It's far worse than that. The deterioration here is reflective of the permeation into conservative ranks of a national-level deterioration of discourse that has been going on for about 35 years, now. The nature of this deterioration goes beyond the simple degradation in language skills; it impacts the very core of what people mean when they speak, up to and including the President of the United States. With whom is my beef.
On 9/12/2001, President Bush articulated a very strong foreign policy stance relating to international terror; asserting that the entire international community was under a new mandate to decide where to make a stand: either with or against terrorists. The explicitly stated response to those two positions was clear: side with us against terrorists, or we will regard you, yourselves, as terrorists and treat you as we would treat them.
As we have since discovered, this tough talk didn't exactly come backed up by the kind of tough action that is required to make the words stick. Oh, sure, we went and destroyed some terrorist groups in various quarters of the globe, but that's a far cry from actualizing the strong language of 9/12. There's an irreconcilable disparity between going head-to-head with select bands of well-funded islamofascist gangs out on the backside of some Third World sandhill and going hard-eyed, and nose to nose with bellicose leaders of terrorist-supporting nation states like Iran and Syria. The former action is a simple exercise of our military capabilities; the latter requires the actual existence of a resolute commitment to the stated doctrine. We've seen plenty of the first, but precious little -- almost none, to be exact -- of the second, despite there having been ample opportunity given for us to demonstrate that President Bush really DID mean exactly what he said.
Instead, repeated provocations -- discoveries of the complicity of Iran and Syria with insurgents in Iraq -- have been followed by nothing more that impotent finger-wagging, and milquetoast, mealy-mouthed, grade-school-playground "you'd better not" remonstrances from Washington. That's nothing like the response the world was told to expect on 9/12, and it does nothing so much as it communicates our dismal lack of either the spine or resolve to walk our talk.
Do you have anything to contribute on an adult level?
Done. Now ante up.
Outstanding post....
Very good.
I agree with you. I really thought finding the connection between Iran and the IEDs and the kidnapping of our soldiers would be the final trigger. On days when I am really pessimistic, I think that perhaps the penetration of sleeper cells in the US is so significant that it is constraining us.
Do any of our political elite speak clearly, honestly? It seems to be that it is electrifying and different when they do. Coincidently I just watched a very interesting presentation along the same lines. http://www.heritage.org/Press/Events/ev030507a.cfm. The speaker, a comedian (wearing airborne wings) discusses the destructiveness of modern liberalism resulting from thought processes described by Alan Bloom (Closing of the American Mind).
The hunger for clear analysis is why I come here to read.