"The president does not think that generals should be denigrated at all," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said. If critics of the president "want to attack him, fine, but the generals, and by association the military, should be out of bounds from partisan attacks."That's ridiculous, dangerous, and utterly un-American. And it's a notion that the Republicans have pushed for years. Namely, that the military in America is off-limits, above criticism, and always right. And it's absurd. And dangerous. In America, the military is under civilian rule. And there's a reason for that. The military, like any government entity, or any man, is not infallible. And worse, the military, unlike HUD or the Department of Labor, can throw its weight around in ways only dreamed of by other less-armed agencies (hard to imagine HUD waterboarding). It is a direct danger to our democracy, to any democracy, to give the military the right to trump the civilian.
But this kind of democracy-baiting isn't new for the Republicans. They don't like our system of jurisprudence either. They have disdain for judges - but really, it's a disdain for the entire branch of government, the very existence of the branch.
Then there are the rights and liberties underlying our country. Freedom of religion? They don't believe in freedom of religion. They believe in freedom of the Southern Baptist religion. All others need not apply. Freedom of speech? They don't believe in any speech at all anymore. Freedom of the press? They think reporters should be tried for treason. Then there's domestic spying. A crime once considered verboten. Now it's shrugged off as just another acceptable fact of every day life because, you know, we have nothing to hide. Which goes to another underlying fact of American life, the right to a lawyer and the right to be innocent until proven guilty. Republicans don't believe in those either, anymore.
And the arguments that Republicans use to bolster all of these claims? Straight out of the Soviet handbook. What are you so afraid of if you've got nothing to hide?
Back to the topic at hand, if the military is sacrosanct and off limits, then why do we have a Uniform Code of Military Justice at all? Let's just delete it from the laws and say that anything the military does, anywhere, is okay, legal, and downright good. Or at the very least, make the UCMJ no longer apply to generals, since the White House seems to think that generals can do no wrong (still waiting for an answer on why Negroponte balled out Petraeus a few years back for cooking the books re: the number of Iraqi security forces trained - doesn't sound like the kind of scolding he'd get if he were truly infallible).
If we're the country the Republicans keep describing, then we are not the country I grew up in. Or worse, we are the country I grew up in, but I was lied to for 40 years about what that country stands for.
I'm not sure which is worse.
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