The second-greatest liberal blog out of Seattle
Orcinus has an extraordinarily lengthy but well-worth reading entry on the subject of “A liberal war on terror.”
There’s been a discussion (and a reasonable amount of finger-pointing) bouncing around some of the blogs like New Republic, Atrios and Kevin Drum to the effect that liberals have to “get behind” the war on terror. Fair enough. But as Orcinus writer David Neiwert points out, we shouldn’t have to get behind this one.
There’s too much good stuff, especially about the irrationality of people who were wrong about the war presuming to tell people who were right about it what to do. But then Orcinus moves past that (MoveOn, you might say) and onto solid ground:
“The key to winning any war, whether amorphous, cold, or real, is contingent on one’s ability to objectively assess the facts on the ground. When your assessments are constantly twisted by politics, ideology, and public relations, you lose that ability. The Bush “war on terror” is doomed to fail because it has made itself ideologically incapable of recognizing the real nature of terrorism itself.”
“The Bush administration has deemed eco-terrorism the most significant source of domestic terror – a clear skewing of priorities, considering that eco-terrorists have to date only committed property crimes, while fundamentalist right-wing terrorists have a long and bloody history of killing people, and have shown little inclination to stop this. (At the same time, mainstream liberals need to take eco-terrorists seriously, which they often do not; the fact remains that not only are these people committing acts of violence, their attacks on scientific research are every bit as regressive as any Bible-thumper’s attempts to impose creationism on local schools).”
Like I say, the piece is long, but I think it’s worth your time.
