Reply #49: Freedom fries anyone?

[zara]

Of course you can't trust an Arab right? I mean let's play the Xenophobia card. This move by Dems and Repugs targets the fear of the other in the culture wars.
Why would Bush do it? Well it’s a way of letting the Arabs on our side know we trust them.
And its consistent with letting Big Business do what it wants, on the basis that they will back Bush and his ilk. In other words, this move is entirely consistent with Bush’s corporatism! Let Big Business (and free capital flows) reign!
So it seems like our feckless leader has made a politically tone deaf move—very very very tone deaf--but also a move that follows necessarily from his geopolitics,or more correctly, from his multinational corporatist economics.

Assume his basic geo-economics: Keeping friendly Arab investors on board is necessary from the perspective of global capital flows. Bush has to let stock market funds go where they will. That’s a requirement of what the US and US-dominated world financial institutions require all the time of developing countries. (Imagine what would happen if we refused Arab money and imagine if Arab capital fled? Imagine Chinese capital fleeing? Imagine Japanese capital fleeing? Are you imagining a depression?)

On the other hand, America IS the Xenophobic country that changed French fries to freedom fries. I hope the recent move by Iran to call Danish pastries Rose buds of the Prophet Mohammad (or something ridiculous like that) reflects on just what fools we looked like to the world. (Don't most people on DU share that view? Or is fear of the other now a Democratic value among us?)

Query: which party benefits more by staking out reactionary Xenophobic policies? Which party can stoke these emotions into angry votes better? Just asking....It’s so obvious that the Rethugs batter the Dems with this patriotism of scoundrels again and again.

The irony here, the tone deaf President has a quandary where his economic policies are openly at odds with his party’s hatred of the other. Read: racism.

And no, I am not a Bush supporter, and if you would like to advise me to go to Free Rethuglic and spew my crud there, someone already beat you to it! I also don't think that just because someone is an Arab, that they cannot be trusted--look at Helen Thomas, an Arab American who is among our finest!!!!

: )