“Terrorism Truths No Politician Will Admit”: Republicans Are Uniquely Immune To Learning From History
Here’s a truth that no politician, Democrat or Republican, is going to tell you: There is absolutely nothing that our government could have done to prevent the attack that took 14 lives in San Bernardino last week. If you’re looking for a lesson we can learn from it, that’s the one you ought to take. Universal background checks for gun purchases is a good idea, but it wouldn’t have stopped that couple from killing those people. Starting a new war in the Middle East is a terrible idea, but it also wouldn’t have stopped it.
We can’t stop an attack like the one in San Bernardino before it happens because our ability to do that is dependent on the plot coming to the government’s attention. In order for that to happen, knowledge of the plan has to leak out in some way—to someone who overhears the planning and tells the authorities, to an informant whom the attackers bring into their confidence, over an electronic medium like email or telephone that is being monitored. But what if all you have is a husband and wife working out the details over their kitchen table, and buying their tools of mayhem the same way a hundred million other Americans do, down at the local gun shop? There is no way to stop that.
Which brings us to another truth you won’t see politicians admit: terrorism will never be defeated or vanquished or eliminated or banished. It’s a technique, attractive to those with limited power precisely because it’s relatively easy to use.
Actually, there was a politician who once acknowledged that reality. In 2004, John Kerry said, “We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance.” He cited organized crime as a comparison of what we ought to seek: “It isn’t threatening people’s lives every day, and fundamentally, it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life.” His opponent was positively gleeful that Kerry would say something so weak and defeatist. “I couldn’t disagree more,” said George W. Bush. “Our goal is not to reduce terror to some acceptable level of nuisance, our goal is to defeat terror by staying on the offensive, destroying terrorist networks, and spreading freedom and liberty around the world.” His campaign rushed to make a television ad based on Kerry’s quote, and four years later, when he left office, Bush’s strength and resolve had ended the threat of terrorism for all time.
Just kidding—for some inexplicable reason, George Bush didn’t manage to “defeat terror.” But now the members of his party say they’ve got the plan that will take care of it. Donald Trump, who already promised to start torturing prisoners again (not that we have any Islamic State prisoners to torture, but whatever), now says if you want to defeat terrorism, “You have to take out their families.” Sure, it’s a war crime, but just think of the satisfaction we’ll get from killing a bunch of children! Ted Cruz is talkin’ the tough-guy talk too. “If I am elected president, we will utterly destroy ISIS,” he said on Saturday. “We won’t weaken them. We won’t degrade them. We will utterly destroy them. We will carpet bomb them into oblivion. I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out.” Yeehaw.
Republicans are uniquely immune to learning from history, and at the moment they’ve convinced themselves that once we crush the Islamic State, terrorism will no longer be much of a problem. But of course that’s just what we thought about Al Qaeda, and it’s what we’ll think about the terror group spawned by our next Middle East war. Let’s just kill these guys, and then the problem will be solved.
How many Americans actually believe that? It’s hard to know. But there’s no question the San Bernardino attack has ratcheted up Americans’ fear. The apparent futility of any practical solution to a threat like this one seems only to drive people into the arms of a hateful demagogue like Trump and the demi-demagogues who scuttle after him. Maybe people actually buy the absurd idea that if we just go after this one terrorist group with enough ruthlessness, no other terrorist group will ever emerge. Maybe people actually believe that if we subject American Muslims to enough suspicion and harassment, no American Muslim will become angry enough to want to kill his or her fellow citizens.
But let’s be honest: what the Republicans are selling isn’t a practical plan to solve a practical problem, because the problem defined that way—can we stop an attack just like this one?—has no real solution. So what they promise is an amplification of all the poisonous emotions swirling inside you. Are you afraid? I will validate your fears and shout that things are even worse than you think. Do you hate? I will give your hatred voice, point it outward, translate it into pledges of rage and violence visited upon the guilty and innocent alike.
In his Oval Office address Sunday night, President Obama tried to make a different argument, that “Our success won’t depend on tough talk, or abandoning our values or giving into fear. That’s what groups like ISIL are hoping for.” But he too insisted that “The threat from terrorism is real, but we will overcome it.” It’s what any president would have to say, I suppose, to reassure and comfort and give hope. The truth—that no matter what we do there will always be the possibility of terrorist attacks, and some of them will inevitably succeed—isn’t something presidents are supposed to say.
