Patriots For Every Country But Their Own

During a phone interview yesterday on MSNBC, as Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) accused congressional Republicans of “rooting against the country” for daring to vote against cap and trade, I could only ask myself of the painful irony I was hearing, “Can he possibly be saying this with a straight face?”

The statement, deeply cynical and wholly inappropriate, along with the rationale behind it, deserves further examination. Listen to it for yourself here.

Here’s a partial transcription of what Waxman told host Andrea Mitchell:

So far, this Congress -- since Obama became President -- the Republicans have said no to an economic stimulus bill, they’re saying no to a global warming bill... They want to play politics and see if they can keep any achievements from being accomplished that may be beneficial to the Democrats. They're rooting against the country and I think in this case, even rooting against the world because the world needs to get its act together to stop global warming. I wish they were playing a more constructive role. Some Republicans doubt the whole science of global warming, even though the consensus is overwhelming. They don’t want to believe it.

Let’s be clear: One of the same guys from the same party that not long ago suffered a near-panic attack at the prospect of American victory in Iraq is actually trying to call out the GOP for putting politics before, well, patriotism. As the saying goes, you just can’t make this stuff up.

Waxman did more than bestow new meaning upon the phrase, “People in glass houses shouldn’t cast stones.” As strange and irreverent as it may seem, Waxman actually confirmed just how much global warming may be to the left what Islamist terrorism is to the right, and probably still most Americans.  As Paul Krugman put it in Sunday’s New York Times:

Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an “existential threat” to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole — but the existential threat from climate change is all too real.

Still skeptical? Let’s reexamine Waxman’s own words. A simple swap of environmental-speak for war on terror talk and an interchange of party names offers a more precise illustration of his inadvertent irony. Here’s what a conservative Republican easily could have said just two short years ago:

So far, this Congress -- since they became the majority -- the Democrats have said no to the troop surge, they’re saying no to a war funding bill... They want to play politics and see if they can keep any achievements from being accomplished that may be beneficial to the Republicans. They're rooting against the country and I think in this case, even rooting against the world because the world needs to get its act together to stop global terrorism. I wish they were playing a more constructive role. Some Democrats doubt the whole success of the surge, even though the consensus is overwhelming. They don’t want to believe it.

See the comparison? In Waxman & Krugman’s world, global warming, not Islamofascism, is “the existential threat” that demands urgent, dramatic, status quo-changing action. All who oppose or even slightly disagree with them are, according to Krugman, committing “betrayal” and “a form of treason — treason against the planet.”

(Michael Goldfarb at The Weekly Standard rightly points out that, according to leftwing criteria, more Americans are actually traitors as opposed to… I guess we’ll call them “patriots of the world.”)

Bottom line: Nobody ought to be “rooting against the country,” ever, for any reason at all. The reasons are too obvious to even list. And in a way, Waxman et al are at least right to be on the lookout for snakes in the garden. However, his accusation was both wrongly directed and poorly applied. By lumping well-meaning Republicans in Congress with certain talking head types, Waxman completely rejects the serious arguments being made against cap and trade, not to mention the merits of various alternatives to the bill. (Such immense criticism will likely, hopefully lead to the bill’s demise in the Senate.) All things considered, who’s really doing the disservice to the country?

In recent years, many on the right have called out their fellow Americans -- whether they’ve been Democratic leaders, the far left, Limbaugh, or even the paleocons -- for openly craving the present administration’s failure. Such a selfish desire is downright vulgar in our modern, decent democracy and deserves to be condemned. Many on the left, however, have consistently been missing the mark.

In Waxman’s recent episode, legitimate concern was mistaken for callous sedition, quite possibly because he (like Krugman and others) truly believes global warming is a more deadly threat than radical Islam. In his world, regrettably, basic policy skepticism is “treason” and the largest tax on the middle class in more than a decade, in the words of another Democrat, is “patriotic.”