Fear in Our Times

In his speech a few nights ago, President Obama said “Our government made decisions based on fear rather than foresight”. I think he was being diplomatic. I believe the Bush Administration made decisions based on fear and with the intention to incite fear. The more fearful we were the better. They ladled it on, thick and rich with everything they could think if to make us think that the terrorist were just down the block, ready to kill us all in our sleep.

The Bush Administration used they very tactics we decry as evil in the pursuit of their agenda. They wanted a war that wasn’t necessary, so they did everything possible to change the facts to fit. The Iraqis were surprised that anyone thought they had a connection to Al Qaeda, just torture people until one of them says there was a connection just so that the torture will stop.

They wanted to shift the blame for being asleep at the wheel when the World Trade Center attack happened, so they screamed at every opportunity that it was Clinton’s fault. It doesn’t matter that he left office nine months prior to the attack and his intelligence folk warned there was something in the offing.

Now Dick Cheney is making the rounds, telling anyone with a microphone that torture made us safe. Even though the overwhelming evidence is that any useful information was obtain from “prisoners” was obtained before the torture started, and that torture usually produces more false information that truth, and it was very useful in recruiting for the terrorists, and made it exponentially more dangerous for any captured American service men and women, Mr. Cheney is adamant that is kept us safe.

The GOP is following hot on his heels. They are using every trick in the book to spread the fear again. According to them, Obama wants to release all the people being held at Quantanamo onto the streets of the United States. From there, they will invade our neighborhoods and kill us in our sleep.

The media outlets, newspapers and broadcast are, of course, breathless in their need to propagate these insane accusations as fact and reality. They seem to be falling over each other in the haste to have Cheney and the GOPers on their shows and in their columns. I know the need to sell papers and commercial time is a high priority, but at the cost of our country? The term media whore can be applied to more and more of our supposedly noble journalists these days.

What really gets is the number of allegedly educated and sober Democratic politicians that are falling for it. Apparently their spines did disappear years ago and will never be found again.

We have gone from being a nation that can hold its collective head high and look danger in the eye to a nation of cowering, gibbering idiots. We have not recovered from the days of reds under the beds, we have just replaced them with terrorists. We are now using and condoning torture and the worst of tactics that we abhor in our enemies.

How can we, as a nation, as the United States of America, say to future generations that we stood up and met the challenges of our time? If we succumb to the fear, if we do not meet the fight head on, if we do not keep that moral high ground, we will not be worthy of being called Americans. We have become the very things we once stood against.