Republican and "un-American" with Democrats -- neater still when there are fewer and fewer Americans who fit the most colorful aspects of authenticity represented by a Sarah Palin.

If the country keeps clinging to this reductive stereotype despite its absurdity, it may be because we have never quite lost those powerful early American impulses. Our resentments against elitists still burn, our anger against our "betters" is still hot, and our fear of being called a phony still roars. Just ask any Republican.

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