Enough Appeasement

"Americans these days don't respond to rational argument. Now that I think about it, I don't think they ever have. They respond to the brute who picks up the biggest stick and beats it hardest on the ground, which is why the Right has had so much success over the past 20 years. The Right is merely playing catch-up with the base nature of Middle America, populated by the descendents of the same mob feared by Alexander Hamilton.

After My Lai broke, even after Americans knew exactly what had happened, an overwhelming majority supported the leader of the unit that carried out the massacre, Lt. William Calley, practically forcing Nixon to intervene and soften his sentence. Indeed, if Americans had their way, we'd probably still be bombing Vietnam today. It took the Vietnamese whipping our asses to bring some sense into the nation--not rational argument.

That's why the Iraqi insurgents are saving us from ourselves. My own sense is that the Times, like so many other media, trumped up the war in Iraq not so much because they believed in it, but because they knew that their brutish, bloodthirsty consumers--the American newspaper-reading public--wanted war, any war."


(via <$Xvarenah$>)