if that's winning, i'll gladly lose

I got this chain e-mail today. It infuriated me so much that I nearly tore the sender a new e-hole via 'Reply All', but my senses prevailed and I decided to dissect it for public scrutiny instead. So here we go:

Subject: Unfortunately, this says it all!!!

Everyone has a different opinion on the war, and our current President. But, this article makes a lot of sense, and I hope you will read it and give it some thought:

What a difference 60 years makes..!!!

'You aint gonna like losing.' Author unknown.

President Bush did make a bad mistake in the war on terrorism. But the mistake was not necessarily his decision to go to war in Iraq .

Bush's mistake came in his belief that this country is the same one his father fought for in WWII. It is not.

Back then, they had just come out of a vicious depression. The country was steeled by the hardship of that depression, but they still believed fervently in this country. They knew that the people had elected their leaders, so it was the people's duty to back those leaders.
Hold on a minute here. It's our duty to back our leaders? Funny, I could've sworn our Declaration of Independence states:

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it...

and that our Constitution spells out, in Article II, Section 4, that the citizenry has the right and responsibility to force out of office any elected leader who betrays the public trust by acting above the law or selling out the People. This is a far cry from the people having the duty to back their leaders unquestioningly, as this essay suggests. Indeed, it's exactly the opposite; since the People elect their leaders, it's the duty of the People to not back those leaders when they fail to represent the interests of the People.

Let's continue...

Therefore, when the war broke out the people came together, rallied behind, and stuck with their leaders, whether they had voted for them or not or whether the war was going badly or not.

And war was just as distasteful and the anguish just as great then as it is today. Often there were more casualties in one day in WWII than we have had in the entire Iraq war. But that did not matter. The people stuck with the President because it was their patriotic duty. Americans put aside their differences in WWII and worked together to win that war.
Once again, 'sticking with the President' is not anybody's "patriotic duty". By now, you can probably see the horrible road this essay heading down...

Everyone from every strata of society, from young to old pitched in. Small children pulled little wagons around to gather scrap metal for the war effort. Grade school students saved their pennies to buy stamps for war bonds to help the effort.

Men who were too old or medically 4F lied about their age or condition trying their best to join the military. Women doubled their work to keep things going at home. Harsh rationing of everything from gasoline to soap, to butter was imposed, yet there was very little complaining.
Comparing the current war to WWII is like comparing apples and unicycles. The reason WWII had such great citizen mobilization is that it was a war that most people agreed was right, just, and necessary for the survival of a free world. The current war, on the other hand, is almost universally understood to be wrong, unjust, and certainly not necessary for the survival of anything other than war profiteers. Germany and Japan were real hostile forces who were directly attacking us and our allies; Iraq was not directly hostile, never attacked, nor had any plans to attack us or our allies, and has been known for years to have nothing to do with the terrorist networks we were supposed to be warring against. One would have to be either stupid or insane to think Iraq and WWII are anything alike.

You never heard prominent people on the radio belittling the President. Interestingly enough in those days there were no fat cat actors and entertainers who ran off to visit and fawn over dictators of hostile countries and complain to them about our President. Instead, they made upbeat films and entertained our troops to help the troops' morale. And a bunch even enlisted.
The media stringently censored their personalities in the mid-20th century, and dissenting voices were harassed, fired, or even blacklisted. It's also worth pointing out that George Bush isn't exactly the FDR of our time.

And imagine this: Teachers in schools actually started the day off with a Pledge of Allegiance, and with prayers for our country and our troops!
Yeah, we've made a lot of progress on that front in the past 60 years. Forced prayers and forced loyalty oaths are decidedly un-American.

Back then, no newspaper would have dared point out certain weak spots in our cities where bombs could be set off to cause the maximum damage.
Often times, bringing our weaknesses to public light is the most expedient way of getting our weaknesses fixed by those who have the power to fix them. And besides, if a newspaper reporter is able to uncover the high casualty weak spots in a city, a terrorist sure as hell already knows about them, or at least knows how to find them at least as easily as the reporter did. And even if he can't, I can pretty much guarantee he's not getting his target intel from the Sacramento Bee.
No newspaper would have dared complain about what we were doing to catch spies.
"What we're doing to catch spies" is the FOX News way of saying "illegally spying on American citizens, without congressional or judicial oversight, in flagrant violation of the National Security Act of 1947 Title V, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, and the Constitution of the United States of America."
A newspaper would have been laughed out of existence if it had complained that German or Japanese soldiers were being 'tortured' by being forced to wear women's underwear, or subjected to interrogation by a woman, or being scared by a dog or did not have air conditioning.
First, the author's thoughtless dismissal of these forms of torture is, well, torturous. These acts aren't the petty, frat-like gags this essay portrays them as. In the conservative, religious, patriarchal cultures of the Middle East, being forced to wear women's underwear ranks closely below being raped. There's also a huge difference between "being scared by a dog" and being threatened with the prospect of literally being eaten alive by snarling attack dogs. I'm not aware of any "enhanced interrogation techniques" involving 'not having air conditioning', but I do know that it's not uncommon to have temperatures of 120+ degrees in Iraq, and if people are being forced into a hotbox in that kind of climate, that's pretty damn disgusting.
Second, if it was revealed that we were torturing POWs during WWII, I doubt that newspapers "would have been laughed out of existence". It wasn't that long ago that Americans thought of their country as a beacon of morality in a depraved world, and torture has always been about as un-American-ly immoral as it gets.

There were a lot of things different back then. We were not subjected to a constant bombardment of pornography, perversion and promiscuity in movies or on radio. We did not have legions of crackheads, dope pushers and armed gangs roaming our streets.
Al Capone, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, John Dillinger, Lucky Luciano, Bugsy Siegel, Frank Costello... yeah there were definitely no "dope pushers and armed gangs roaming our streets" back in the good ol' days.
What does this have to do with the topic at hand, anyway? I thought we were talking about the war...

No, President Bush did not make a mistake in his handling of terrorism. He made the mistake of believing that we still had the courage and fortitude of our fathers. He believed that this was still the country that our fathers fought so dearly to preserve.
If this was still the country our fathers fought to preserve, this war would never have started, 9/11 would have never happened, and Bush sure as hell would never have made it into office. This is what happens when a great nation becomes arrogant and lazy.

It is not the same country. It is now a cross between Sodom and Gomorra and the land of Oz. We did unite for a short while after 9/11, but our attitude changed when we found out that defending our country would require some sacrifices.
No, our attitude changed when we snapped out of our collective jingoistic euphoria and began to realize that we were being manipulated and sold out by our government, and led into a war that had been planned prior to 9/11 [1, 2, 3], based on obviously falsified intelligence.
Oh, and "a cross between Sodom and Gomorra [sic] and the land of Oz"? That's cute.

We are in great danger. The terrorists are fanatic Muslims. They believe that it is okay, even their duty to kill anyone who will not convert to Islam. It has been estimated that about one third or over three hundred million Muslims are sympathetic to the terrorists cause...Hitler and Tojo combined did not have nearly that many potential recruits.
People who have no ground to stand on love to say things like "it has been estimated that about one third or over three hundred million" without actually citing any stats to back up their claims. If those estimates are legitimate, and not just pulled from thin air, I'd love to see them. Until the author can provide me with valid statistics, I'm going to dismiss this as the ramblings of a very ignorant, small-minded, and sad individual.

So...we either win it - or lose it - and you ain't gonna like losing.

America is not at war. The military is at war. America is at the mall.
Funny, that's exactly where Bush told us to go right after the twin towers fell. That makes us patriots, doesn't it?