What if we had a president who inspired courage rather than inciting cowardice?
The politics of fear has been on my mind a lot lately, so I found Arianna Huffington’s column today to be very interesting. Huffington, who has a book out titled “Becoming Fearless,” sees a stark contrast between the Bush regime’s campaign of terror politics this season and President Franklin Roosevelt’s attempt to inspire courage during the Great Depression:
…Fearlessness, like fear itself, is contagious, FDR’s conviction that he and his fellow Americans could handle whatever challenges came their way ended up infecting — and buoying — the entire country. The Great Depression and WW II were certainly legitimate causes of fear, but Roosevelt’s mastery of his fear helped inspire millions to do the same. Just imagine how differently the current occupant of the White House would have dealt with these monumental crises — using them to stifle dissent, gain political and partisan advantage, smear critics, and browbeat a nation into compliance.
Instead of assuring us “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” W would have told us the only way out of the Depression is to waterboard the Constitution, put Lady Liberty in a “stress position,” and attach electrodes to the private parts of the Bill of Rights.
The paraphrase FDR, the only things we have to fear are fear itself — and those who use it for their own shameful purposes.
In dangerous times, we need leaders who inspire courage and hope, not fear and despair. What we have instead is the president and vice president barnstorming the country spreading messages of fear and slandering their opponents by suggesting they are in league with terrorists.
Enflamed fear is a like a free radical in the body politic. The damage it does is hard to predict and can lead to a break down of order. The British survived over a century of attacks by Irish terrorists. Israelis live with terror every minute. While politicians in both countries have been guilty of politicizing hatred, British or Israeli leaders have consistently depended on the courage of their people rather than exploiting their fears.
Why does he do it? Fearmongering by politicians is a marker for despotic and fascistic tendencies but it is hard to picture George Bush seeking a dictatorship — he’s looking forward to returning to Crawford in January 2009. The president has shorter term motives. If the Democrats win control of Congress, Mr. Bush will be forced to cede to the Legislative Branch the power the Constitution awarded it but which his cronies in the GOP have neglected to use. The Democrats would hold him accountable, finally; and he will do anything to avoid that.
A friend sends this verse, via the Internets:
Bush is my shepherd; I dwell in want.
He maketh logs to be cut down in national forests.
He leadeth trucks into the still wilderness.
He restoreth my fears.
He leadeth me in the paths of international disgrace for his ego’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of pollution and war,
I will find no exit, for thou art in office.
Thy tax cuts for the rich and thy media control, they discomfort me.
Thou preparest an agenda of deception in the presence of thy religion.
Thou anointest my head with foreign oil.
My health insurance runneth out.
Surely megalomania and false patriotism shall follow me all the day s of thy term,
And my jobless child shall dwell in my basement forever.
Amen Jim
Nice one, Jim. Bush is deathly afraid of being held accountable for his incompetence and misdeeds. He will say and do absolutely anything between now and November 7th to avoid accountability, since he has never had to be accountable for anything in his 60 years on this earth…
George W. Bush is the end product of very discriminate inbreeding within the AMERICAN RULING ELITE: a consistent concentration of recessive and double recessive gens that has produced this classic example of autistic dyslexia, a genetically failed organism from birth that unfortunately survived.
As his personal history, lonf in the public domain, demonstrates time after time, his personality of rigidity was set by age five, AND HAS SHOW NO PERMANENT MODIFICATION SINCE.
A perfect tool in the hands of the RULING ELITE IN POWER, precisely for the fact that George is in fact a paranoid coward made so by the coding in his DNA…for which there is no known cure….