The more important truth, also out of bounds for politicians, is that as horrifying as any one attack is, terrorism is a threat we can live with, just like we live with the threat of natural disasters or crime or the flu, all of which take many more lives than terrorism does. Somehow we manage to accommodate ourselves to those threats without losing our damn minds. Surely there’s a lesson there.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, December 7, 2015
“Trump Keeps Insulting Our 9/11 Dead”: Twisting The History Of A Sacred Day Shows Why He’s Unfit To Be President
Because Donald Trump has to destroy everything in his path, why not the true history 9/11? Trump would have us revise and edit our historical memory of 9/11, turning it from a unifying narrative of heroism, tragedy, and war and recast it to serve the political ends of a man unworthy of the presidency.
Let’s be specific, because history matters. Here is Trump’s claim, which he’s been obsessively defending for weeks now:
“I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.”
Trump’s Big Lie, as every fact checker from across the political spectrum has verified, is both simple and egregious: “thousands and thousands.” On the most-recorded day of our age, no record exists of “thousands and thousands” because it would have been a story of immediate, devastating consequences not only for the Muslims involved, but for this nation. It would have blown back immediately both on Muslims and on President Bush and Mayor Giuliani, who had called on Americans to refrain from assigning collective guilt.
Did any American Muslim celebrate 9/11? I’m sure some did. There are assholes in every walk of life, and in a metro area with 10 million people and a nation of 350 million, I’d be shocked if a couple of idiots didn’t act out. But it’s not a defense of Muslim extremism to stand for the truth of history.
Despite being called out on this lie repeatedly, Team Trump has produced nothing whatsoever to back up the “thousands and thousands” claim. Instead, they’ve produced a handful of anecdotes, secondhand news stories and hazy memories of what might have been a trivial number of Muslims celebrating the attacks.
They’ve failed—of course—to produce video, photos, news stories, police reports, eyewitnesses, or any other evidence for Trump’s “thousands and thousands” claim, and they never will. And when cornered with the facts, Trump’s talk-radio and online cheerleaders allege that a massive media conspiracy is keeping all the documentary evidence supporting the claim under wraps.
So why is this different from any other part of the Trumpendammerung cycle of outrageous statements, tornadoes of lies, and shoot-from-the-lip populism? Because we owe history, and the dead of that terrible September day something better.
We should tell the true stories of that day to honor the memory and sacrifice of those who perished on 9/11 and in the long wars since. We should remember the real events, not transform them into post-hoc, politically expedient exaggerations meant to amplify Donald Trump’s bravado.
The deaths of thousands at the hands of 19 Islamic radicals dispatched by Osama Bin Laden created an inflection point in our history, leading to tragedies and victories, losses and triumphs, in what is becoming a generation of war. We should tell the honest, painful stories of 9/11 because it dishonors the memory of heroes to invent a phony cast of villains when the actual terrorists were terrible enough to tear open this nation’s heart.
Trump is trying to write himself into a heroic narrative at the cost of truth, and of the memories of the real heroes who perished that day. While Trump sat staring at his television and imagining Muslims celebrating, better men and women than he will ever be died in Lower Manhattan.
They were heroes like Terry Hatton of FDNY Rescue Company 1, who charged in to the Towers without a moment’s hesitation, never knowing his wife was pregnant with their daughter. They were men of faith like Father Mychal Judge, who spent his last moments comforting the doomed as the Towers fell around them, praying “Jesus, please end this right now! God, please end this!”
They were immigrants to this country like Rick Rescorla—people who fought our wars, embraced our values more deeply than many born here, and died as heroes trying to save his charges in the Towers. They were men like Tom Burnett, whose last whispered conversation to his wife from Flight 93 was, “I know we’re going to die. There’s three of us who are going to do something about it.”
They were stockbrokers, secretaries, office techs, lawyers, waiters, firefighters, cops, and EMTs with stories of heroism and grace. They were Christians, Muslims, Jews, atheists, and everything in between.
The families they left behind deserve a truthful recounting of their end and of that day.
I should know by now that arguing with diehard Trump supporters is largely futile but, if any of you are reading this, I pray you’ll take this issue seriously.
Two equally grim prospects can explain your behavior. The first that you know Trump’s claim is untrue, but enjoy living in his Reality Distortion Field simply to tweak mainstream America and the news media. You’ve become inhabitants of a funhouse-mirror version of the liberal culture and media you mock: insular, aggressively contrarian, obsessed with narrative over fact and anger over history.
The second is that you want it to be true so badly that you’ll invent an imagined outrage rather than focus on the actual, terrible problem of Islamic radicalism (as we saw this week in California) because that fight is harder, more complex and more painful than the hokey nostrums of Trump’s “plan” to fight ISIS. (“Take duh oil! Bomb da shit outta dem!” “Muslim database!”)
