The Barbarism of ISIL, the Taliban and Wahhabism and collapse of hegemonic ideology, Ian Welsh, ianwelsh.net, July 19, 2014
Don’t use barbarians as your proxies. Saudi Wahhabism and its offshoots is fundamentally in opposition to secular Western enlightenment society. Doing business with such people undermines the core ethics of our own system of ideology.
This does not mean neo-con style perma war. It means showing that our ideology produces better outcomes for them than their own ideology does. Through the fifties and even into the seventies, secularism rose in the world because it was seen as providing better outcomes. It was constantly undermined by the actions of the United States in overthrowing democratic governments they didn’t like. Noticing that the West didn’t believe in its own ideology (at least not for Muslims, and today not even for its own citizens), and that they could not share in the prosperity of secular democracy and socialistic capitalism, is it any wonder that many turned to another strong ideology?
Not every international crisis is about Obama, Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 21, 2014
Syria is in the midst of a brutal civil war? The right blames President Obama. ISIS advances in Iraq? The right blames President Obama. Innocents die in violence between Israelis and Palestinians? The right blames President Obama. Ukrainian separatists are accused of shooting down an airliner with Russian military equipment? The right blames President Obama.
This just isn’t healthy.
In 1984, during the Republican National Convention, Jeane Kirkpatrick delivered a speech that included a catchphrase she repeated five times: “They always blame America first.” In reference to Democrats, she went on to condemn the “blame America first crowd.”
It was an ugly line of attack, but it caught on and became a favorite of the right, still embraced by prominent Republicans a generation later.
There’s no point in casually throwing around such obnoxious attacks on other Americans’ patriotism. That said, contemporary Republicans should pause to realize that the more they instinctively blame U.S. leaders for every international crisis, the more they open the door to the very criticism they once reserved for their rivals.
