Rhetowreck

Opinions: Everyone has them and they all stink, or so goes part of the old saw about opinions. Now that we find ourselves within  the calendar year of our next presidential election, the opinions will be flying around like opinions do in election years. After eight years of Obama and his administration, we will now be treated with contrasting views from both sides. Hilary and Bernie need to make themselves distinct from the policies and accomplishments of the current crew in the White House. Nobody wants to be part of the same old song and dance. That's why Democrats have chosen to align themselves with the words of George W. Bush, who reminded us that "Islam is Peace."
Of course, this leaves the Republicans' door wide open to start pushing back against all this talk of understanding and forgiveness. Forrest Trump and Doctor Ben Carson have recently taken  to the airwaves to remind us that thousands of Muslims in New Jersey were cheering after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Doctor Ben Carson has since backed off these claims, but that hasn't kept him from insisting that mosques, schools, supermarkets, car repair shops and "any place where radicalization is going on" should be monitored in light of terrorist threats. "I would say we use our intelligence and we monitor anything: our mosques, a church, a museum, a supermarket," he said, later adding that monitoring would come after multiple reports or indications of radical activity. "We live in a very different time right now."
It's a different time, alright. But it's one we've seen before. The times they are a'changin', but not necessarily in the clean, linear way we like to think that they do. Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it, and those who repeat it are most often politicians. Doctor Ben Carson, who used to be a brain surgeon before he became a politician, seems to be enamored of a time in our past when personal liberties lost out to concerns about national securities. Or is that national insecurities? Once upon a time, the United States government locked up a bunch of Japanese Americans because they shared ancestry with a country with whom we were at war. Decades later, our government felt bad about locking men, women and children up without any sort of due process, and paid each of the survivors twenty thousand dollars. That little proposition cost us more than one and a half billion dollars in reparations. That's not an opinion, by the way. That's a fact.