Blaming America first (a new frame)

[Squeech]

The eminently snarky blogger Tbogg has a post up today about some new consortium of erstwhile liberals who have purportedly seen the light and signed on with the war party. I got to the part about apologizing for the excesses of Stalinism and Maoism, and I said to myself, the reason we ended up with Mao was because America supported Chiang Kai-Shek, a craven little rat-bastard militarist who was the Ahmed Chalabi of his day. And then it hit me: I had just blamed America first!

But I did so for a stereotypically liberal reason: I figure that if we don't acknowledge our mistakes, we'll never learn from them.

Let me put this in terms even a Republican can understand. When the coach runs the game films for the team, does he linger over the flawlessly executed plays, the heroic feats, the gambles that panned out perfectly? No, I don't think so. He'll take a moment to acknowledge the successes, especially the ones that really are out of the ordinary. But most of the moments he's going to dwell on are the blunders-- the plays where the quarterback misreads the defense and throws for an interception, the lines that collapse and the quarterback gets sacked, that sort of thing.

Is it too silly to think we should take our diplomacy and our war planning at least as seriously as our football, or is it somehow proof that I hate America? I can't see why. The fact of the matter is that we're in deep shit, and the first principle of sound management is, if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging! That's the least we should expect of our leaders, isn't it?

Of course Commander Cuckoo Bananas famously couldn't think of any mistakes he'd ever made. All the more reason to consider him unfit for the office.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

1. Good point squeech, we always have to clean our own house first.

[Jed Dilligan]

2. Yeah but that football stuff's old conservative talk

The Repug radicals are of the NEW America, where everyone of "us" gets a medal for every little thing we do. We're not even supposed to compete anymore, just feel good about ourselves. It makes us into better button-pushing ad-watching mall-going drones.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

3. I love that, especially folks like Hannity referring to his callers as

"great Americans"!

As if being an idiot chickenhawk wingnut couch potato knuckle dragger who calls in to RW hate radio to say "megadittoes!" (wrong show I know but go with me) qualifies one as a "great American!"

Sure. Kerry, and Clark, who risked their lives in military service, are traitors, and some cheeto eating pig calling in on his cell phone during rush hour is a "great American". Gotta love it.

[rinsd]

4. Huh?

So if America had supported Mao, his cultural revolution would not have been so brutal?

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

5. I think the point is, if the West had not insisted on supporting Chiang

Kai-Shek, that the alternative would not have necessarily been Mao.

In the case of Ho Chi Minh, it's very possible that his chosen system of government would have been entirely different had the West and U.S. embraced him from the beginning when he sought that support, instead of America instinctively embracing its racial colonial blood brother's interests.

[rinsd]

6. Ho Chi Minh is a different story

I don't think it would have matter in the Mao vs Shek civil war which side we choose.

"In the case of Ho Chi Minh, it's very possible that his chosen system of government would have been entirely different had the West and U.S. embraced him from the beginning when he sought that support, instead of America instinctively embracing its racial colonial blood brother's interests."

One of the most misguided policies in post-WW2 was allowing the reclamation of colonies. And that short paragraph just abouts nails it when it comes to what happened.

[Squeech]

7. No

Sun Yat Sen tried to establish representative democracy in China. I don't know enough history to say how that got derailed, but I assume the Japanese invasion didn't help matters.

Mao succeeded in large part because the peasants saw him being geniunely helpful to them. Not only did he mobilize the Red Army to fight the Japanese (while Chiang was essentially hiding out hoping that Mao and Japan would chew each other up, and he could step into a power vacuum), but during the Long March, he instructed his army to be useful: when they came to town, they'd help plant the crops or bring in the harvest or dig the irrigation trenches or whatever the locals needed. It wasn't just to earn their keep, it was to convince the populace that the Communists understood their needs.

By the time of the Cultural Revolution, Mao's regime had already promoted two monumental failures at jump-starting a modern industrial economy, and he was running out of options to keep China from total collapse, so counter-counter-revolutionary terror must have looked awfully convenient at that point.

It occurs to me that, during the Great Depression, Stalin convinced some Americans of Russian descent that there would be jobs for them in the Soviet Union. I know a guy whose father was a laid off steel worker, who emigrated back to help run a steel mill in the Ukraine. If Mao had had any industrial or managerial talent behind his Great Leap Forward, it might actually have worked, but America was too prosperous in the '50s to recruit from.

On edit: I allowed myself to woolgather here and distracted myself from my real point, which was exactly what MayberryMacchiavelli said.

[Rose Siding]

8. Tbogg nailed it with his header: We were liberals once and had dry pants

The guy cracks me up :D

In case anyone hasn't seen it-

http://tbogg.blogspot.com/2006/04/we-were-liberals-once-and-had-dry.html

[rniel]

9. Would make sense if

The republicans were real Americans and not Fascist/Nazis.

[Squeech]

10. Yeah, but

not all Republicans are goose-steppers. A lot of them are results-oriented business people, and they're losing faith with the Bushbot program, precisely because it's so obviously corrupt, nor does it accomplish anything like its stated goals. There's a lot of evidence, both anecdotal and polling, that they're uncomfortable continuing to vote Republican-- but they're still uncomfortable voting Democratic, because they've been told incessantly that we hate America and won't lift a finger to defend it.

So all I'm looking for is a new frame, where we make it clear why we dissent-- not to undermine the valiant efforts of Commander Cuckoo Bananas and his hard work writing all those findings that allow Homeland Security to tap our Internet connections, but because we think it's both unconstitutional and ineffective. This is how we can talk about the body armor Rumsfeld won't give the troops (or even let them buy their own), the money they promised for first responders and then reneged on, and all the other issues that actively impede our war preparedness and national defense. At least it's smarter than saying we supported the $87 billion before we voted against it, don't you think?

[alfredo]

11. Fix America first. Are we part of the problem, or part of the solution.

No, I am not part of that "blame America first"
crowd, I am part of that "let he who is without sin, cast
the first stone" crowd that understands that I can't try
to fix the ills of the world if my own country is part of what
is broken in the world.  (from John 8:7)

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye,
but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Matthew
7:3