Hypocrisy and... (part I)

...Patriotism. Remember all of the right wing rhetoric, during the Iraq war, of "Blame America First"? Any time in which a rational individual would (responsibly) say any form of "Wait a minute, let's be grown-ups here and look at what our part in this is..." some outraged and self-righteous Fox News fan would come flying out of the woodwork to, with conclusive judgement, accuse the rational individual of "Blaming America first". The ironic and seemingly never revealed reality of that whole "You flag burning liberals just want to blame America first" campaign, is that the rational individuals, saying "Hey, let's look at our part in this", were in fact the real patriots of this dichotomy. It's always the rational voice of the Left saying hey, we're The United States of America. We are the grown-ups in the room. That's our place on the world stage. Or at least that's what our place was until the Republicans turned us into the nation of petulant children having a tantrum. And every time that the responsible, rational, grown-up voice of reason attempts to resurrect great American standards like: Let's sit at the grown-up table and rise high enough above our egos to see our own shortcomings and work toward improving ourselves as a society; Let's lead the world by being an example to other nations, in our ability to reason, to exercise humility, to compromise like rational adults, to see the big picture, and to realize that the role which we play in that very big picture will lose it's greatness if we allow ourselves to be ruled by rampant unbridled arrogance; Let's not be like Russia, blindly and unyieldingly asserting that we're the greatest nation in the world - shut up - end of story - don't question it, while our citizens hopelessly suffer in poverty; Let's not be like Iran, thumbing our nose at the global community, arrogantly behaving as thought our divinely endowed superiority magically makes everything we do the right thing to do - and everyone else is just wrong, because they're not us; Let's strive to actually be in the right, rather than just asserting an assumed righteousness so loudly an forcefully, that eventually we get our way even if we're wrong. But without fail, as soon as any voice of reason makes any suggestion that we Americans should re-embrace our old tradition of behaving like adults (AKA: behaving like Americans), that voice gets immediately and scornfully shouted down by the flock of right-wing sound-bite parrots, accusing that voice of reason of being "anti-America" and "blaming America first". The reality is that the voice of reason keeps basically saying let's stand tall and act like Americans. And in turn, the right-wing is saying "no, you can't do that - it's un-American. With their position of blind unyielding arrogance, relentlessly and unapologetically asserting that our actions on the world stage are flawless, with this childishly closed minded position, the right-wing is driving us toward being more like Russia, more like Iran, more like China, and ultimately far less like America. So, in accusing the Left of being anti-America, just because we're big enough (American enough) to stand up and say "let's own our part of the problem", those on the right are actually assuming a truly Anti-American position. They are on a crusade to get America to behave more and more like Russia, Iran, and China, while hypocritically proclaiming that any who oppose their crusade are "flag burning America haters".

Pretty simple...

If we try to solve the problem with the policies which created the problem, we'll have a deeper problem.  ...It's basic Cause & Effect.