I was listening today, as I often do, to the Laura Schlessinger radio program. In the future I will write more about my interest in Laura (I patently refuse to use her titular prefix - neither will I refer to the popular comedian Bill as Dr. Cosby.) and my realization that I tend to agree with most of the advice she dispenses to her callers, but I had to mention what has been a recent theme of Laura's, a page taken straight from the White House's playbook du jour. (Ah, I used French, so I must hate America.)
The moments that make me truly cringe when I listen to Laura are when she reads a letter from a listener or talks about a book or article that she has read. Often, the email or article is fairly benign, a sort of "chicken soup for the radio listener" - "values are good" or "I love my country" or "aren't we grateful for God's many blessings". But somehow, Laura always takes this innocent idea and twists it into an unrelated political jab at the left.
Today featured one of the best examples of this that I have heard in a few weeks. She was talking about her book of the week - The Heart of America: Ten Core Values That Make Our Country Great - and gave it her highest endorsement of "you must read this". She talked about how the words "core values" actually spell out the ten things that make America great: Compassion, Opportunity, Responsibility, Equality, Valor, Ambition, Liberty, Unity, Enterprise, Spirituality. Like I said, chicken soup for the American soul.
A quick look at her own website reveals that this is a book that hopes to transcend the gulf between the right and the left. It's press release calls it an "inspiring and nonpartisan guide" and says that America is a great country "a fact that is often overlooked with all the bickering and negativity in our culture today". Finally, it affirms "The Heart of America is not about philosophy or finger-pointing at either side in the culture debate". Sounds fine by me, might even buy a copy for my mom.
Going a bit further to check out the book's Amazon page and it seems that the author and publisher have sought book jacket quotes from a wide spectrum of notable persons - Arianna Huffington, Laura Bush, The Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Barbara Bush and Leon Panetta. It makes it clear that the foundation behind the book is a "national non-partisan, nonprofit humanitarian organization".
OK, OK. I get it. Surely Laura is on the same wavelength.
But no. After praising the book at length, Laura went on to talk about (and I'm paraphrasing here cause I just can't get myself to cough up the money to subscribe to the internet replays of her program) those people on the left, those groups with names like jihadists (she actually said jihadists) who say that America is awful because of all this torture nonsense. And aren't they lucky that they live here where they are free to criticize George W Bush, as opposed to in some African country or under Al Qaeda, where they would be dead if they said such a thing. (I know that this doesn't flow together as a totally understandable statement, but it's a fairly close recreation of her rant.)
This is not the first time she has mentioned the "torture nonsense". A few weeks ago, before the Dick Durbin and Karl Rove brewhahas, she pivoted from a woman's heart-tugging, love of country email into a direct assault on Newsweek, which had just retracted a story about Koran abuse and torture of prisoners at Gitmo. In her diatribe, Laura accused Newsweek of willfully making up the story (as opposed to believing a well-placed government source) because Newsweek wanted America to look bad - the nonsense that America would "do such a thing". There was also the inference that any of these stories were propaganda from or for the terrorists.
Of course, when the Pentagon admitted a week or so later that there had been Koran abuse at Gitmo (just not the specific kind referenced by Newsweek), there was no follow-up on Laura's show.
Laura's problem (and, let's face it, her strategy - along with others on the White House speed dial) is that in her mind and in her rhetoric - George W. Bush = America; Donald Rumsfeld = America; Gitmo = America. And so to criticize any or all of the above is to hate America. To say that torture by Americans is awful is to say that America itself is awful. To say that the Iraq war is a mistake is to say the troops are bad, which is to say that America is bad. Why does the left hate America so much?
In fact, most of what I've read on the left, and what I've felt myself, is that America is, in fact, better than Laura's image of it. We're better than George Bush's fumbled plan for the middle east. We're better than Donald Rumsfeld's evasive interviews. We're better than the torture (and in some cases unexplained deaths) of prisoners.
What's sad is that Laura and the rapidly shrinking number of folks who still support Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq seem to think that America isn't as good as the rest of us think it is. And as the public continues to turn against them, they will use any weapon, verbal or otherwise, to demean America's greatness and assert that we are really the most mediocre nation on Earth.
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