Linda Chavez wrote in an article that originally appeared in the New York Post about “Liberal patriotism” that real patriotism understands these simple facts:
Our elected officials don’t make America great, nor do temporal policies. America is great because of its people, its defining institutions and its freedoms.
As a liberal and a patriot, I agree with Ms. Chavez. At least in this instance. But somehow, Ms. Chavez manages to praise America’s “defining institutions and its freedoms” ((Which must obviously include the Congress, the courts, the laws of the land, and the Bill of Rights.)) while endorsing the power of the executive branch to break the law, violate the freedoms of its citizens without due process, violate the Bill of Rights, and even torture. Ms. Chavez’s understanding of patriotism itself is so tortured that she manages to decry – at a full column’s length – a candidate’s spouse’s off-the-cuff remark as demonstrating a nefarious anti-freedom-ism while applauding that the Attorney General, in his considered testimony, refused to reject “cruel and inhuman treatment” of prisoners as is Constitutionally required of him.
Somehow, “freedom” – in the sense Ms. Chavez uses the term – has nothing to do with violating civil liberties. And upholding the “defining institutions” of America sometimes requires breaking the law. Those who seek to uphold the law – or who are embarrassed by the blatant lawlessness – are not considered patriots. Instead, they “put politics before the national interest” and give “aid and comfort to the enemy” while trying to “hamper the military’s ability to fight…effectively.” There is a more sympathetic way to view Ms. Chavez’s inflammatory and extreme rhetoric but she certainly doesn’t encourage anyone who disagrees with her in the slightest to attempt to find it.
To some extent, I ask myself: why do I even care about what this woman is writing? She may be wrong; she may be using her position as a syndicated columnist to promote lies and unfairly attack good people. Isn’t it a standard “conservative” line that liberals are in fact traitors by their very nature? ((See anything Ann Coulter has said in the past decade, and much of what Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity have said.)) But at this point, is it even newsworthy that a “conservative” political commenter regularly calls the majority of Americans “America-haters” – and worse?
Maybe not. But it is worth pointing out again – and again – that as these hacks drape themselves with the Stars and Stripes, they undermine the very freedoms and attack the very people they claim to admire.
There is a reasonable argument to be made in favor of torture, law-breaking, and freedom-impingement. But it involves compromises our core values in the face of enemy aggression. That’s an argument no hack wants to make.