Waving the Bloody Shirt

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, waving the bloody shirt refers to Republican politics following the Civil War. The Civil War had cost the lives of many northerners and the South was solidly Democratic (this was in the days when Democrat = Conservative for those of you who think you have scored a point). So Republicans running against Democrats would remind everybody which party supported the south and got their sons killed. This tactic was called waving the bloody shirt.

Well, Republicans are going back to this old playbook. Only they need some new shirts. Cal Thomas has the shirt of those martyrs on Flight 93, and is waving it frantically in his new article "Flight 93: Do We Still Care?" Ben Shapiro has an even older shirt from the Holocaust in his article "The new Holocaust."

The point to both these articles is the same - to set up a false dichotomy. Either you support President Bush and the Conservative way of fighting the war on terror or you don't want to save America and, incidentally, you are dishonoring the memory of our dead.

Well I do favor protecting America from the sorts of events that scarred us on September 11, and yet I am opposed to the Bush Administrations hamfisted way of fighting that war. I'm even more opposed to how Thomas and Shapiro would fight said war (by, essentially, declaring war on Islam). If Thomas and Shapiro and their followers have a hard time understanding that, well, the problem is theirs, not mine.