Allah got a Christmas wish answered when The View re-aired James Brolin coming thiiis close to espousing truthernut conspiracies. To me, the link is less important for that than for this quote of Brolin’s:

We were Americans. Now we’re split and arguing. So whose fault is that, and what’s going wrong, and think about the issues.

The main trouble with people like Brolin, and it gives rise to their willingness to swallow crap like 9/11 truthernut salad, is that they know absolutely no history and nothing whatsoever about human nature. Splits and arguments among Americans, nasty ones about heavy, anguishing issues, date right back to 1776 and the argument over whether we should even become Americans or not.

This is not new. It is not new to our era. There is vicious infighting over every major issue that comes our way, and we are pushed to the point of being “all Americans” only when the evil of the day and its danger to us are so clearly delineated that even the doviest among us can clearly see the choice between fighting and being subjugated, as in WWII, presumably the start date of that elusive “we were Americans” period Brolin burbled about. It’s all well and good to say now that Britain had no right to rule us and the Revolution was correct even at the price, but it wasn’t so clear at the time. Ditto the preservation of the Union, 1861-1865, ditto the 1930s run-up to WWII. Evils are frequently not so clearly delineated as Hitler was eventually revealed to be. People of Brolin’s ilk would apparently prefer that nothing controversial were done until a few millions had been shoveled into furnaces so that they would not have to whine about splits and arguments at home. Or they would rather find the evil at home, spreading the monstrous idea that the freely elected president of a modern republic killed 3K of his own citizens, than believe that either saving or stopping anybody outside our borders could be worth those 3K lives twice over.

It’s your fault, Brolin. It’s your fault for lacking even basic realism, any common decency, or a smidge more than the “little learning” that we’ve always been warned is so dangerous. Pick up a book like Modern Times or John Adams and then tell me whose fault it is. You prig.

Cross-posted at Electric Venom.