Like God, the progressive mind works in mysterious ways. Take, for instance, this fascinating (from a clinical perspective) column by the Boston Globe’s Derrick Z. Jackson, “Bush’s blessed omission”— choice bits from which I’ll excerpt here:
God Bless President Bush for not saying “God bless America.”
He ended his State of the Union address with a simple “God bless.” He said the same thing the next day at a speech in Delaware.
[…]
Why, as of this writing Friday morning, Bush has gone 26 days without ending a speech or appearance with “God bless America.” The closest he came to divine politics and nationalism in that time period was in his Roe v. Wade anniversary telephone greetings from Camp David to abortion opponents on the Washington Mall. Bush said, “I ask for God’s blessings on your work, and that God continue to bless our country.”
[…]
Bush has periodically said just “God bless” throughout his presidency. But this recent pattern is a long way away from 2003 when Bush said at the end of his “Saddam-has-48-hours-to-get-out-of-town” speech, “May God continue to bless America.” It is a long way from his announcement of his immoral invasion of Iraq under false pretenses of imminent danger that ended, “May God bless our country and all who defend her.”
[my emphasis]
I don’t have anything significant to say here. I just thought I’d pause to let you marvel at the chain of rote, anti-war shibboleths Jackson is able to link together by way of a succession of clumsy, slapdash prepositional phrases.
And to hammer home just how sad it is that the Globe severed ties with Cathy Young.
You may continue:
It is light years from the concentrated dose of Amerocentric utterances in the first weeks of the invasion, where Bush closed appearances at MacDill Air Force Base, the White House, the Pentagon, and the Port of Philadelphia with variations of God bless America or our troops. The most God-awful moment was his speech at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport 2 1/2 weeks after 9/11.
Nauseatingly symbolic of the relatively painless war his administration promised for non fighting Americans Bush told us that we could show our patriotism by getting on an airplane to “fly and enjoy America’s great destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed. He dispensed with the polite “may” and bluntly declared, “God bless America.” To this day Bush has not asked for any significant sacrifice of US civilians even as more than 34,000 Iraqi civilians died last year in the aftershock of our botched invasion.
Okay, time to interject a bit of commentary here.
First, does anyone else find it strange the Jackson seems to be upset that the American President uses “Amerocentric [sic?] utterances” while addressing Americans about America and its battles against foreign enemies? I mean, from the tone of Jackson’s complaints, one might conclude that the only thing that would have prevented him from physically recoiling in the face of all this petit bourgeois provincialism was if Bush had suddenly lit up a Gitanes, slipped on a beret, and begun “discoursing” about the deconstruction of a globalized hegemony through “the politics of preemptive heteroglossia.”
Second, I’m rather sick to death of the Bill Maher-led canard that American civilians haven’t been asked to make “any significant sacrifice,” which is routinely uttered by the same people who constantly remind us how we’ve “wasted all of our international goodwill” and accuse the Bush administration of “taking away our civil liberties.” Are those not considered “significant sacrifices” to these people?
Or is the problem that these sacrifices (Buscho: “we ask that you don’t shit a brick about the NSA data mining, without first seeking a warrant, phone chains that have nodes within the US”; progressives / civil libertarians: “That’s too much to ask, fascist!”) aren’t quite so iconic as those of previous wars? Would it make Mr Jackson feel better, for instance, if Bush asked him not to use so much sugar on his bran flakes? Is everything with these people about appearances?
And really, hasn’t your political philosophy hit some sort of troublesome roadblock when you find yourself complaining that you haven’t been inconvenienced enough?
Concludes Jackson:
[…]
Perhaps the messenger, in the privacy of his soul, questions whether Thy will was done. Six years of asking God to bless America while cursing global cooperation has created more hell than heaven. Just maybe, Bush, seeing his party humbled in the November elections, has decided to take on a more humble approach in general.
War aside, asking for blessing for merely one’s own country becomes more anachronistic with each computer service call we make to India, with each Japanese car factory in mid-America, with every sneaker made in China, Vietnam, and Indonesia, and of course, with every barrel of oil we import from undemocratic or barely democratic nations in the Middle East and Africa. Whether he meant it or not, Bush is headed in the right direction on publicly asking for God’s blessing. America under his watch had been giving a bad name to God.
Note the rhetorical sleight of hand at work here.
