Choosing Brave and Smart Over Scared and Stupid

Ever notice how real heroes are never the ones screaming "OMG we're all gonna die!"

Digby:

I've been aghast at the panic stricken bellowing coming from mainstream US media in the wake of Paris and needless to say, Fox News has been worse than most.  But once in awhile someone surprises you. Here's Fox's Shep Smith:

In the face of terror, will we panic or be calm and deliberative in approach?” Smith asked in a 90-second monologue. “Confronted with those who want to change our way of life, will we abandon our freedoms and the rights granted to us by the creator, or will we welcome huddled masses, yearning to breathe free? Will we take extreme measures to fundamentally alter who and what we are?” 

“Our shining city on a hill is vulnerable,” he continued. “We’ve always known that. If we change it to accommodate the savages, have they won? And what then would be left to protect? We profess to stand as an example for all the world. Our unique experiment in freedom, tolerance, openness, and equality, is our gift to societies and peoples everywhere. Come, join us. Enjoy a chance at the American dream.” 

He concluded, “Today we mourn but we cannot allow ourselves to become like those who want to destroy us. We cannot resort to tactics of the barbarians. We must fight for what we believe in and who we are. Guard our freedoms faithfully for the generations to follow. And we must not let the rhetoric of potential and political extremists among us lead us to self-destruction. When there’s panic, we show resolve. When there’s calm for extremism, we resist. We are America. We must lead.”

THIS Is American Exceptionalism

When we save lives, not take them. When we prevent civil wars through aid and assistance, not cause them with military attacks. When we make friends instead of enemies.

Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf paid emotional tribute to the American people on Thursday as the United States formally wound up its successful five-month mission to combat the west African nation's Ebola outbreak.

With Liberia now in recovery from the worst outbreak of the deadly virus in history, the visiting Sirleaf thanked the United States for coming to the region's aid in its hour of need.

"America responded, you did not run from Liberia," Sirleaf told US lawmakers in Washington, expressing the "profound gratitude" of Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.

Liberia, once the country worst hit by Ebola, has registered 4,037 of around 9,600 deaths in the epidemic, which began in Guinea in December 2013.

At its height in the final four months of last year, Liberia and Sierra Leone were recording between 300 and 550 confirmed, suspect and probable cases a week.

It was in some of the darkest days in August when the Liberian leader said she reached out to US President Barack Obama and to the US Congress amid "grim and terrifying" international predictions that before the end of January at least 20,000 people would die every month.

View gallery

Ebola survivor James Mulbah, 2, stands with his mother, Tamah Mulbah, 28, who also recovered from Ebola

But with US help, including a military force which reached 2,800 personnel at one point, there are now only one to three new infections each week in Liberia.

"We are chasing the very last element of the chain of transmission we have," Sirleaf said, praising all the international and regional military and aid workers who "reached beyond their fears and ran towards the danger and not from it."

When I traveled in Europe thirty years ago, there were people there still living who remembered the American troops who liberated them during World War II in France and Italy and Belgium and the Netherlands. People in Germany who remembered the Marshall Plan that saved them from starvation and economic catastrophe. People who would never forget, and would always view Americans as heroes, as saviors.

That's the "essential nation" I love, the one I think President Barack Obama loves, too.

That's the nation vicious morons like George W. Bush and torture-porn-lovers like Dick Cheney will never even know.

The nation repugs and freakzoids and warmongers and gun nuts can't even imagine.

What We Mean When We Say "Freedom"

That's the rub. We all want freedom, but some people insist their freedom demands taking other people's freedom away.

Ken in NY at Down with Tyranny:

"Are we less 'free' because we spend money on public schools and student loans, Medicare and Medicaid, police and firefighters, roads and transit, national defense and environmental protection? Would we be 'freer' if government spent zero percent of the economy and just stopped doing things? . . .

"Many of us 'believe in America' because we believe its history shows that our sacred liberties are compatible with a rather substantial government that invests in efforts to expand the freedom from want, the freedom from fear, the freedom from unfair treatment and the freedom to improve ourselves."

