Attending a Tea Party Rally on Tax Day

On Thursday the grand finale of the "Tea Party Express," as they've been calling it, held a demonstration in Washington, DC, ostensibly protesting taxes, big government, and excess spending, but also evoking some other, rather unrelated issues. I only had time to stay for a few minutes, but I got to talk to a few people and take some pictures. I think I was there at a bad time, because I just saw a guy doing a bizarre stand-up routine that had very little to do with the rally, and the people I was around seemed pretty bewildered by it, though they all broke into wild applause when he ended with "So are we gonna vote these guys out of office?!" and made a reference implying assassinating our incumbents that related to a joke about Lincoln he'd told a few minutes earlier. Here are some photos:

Ring Out the Old, Ring in the New

People love to poke fun at George W. Bush. Comics, cartoonists, and commentators have made fun of him regularly over the past eight years. We’ve seen plenty of footage of the President saying and doing objectively stupid things, and we got so used to this as the norm that we started to pay less attention to his embarrassing blunders as time went on. But in the midst of having such an ineloquent, mistake-prone President, we’ve become so jaded that perhaps we have begun to forget the extremely serious predicament into which he has led us up until today, the last day of his Presidency.



George W. Bush’s tenure was defined by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. After that fateful and frightful moment in our history, we banded together. We proudly waved American flags, opened our hearts and our wallets to victims’ families, and put all our faith in our elected leader to help mend the world and make sure such a catastrophe would never recur. At that point, Americans were ready to heed the call of service, of patriotism, and of community, and we were ready to go in whatever direction the President wanted to take us in.

But the President led us astray. He should have used the “rally around the flag” effect to enact sweeping changes and help usher in a new era—by raising taxes, with what would have surely been little fuss, in order to help wean us off foreign energy sources that were strengthening terrorist-harboring countries, and move us toward a new, independent energy economy. He should have exploited people’s willingness to serve and sacrifice by asking us to consume less energy, to help our neighbors, and to serve our communities.

Instead, he told Americans to “go shopping.” He hindered our progress toward energy independence by underfunding renewable energy investment and research. He led us into a war that no sound intelligence indicated was a relevant front to combating terrorism. He led us toward more foreign oil resources instead of away from them. He neglected an opportunity where nearly all the countries of the world were behind us, ready to help us however they could, and instead violated the trust of some of our greatest allies and the international community at large, unilaterally launching our country into a deadly, ill-advised, and protracted war and ultimately sending an already unstable region into further havoc.

I often wonder what the world would be like right now if Al Gore had won the 2000 election. The only thing I can say with certainty is that it would be a much, much different world. Eight years after Bush’s first inauguration, we find ourselves in an economic recession, with a little-regulated financial system that has spiraled out of control. We find ourselves with our power and influence around the world at perhaps its lowest level since World War I, as few countries still look to us as a moral exemplar. We find ourselves contributing more than ever to dangerous global climate change and more dependent than ever on foreign oil.

Today, we have witnessed history with the inauguration of our first African American President. But we are handing our new President a country that is battered and bleeding. The idea of “change” is not just a campaign slogan. It’s something that we desperately need, and have desperately needed for the last eight years. Only now, with so much opportunity squandered, so much patriotism wasted on questioning others’ loyalty to the country, so much fear instilled in the minds of Americans instead of good will and hard work elicited from our hearts and our hands, we need change more than ever. It’s not going to be easy being President right now. But just as we put our faith in President Bush after September 11, let’s put our faith in President Obama now, and hope for a better result.

Photos: Obama taking the oath of office (New York Times), Americans with flags (MSNBC)

Bill Kristol: All You Need is Patriotism

In today's New York Times, Bill Kristol lays out his plan to fight terrorism. Kristol says that while wishy-washy liberals like the invoke things like "the law" and American values like habeas corpus, the people who really know what they are talking about know that the most important tool to fight terrorism is simple: patriotism. But once again, Kristol twists and bends the truth to have things his way; much of what he has to say has been undermined by America's lying about the War in Iraq and other factual misstatements.

To begin with, Kristol falls into the trap set by these psuedo-Muslims for all those who know nothing about Islam. Instead of framing the debate in political terms, Kristol continues to use the "Islamic extremist" moniker for the attackers. The attackers are not Muslim in the traditional sense of the word - jihad is not a global war against non-believers, it is an inner-struggle for understanding of oneself and Allah. Waging a war on non-believers in the name of Islam would be like saying you are marrying gay couples in the name of Catholicism. Secondly, it would make no sense for Muslims to attack citizens of the United States - a country inhabited by numerous Christians - and Israel - a Jewish country - when these two religions are considered to be People of the Book and because they are Abrahamic, they are not seen as enemies but friends according to the Qur'an.

Secondly, Kristol makes an allusion to the fact that the United States should stand with India against our common enemies. I agree with this, but the attackers in this case seem to be more focused on India and its involvement in the Kashmir than with the U.S. Reports have come out that U.S. and British nationals may have been targeted, and if this is true then the U.S. and the other states whose citizens were targeted should assist in the investigation. What is also important to remember is that Lashkar-e-Taiba got a lot of their training from Pakistan's intelligence agency, ISI, and were only banned in Pakistan when American ally Pervez Musharraf felt pressured by Bush and Co. The ISI, of course, was heavily funded and trained by the United States, who brought it out of extinction during General Zia ul-Haq's reign and the Soviet-Afghan War, yet we continue to blame it for problems like the Mumbai attacks or lack of law enforcement in the FATA region. That's like raising a kid until he's 10, unexpectedly leaving, and then wondering why he has attachment issues.

Finally, Kristol believes that the answer to the "barbarism" of terrorist organizations is patriotism. He may be right, but he still needs to define patriotism. Let's not forget that following 9/11, if you questioned the move to go into Iraq from Afghanistan, you were labeled unpatriotic (when in reality you would have saved your country $10 billion a month and global diplomatic embarrassment). Patriotism is indeed a virtue, but one defined in many ways. We cannot allow one portion of this country to railroad us into a singular, concrete definition of patriotism as we did leading up to Iraq. A love of one's country comes in many forms, not just blind loyalty to the ruling party of the time because of reactionary forces. I think patriotism is best summed up in Adlai Stevenson's timeless quote, "What do we mean by patriotism in the context of our times? I venture to suggest that what we mean is a sense of national responsibility ... a patriotism which is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime." Peace.

Photos - Bill Kristol (Fox News), Armed security forces outside of the Taj Mahal Hotel in India (CBC News), The Taj Mahal Hotel (Wikipedia)