Bush, the (implied) charge goes, is to be vilified for singling out his own country for God’s blessing—a move Mr Jackson finds “anachronistic,” though it isn’t clear to me at all how, when addressing one’s fellow countrymen as their elected leader, it is somehow rude to bless them and the country that provides them their freedoms. I mean, given the context and all.
Nevertheless, this appears to be Jackson’s beef, so it follows that what he would prefer to hear is one of two things: either the President end his speech by removing the specific blessing for America altogether (which, while we’re at it, why not just stop calling ourselves the United States, and nip this whole state of the “union” joke in the bud?); or else alter the formulation so as to make the blessing more inclusive. Like, for instance, “May God Bless you all, and may God continue to bless America. And Darfur. And Syria. And Iran. And North Korea. And all them littler countries whose names I can’t even begin to remember just now.”
Or, to put it in simpler terms, what Jackson’s finger wagging amounts to is this: if you don’t have enough blessings for the rest of the class, Mr President, you’re going to have to put away the ones you brought for yourself and your “Amerococentric” friends. Sorry. But fair is fair.
That Jackson ends his paean to relativism and transnationalist dreams of a unified world government freed from the petty constraints of nationalism with the charge that “America under [President Bush’s] watch had been giving a bad name to God” is not only vile, arrogant, and blind to how our enemies marshal God to their own ends. But it likewise gives us a glimpse into the calculating souls of faux-moralizing cynics like Mr Jackson who set themselves up as God’s proxy, presuming to decide what it is, exactly, God would like done in His name—a position that becomes clear once Jackson announces with certainty that what Mr Bush has done has, without a doubt, given God a bad name.
And here I thought only Bush and the Pope had the Big Guy’s home phone number…
I’ll let the blasphemy pass this time, Jackson.
But watch your ass, huh? A word to the wise…
Minion …..take a backseat .
I’m with you, God. Let’s fuck him up.
Sounds like a guy that doesn’t like either God or America. Let me guess…”Progressive”?
“Isn’t what Torah forbids enough for you, that you come to forbid yourself other things?”—JT Nedarim 9:1
It’s almost as if the proggs don’t believe in God or America….
But don’t question my patriotism!
Your analysis was excellant, God will be pleased. Would you however do me a favour and adjust your website so that my browser can make larger typefaces. At my age I have trouble reading the smaller typefaces. IE has a function that allows me to enlarge the type for easier reading but for some reason it will not change yours.
“God Bless” puts them into a Godless tizzy. Strangely enough, they’re fine with “Bismallah!”
I’ll pass it along to the site designer, Ron. Sorry about that.
The most God-awful moment was his speech at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport 2-1/2 weeks after 9/11…
Derrick Z. says this moment, September 27, 2001, is “nauseatingly symbolic of the relatively painless war his administration promised for non fighting Americans.”
In his Jan. 17, 2007 column, Derrick Z. reflected that… “Long after bipartisan commissions and committees found no ties between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and 9/11 or Al Qaeda, Cheney was still talking domino theory with the same intensity as Johnson and his minions once did.”
But see how quickly Derrick Z. conflates a post 9/11 speech, a speech addressed to flight attendants and airline mechanics and pilots, with the Iraq War for which “to this day Bush has not asked for any significant sacrifice of US civilians.” It seems the putative “ties” between 9/11 and Iraq are fixed and enduring ones in the minds of the left, at least when these ties-that-aren’t-ties suit their rhetorical needs.
They just love to repeat that falsehood, don’t they? It’s pointless (though it needs pointing out just the same) to correct them, they always come back 72 hours later with the same old, same old.
Here, once again, it is:
– SOTU 2003
RE Rhetorical sleight of hands, and the hands who sleight.:
Have you guys read Gates of Vienna’s recent essay on ”Glossocrats.”
I thought it’s analysis was spot on: the Glossocrats rule by rhetoric. The piece lays out how and why words like “Catholics” can equal “Taliban,” and “Bush” can equal “Hitler.”
I highly recommend it.
Excellent deconstruction. Who knew it was possible to deconstruct an anus?
I imagine the Z. stands for Zoophile.
Maybe he can start saving radial tires and cutting back on sugar use. They seem to have a serious hard-on for rationing things.
I don’t have a link–I read this in the late-mid-90s, when I used to read the actual paper Boston Globe over lunch at work. Since the big day was coming up, Derrick Z. Jackson wrote a column explaining why he refuses to celebrate the Fourth of July. The gist of it was that America’s historical sins well outweigh anything good to be said; on balance, we should not celebrate.
