PunkAssBlog.com

I love it when the mainstream media in the US lets its liberal freak flag fly. You know you’ve found yet another true lefty when they’re writing articles about genocide abroad, the evils of Big Oil, or our health care crisis. Also, when they write an editorial titled “Why I defend President Bush when I’m abroad.”

Love me.

Americans abroad can thank George W. Bush

For ruining our reputation. For reminding them why they left. For making the locals around them feel like the good guys, no matter where they live. For not causing global thermonuclear war (yet)?

for sharpening our survival skills.

Does this mean that all the international asskickings brought on merely by mentioning you’re American have been by design? I suppose we were getting soft in our hegemony.

We have weathered a sea of anti-Iraq war protests and had the intelligence of our president and those who voted for him questioned more times than we care to remember.

False assumption #1: That Americans abroad are “weathering” these insults as opposed to lobbing them.
False assumption #2: That our president’s intelligence has been “questioned” as opposed to demonstrably proven false.

In my hometown of San Francisco,

See? Liberal. This is totally going to turn out liberal.

Bush supporters are called all sorts of names, and I rarely bother with defending them.

Rarely? Hmm. Rarely is code for sometimes. Sometimes this person defends George Bush. Less liberal, but I suppose that was the title of the article.

When abroad, however, I feel a patriotic duty

WOOOOP! WOOOOP! Alert! Irrational behavior about to be justified by the invocation of patriotic duty! Batten down the hatches, there’s no way this is a liberal!

to try to explain the political views of those with whom I adamantly disagree.

Huh? You are a liberal? The sense is making none. Please continue so I can fail to compute.

Over the years, I’ve grown skillful at mounting semicoherent explanations of support for the invasion of Iraq, though I do a less stellar job when it comes to explaining his opposition to abortion rights and gay marriage.

Skillfully mounting semi-coherent explanations. That explains a lot.

Living in San Francisco has ill-prepared me for playing devil’s advocate. It is not just because the city is overwhelmingly Democratic. The real problem is that the Democrats here are often closed to having a constructive debate.

Shenanigans. Straight up shenanigans. Let’s see, we’ve got a person who hates hearing our president insulted, justifies actions with patriotism, bags *Democrats* (especially the evil ones in that bastion of liberal hell called San Francisco) as the side refusing to debate fairly, and yet supposedly “adamantly disagrees” with the actions of this administration. Uh huh.

Opponents of affirmative action are dismissed as “racist,” and the Iraq war is immediately labeled “criminal.” This neither helps Democrats understand the views of Republicans, nor change them. More often than not, the conversation either abruptly ends or escalates into a meaningless shouting match.

The anger is real and its roots are varied. The 2000 Florida election debacle ensured that the Bush administration was not going to bask in Democratic goodwill. The war in Iraq, meanwhile, ensured that many Democrats are literally counting down the days until a new president takes office.

I’m glad that the author made it clear she’s got skillz, because this is a fucking opus of semi-coherence.

Many reasons for the animosity, however, predate Bush.

You don’t say. In all of my textbooks, we read only of The Before Time, from the Big Bang to 1999, when everyone was nude and frolicky, awash in the glow of nature and free from the tyranny of close-minded San Franciscans.

Amazingly, the author argues, these turf wars extend alllll the way back to the ’60s. Then she says the internet makes it easy to ignore voices of opposition and that YouTube makes life awful hard on those poor li’l politicians. Semi-coherent? We’re just getting started, peeps.

Voters’ complex lives have been reduced to ludicrous stereotypes. Latte-drinkers are liberals, while NASCAR fans are conservatives. The former buy bulk at Costco and hug trees while the latter fill their carts at Wal-Mart and hug guns.

I can’t think of a single reference to “latte conservatives,” although I have certainly witnessed Republicans and independents enjoying the coffee beverage.

I remind the jury that this article began as a defense of having Bush’s back abroad. So let’s just jump back into that topic without adequate transition.

Explaining the complexities of America’s little red vs. blue war to foreigners isn’t easy and when I get tired of it, I always have an out: I wasn’t born in the United States and came here as a child from Soviet Ukraine.

Whoa. A twist of M. Night Shyamalan proportions. One minute I’m reading something from a regular ol’ American, but then I learn that it’s from a Russian-American! This has completely distracted me from realizing that the topic of international discussion somehow transformed from defending George Bush to explaining why Americans have opposing sides with different philosophies arguing over how to use political power (this is different from the rest of the world how, again?).

Never mind. Let’s trot out some conservative storylines about America to explain why it’s okay to be a big obnoxious American Patriot when abroad:

It is natural to feel defensive when something you love is being criticized, even when the criticism is justified. My deep unhappiness with the current administration, however, hasn’t influenced my appreciation for my adopted country’s rowdy democratic system of government, the incredible social mobility it affords to those without connections, and its ability to successfully integrate immigrants from all over the world.

As much as I find her work inscrutable, I’m happy that our author has achieved success in this country. But, y’know, and I hate to nitpick, but just because it happened for you doesn’t mean there aren’t a whole lot more people for whom there are all kinds of social and economic barriers to freedom/mobility. To universalize your own personal success story is, well, kinda [shhh] Republican of you. Just, y’know, saying.

Okay, we’re in the stretch run here. So let’s take this borderline-incoherent piece and raise it back to the level of semi-coherence for which the author is known by tying all of this together somehow!

Americans are rightly known as a hopeful bunch. And so, come this election season, I hope that regardless of the outcome, fierce partisan debate won’t preclude bipartisanship.

We can begin to transform the caustic political climate by choosing our words of criticism more carefully and realizing conservative and liberal common ground on issues such as electoral college reform.

Uh, nope, that’s not so much tying it back together. Still not sure why you defend George Bush abroad when you supposedly hate him so much.

Many of us may be breathing a sigh of relief because Bush will soon be out of office, but we need to keep the survival skills he helped traveling Americans sharpen, and use them at home.

From the war in Iraq to the environment, the stakes are too high for a political stalemate at home or the failure to engage our allies abroad.

Sigh. Let me see if I have your story straight: It was important to be defending our genocidal war criminal in chief abroad because it will help us come home and play fair with those who found their political ideology on ignorance, fear, and hate, who have all the money and power, and who have been systematically dismantling the Constitution for funsies. That sounds both fair and balanced!