We offer the world Pat Buchanan! Someone please take him.
Posted on 05/19/2004 2:54:18 AM PDT by Theodore R.
What do we offer the world?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: May 19, 2004 1:00 a.m. Eastern
"So, how do we advance the cause of female emancipation in the Muslim world?" asks Richard Perle in "An End to Evil." He replies, "We need to remind the women of Islam ceaselessly: Our enemies are the same as theirs; our victory will be theirs as well."
Well, the neoconservative cause "of female emancipation in the Muslim world" was probably set back a bit by the photo shoot of Pfc. Lynndie England and the "Girls Gone Wild" of Abu Ghraib prison.
Indeed, the filmed orgies among U.S. military police outside the cells of Iraqi prisoners, the S&M humiliation of Muslim men, the sexual torment of their women raise a question. Exactly what are the "values" the West has to teach the Islamic world?
"This war ... is about – deeply about – sex," declaims neocon Charles Krauthammer. Militant Islam is "threatened by the West because of our twin doctrines of equality and sexual liberation."
But whose "twin doctrines" is Krauthammer talking about? The sexual liberation he calls our doctrine belongs to a '60s revolution that devout Christians, Jews and Muslims have been resisting for years.
What does Krauthammer mean by sexual liberation? The right of "tweeners" and teenage girls to dress and behave like Britney Spears? Their right to condoms in junior high? Their right to abortion without parental consent?
If conservatives reject the "equality" preached by Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, NARAL and the National Organization for Women, why seek to impose it on the Islamic world? Why not stand beside Islam, and against Hollywood and Hillary?
In June 2002 at West Point, President Bush said, "Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time and in every place."
But even John Kerry does not agree with George Bush on the morality of homosexual unions and stem-cell research. On such issues, conservative Americans have more in common with devout Muslims than with liberal Democrats.
The president notwithstanding, Americans no longer agree on what is moral truth. For as someone said a few years back, there is a cultural war going on in this country – a religious war. It is about who we are, what we believe and what we stand for as a people.
What some of us view as the moral descent of a great and Godly republic into imperial decadence, neocons see as their big chance to rule the world.
In Georgia, recently, the president declared to great applause: "I can't tell you how proud I am of our commitment to values. ... That commitment to values is going to be an integral part of our foreign policy as we move forward. These aren't American values, these are universal values. Values that speak universal truths."
But what universal values is he talking about? If he intends to impose the values of MTV America on the Muslim world in the name of a "world democratic revolution," he will provoke and incite a war of civilizations America cannot win because Americans do not want to fight it. This may be the neocons' war. It is not our war.
When Bush speaks of freedom as God's gift to humanity, does he mean the First Amendment freedom of Larry Flynt to produce pornography and of Salman Rushdie to publish "The Satanic Verses" – a book considered blasphemous to the Islamic faith? If the Islamic world rejects this notion of freedom, why is it our duty to change their thinking? Why are they wrong?
When the president speaks of freedom, does he mean the First Amendment prohibition against our children reading the Bible and being taught the Ten Commandments in school?
If the president wishes to fight a moral crusade, he should know the enemy is inside the gates. The great moral and cultural threats to our civilization come not from outside America, but from within. We have met the enemy, and he is us. The war for the soul of America is not going to be lost or won in Fallujah.
Unfortunately, Pagan America of 2004 has far less to offer the world in cultural fare than did Christian America of 1954. Many of the movies, books, magazines, TV shows, videos and much of the music we export to the world are as poisonous as the narcotics the Royal Navy forced on the Chinese people in the Opium Wars.
A society that accepts the killing of a third of its babies as women's "emancipation," that considers homosexual marriage to be social progress, that hands out contraceptives to 13-year-old girls at junior high ought to be seeking out a confessional – better yet, an exorcist – rather than striding into a pulpit like Elmer Gantry to lecture mankind on the superiority of "American values."
Let's read this again:
If the Islamic world rejects this notion of freedom, why is it our duty to change their thinking? Why are they wrong?
Buchanan asks "why is freedom an inherent good? Maybe their rejection of freedom is just as legitimate as our embrace of it."
Buchanan has lost his moorings, and these notions of his are not the notions of an American conservative.
And if he were Jewish he would support Sharon.
Tell me why you insist on the fallacy of the false dichotomy, that Iraq must either labor under the tyrant Saddam or the mullahs of the house of Saud, and no other alternative is available, so therefore the tyrant is comparatively better and must be restored posthaste.
Plus I really fail to understand why anyone continues to listen to these sermons on the "immoral modern west" when they come from a guy who was 4-F for military service due to complications from venereal disease, and who has a child out of wedlock (to their great credit, both the GHWB campaign in '92 and the Dole campaign in '96 were well aware of Pat's love child, but chose not to make an issue of it, since she's a kid and deserves some privacy, even if her loudmouth father doesn't).
And has Pat ever written an article condemning the anti-Semitism of the Arab world?
Or was Buchanan too busy researching topics like whether diesel fumes could have really killed as many Jews as the Holocaust survivors claimed?
I know in Iraq if a Christian was deemed a threat to Saddam or his sons they could be put in a plastic shredder or their daughters raped in front of them or their sons tortured. I know if Uday thought a Christians daughter was pretty he could haul her away to be raped and killed just because he got off on it.
We offer the world Pat Buchanan! Someone please take him.
Pat misses that the war for the soul of America has more than one front. To be sure there is the assault by what he refers to as Pagan America that is attacking from inside the gates, but he apparently is unaware that the war on terrorism is also a cultural war, and the front lines are all over the world, but indeed Fallujah IS one of those.
Unfortunately, Pagan America of 2004 has far less to offer the world in cultural fare than did Christian America of 1954. Many of the movies, books, magazines, TV shows, videos and much of the music we export to the world are as poisonous as the narcotics the Royal Navy forced on the Chinese people in the Opium Wars
This is probably the most accurate statement he makes in this article.
Naw...if Pat were Jewish, he'd throw himself off a bridge.
In the Middle East you have choice between authoritarian secular government or grass-root Islamic one. Saddam Hussein was bad, but a moderate Baath regime could be a good alternative. Unfortunately it is too late and the Pandora Box is opened.
I guess the country was pretty smart when they rejected this madman.
Hardly.
Sharon supports tightening Israels borders and cutting off illegal immigrating by the Palestinians, which Pat condemns. [except when the subject is America and the Mexicans]
Or into an oven....
Piffle...You are not professing love of Christianity when you are blind to the suffering under Saddam. My Christianity does not allow me to have such a view. You would think you wanted Saddam's cruelty to still be in place.
Unless you live in Israel.
But if a Christian did not get involved into politics he could worship freely. BTW, "plastic shredder" story is as true as "incubator babies in Kuwait".
Or into a car with a hose attached to the tailpipe.
The America Pat would create would be like the American that existed for most of our history, one informed by Christian morality. I have no idea why you find this so frightening.
LOL You've nailed it. Bravo.
O.k you say the plastic shredder was made up. Fine although I doubt your authority on the subject. If I were a Christian (or Muslim for that matter) my daughter could still be raped by a gov't official right. Are you saying these people were sane enough to know who was or wasn't political. Were all those murdered really out to get Saddam? Give me a freakin break man.
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