Blog

Through the Daou Report, I wandered (against my better judgment) over to Dr. Sanity to read the post “Go Wide Mr. President“. Then I read the comments and I was shocked to see something I actually agreed with, posted by someone named GnuCarSmell replying to someone named Garry:

You have it exactly right. It is literally impossible for the jihadists to defeat America in Iraq (or anywhere else) and they know it. It is possible, however, for us to surrender. An American defeat can only be self-inflicted.

Totally. We can only lose in the struggle against terrorism if we surrender… if we surrender our history, if we surrender our decency, if we surrender our fundamental rights and our habits of freedom. We can lose only if we parlay a losing war of choice (launched under false pretenses) into an epic struggle of us against everyone. We can lose only if we give up our history of tolerance and tradition of fair play.

If Iraq is “the central front in the war on terror”, it is only because President Bush made it so. And if we are losing, it is only because he and his cronies completely flubbed the war they chose. The left doesn’t “hate America”. We hate seeing America made over into less than it should be, we hate seeing American soldiers squandering their lives on a war we didn’t have to fight and which our “leaders” chose to fight poorly. We hate seeing the future of our country, in a genuinely dangerous century, being decided by ideologues with willful blinders on, people who can’t “go wide” because they can’t see the imbraglio they caused without reason or justification.

Hate America? If we hated America, we’d be cheering on the Rabid Right as it paves our way to destruction…

So for about a month there’s been a tempest-in-a-teapot “raging” over the decision by newly elected Democratic Representative Keith Ellison to use a Koran in his private swearing-in ceremony. Some loudmouths, including Rep. Virgil Goode, have decried this and insisted that Mr. Ellison use the same traditional book as all previous representatives, to wit, the good old Christian Bible. Never mind that Mr. Ellison is a practicing Muslim. Never mind that there are as many “one true Bibles” as there are sects of Christianity. Never mind that no representative swears on a Bible — they take the public oath in, well, public and without swearing on any book. (Mr. Ellison plans to use the Koran at the also-traditional, private photogenic ceremony.)

But according to The Washington Post, Mr. Ellison’s gone one further: He’s requested (and been granted) that the Library of Congress loan him a special Koran — one owned by Thomas Jefferson. How’s that for polishing the symbolism? On issues of faith and politics there are few sources more hallowed than Jefferson. Take that, Virgil Goode!

This does raise an important question, almost unthinkable a few short years ago: What if the Democrats are finally learning how to play the symbolism game on par with the Republicans? What if the Democrats stop automatically yielding the photogenic spotlight and the symbolic high ground? What if — Heaven astound us — the Democrats have learned to deal with matters of faith in public? Can you even imagine an America where the religious right has lost its default supremacy, where the symbolism tactics cancel out and people are forced to start talking about, you know, the issues again?

That could well be the best gift Mr. Ellison could give his country.