My Country, Right or Wrong?

This has been bugging me ever since she made this statement at the convention.

From the WP 9/5/08 - click on the link above for the whole story.

"Palin, the first woman to appear on a Republican presidential ticket, continued her attacks on Obama, mocking his background as a community organizer in Chicago and deriding him as showing indifference toward small-town people.

"These are the people who do some of the hardest work in America," she said, prompting chants of "U-S-A." "They grow our foods and they run our factories and they fight our wars. They love their country, in good times and in bad, and they are always proud to be an American."

So, according to Palin people in small town America are proud of their country when it engages in a preemptive war based on fabricated intelligence against a country that did not - I repeat - did not - present a clear and present danger? Proud of America when it tortures innocent people? Proud of America when its fits of imperial pique is responsible for the deaths of countless innocent Iraqis, Afghanis, Vietnamese, El Salvadorians, Guatemalans, Native Americans etc.? Proud of America when its chief executive ignores the law and spies on American citizens? I suppose proud of America too when it arrested and beat lawful, peaceful dissenters at the just concluded Republican convention?

If she is right - and she is not - then what? How can one be "proud" of these actions? I too am proud to be an American but not for these reasons. I'm proud of our Constitution, our Declaration of Independence and our other founding documents. I'm proud of how we separate church from state, that we ended slavery and under the law at least all people are equal. I'm proud of many other actions America has taken over the years and the fundamental principles upon which our society is based. However, one needs to use one's intelligence to discriminate between right and wrong actions. America is far from perfect and has fallen very far in these last dark years of the Bush/Cheney regime.

Palin insults the intelligence of small town America. There are plenty of folks out there that don't agree with her radical right-wing Christian fundamentalist view of the world. God help us if McCain is elected and dies in office and she becomes president. She claims to be a Christian? True Christians don't kill innocents, true Christians don't lie. Her beliefs, which she is entitled to under our system, are in lockstep with the most radical neo-con, neo-fascist, anti-environmentalist, ant-feminist segments of the political spectrum.

Yes, there are unthinking people in small towns just as there are in big cities who chant U-S-A and support whatever war mongering politician happens to be the flavor of the moment but don't paint all small town folks with that brush.