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Patrick
Hurley's current article for The Blanket
is absolutely correct in pointing out the Democratic
Party's efforts to pitch Kerry as a viable war president.
However, he refuses to acknowledge the controversy
surrounding Bush's record or the hypocrisy and double-talk
of each political party concerning foreign or domestic
policy. Hurley's position is fundamentally flawed
in that he addresses the issue as if there is something
morally or politically objectionable in criticizing
U.S. war efforts, whether by dissenting civilians
or military personnel. The current invasion is taking
so many lives that to point out its fatal flaws is
in no way a slander-- it is in fact an expression
of humanitarian honesty.
John Kerry did not let down a whole generation of
GI's by lambasting the Vietnam war and its prosecution.
Such reductivism is typical of Democrats and Republicans
alike. And to suggest that George W. Bush might well
have been sent to Vietnam is false: the Texas National
Guard was then, unlike now, quite removed from the
possibility of active service.
But I digress: Patrick Hurley is partisan to a political
establishment and its arrogant claims that deem all
U.S. imperialist ventures just and any dissent unpatriotic.
I don't know why The Blanket, a forum for dissident
thought, would even bother to publish such a mainstream,
reactionary, and misguided treatise. Hurley, who happens
to live in my neighborhood (or rather, I live in his),
is a Republican of another tradition, and American
nationalism at the moment is as toxic and paranoid
as any species of nationalism, Irish or otherwise,
that grows insular and refuses any progressive sense
of itself.
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