I am SO over apologists, I can’t even tell you. Corporate apologists, political apologists, national apologists, I’m fed up with all of them.
People need to understand that apologizing for their “team” necessitates more apologizing. You’re not doing your ideology any favors by making apologies and excuses. You’re just compounding the problem. And you’re insuring a lifetime of apologizing.
People often accuse me of being too hard on Obama. I firmly believe that there’s no such thing as being too hard on something that you support or supported. If supporters don’t speak out against the thing they support when they fuck up, they just guarantee that more fucking up is coming. We should demand more from the people that we support. Why would anyone actively set the bar low?
Our country is in financial ruin. Our middle east policy is an unmitigated disaster. Our money would be virtually worthless if it weren’t for the fact that our financial “big wigs” were greedy enough to ship our fiscal malfeasance all around the world. Our kids are getting dumber and dumber every year, as we drop further down the world rankings for education. Our military is on the brink of collapsing. And it’s all happening because of apologists.
We all watched Bush (2.0) get away with murder for eight long years. That didn’t happen because there wasn’t a strong opposition. It happened because his supporters were willing to go along with every single bit of bullshit he served up to them. He didn’t care about the opposition because they were irrelevant. They were never going to support him. He was going to be just fine as long as he didn’t lose his supporters.
And to make matters worse, liberals and democrats (they’re not the same thing) were so busy hating him that they weren’t paying attention to what democrats in the senate were doing when they finally regained power. Nothing changed in the senate when democrats took over. The house improved nominally, but not nearly the way it should have. The “emergency” supplementals that were putting our country in financial ruin continued. Troops levels in both the war and the occupation didn’t go down. Deregulation of fucking everything kept humming along. Nothing changed because democrats weren’t paying attention to how Evan Bayh, Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, and about a half dozen other democrats in the senate were helping Bush ruin this country. They were all too busy screaming at Bush.
Supporters need to be more vigilant and critical when it comes to their own side.
We’re seeing this at play with Obama right now with the gulf oil spill. Although the damned thing is still gushing uncontrollably down there, we now know that there are engineers from all around the world working on it. We have engineers from Canada, Saudi Arabia, and Russia working on this finally. Three weeks ago, we seemed to have only BP working on this. We didn’t see much action until the public outrage over Obama’s handling of the situation began. It didn’t look like he was going to spring into action until we made him. Now I don’t know of we’re just getting better communication from the white house or if we’re getting more resources working on the problem. But either way, we’re getting more than we were before the outrage.
Refusing to accept either the half assed communication, or the half assed efforts at fixing the problem got us some results. We need to keep it up. We, the supporters of Obama are ultimately responsible for what we do or don’t get our of him.
This isn’t just relevant to Obama. This is extremely relevant to the situation in Israel at the moment.
People who are apologizing for Israel today will never be done apologizing for Israel. Jewish apologists in particular will find their children and their children’s children apologizing for Israel. The Israeli government is spiraling out of control in much the same way that the German government spiraled out of control under Hitler’s rule. I don’t believe that Hitler apologists from 1925 ever imagined, in their wildest dreams, that their great grand children would be apologizing for what happened there.
Israeli apologists, particularly in the US have the power to stop this before it goes any further. I’ve been reading far more criticism for what Netanyahu is doing in Israeli newspapers than I am in the American press. Haaretz is doing a fairly good job of presenting both sides of the story. There are even a few even handed articles in the op ed section of the Jerusalem Post, which is surprising. But the main stream American press has almost unanimously taken a pro-Israel stance on this issue.
I don’t believe that apologizing for what Israel is doing in Gaza is ultimately good for Israel. And I believe that apologists apologize for Israel at Israel’s peril. You don’t support a people by allowing them to do anything they want, regardless of international law or sentiment. You support them by forcing them to correct course when they’re driving off a cliff. Aiding and abetting criminal action is not love, it’s enabling.
I criticize because I love.
We need to stop this epidemic of apology.