Call me closed-minded, but I never did read a Derrick Z. Jackson column again.
Is it just me, or is the acuity of the moonbat’s craniorectal impactions growing?
You sure don’t hear them in an uproar over this.
I’m waiting for Mr. Jackson to analyze the Democrat plan for the war in Iraq. I’m sure he could, in say, 12,000 words, enlighten us as to whether they’d prefer to surrender to the Iranians, the Syrians, the Shiites, the Sunnis, the Kurds or some combination thereof.
Perhaps our “good allies”, the French could help the American left in their determinations since, after all, they are the world’s experts in capitulation.
In a related note, French Security officals just raised their “Terror Warning” from level one, also known as “Run and Hide” to level two, “Grovel”. Should the shit really hit the fan, they’ll go their highest alert level, “Collaborate”.
Judging by this report from the AP, the BIG GUY must also be mightily peeved at the Globe:
</blockquote>The New York Times Co. posted a $648 million loss for the fourth quarter on Wednesday as it absorbed an $814.4 million charge to write down the value of its struggling New England properties, The Boston Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.<blockquote>
So, Mr. Jackson–beam, mote, eye…God Bless.
Isn’t it neat how people so troubled by American nationalism have no trouble with other nations acting in a nationalistic fashion with regard to us?
Having read the Globe online the last few years, I have to say that Derrick Z never struck me as particularly bright or creative.
There was a blogger from up there that was (can’t recall his name or URL) frequently on the Globe’s case who referred to him as the paper’s stock “Angry Black Columnist” – can’t classify him much better than that.
Americocentric, clearly – and so the BushConnor Code is finally broken! Can anyone longer doubt why African Americans might feel so excluded?
Freed, indeed, to what? Racism’s eternal orbit around the two centers, Americo and Africo, eternally ellipsed at the approach of each – thus socially constructed to be nowhere?
Carl Rove wil be made to rue the day he ever named Americans African, or my name is not Asinistra Feminista.
I considered myself a lefty on 9/11. As a Canadian, I didn’t have much opportunity for anything else locally. I started to have my doubts around that time but I continued to follow lefty opinion for until at least a year after the start of the Iraq war. What eventually drove me to look beyond my narrow emotional lefty thinking was the pure lie of the “he lied” message that I was being asked to accept. The fact that everyone I identified with was accepting an obvious lie and would grow angry at my questioning told me that something was wrong with “my side”.
To get to the point…
Based on what I read among lefties at the time the whole “he hasn’t asked for sacrifice” meme was based on the explicit complaint that Bush wouldn’t raise taxes. Later, it was expanded but the genesis of the complaint was always the inability of the left to understand why he wouldn’t reverse his tax cuts and in fact increased the cuts after the mid-term elections. It is telling that on the left, sacrifice = taxes. If he had asked people to join the army, I’m sure that wouldn’t have counted. But raising taxes on the rich equals sacrifice.
From the 2003 SOTU. (Thanks Mark)
Hands down, best GW Bush quote ever:
I find it sad to consider how I understand the Islamofascist more than the American progg. Even sadder to think I’m unsure which is more dangerous.
I guess that’s how a progg feels about Bush, and all we minions.
This weirdo hates his country, Proclaims it a disaster, yet complains it affords him too few inconveniances. What a whiny, spoiled, peice of shit.
And don’t even get me started on his presumptions RE. God. Let me just say, I hope one day he forgets himself for a moment, and says something that offensive about Allah.
oy…that deconstruction hurts…like a kick to the spleen..uh..i think
You can’t argue with an ideologue. As has been pointed out already on this thread, their arguments are always endless repetition.
So all you can do is point out that DZJ is a big old bed-wetting doody-head.
Because no matter how many hundreds or thousands of people rebut all of his points one or a dozen times each – he’ll just repeat them the next week.
You can’t argue with an ideologue, you can’t punch ‘em in the mush, what can you do?
Maybe we should introduce this boy to Bad Billy Arkin…
Perhaps then, a fund drive for new plastic sheets for DZJ from some discount mat type place is in order?
That’s MY line. </nerd>
If you mix equal parts:
-railing about “Bush’s”
which of the following do you get?
1) Glaring dissonance
2) Anti-caribou agitation for drilling ANWAR
3) An implicit argument that the U.S. economy should crash and burn – just so long as the Boston Globe continues its (not so) strong sales?
Not sure if this is the guy you’re talking about, but he is good. He has had some good posts on Mr. Jackson.