American Values

Steve Clemons offers insightful comment on attitudes toward the Muslim world on Talking Points Memo.

One of my late mentors, Hans Baerwald, taught me that the only way to get a real rather than shallow sense of a political system's norms and operating behavior was to watch it under stress. With commentary like that we have seen from John Bolton, Martin Peretz, Richard Cheney, Liz Cheney, Glenn Beck, and saw in the political maneuvering of Cheney Chief of Staff, David Addington, we unleashed an America that defiles key aspects of its own DNA and that is less-trustable by the rest of the world today.

To take this further, I think the debate today is not about the treatment of Muslims or those of Arab descent, but about the United States itself. John Bolton and Martin Peretz, in undermining America's core values of a big-tent approach to accommodating and absorbing other societies, are not performing a patriotic duty -- but are displaying the opposite of American patriotism.

--Ballard Burgher