Leaders come and go, but it’s always up to us – a Nixonian lesson

"To continue to fight through the months ahead for my personal vindication would almost totally absorb the time and attention of both the President and the Congress in a period when our entire focus should be on the great issues of peace abroad and prosperity without inflation at home.

"Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as President at that hour in this office."

- President Richard M. Nixon, in his resignation address to the people of the United States, August 8, 1974

No politician, least of all, the president, leaves office with a positive legacy, until the people find agreement that it is so. The good old boys can pat each other on the back and give each other medals, as was done in the Bush 43 administration, or claim they act in the best interest of their oaths to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States," as this administration and its Congressional supporters claim they do. The final word, though, is for the voters to decide whose service we laud, and whose we condemn, before it gets left to history.

By definition, in order to lead, one must have a compelling message, with an understandable plan, addressing important issues in a way that enrolls others to follow. So hungry are we for this kind of leadership, that we transfer our desire to be led to pop-culture heroes, like rock gods and movie stars, who tend to disappoint us because we bestow upon them a mantle, for which the never asked, and shake from their shoulders like an unwelcome chill.

Political leaders, however, are happy to acknowledge that we have high expectations of their service, and are not afraid to indulge us in any quality we want to assume they endorse, if it helps them gain a following, whether they actually have a stated commitment to our pet cause, or not. President Obama, for example, did not hide his disdain for the actions of the Bush administration, when it came to the warrantless acquisition of telephone data, during his tenure in the U.S. Senate, or when he was running for his current office, in 2008.

Then we hear phrases like the one President Obama uttered, Tuesday night, during his appearance on the Tonight Show, with Jay Leno. "We don't have a domestic spying program," he said, adding, "What we do have are some mechanisms where we can track a phone number or an e-mail address that we know is connected to some sort of terrorist threat."

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Boston to Houston: a right to radicalize?

"As Tamerlan's devotion to Islam became more intense and radicalized, Dzhokhar showed signs of his brother's influence" - The Atlantic Wire, May 5, 2013

"A YouTube account apparently belonging to Tamerlan Tsarnaev gives tantalising hints of his radicalisation before the Boston bombings" - The (UK) Guardian, April 22, 2013

"Rojanksy will speak to the notion that Islamic extremists, and Chechen ties, contributed to the radicalization of the suspected bombers" - programming notes for the April 24, 2013, episode of CNN's Piers Morgan Live [emphasis mine]

Since the horrible events in Boston, last month, it is impossible to browse a news site or watch television news without having the word thrown in your face like a water soaked towel. Guantanamo radicalizes. Middle East politics radicalizes. Islam radicalizes. The Internet radicalizes.

"I think that this is a very difficult challenge when you have individuals who are self-radicalizing, they’re not part of some massive conspiracy or a network," President Obama told a Univision interviewer, Friday.
To that end, Newsweek's Michael Moynihan, in a piece where he uses a pseudonym to explore extremist websites, defines "self-radicalization" as "the process by which those unconnected to organized jihad are lured toward extremism via the Web."

If the online snuff films and photographs of dead children that Moynihan describes are part of the jihadist call to arms, then coming down from the dark cloud of the terrorist underworld can only be countered with an equally potent validation of community and belonging.

"A lot of these videos, they are very emotive," Haris Tarin, of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, told PBS' Bob Abernethy, last week. "These sermons, they use violence and gruesome images to tug at the emotion of young people."

But while the media is scrambling to compartmentalize "self-radicalization" as a behavior in which only a handful of sociopathic, homegrown Islamic terrorists engage, there's one place in the American conversation where radicalization from an organized group gets only minimal attention from the press, as an existential threat. I'm speaking, of course, of the National Rifle Association.

In Houston, this past weekend, the NRA paraded speaker after speaker, who railed against Obama and gun safety advocates with the hateful energy of a radical imam. Through the exhortations of their leadership, the NRA are behaving like American jihadis. Like the terrorist who twists the Qur'an to defend their murderous ways, the anti-government, cultural isolationists of the NRA re-interpret the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights to justify arming themselves for revolution.

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