KAMIKAZI POLITICS MAKES IT OKAY TO UNDERMINE OUR TROOPS?

REPEALICANS

The GOP's risky plan to run against health care reform.

By William Saletan

Posted Monday, March 22, 2010, at 8:26 AM ET

Below is an excerpt from the above titled article.  You can read Saletan's entire article at http://www.slate.com/default.aspx?id=2248513.
"In his speech to House Democrats on Saturday, President Obama listed some of the bill's most popular elements: tax credits to small business to provide insurance, a ban on insurance exclusion for pre-existing conditions, a ban on lifetime coverage caps, and letting twentysomethings stay on their parents' policies. Obama argued that these provisions make the bill easier to defend. But his political advisers are hinting at a more aggressive strategy: portraying Republicans who oppose the legislation as opposing all of its benefits.



In the Bush administration, this was standard practice. Any Democrat who resisted any component of a bill was accused of opposing the bill's objective. If you complained about labor provisions of the bill to establish a federal department of homeland security, Republicans said you were against homeland security. If you objected to part of the "Patriot Act," they said you were unpatriotic. If you criticized Bush's execution of the Iraq war, they said you were undermining our troops."


I was taken aback by the comment at the end of the first quoted paragraph to the effect that some of Obama's political advisers want to aggressively portray "Republicans who oppose the [health care reform] legislation as opposing all of its benefits."  This is wrong, I thought, and then I read the next paragraph and realized why I was taken aback.  We've seen this strategy before -- and I didn't like it then.

Everything in that second paragraph is true and only those with short or selective memories have forgotten.

Yet, just last week a Facebook friend made the statement, "Obama is more of a threat to America than the terrorists."  Wow, talk about undermining the troops.  Declaring the Commander in Chief of our troops fighting the terrorists in Afghanistan as being more of a threat to American than the terrorists they are fighting would normally be consider treason.  It is certainly irresponsible.

Fanaticism apparently knows no bounds and carries no shame.

I do not fear for the country under President Obama or any other president.  I fear for the country when political or religious fanatics can make such statements and instead of fearing a knock on their door from the FBI, they receive praise from some quarters.  Desperate military leaders in Japan near the close of the war capitalized on the medieval religious fanaticism of the times to send Kamikaze pilots to certain death in the futile attempt to forestall certain defeat.  Are we (some of us, at least) feeling so desperate that we must resort to Kamikaze style politics?

Are we approaching the point in our country where divisive politics, heated, overcharged and often unfounded words and hate symbols can be used to provoke the radical fanatics among us to commit Kamikaze style acts in the mistaken belief that they are acting for the good of the country.  If so, we face a greater enemy within than from any terrorists abroad.