I suppose the Boston Globe editorial page editors feel an obligation to publish something by a mouth-breathing yahoo now and then, if only to be sure the opinions of mouth-breathing yahoos are fairly represented. But I think publishing anything beginning with this sentence is unconscionable:

The reason George W. Bush kept America safe is because he treated the war on terror as a real war and not a law enforcement action.

Grammar, please, Boston Globe editorial page editors! Grammar! It is not “the reason is because” but “the reason is that“!

Anyway, the mouth-breathing yahoo who came up with that atrocity is named Eric Fehrnstrom. The rest of the column logically follows, which is to say, it’s utterly void of sense. Maybe the Boston Globe editorial page editors decided the whole thing was such a mess the first sentence didn’t matter. Especially considering the way this mess ends —

Obama views Guantanamo as a symbol of repression and abuse; others see it as a symbol of American resolve. One thing is for sure: its dismantling will not appease our enemy. Let’s hope it doesn’t embolden them.

Jeez; did this poor dweeb go to the George W. Bush school of swaggering, empty rhetoric, or what?

In Salon, Gary Kamiya correctly diagnoses Mr. Fehrnstrom’s real problem — other than being language challenged. It is cowardice.

… behind their posturing, Bush, his manly-men cronies and their right-wing cheering section were trembling weenies who fled their posts at the first shot. In a perfect world, they would not only be dragged before the International Criminal Court for their crimes, but suffer public branding for desertion, their bars ripped off and their sabers broken as in the opening scene in the old Chuck Connors TV show “Branded.”

Writing of the order to close Guantanamo, Kamiya says,

By signing those four executive orders, Obama emphatically rejected Bush’s warped vision of America, and announced the return of the confident, principled country we all believed in, and too cavalierly took for granted. With a few strokes of the pen, he began to erase the ugly ethos that dishonored us for eight years, and called upon us to stand for a braver, better America. An America that will not abandon its moral principles at the first setback. An America that knows its real power lies not in its mighty army but in its mightier ideals.

That righties are, essentially, cowards is an old theme of this blog. But it’s nice to see it restated. Another old argument of mine restated by Kamiya is that Bush’s “war on terror” was exactly what Osama bin Laden wanted. Bush couldn’t have carried out bin Laden’s plans any better had he invited al Qaeda into the Pentagon to plan strategy. Kamiya writes,

Bush allowed a tiny band of fanatics, led by a turbaned bozo hiding in a cave, to so terrify him that he abandoned his sworn duty to preserve, protect and defend the United States and what it stands for. Like a nervous, inexperienced general who panics at an enemy feint and pours troops from both wings into the skirmish, exposing his army’s flanks, Bush completely lost sight of both strategy and tactics. Unmanned by fear, he treated a small group of Salafi jihadists who managed to get in a lucky strike as if they were a monstrous, apocalyptic entity from an evil galaxy beyond space and time, an army of Satanists endowed with inhuman powers. Then, having created this phantasmagorical enemy out of some right-wing biblical sci-fi novel, he proceeded to fight it by trashing America’s most cherished traditions, embracing torture and Big Brother tactics. His hysterical reaction not only increased global hatred against the U.S. and bred many more terrorists than he killed, it overburdened and severely weakened our military and allowed the real enemy to slip away.

Kamiya’s articles for Salon are always worth reading, and this one is no exception. So let weenies like Eric Fehrnstrom wet their pants. It’s way past time we pulled ourselves together and carried ourselves with dignity and courage.

You can count on William Kristol for a good laugh.

Since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, conservatives of various sorts, and conservatisms of various stripes, have generally been in the ascendancy. And a good thing, too! Conservatives have been right more often than not — and more often than liberals — about most of the important issues of the day: about Communism and jihadism, crime and welfare, education and the family. Conservative policies have on the whole worked — insofar as any set of policies can be said to “work” in the real world. Conservatives of the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich-Bush years have a fair amount to be proud of.

Translation: The ideas of Reagan-Bush-Gingrich-Bush conservatives don’t work in the real world, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t completely successful by the standards of Reagan-Bush-Gingrich-Bush conservatives, because their standards don’t have anything to do with the real world, either.

Some say the best part of Kristol’s column is the very end:

This is William Kristol’s last column.

But I say, damn. The New York Times has canceled its best comedy sitcom.

Kristol goes on to say,

What we have so far, mainly, is an Inaugural Address, and it suggests that he may have learned more from Reagan than he has sometimes let on. Obama’s speech was unabashedly pro-American and implicitly conservative.

Obama appealed to the authority of “our forebears,” “our founding documents,” even — political correctness alert! — “our founding fathers.” He emphasized that “we will not apologize for our way of life nor will we waver in its defense.” He spoke almost not at all about rights (he had one mention of “the rights of man,” paired with “the rule of law” in the context of a discussion of the Constitution). He called for “a new era of responsibility.”

In some ways the speech was conservative, because truth be told, in the U.S. liberalism is “conservative” by most dictionary definitions of the word “conservative.” Contemporary conservatism, on the other hand, is radical and reactionary. But of course Kristol implies that conservatism owns the patent on patriotism, not to mention virtues like “responsibility” and the “rule of law,” even though conservatism in the real world stands for blowing off responsibility and the rule of law. The key to understanding the rightie brain is to appreciate that the real world doesn’t count for anything with them.

Kristol gets one thing right:

Liberalism’s fate rests to an astonishing degree on his shoulders. If he governs successfully, we’re in a new political era. If not, the country will be open to new conservative alternatives.

Michael Tomasky says pretty much the same thing at The Guardian. In a nutshell, if Obama’s more progressive programs do work in the real world, “Obama will make us a liberal country again.”

We’re not a nation of amateur political philosophers debating Locke down at the bowling alley. What we are is a practical people, and after the wreckage left by Bush, the above seems practical. And if it works, Obama will make us a liberal country again, in which a mostly forgotten tradition of shared sacrifice for the common good will be reasserted.

In other words, if Obama succeeds we can look forward to at least a couple of decades in which the Right’s “every man for himself, and me first” ethos will be replaced with a sense that we’re all in this together.

Of course, in our most progressive moment of the past we were not really all in this together. Racial minorities were shut out, and women were kept in second-class status. The really audacious thing an Obama era promises is that, finally, we might really be what we have always said we wanted to be — a nation in which all of us are created equal.

The Right gained ascendancy mostly by stoking resentments and dividing us into a multitude of warring factions that could be manipulated for maximum political advantage. Their “shining city on a hill” is a cruel, greedy, vindictive place. Can we look forward to being compassionate, generous and supportive of each other? Imagine.