A Mawkish "Tribute" (3)

Maybe I over-reacted a bit to something that's just a mawkishly sentimental slideshow. But as far as the "no matter if you're liberal or conservative": unfortunately for us all, it does matter in the world Bush and Rummy have created. As Joe Conason puts it in the first of his articles to which I linked earlier in this post:

There was a time when Republicans were the first to defend veterans and the last to attack anyone who had served, regardless of partisan affiliation. That tradition is dead, however, in part because so many of the party’s extremist leaders, who talk loudly about war, managed to avoid military service when their time came.

But beyond the personal psychology of that odd position  in which so many Republican leaders find themselves - Conason has a whole chapter in his book Big Lies (2003) on that topic, called "Male Cheerleaders and Chicken Hawks" - there is the increasingly authoritarian bent of the Republican Party. That mindset tends to obliterate any distinction between the Party and the country. The idea of "patriotism" as being something other than party loyalty begins to disappear.