Cognitive Dissonance
By Anthony | June 25th, 2006 | 4:18 pmOne of Bubba’s first blog posts tries to claim that you can’t support our troops without supporting their mission. He of course tries to wave away all the badmouthing Clinton and his Kosovo mission received in the 90s. He mentions this Tom Delay quote from around the time of the Kosovo invasion:
You can support the troops but not the president.
Agreeing with it, Bubba says:
…you don’t have to support the President to support the mission.
Meanwhile, on another thread, Jaycee, a conservative commenter in the same vein as Bubba (who seems to be playing the part of Bubba’s bulldog on a few of the threads so far) upbraids a commenter who criticized Bush, and makes a post containing the following comments:
President Bush IS one of the troops, he’s the head military man in our government. The boss. If you support “our troops” then you necessarily support the boss.
… The whole “support the troops but not the leaders” is just silly and naive.
… If you don’t support our President then you don’t support the country or any of it’s leaders. You may not agree with every decision of our leaders, but please have the moral courage to support your country.
I can’t wait to see Bubba and Jaycee argue about which one of them is right. Oh wait, I’m sure they’re both right, because whenever a Democrat does something, it’s bad, but whenever a Republican does something, it’s good. Fred Gregory jumps in on the thread to put me in my place, saying:
Stew, You have crossed that line between denial and delusion.
However, I’m not the one trying to hold a different standard based on whether someone is a Republican or a Democrat. The Republicans were perfectly within their rights at the time to criticize Clinton and his mission if they saw a problem with it. In fact, I would consider them negligent if they didn’t speak up. Critics of the Iraq war should receive the same respect for their point of view without having their dedication to the troops and loyalty to our country questioned.
June 25th, 2006 at 4:57 pm
The game is simple, Stew. Obfuscate, obfuscate. Say it often enough and it becomes truth, even when it’s false. If you play their game, or if you try to dissect it with logic, you just play into their hands.
Move the conversation away from their silliness and you’ll see that the sand is brighter when your head is out of it.
June 25th, 2006 at 5:04 pm
what sue said… times 10.
June 25th, 2006 at 5:40 pm
[[Critics of the Iraq war should receive the same respect for their point of view without having their dedication to the troops and loyalty to our country questioned.]]
Yeah, they should, but good luck with that.
June 25th, 2006 at 5:41 pm
The President is not the “head military man.” The President is the civilian commander in chief. The distinction is important, and an vital element of American Constitutional government.
Jaycee: “The President IS our country.”
Louis XIV: “L’etat, c’est moi.”
Speaks for itself.
Of course one can support and honor troops without approving of the mission on which they have been sent.
The support-the-troops meme was born in Vietnam, when people who opposed the war took their displeasure out on the troops — most of them draftees, ironically. This was unjust and I think Americans learned from the experience.
June 25th, 2006 at 5:49 pm
It sickens me to have people call my patriotism into question simply because I refuse to believe EVERY SINGLE THING our dear leader tells me. “Its killing our troops!” or “Your aiding the enemy!” are all smoke and mirrors for the right to help them cling to their position that nothing W does can be wrong in any way shape or form.
In the same way Republican senators are now calling for the NYT to be brought up on charges of treason because they published details about the Bush admin spying on our bank records. The media is THE ONLY THING that is keeping this goverment from doing pretty much whatever the hell it wants. Even then, they have gotten away with everything to date anyway.
And lest we remind our “friends” on the right one more time, the President does not MAKE the laws, Congress does. The President is in charge of faithfully executing them, not pulling them out of his ass when it helps him gain even more power than he already has. This is the basis in LAW that our country was founded on, and it is indeed a slippery slope we are now, unfortunately, sliding head-first down.