Now what are we fighting for?

Thanks to Stupid Country for this Senator John Cornyn quote:
“None of your civil liberties matter much after you’re dead.”

I heard Rush Limbaugh making the same argument a few days ago. Rush Limbaugh argued incessantly that we’ve never fought a war for civil liberties. It’s the new Republican meme.

What’s strange about this position is that civil liberties, are what is laid out in the Bill of Rights and made into law in The Constitution of the United States of America.

Civil Liberties is just another name for Freedom. After all, what is Liberty if not Freedom? What is Civil? Well it comes from the Latin ‘civilis’ or ‘civis’, which means ‘Citizen’. So what Rush Limbaugh is telling us is that we’ve never fought for our rights and freedoms as citizens of the United States of America.

Rush went on to argue that we’ve only ever fought wars for our right to stay alive. All of our wars have been to prevent the extermination of the American People. We’re fighting in Iraq at this moment, not for Freedom, Not for Democracy, and certainly not for Civil Liberties (the right of the citizens of Iraq to be free), but because our very lives are in danger.

And what does this mean? While listening to him on the radio, I couldn’t quite figure it out. But he kept explaining that the War in Iraq was to save the American people. So, clearly all Americans were being threatened by the people of Iraq. Cheesemakers in Wisconsin were under threat of being exterminated by Iraqis. California was in danger of an Iraqi invasion and subsequent executions in gas chambers. The greatest fears of the people in great state of Kansas, was no longer tornadoes and drought, but an invading horde of Iraqis.

So under this new theory that the US has never fought for freedom and democracy, we need to re-examine the colonial wars against the British. Under this new history, the British were intent on committing genocide against the original colonists that they were taxing for profit and relied on for steady shipments of lumber, in order to keep their colonial expansion moving. It wasn’t about freedom and independence, it was to stop genocide.

And the American Civil war wasn’t about Freedom or economics… It was about stopping the South from committing genocide against the North. The very survival of the people in Northern States depended on defeating the South. Otherwise they would’ve all been executed.

The alternate universe that Rush Limbaugh and John Cornyn live in, is a very strange place. It has no semblance to anything I’m familiar with. It appears to have nothing in common with my experiences, even from last month.

Remember last month when we were in Iraq to promote freedom and democracy? You do? Well according to these people, that didn’t happen. That was never the reason.

And this is the insanity that you have to embrace when you start believing in every contradictory lie, told by the Bush administration. When it’s your job to be an apologist for an administration that argues that it has to take away our freedoms to keep the terrorists from taking them away from us.

Because if we’re to accept the notion that we need our freedoms stripped from us so that we can fight a war in Iraq, we need to some pretty insane ideas shoved done our throats.

Forget everything you ever knew about why we went to Iraq. We’re there because that incredibly powerful nation had the means to vaporize the entire North American continent, and that’s why all Iraqis must die.

It’s not about Freedom anymore. Forget anyone ever said that.