I wonder if people realize how much the Republicans just validated why we need a person like Barack Obama as our next President. Almost every time a Republican politician says something, they insult the American people’s intelligence. A little over a year and a half ago, I wrote an article “Appeasement - Republicans misuse the term so much it no longer means anything” http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_steven_l_061013_appeasement___republ.htm that described how Republicans knowingly lie when they use the word “appeasement”, what the word really means and its historical context as well as how Republican politicians do the exact same thing of which they accuse Democrats including Obama.
If you are hesitant to believe me, think about your own life. Have you ever talked with someone you don’t like or with whom you have a major disagreement? Did the very fact that you talked with them mean that you were giving everything away? That is what the Republicans, including George W. Bush and John McCain are asserting. Actually, that isn’t completely correct, what the Republicans are asserting is even more dishonest and despicable. They are asserting that merely deciding to talk with someone you disagree with is as bad as giving an entire country away to Hitler and allowing the Jews of that country to be sent to concentration camps.
If you are like me, during your life you have talked with people you disagree with in a way that was decidedly non-appeasing. It isn’t hard to envision having a discussion with a leader of a foreign country like North Korea or Iran or Cuba or Myanmar that does not in any way resemble appeasement. Diplomats, in fact, do this kind of thing all of the time. Case in point, early on in Bush’s Presidency, we had a military plane that was forced to land in China. There was a tense few days while our diplomats met with the Chinese and worked out how they would come back to the US. Did Bush and the State Department appease the Chinese by discussing this with them? According to the new Republican definition of the word, they did. In November 1985, then President Ronald Reagan, at the behest of Margaret Thatcher, met with Soviet Union premier Mikhail Gorbachev.
Did Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher conspire to appease Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet Union?
I think if you use the word appeasement as the Republicans have used it over the last few years, you would have to say yes, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were appeasers of the worst kind. This meeting with Gorbachev was only a few years after he called the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire’. Reagan met with the new dictator of the unitary axis of evil of his time. This meeting was before we had any firm knowledge of what sort of man Gorbachev was. We also know that Reagan and his administration did business with Iran under the Ayatollah Khomeini and with Iraq and Saddam Hussein on several occasions. Therefore, I guess that’s it:
According to modern day Republican ideology, Ronald Reagan was the world’s worst appeaser of all time.
I expect any day now George W. Bush, Peggy Noonan, George H. W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice and many other Republicans who worked under Reagan or are now in positions of power to come out and denounce Reagan and say he is no longer a Republican to be revered by his party. I expect the Tories (conservatives) in the UK to do the same about Margaret Thatcher. They are now exposed as the weak appeasers they are, at least according to modern day Republican and conservative ideology. I also expect an apology from George W. Bush and the State Department (led at the time by Colin Powell) for appeasing the Chinese.
What this all proves is that we need honest talk from our politicians. We need leaders to come before us and tell us the truth about things, not just silly rhetoric that twists the meaning of words in order to best skewer the political opposition. We need a new kind of politician and President, one that embraces honesty and change. If you are reading this and saying that the American people will never be able to get someone like that for their President, I have a simple answer, “Yes We Can”. Support Barack Obama, he is the kind of leader we need, the kind of leader you will never hear spout crazy rhetoric as an excuse for not having a good plan to govern.
