Criticizing Bush is patriotic thing to do

By James V. Burke

Under George W. Bush we have a government that engages in secret domestic spying by presidential decree; monitors personal library use; maintains secret CIA prisons in eastern Europe for unidentified prisoners held without recourse; engages in abusive treatment (if not torture) of prisoners; plants propaganda articles in domestic and foreign media; and formulates its domestic agenda based upon fundamentalist religious principles.

President Bush seems not to recognize that he is pushing us toward a police state, exactly what he claims we are fighting against. And yet, when loyal Americans who cherish their democracy dare to criticize the Bush administration for its blizzard of lies and deception during the past five years, their reputations and patriotism are impugned by Bush, Cheney and the right-wing neo-cons.

But being critical of the decisions of a particular president does not constitute disloyalty to the United States. Many other patriotic Americans of the past have made that point. Teddy Roosevelt, as a former Republican president who often criticized Democratic President Woodrow Wilson during World War I, put it this way: "To announce that there must be no criticism of the president is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonous to the American public.

I agree with Teddy Roosevelt. A true patriot will — out of love — constructively criticize his country when he thinks it is wrong: for example, the genocide against American Indians, slavery, the political assassination of Al Smith by the right-wing Catholic-haters in 1928, the Vietnam War and the police-state corruption of Watergate and the Iran-Contra scandal.

It is a false patriotism that says, like Hitler’s Nazis in World War II: "My country right or wrong." It is a false patriotism that ignores — or is ignorant of — the obvious wrongs committed in our nation’s history.

If we voluntarily give up our freedoms and become a fascist state, where dissent is tantamount to treason, we will be handing the assassins of Sept. 11 their greatest victory. If that occurs, as the late cartoonist Walt Kelly observed in "Pogo": "We have met the enemy . . . and he is us."

SAYREVILLE