The policies of the GOPresidency when it comes to the so-called war on terrorism are defeatist.
This is the thought which occured to me sitting here at work, where I’m having a difficult time packing a copy of Whose Freedom? by George Lakoff because I keep reading just a couple more pages, and then just a couple more pages.
Translated into plain language, its policies are something like the following. The terrorists, it says, hate us because of our freedom. So much so that they want to kill us because of it. To fight them, we must curtail the freedom which they hate so much and over which they want to kill us. Only by so curtailing our freedom can we be safe. Not only that, but it’s also the only way for us to be free.
You can see the myriad fundamental flaws in the policy.
For one thing, it suggests that if we just curtail our freedom, since that’s allegedly why the terrorists want to kill us, they will stop wanting to kill us. For another thing, it suggests that by giving the terrorists what they allegedly want — an end to our freedom — they will be satisfied.
In other words, it’s not only a nonsensical policy, not only an Orwellian policy, not only a defeatist policy, it’s also one of capitulation to what the GOPresidency claims is the terrorists’ grievance with us. “We had to destroy freedom,” it argues, “in order to save it”