The Myth of Moral Equivalency

By Burt Prelutsky

There was a time not all that long ago when most of us agreed about what constituted good and evil. But that time, I’m afraid, has come and gone and is now as passé as five cent cigars and 45 cents-a-gallon gasoline.

Our former sense of morality hasn’t been replaced by immorality, at least not entirely, but by something that’s probably more dangerous because it comes cleverly disguised as broad-mindedness. Those in the mass media and academia ridicule people who still believe there are nations, values, and cultures that are superior to others, and they regard those Americans who have the temerity to disagree with them as yokels, super patriots, and religious hypocrites. The elitists trumpet moral equivalency as an ideal. And yet, time and again, they display their own double standards. The same folks who were so upset about George W. Bush’s time in the Air National Guard and his early problems with alcohol aren’t the least put out by Barack Obama’s avoidance of military service and his admitted use of illegal drugs. Apparently even moral equivalency doesn’t exist if one of the parties is a Republican and the other is a Democrat.

If you doubt that, consider how the MSM dealt with Newt Gingrich when he took up with another woman while his wife had cancer and the way they tried to avoid dealing with John Edwards and his mistress. If it hadn’t been for the National Enquirer and the Drudge Report, they’d have buried that story alongside Jimmy Hoffa. By the way, rumor has it that the baby in question has its mother’s eyes and its father’s hair stylist...

“It just may wake up enough people to the realities of life - hopefully in time to avoid the suicide.”

Your hope depends upon a type NOT ACTING to type.

People came here and knocked down the world trade center killing thousands and we can't even name the killers.

In response we sent the military out to fight shadows in a relatively non violent and limited sort of way instead of going to war as one Nation against its enemy.

We didn't even close our borders or enforce the Law against a foreign swarm of invaders, inventing rather a 2nd tier of law for them to which we, who are paying the tab and who are held STRICLY to account, are NOT entitled.

And now we, who, for seven years since the death of the towers, have been eating ice cream and cake and watching DVD’s in air conditioned comfort and buying ever bigger cars and houses are “sick of the war”.

Just because you know who and what Putin is and are appalled and horrified, don't think that it is impossible that he should not eventually be recognized by all. Even if Americans today can see him and his type for what they are a second thing is necessary for action: Resolve and Courage. People who are in the dreamy land of PC and denial that a huge number of Americans seem to be in aren't bloody likely to suddenly man up and start calling a spade a spade and manning the battlements. This is what Mr. Putin and whomever he is conspiring with are counting on in the adventure they have undertaken together.

And unless we can scare the adventurers with our nuclear arsenal we may be in some trouble. Now, what are the odds that a guy like Putin hasn’t considered that before he ever started out on whatever game he is up to?

“I'm curious. Who do you think we should have attacked?”

Who knocked down the towers? Where did they come from. What nations have official and unofficial and cultural supports for such people.

We should have stopped everything NAMED the enemy and had a war. We should have forced ALL other nations to choose sides . Then we should have utterly destroyed anyone who wasn't on our side.

Since we did not do this we have convinced radical Islam as well as other more conventional enemies of America (Putin, N Korea etc) that we lack guts and courage. This may or may not be fundamentally true but it only needs to be believed thus guaranteeing that many many more will die and greater destruction wrought when such evil dangerous people act upon their perceptions.

Too many idiocies here to comment on them all, so I'll just hit the highlights.

We should have stopped everything NAMED the enemy and had a war. We should have forced ALL other nations to choose sides . Then we should have utterly destroyed anyone who wasn't on our side.

Define utterly destroyed. If you mean kill everyone in those countries, we certainly have the capability to do this by using nukes. However, by your definition this would require us to kill most if not all Muslims, upwards of a billion people.

Leaving aside the moral implications of killing a billion people, which would put Americans ahead of even Stalin by about 50x, there are serious environmental implications to using that many nuclear warheads. We can't kill all of THEM in this way without seriously messing up the only planet WE have to live on. Not a good idea other than in the absolute last extremity of desperation.

If you mean something less utterly aggressive, such as invading, conquering and occupying all the countries involved, I hope you realize we don't have the capacity to do that. Not with solely American troops. There aren't enough Americans to provide the troops for such a massive occupation. There is also the fact that the American economy, while wealthy, isn't even close to being wealthy enough to finance such a plan, which would utterly dwarf our efforts in WWII. Not to mention that this is our present Iraq situation x50. The financial cost of this to date would therefore be somewhere in the vicinity of $25T, and American dead could be presumed to be upwards of 200,000.

The American people would never have supported any such action. Not at this time. Lose a few cities and there will be a whole new ball game.

But as long as America is a republic, the leaders cannot do anything too far beyond what the people will put up with. Which I think is a good thing.

The sort of action you propose could only be taken after turning America into a military dictatorship, which I think would be a bad thing.

Also, your comments taken literally mean that we would utterly destroy anyone who isn't on our side. No neutrals, even friendly neutrals, allowed.

The Russians still have a good many thousand nukes, and the Chinese have quite a few. Are you planning a nuclear war with these guys if they don't exactly follow your desires?

I think you're falling into the extremely common trap of trying to refight the last war, in this case WWII. It was a war that played directly into American strengths, and we kicked ass and took names. But this war is very different, requiring different strategy and tactics. Trying to force the GWOT into a WWII template would be incredibly wasteful of life and resources, and then it still wouldn't work. Doing so would be as foolish as the European generals in WWI who tried for several years to replay the Napoleonic Wars, the last really big wars they had to base their strategy on.

For starters Winston Churchill was God knows how many kinds of an "idiot" to a great many people in society and government in his day right up until he saved England. "Stupid" is the charge thrown both at people who are actually stupid and others who see what IS based upon History and who are far from stupid. I've no doubt you regard yourself as a realist. "Realist" is the claim people often wrap themselves in when they see a course that scares them (often understandably) shitless. You go into a pointless argument involving what might be encountered or how things would go. It is pointless because it is the exact same argument that would have sounded so sane on Dec 6th 1941. America's tiny army was drilling with broomsticks at the time and the idea of it taking on the wermacht and the Imperial Navy to say nothing of the air wings of those forces was laughable. My forecasting is no more the truth than yours, however: Today The USA has control of the seas. I'm sure you understand the implications. We COULD make a hell of a lot of trouble for everyone before we ever began to speak of land forces

Also: You make the mistake of thinking people in other nations wouldn't move against the
“problem” factor among themselves if they had to. Putting people between a rock and a hard place often produces results. If America were serious people would take that as a given, a fact of life not to be wished away. (Wouldn't it be nice just at the moment if Putin had a little more fear of us?)

Really I have no problem fighting the last war (you're using this phrase slightly out of context, by the way, I am NOT an officer) since the last war seems to have turned out so well. It turned out well because we did what you think is impossible today. Indeed, we did something that amazes us so much that STILL there is profit in airing documentary about it.

Of course and, sadly, you win the argument when you speak of the American public. Alas, that is where my view breaks down. It would be silly to contend your point about the public not wanting to follow such leadership. We both know the American public, to a shocking degree, would want nothing to do with fighting people who Hate us as a fact of life, who have attacked us whenever and wherever able, who are supported by States and who WILL TRY TO DESTROY US UTTERLY in an attack to come that will be so stupid and vicious and short sighted and evil that generations hence will wonder how a nation so mighty could decline so quickly in the matter of moral vision. Hell they attacked us on a day that saw more dead than Pearl Harbor after two decades of smaller attacks and we didn't close our borders. We didn't rally America. We didn't even name the enemy. And now we eat cake and talk of being "sick" of the war that we graciously let other Americans fight for us.

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