At a serious time for our nation and for the world, we all have the misfortune of living through what can only be described as a Republican Party meltdown of racial and religious hatred.
Republicans will have to figure out how to repair the damage to their political party. What’s important for the rest of us, to paraphrase that Rudyard Kipling poem from grade school, is to keep our heads when those about us are losing theirs and blaming it on Democrats.
Most amazing was just how quickly the Republican Party, once one of our country’s two major political parties, lost its collective mind.
As millions of Muslim refugees flee for their lives from terrorism in Syria, the Republican contribution to the worldwide humanitarian crisis is to try to terrify Americans into fearing all Muslim refugees as potential terrorists plotting to kill us all.
Republicans seem to think they can stampede frightened Americans into doing stupid things such as electing their raving, hysterical candidates in a public panic.
And it was just a few weeks ago that many Republican leaders were intelligent enough to know better.
For months, Republican leaders told themselves they had a temporary problem with a couple of unqualified extremists, Donald Trump and Ben Carson, disrupting Republican primaries for a while, but that eventually a serious presidential candidate would emerge.
But Republicans never got around to coming up with a serious candidate. Instead, growing enthusiasm for frontrunners Trump and Carson pushed all the other candidates into parroting their irrational crazy talk.
Then the ISIS terrorist attack in Paris unleashed a spectacular Republican Lollapalooza of Fear and Hatred.
Comparing the partisan reaction to a terrorist attack on 9/11 under a Republican president to the Republican reaction to the Paris attack under President Barack Obama couldn’t be more telling.
|
|
Even though few Democrats had great respect for Republican President George W. Bush, Democrats and Republicans stood together in support of our country when it suffered a terrorist attack by Muslim extremists.
And even though Bush himself is not often remembered for doing the right thing, he took admirable steps to calm anti-Muslim hysteria in this country by visiting a mosque, inviting Muslim-American leaders to the White House and declaring that the U.S. was not at war with Islam.
That helped reduce what were nevertheless some shameful American incidents spawned by fear and hatred. Law enforcement rounded up and imprisoned Muslims without cause. Vigilantes attacked citizens they believed (often erroneously) to be Muslim.
Feeding Intolerance for Political Gain
Contrast the responsible reaction of political leaders after 9/11 to the current vicious Republican efforts to feed and inflame racial and religious intolerance for political gain.
Once again, Trump’s audacity was stunning. He advocated not only shutting down mosques, but also creating a database to track every Muslim in this country. Religious leaders of all denominations, conservative to liberal, immediately compared the idea to Nazis tracking down Jews.
No surprise either that Carson, who already had declared Muslims unfit to hold the office of president in America, openly compared Muslims to rabid dogs.
But Trump and Carson no longer stood out as any more irrational or extreme than any of the other Republican candidates.
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, once considered a moderate Republican, and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who never has been, both proposed that the U.S. accept only Christian refugees on the theory that Christians are a lot nicer than those scary Muslims. Forget those bloody crusades and that nasty inquisition.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, despite his reputation as a schoolyard bully, was even frightened of Muslim children. He warned against admitting Muslim toddler terrorists under 5.
Blustering Republican presidential candidates vowing to protect America from sleeper cells of Muslim kindergarteners were supported by most of the nation’s Republican governors, including Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, who promised somehow to block Muslim refugees from crossing their borders to enter their states.
Republicans who have long opposed public spending to create jobs to repair the nation’s crumbling infrastructure of roads and bridges now appear open to constructing massive walls along every border, including around individual states governed by Republicans.
Speaker Paul Ryan from Wisconsin signaled that the Republican House of Representatives would continue to be a national embarrassment under his leadership by immediately passing a measure intended to stop acceptance of any Muslim refugees fleeing Syrian terror.
All this ugly, anti-refugee hysteria is based on an outrageous lie, that Democrats would admit murderous Muslim terrorists into the country without any screening unless loudmouth Republicans do something to stop them.
Republicans would have to reinstitute Dick Cheney’s waterboarding to make the U.S. two-year screening process for refugees any more severe.
Despite all the rhetoric following the Paris attacks, terrorism by suicide bombers and gunmen shooting up bars can never destroy civilized society. Only our own overreaction based on fear and hatred fed by irresponsible leaders can do that.
