The United States of America is the sole embodiment of all that is Good in this world. I know this for a fact. After all, President George W. Bush told me so time and again, calling the war the U.S. is currently fighting a battle of "good versus evil," with our "responsibility to history" to "rid the world of evil." That's quite a charge for one nation, but we can handle it.

Well, we can at least rid the world of the evil man who we suspect masterminded the horrific September 11 attacks, militant terrorist Osama bin Laden. Or maybe not. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld himself equivocated on that point, declaring that capturing bin Laden will be a "very difficult thing to do," and claiming the very next day, "Do I expect to get [the terrorists]? You bet we expect to get them."

Even ignoring bin Laden, America’s track record on ridding the world of evil has, so far, been patchy at best. We did not enter into WWII until our nation was attacked, and recently the U.S. sat by and did nothing as the genocide in Rwanda exacted its toll. This nation alone has committed countless atrocities. The United Nations had estimated that the U.S.-imposed sanctions on Iraq have led to the deaths of half a million Iraqi children. It is estimated that every month another 5000 die. That’s more than the number killed in the September 11 attacks. It hasn’t been two decades since the Iran-contra affair in which the Reagan administration backed a war between the “contras” and the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, using money gained by arms sales to Iran. Elliot Abrams, John Negroponte, and Otto Reich, all implicated in the scandal, have been appointed by the Bush administration to the appropriate positions of senior director for Democracy, Human Rights and International Operations at the National Security Council, Ambassador to the United Nations, and Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere, respectively.
So maybe America is not perfect, but at least we can be sure that bin Laden and the Taliban are truly evil. Yet fifteen years ago former President Reagan declared that same group of people to be “Afghan freedom fighters” in their war against the Soviet Union, and covertly supplied them with hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid.

This might be a little confusing, so I’ll return to a surer topic. The American way of life is good. In fact, anything American is wonderful! In June White House spokesman Ari Fleischer responded to a question about whether the administration would ask the people of America to reduce their use on electricity with this reply: “That’s a big ‘no’... The president believes that it’s an American way of life, that it should be the goal of policy-makers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one.” Jeffrey K. Skilling, head of the Texas energy conglomerate Enron, agreed that spending lots of money of energy is better than using less. When blasted by charges of profiting off of the Californian energy crisis, he claimed: “We are on the side of angels. People want to have open, competitive markets... It’s the American way.” Enron donated $113,800 to Bush's presidential campaign, making it the twelfth largest donor.
Case closed.

In a recent press release, President Bush stated, “The object of terrorism is to try to force us to change our way of life, is to force us to retreat, is to force us to be what we’re not. And that’s-they’re going to fail.” Perhaps the terrorists are concerned about the environmental effects of America’s electrical use then? Or maybe when Bush said the terrorists were attacking America’s way of life, he meant America’s freedoms. He certainly suggested that six days after the attacks: “There are people who hate freedom. This is a fight for freedom. This is a fight to say to the freedom-loving people of the world: ‘We will not allow ourselves to be terrorized by somebody who think they can hit and hide in some cage somewhere.’”

If this is the case, however, then the path the federal government has taken since the attacks is quite perplexing. On the one hand, we are fighting the freedom-haters, on the other hand, we are limiting the freedoms of American citizens to express their opinions and live their lives in privacy. Bill Maher, host of the late-night show Politically Incorrect, compared the U.S. military to the terrorist martyrs: “We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away.” The aforementioned Ari Fleischer didn’t take to kindly to Maher’s comments, saying that Americans “need to watch what they say, watch what they do.” Apparently the spokesman for the White House does not believe that freedom of speech is part of his “blessed” American way of life.

Cartoonists have had similar troubles exercising their First Amendment rights. The witty and politically-insightful strip “The Boondocks” has been pulled from the New York Daily News after it began questioning the validity of the “war on terrorism” and pointing out the CIA’s involvement in funding and training Osama bin Laden. In response the strip published a satirical comic, “The Adventures of Flagee and Ribbon,” suggesting that that type of strip would be the only thing politically correct in this new age.

Ted Rall got away with only a slap on the wrist in the form of editorial calumny by the October 23 Wall Street Journal, in being called “the cartoonist and columnist who is probably the most bitterly anti-American commentator in America.” This was preceded by “Ah, what a rich harvest of idiocy we have today.” Rall’s strips are notable for attacking hypocrisy and ignorance in American politics.

So America is good-yet many times it is not. The terrorists are bad-but we sometimes treat them as if they’re good. The American way of life is blessed-but we will not uphold it. The politics of today is drenched in meaningless rhetoric. The Bushes and Fleischers of this world would rather have an ignorant populace waving flags than a knowledgeable body of people able to question their moves. The massive tax cuts they’ve passed since the attacks; the increased level of domestic surveillance made legal; the Red Cross warehouses bombed; and the support of the Northern Alliance-a group whose own human rights abuses (including pillaging towns, raping women, and indiscriminately killing citizens) have been completely ignored by the mass media.

We, as citizens of the purported bastion of freedom and justice in the world today, cannot let doublespeak confuse and disarm us. We are at a turning point in history; we can allow civil liberties to disappear beneath a wave of blind patriotism if we want. We can repeat the mistakes of supporting our enemies’ enemies as we did in Afghanistan in the eighties, and create a second generation of Afghan terrorists, if we see fit. We can forget our past blunders and stand behind the President come hell or high water, as we appear to be doing. But in doing so, we will be hypocrites, because America is not about suppression, America is not about ignorance, and America is not about conformity. A true patriot makes sure his or her nation adheres to its ideals whether convenient or not.

Only in doing so can America truly represent all that is Good.