I’m thinking today of two quotes that have recently garnered attention (albeit not sufficient attention) which are seemingly quite different and from rather different people but are, in at least one way, of a piece.

John Murtha (congressman from Pennsylvania, decorated former Marine and the Democratic Party’s standard bearer in criticizing Bush administration policy on the Iraq war) has identified the greatest threat to peace in the world, and it is us.

American presence in Iraq is more dangerous to world peace than nuclear threats from North Korea or Iran, U.S. Rep. John P. Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat, said yesterday to a crowd of more than 200 in North Miami.
…
He said the more than 100,000 troops in Iraq should be pulled out immediately, and deployed to peripheral countries such as Kuwait.

(And if the terrorists start planting their bombs in Kuwait, what will be Murtha’s recommendation?)

Murtha’s remarks reveal, plainly, the world view behind his policy on Iraq. While it has been implicit in the media coverage of his opposition to the war to date that his concern, as “a decorated former Marine,” is for the suffering of American troops, his remarks the other day (not to mention previous statements when properly analyzed) demonstrate that, fundamentally, he considers America to be the bad actor in the world. The worst actor. Our troops, frankly, are the bad guys. You cannot get around it.

The other recent quote that seems to me related in a certain way is that of Natalie Maines, famed Dixie Chick, in an interview with Britain’s Telegraph.

“The entire country may disagree with me, but I don’t understand the necessity for patriotism,” Maines resumes, through gritted teeth. “Why do you have to be a patriot? About what? This land is our land? Why? You can like where you live and like your life, but as for loving the whole country … I don’t see why people care about patriotism.”

Under “unintentionally hilarious,” you can file what the writer of the piece says immediately after that quote:

There can be no rational explanation of how Maines’s remark [Ed: i.e. her original remark from a stage in England about President Bush on the eve of the Iraq war] came to drive a red-hot poker into America’s divided soul, but it’s only now that some of the poison has begun to dissipate.

I wrote previously about how the context of the 2003 remark about President Bush was key in understanding the outrage it generated, and how this context has been glossed over lately. Natalie Maines’ latest quote to the effect that she simply doesn’t care about patriotism demonstrates that ordinary people were correct in what they instinctively perceived within that original remark, and the when and where of how it was made. Maines saw no problem with deriding the President of the United States from a foreign stage when hundreds of thousands of American troops were about to strap on their flak jackets and head into an impossible-to-predict battle, because, obviously, it didn’t matter to her that they were American, or that she was, or that the President was. She possessed no semblance of patriotism. That’s what irked people.

Of-course you’re not supposed to be able to accuse liberals who oppose the Iraq war of lacking patriotism. Natalie Maines, who is at least to be admired for her guilelessness on this occasion, has thankfully put paid to her right to be “presumed patriotic.”

Murtha, Maines et al: Long may you speak out.

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