The right wing's most prominent master of dirty tricks, Roger Stone, who's plied his cons for presidents Nixon and George W. Bush, has declared Barack Obama unpatriotic because he doesn't wear an American flag lapel pin. This is a cheap imitation of the far right's branding of John Kerry as a non-hero of the Vietnam War, despite his combat tours and medals for gallantry.
Imagine millions of Americans without Old Glory pins suddenly stigmatized by our far-right betters as un-American or worse. I don't own an Old Glory lapel pin. However, on the few occasions when I wear a suit coat, I wear the miniature lapel pin for the Bronze Star medal I was awarded in the Korean War. Would that pass the right wing's patriotism test?
(Do the guardians of patriotism realize—gasp!—John McCain often doesn't wear a lapel flag pin?)
This shame-on-you gimmick is an old fraud—a way to humiliate people into submitting to groupthink.
Workers who cross union picket lines are condemned as "scabs." Critics of government policies are told to "love (the country) or leave it." Others who respond like sheep chant, "My country, right or wrong." And to justify wrong-headed decisions and silence dissent, politicians trot out this shopworn slogan, "You're with us or against us."
True patriotism is found in deeds.
How could President Bush or Vice President Cheney ever be regarded as patriots, despite their Old Glory lapel pins? Bush took the easy way out during the Vietnam War by joining an Air Force squadron of privileged rich kids, then went AWOL before completing his tour. Cheney dodged the draft five times with lame excuses. Bush and Cheney also shredded the U.S. Constitution with abusive police powers and impeachable conduct.
Pentagon brass who sent U.S. forces into combat ill-equipped, then shortchanged the horribly wounded when they returned home for treatment, are not patriots, even with flag lapel pins.
Americans have had a bellyful of snake-oil patriots and jet-setting, politico-evangelicals trying to control public thought and dictate national policy with lapel-pin gimmicks, Ten Commandment monuments and flag-desecration laws.
Samuel Johnson, the gifted 1800s English writer who coined the phrase, "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel," is also known for another aphorism about patriotism.
"He that wishes to see his country robbed of its rights," Johnson wrote, "cannot be a patriot."
Americans have lost more of their rights under phony right-wing patriots with flag pins in their lapels than at any other time in modern U.S. history.
