Morford - America, Narcoleptic Pit Bull

[realFedUp]

America, Narcoleptic Pit Bull
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/archive/2006/02/24/notes022406.DTL&nl=fix

Mark Morford
Feb 24, 2006

snip

Sound familiar? At this moment in American history, we are surrounded, infiltrated, soaked to the bone with warmongers and fear dealers and hate poppers. The GOP has been positively masterful in cultivating a culture of intolerance and disgust and Taliban-like fanaticism, instilling a brilliant kind of poisonous fear into middle 'Merka that equates gays with terrorists and terrorists with the Middle East and the Middle East with the Devil and the Devil with liberals and liberals with, well, gays. Isn't that clever?

As it goes with America, so it goes with the world. You want to know why there's vicious rioting and people dying across the world right now, from Iran to Pakistan, Libya to Nigeria, all in the name of a mediocre cartoon featuring Allah and a cute turban bomb? Why otherwise rational Muslims are protesting by the thousands from London to Cairo? Here's a hint: It has nothing to do with the cartoon. It has nothing to do with Muslims loathing Christianity, or even with the Islamic fundamentalists who teach their children to hate pretty much everyone (but especially America) from birth.

But it has a great deal to do with the world's foremost peace-keeping superpower becoming the world's foremost thug, turning into a self-righteous torture-happy God-monger and a grand perpetuator of war. It has much to do with the U.S.-led stoking of an already white-hot Middle East tinderbox via launching two brutal, unwinnable wars and fueling the fires of division and separation and rage. Once we were the great beacon of peace and diplomacy. But now the beacon has become bloody and malicious and hollow. It has become a brutal joke.

snip

It is far from over. We have, by many accounts, helped set the stage for a perfect storm of perpetual war and even more explosive hate. But until this dark BushCo cloud begins to lift, much of the world will only look to us the way a battered wife looks at her violently alcoholic husband. And haven't we had just about enough of that?

continued

[AndreaCG]

1. Morford on the ball again

Perhaps a little more somber than usual.

[Briar]

2. It's not just the GOP who

equate "gays with terrorists and terrorists with the Middle East and the Middle East with the Devil and the Devil with liberals and liberals with, well, gays." Plenty of middle americans who self identify as liberals have also joined in with the paroxysm of islamophobia which has been sweeping the country over the weeks since the cartoon crisis surfaced, to be followed by "Portergate."

[cybildisobedience]

3. what makes matters worse

is that the battered wife's alcoholic and abusive husband happens to be a crooked cop, too, and all his buddies are ready to let him off the hook. There's NOWHERE to go for help.

[realFedUp]

4. yeah....our only hope is in numbers on the side of truth and good.

nt

[otohara]

5. Smacks of Truth

in big tough love doses from Morford...again!

[katty]

6. best title-spot on

[atommom]

7. He does have a way with words. If it weren't so true, it would be comedy.

Are we to blame for all the eternal tension and raging religious hatreds in the Middle East? Of course not. Are we largely responsible for making them far, far worse than they were just five years ago by deciding, under Bush's pampered thumb, to become the planet's sanctimonious hell-bent Jesus-crazed bitch-slapper? Hell yes.