{"id":347,"date":"2004-02-15T15:29:21","date_gmt":"2004-02-15T15:29:21","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:08:30","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:08:30","slug":"fear_itself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=347","title":{"rendered":"Fear Itself"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two great (and vaguely linked) posts over at Jeff Jarvis’ Buzz Machine – one of my daily reads. Check out his post on ‘Change and Fear: What They Got Wrong About America<\/a>‘:<\/p>\n

We wanted to hear a candidate start by saying he liked America, he loved America — especially<\/b> at a time when it is under attack from Islamic nut jobs and Euro bozos and even Mexican soccer hooligans — and then propose ways to make it better<\/b>.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You betcha. That’s a drum I’ve beaten<\/a> for a long time and will gladly join Jeff in beating every chance I get.As an example of what Jeff’s talking about, scroll down his site and check out his dissection<\/a> of Gore’s speech on terrorism in New York.<\/p>\n

“Beginning with former Vice President Al Gore, who delivered the keynote address, speakers asserted again and again that the American government is preoccupied with instilling fear,” Rothstein writes.<\/p>\n

But the dominant idea was that, as the conference’s thematic statement put it, fear was being “encouraged by our government and exacerbated by our media.” It was compared with the irrational fear of Communism and the perversions of McCarthyism. It was described as part of a counter-constitutional coup by a radical right.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, I find that utterly offensive. I know personally how deep and real the fear is. I felt the searing heat of a jet exploding on my face; I breathed the dust of their destruction into my lungs; I saw the lives lost with my eyes. I do still live in fear, a very real fear. To dismiss that fear as an irrational variant of McCarthyism is to dismiss reality of the thousands of lives lost in that very real attack and to portray as harmless ideologues the terrorists who waged it; it uses the attacks against us to wage a self-serving political attack within. I am most disturbed that Gore — for whom I voted — is leading this attack. <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s the heart of the anti-Bush campaign this fall; that Bush and his Administration are overhyping 9\/11 and that terrorism really isn’t a significant problem; that the approach to fighting the Islamist terror movement is the one that is working so well<\/b> in fighting drugs (let’s not forget that ‘didn’t inhale’ Clinton was every bit as much a drug warrior and civil liberties violator as Bush I, Reagan, and the other moralist Republicans). Pardon me while I giggle softly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two great (and vaguely linked) posts over at Jeff Jarvis’ Buzz Machine – one of my daily reads. Check out his post on ‘Change and Fear: What They Got Wrong About America‘: We wanted to hear a candidate start by saying he liked America, he loved America — especially at a time when it is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}