The following example of deep thinking from Byron York at The National Review has been quoted extensively across the blogosphere, so there's really no reason to bring it up here. But it's been eating at me for 12 hours now, so I need to purge and move on.
Here's the quote. He was talking about what griped him about Obama's recent speech:
It’s a small passage from Obama’s Berlin speech, but this formulation, common in some circles, grates on some ears, like mine: “The terrorists of September 11th plotted in Hamburg and trained in Kandahar and Karachi before killing thousands from all over the globe on American soil.”
Yes, the victims were from all over the globe — places like Brooklyn, and the Bronx, and Manhattan, and Queens, and Staten Island, and New Jersey — all over. And most were Americans, weren’t they?
This is it. This is the perfect encapsulation of the conservative "mind". They can read and write and do arithmetic, but somehow they missed out on common decency. Only American lives are important. It's just a variant of the same disgusting formulation you hear wherever idiots roam. Only Shiite lives are important. Only Palestinian lives are important. Only Israeli lives are important. Only Serbian lives are important. And on and on ad nauseum.
Jonathan Zasloff at The Reality-Based Community has this to add:
When George W. Bush addressed Congress in the wake of 9/11, and left conservatives fainting in the aisles with man-crushes, he emphasized:
"Nor will we forget the citizens of 80 other nations who died with our own: dozens of Pakistanis; more than 130 Israelis; more than 250 citizens of India; men and women from El Salvador, Iran, Mexico and Japan; and hundreds of British citizens."
But that was back in the days when American foreign policy still acknowledged that your life had value even if you weren't an American. As it turns out, the policy was on its last legs. It would be nice to see it make a come-back.
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