Patriotism

Anyone who doesn't think Barack Obama is an underdog until the day after the election is out of their mind. The press LOVES John McCain so much so that AP reporters take care to bring him his favorite donuts, while trying to do Karl Rove's dirty work and paint Obama as someone he isn't with every angle they can try. In a week where Obama gave a major speech on the true meaning of patriotism, he still has to respond to the left on his FISA stand and the Republicans on his Iraq comments.

Obama has the cajones to let those supporters opposed to his FISA position have a place on his website, the exact opposite of the Bush/Cheney practice of screen speech attendees. He has the cajones to address the issue in writing today and tolerate, even encourage dissent. Because he believes that without differing opinions, there is no democracy.

Happy 4th of July.

Happy Independence Day.

I've been dying for a true patriotic voice ever since Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld and Bush turned patriotism against us McCarthy Era style to get their Iraq War, and here it is, couldn't be clearer. While he goes on to talk about his childhood as an American and separates loyalty to country from loyalty to a particular leader of the government, and he calls for a new national service, sure to grow as a campaign theme leading into the Convention (with some of the leaders to be drawn, no doubt, from his current one million campaign activist recruits), here's what I think is the pivotal set-up passage:

My concerns here aren't simply personal, however. After all, throughout our history, men and women of far greater stature and significance than me have had their patriotism questioned in the midst of momentous debates. Thomas Jefferson was accused by the Federalists of selling out to the French. The anti-Federalists were just as convinced that John Adams was in cahoots with the British and intent on restoring monarchal rule. Likewise, even our wisest Presidents have sought to justify questionable policies on the basis of patriotism. Adams' Alien and Sedition Act, Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, Roosevelt's internment of Japanese Americans - all were defended as expressions of patriotism, and those who disagreed with their policies were sometimes labeled as unpatriotic.

In other words, the use of patriotism as a political sword or a political shield is as old as the Republic. Still, what is striking about today's patriotism debate is the degree to which it remains rooted in the culture wars of the 1960s - in arguments that go back forty years or more. In the early years of the civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War, defenders of the status quo often accused anybody who questioned the wisdom of government policies of being unpatriotic. Meanwhile, some of those in the so-called counter-culture of the Sixties reacted not merely by criticizing particular government policies, but by attacking the symbols, and in extreme cases, the very idea, of America itself - by burning flags; by blaming America for all that was wrong with the world; and perhaps most tragically, by failing to honor those veterans coming home from Vietnam, something that remains a national shame to this day
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Most Americans never bought into these simplistic world-views - these caricatures of left and right. Most Americans understood that dissent does not make one unpatriotic, and that there is nothing smart or sophisticated about a cynical disregard for America's traditions and institutions. And yet the anger and turmoil of that period never entirely drained away. All too often our politics still seems trapped in these old, threadbare arguments - a fact most evident during our recent debates about the war in Iraq, when those who opposed administration policy were tagged by some as unpatriotic, and a general providing his best counsel on how to move forward in Iraq was accused of betrayal.

Given the enormous challenges that lie before us, we can no longer afford these sorts of divisions. None of us expect that arguments about patriotism will, or should, vanish entirely; after all, when we argue about patriotism, we are arguing about who we are as a country, and more importantly, who we should be. But surely we can agree that no party or political philosophy has a monopoly on patriotism. And surely we can arrive at a definition of patriotism that, however rough and imperfect, captures the best of America's common spirit.

The fact that this speech got drowned out by the MSM's protective hue over Wesley Clark's statement about McCain's POW experience not being in unquestionable qualification for Commander-in-Chief, that Obama has to message-battle previously planned MSM conjecture stories casting doubt on his mortgage rate without any hard evidence, barely reporting, shows what he's up against each and every day. That's one of the main reasons Nettertainment is so strongly for his candidacy, damned the purity trolls and all the other torpedoes.

Oh, and even if I believe Obama is an underdog as a challenger to the MSM status quo, let alone as a mixed race candidate trying to be the first in 44 thus far, I do believe he is a (finally, Democrats) winner at heart, and that's what makes him so important to support.

After all, he's just flipped the poll numbers against McCain in the traditionally big red state of Montana.

God bless America.