Life & Wisdom Quote by Linda Chavez

There is a trapdoor in Chavez's phrasing: "seem to believe". It does two jobs at once, dismissing the idea as a perception problem while implying a soft-minded press is flirting with moral equivalence. The line is built to shame journalists without debating them. By framing the media as "many" (broad enough to feel endemic, vague enough to evade proof), Chavez turns scrutiny into a suspect ideology rather than a set of arguments about policy, law, or conduct.

The real charge sits in "little different from our enemies". It's not just disagreement; it's an accusation of disloyalty. The subtext is that comparing "us" to "them" is itself a kind of betrayal, or at least a luxury afforded by people insulated from threat. The sentence invites readers to treat uncomfortable reporting - civilian casualties, surveillance overreach, torture debates, secrecy - as an aesthetic posture: journalists wanting to look sophisticated by refusing simple patriot/villain binaries.

Context matters because Chavez is writing in the long shadow of post-9/11 discourse, when the question "are we becoming what we fight?" became a recurring moral alarm. Her intent is to reassert a clean boundary between democratic self-image and enemy barbarism, and to delegitimize those who blur it. The rhetorical move is effective because it replaces a factual inquiry ("what did we do?") with a character critique ("why do you think like that?"). It shifts the fight from evidence to identity, where emotions - pride, fear, resentment - do most of the work.