No help needed losing our heads

By Brian Greenspun (contact)

Sunday, Sept. 21, 2014 | 2:01 a.m.

So, here’s the thing:

I don’t believe it matters whether the innocent American or British citizens who have been beheaded or have been threatened with murder were liberals or conservatives, internationalists or isolationists, Democrats or Republicans. They were innocent people who cared more about others than themselves. And they were brutally and mercilessly killed for the sake of some sick, political agenda.

Here at home, the debate rages about what, if anything, the United States should do about this latest in a growing line of terrorist organizations — all of which have the United States, our friends and our interests in their sights and at the top of their propaganda campaigns.

By the way, when I say they have us in their sights, don’t forget the three people already brutally beheaded for the world to see, the others who would have met a similar fate had the Australians been less vigilant, and the hundreds, maybe thousands, of U.S. citizens whose deaths on international television would delight the Islamic State crowd.

So the question is what are we going to do about it?

The spectacle in our own country, while not the brutal destruction of innocent human lives like we see happening in Syria and Iraq, is almost as cowardly. I am talking about the politicians who were scrambling around Washington as they looked for political cover because they were being asked to cast a vote for the safety and security of our citizens and country.

Isolationists want to put a fence around the United States and ignore the rest of the world — but they know that is a fantasy in 2014 when neither oceans, nor great distances, nor great armies can keep us safe from a lone suicide bomber who desires more to die than to live, and when what happens across the world has a direct and immediate impact on what happens here. And so they speak isolationism and vote for the president to destroy those who would and will destroy us, if we let them.

The warmongers among us scream and yell for the president to do something — all the while decrying what he hasn’t already done — and when it comes time to authorize a military response, some warmongers still can’t bring themselves to voting for anything President Barack Obama wants because, well, Obama wants it.

And then there are the pacifists among us who want war no more but are nonetheless stuck with the dilemma that opposition to an armed response to this very real threat could case regret at the next beheading and the next and whatever comes after that. So the pacifists vote no while mouthing the words of yes, hoping no one will notice.

But the people do notice. In a country that holds the current Congress in the lowest esteem ever recorded, it is possible Congress could grasp an even-lower rung on the ladder. Its failure to find moral clarity in whatever the vote is regarding this Islamic State scourge could drive the public’s view to the lowest of the lows.

What the people don’t notice, though, is their own complicity in the duplicity that defines American politics these days.

I understand why a Rand Paul screams isolation and votes intervention. I understand why Marco Rubio screams intervention and can vote against authorizing the president to protect us. I understand almost all of what the politicians say and don’t do with regard to the Islamic State. That even applies to the inexplicable votes of Dina Titus, Joe Heck and Mark Amodei, who insist the president do something and then find reasons to vote “no.”

The reason for all of that is us.

We the people demand our presidents do all they can to protect us and, practically before he comes up with considered plans for a response, we take to the airwaves and other means of social communication and pick those plans apart. It happens constantly and continuously.

We threaten our congressmen and senators with electoral defeats if they dare defy our wishes and, yet, we are schizophrenic in defining those wishes. We elect our representatives to use their considered judgment, their knowledge and experience to vote in our best interests, and then we demand they ignore their own good sense and vote only for our lack of it.

They cannot win no matter what they do, so they pretty much don’t do anything.

The result is that the president must act, oftentimes alone and without the help and support of Congress, because as commander in chief and as president he is compelled to protect the security of our citizens and the interests of our country.

In short, we are to blame for all of the politically driven, cowardly actions of our elected representatives. But human nature demands we not blame ourselves, so we must blame someone else.

Meantime, the Islamic State and groups like it are having their way with our citizens and our emotional states.

They don’t need to help us lose our heads. We do a fine job of that ourselves.

Brian Greenspun is owner, publisher and editor of the Las Vegas Sun.