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.