If you seek peace…tear down this wall. Ronald Reagan
The sad truth about Paris is that it might be more productive for the future of the free world to address the American Republican party’s dysphoria this week than The Terrorists’. GOP responses to the Paris attacks prove that the combined wakes of George Bush’s brutally failed Presidency and the “Citizen’s United” cash-for-candidacy system have unleashed (to invert a famous line about Thomas Jefferson) the least intelligent compendium of Presidential aspirants since Sarah Palin opined alone. In the wake of Paris it is painfully apparent that there is not a single GOP candidate or office holder who cares about any human tragedy or your national security more than their own highly profitable intake of campaign donations. Donations that are most effectively attracted with bombastic rubbish and dolt-inspired flamboyance in situations such as this.
This is why it matters: They might win.
Once again The Republicans are getting moral humanity wrong like doing so is their job. Maybe after Paris we should admit that it is. The GOP early responses to last week’s Paris murders are a new high water mark for entrenched immoral reactionism. They embrace the Paris bloodletting as a stage prop to help them re-frame the 2016 election and riot-up another jingoist victory. They instinctively realize that grandstanding about foreign gun violence is a perfect screen to help them deny it exists at home. In this context, and with no wit for irony, the GOP response to the Paris murders is to boil their policy of nation-destroying into five legacy shattering words:
Mr. Putin, Re-Build That Wall.
When it comes to right wing, religious endowed extremism in the world ISIS is the only organization that has outperformed the Republicans in many long years. The Republicans’ most basic core value in your lifetime has always been to force trans-national collapse of civilization as a kind of pre-defense strategy. Even before George H.W. Bush (the last noble Republican in this writer’s opinion) ran CIA, the policy of American GOP politicians has long been a deliberate and intentional destruction and/or destabilization of every other government on earth. (Lately they even seem to have a lot of political money at work trying to destabilize the United States Government).
Here’s an obvious reality the Republican voters are not brave enough to man up to: The policy of destroying nations and then blaming the impoverished victims of that destruction for global instability doesn’t work. At home and abroad the GOP is all stick and no carrot. That stick is a contrived border fence post that has come to shade their individual leader’s intelligence. They have hedged the next century of global security against a single short-sighted generation of profiteering. Mostly for oil resources we no longer seem to need very much.
The actions and policy of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney caused Paris. Flat out. The only people in history who can deny this with a straight face are now running for POTUS on platforms of angry denial. After Paris this fact is not merely The Elephant in the room — it is The Room itself and The Castle and The Kingdom beyond. Terrorism is a disease that must be stopped. First we have to admit that we are doing some (but not all) of the things that seed the pestilence. Then we have to stop doing those things. Only after that will we be able to fight the real war to end it.
An immovable Beast.
The Republican candidates understand there is no profit in governing for the protection of the entire population of the United States like there is in campaigning against the entire United States Government. And so they proclaim that we only need more guns and new walls to make sure what happened in Paris does not happen inside the U.S. Keeping a few terrorists out of public sight inside a crush of refugees is more important to the Republicans than facing up to the millions of stateless innocents. Never mind how simple-minded their candidates have become. And certainly never mind that the current suffering wave was created almost exclusively by previously failed Republican foreign policy arrogance.
The real story after Paris is a sad demonstration that The 2016 Republican candidate mill can offer neither genuine concern for, nor sophisticated participation in any aspect of competent global leadership. People fear complexity and the GOP (just exactly like ISIS in case that matters to anyone) is selling leadership that will protect us from complexity with a wrecking ball.
All the Republicans really have to do to defend against terror is to stop trying to shut down the United States Government and start trying to fire it up. But they cannot because they would first have to admit the Christian hypocrisy of continuing to champion America as a place where armed men are openly allowed to murder 129 civilians every three days or so.
There are many headlines that ask “Could Paris Happen Here?”. They are all a stupendous shame against moral reason. Somewhere north of 30,000 Americans will die by the gun this year. Paris has happened here. Paris happened here twice since last Friday and once again before you finish reading this.
Under Republican leadership every 30 days is September 11th.
Ride for the High Country