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in his WaPo column (Monday),
"Romney's flawed view of freedom"

Let me say again that it's hard not to love E. J. Dionne Jr., that singularly humane denizen of Punditworld. In today's outing he first pays tribute to Willard's old-school approach to being a presidential candidate:

In an age of media flying circuses where you never know who is running for president and who is just trying to boost book sales and speaking fees, Romney did it the old-fashioned way. He really, really wants to be president, and he offered pretty pictures to encourage us to watch him saying so. It was the venerable liturgy of our civil religion.

Then he notes how Willard "barely got his moment in the sun because dark clouds rolled in," in the form of Princess Sarah Palin and Rudy "The Goof" Giuliani showing up in New Hampshire, "bashing him on health care," but qualifies:

Romney’s travails are about more than the man himself. They speak to the condition of a party that won’t let him embrace his actual record and constantly requires him -- and all other Republicans -- to say outlandish things.

In his maiden campaign appearance, E.J. notes, Willard ran like the wind from his "greatest political achievement, the Massachusetts health-care law" during his time as the state's governor -- "a genuinely masterful piece of politics and policy." Willard garnered "modest cheers" from the assembled Republican faithful for minimizing the program as "a state solution to our state's problem," but "received what was, by my reckoning, his loudest response when he pledged “a complete repeal of Obamacare.”

That’s where the GOP heart is, and Palin and Giuliani both got into most of the Romney announcement stories by bashing him on health care. When you’re forced to tiptoe around your accomplishments, it’s no wonder you get accused of shifting your shape.

Yet it was Romney himself who exposed contemporary conservatism’s core flaw. “Did you know,” he asked, “that government -- federal, state and local -- under President Obama, has grown to consume almost 40 percent of our economy? We’re only inches away from ceasing to be a free economy.”

To begin with, E.J. argues, the 40 percent figure is bogus. "[T]he federal government of which Obama is in charge “consumes” about a quarter of the economy — and this after a severe recession, when government’s share naturally goes up." Which sets him revving up for, well, a whirl of classic E.J.:

But even granting Romney his addition of spending by all levels of government, the notion that we are “inches away from ceasing to be a free economy” is worse than absurd. It suggests that the only way we measure whether an economy and a country are “free” is by toting up how much government spends.

Are we less “free” because we spend money on public schools and student loans, Medicare and Medicaid, police and firefighters, roads and transit, national defense and environmental protection? Would we be “freer” if government spent zero percent of the economy and just stopped doing things?

And once E.J. gets going, you don't have to do anything but buckle in and enjoy the ride.

The logic of what he said points in exactly that direction. We thus confront in 2012 nothing short of a fundamental argument over what the word “freedom” means. If freedom, as the conservatives seem to insist, comes down primarily to the quantity of government spending, then a country such as Sweden, where government spends quite a lot, would be less “free” than a right-wing dictatorship that had no welfare state and no public schools — but also didn’t allow its people to speak, pray, write or organize as they wish.

Many of us “believe in America” because we believe its history shows that our sacred liberties are compatible with a rather substantial government that invests in efforts to expand the freedom from want, the freedom from fear, the freedom from unfair treatment and the freedom to improve ourselves. That, as the politicians like to say, is what this campaign is all about.

Yes! Thank you, E.J.!

Even if WaPo keeps him on only as their token liberal, he certainly makes the most of it, and we are better off for having him there.

What do you mean when you say "freedom?"

Quote of the Day

The Rude Pundit on Wednesday, at the end of a post on Cheney's "Torture? What Torture?" tour:

For so very long, torture had stayed out of the mainstream media. Once John McCain and Barack Obama declared they would both close Guantanamo, the issue was off the table for the duration of the campaign. Now that the Obama administration is coming in and members of the House and the Senate are threatening to investigate the Bush White House's actions, now that Obama had to put up or shut up on Gitmo, all of a sudden the media is treating the issue like it matters, like somewhere, hidden in a deep, dark place is this curled up, frightened little American soul and we're trying to figure out how to coax it out of the corner, wondering if we have earned the right to hold out our hands and say, "Come on out. It'll be okay."