Playing out Donald Trump’s lies doesn’t mean you’re fighting some political correct media trope about Muslims or that you’re teaching the press a lesson. It doesn’t mean you’re confronting radical Islam. It doesn’t mean you’re bravely revealing a media cover-up. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to teach the Republican establishment a lesson.
All it means is you’re part of the profoundly recursive Trump dynamic; he feeds your fears, prejudices, and atavistic desires for revenge against your catalog of demons, be they Muslims, Mexicans, or Republicans who fail to kneel before the Donald. You feed his monstrous, boundless ego and like the master con artist he is, he shovels you a fresh line of easily-digested outrage and boob-bait rhetoric.
Embracing the thoroughly discredited claims of a serial liar and proven fabulist over on this history of 9/11 isn’t some bold rebellion or principled stand. It’s an insult to the dead.
By: Rick Wilson, The Daily Beast, December 6, 2015
“Michael Gerson Is An Idiot”: Former Bush Speechwriter Attacks Obama As Vicious Peacemonger
Last week, at a press conference in Turkey, a reporter asked President Obama to respond to the charge that “your reluctance to enter another Middle East war, and your preference of diplomacy over using the military makes the United States weaker and emboldens our enemies.” Obama began with a specific defense of his policies, and eventually added a general defense of his reluctance to send in large numbers of ground troops. “But what we do not do, what I do not do is to take actions either because it is going to work politically or it is going to somehow, in the abstract, make America look tough, or make me look tough,” insisted Obama, “And maybe part of the reason is because every few months I go to Walter Reed, and I see a 25-year-old kid who’s paralyzed or has lost his limbs, and some of those are people I’ve ordered into battle. And so I can’t afford to play some of the political games that others may.”
Washington Post columnist and former Bush administration speechwriter Michael Gerson is scandalized at the president’s rhetoric. “It is almost beyond belief: A commander in chief, in a time of national testing, deploying limbless soldiers as a rhetorical trump card against his political opponents … ” he complained. “The United States has a president whose wartime leadership is apparently inspired not by Winston Churchill or Franklin Roosevelt but by Rachel Maddow. His military strategy in Iraq and Syria may be questionable, but Obama is the Eisenhower of political polarization, the Napoleon of the partisan low blow.”
For the sake of argument, let us grant Gerson’s implicit premise that the president’s rhetoric, rather than his policies, is the primary subject — a premise that no doubt appeals to the wordsmith who wrote eloquent justification on behalf of the most disastrous foreign-policy regime in American history. Focus on Gerson’s premise that there is something especially — indeed, world-historically — gross about Obama citing injured soldiers as an argument against committing soldiers to battle. What are we to make of arguments like this one, by George W. Bush, in favor of war with Iraq?
Some worry that a change of leadership in Iraq could create instability and make the situation worse. The situation could hardly get worse, for world security, and for the people of Iraq. …
On Saddam Hussein’s orders, opponents have been decapitated, wives and mothers of political opponents have been systematically raped as a method of intimidation, and political prisoners have been forced to watch their own children being tortured.
Again, set aside the fact that Bush was utterly wrong in his case that neither human rights nor regional security could possibly get worse in the case of an invasion. What he believed (no doubt in earnest) was that his opponent’s policies would allow the continuation of the genuine horrors of Saddam-era Iraq. It’s beyond the pale to invoke the specter of a wheelchair-bound soldier to make the case against a ground invasion, but completely fair to saddle your opponents with decapitation, mass rape, and child torture?
By: Jonathan Chait, The Daily Intelligencer, November 20, 2015
“It’s Not The Media–It’s Just The GOP Base”: Locked In An Increasingly Hostile Defensive Crouch Against Reality
Bill Schneider at Reuters wrote a piece this week that garnered some attention claiming that the GOP primary disaster is the fault of the media. His argument goes that modern television journalism has created a reality show environment where the most outrageous hucksters perform the best and where quality candidates and policy positions are lost in the undertow. It’s a sentiment shared by many political observers. Schneider writes:
In a contest controlled by the media, personality beats policy. Candidates with colorful and attention-grabbing personalities have the advantage. Even candidates with abrasive personalities, like Donald Trump. And goofy personalities, like Ben Carson.
The process also rewards candidates with well-honed debating skills like Florida Senator Marco Rubio and Texas Senator Ted Cruz. Even though debating skill may not be an essential quality of a great president. Things like a solid record of achievement, practical ideas and endorsements by one’s peers get discounted in today’s media-driven process. Bush’s new slogan – “Jeb Can Fix It” — does not seem to be catapulting him into the lead.
With all due respect, this argument is more than a little bit of wishful thinking. People who make this claim have an idea in their heads of what they think politics should be: a series of competing resumes and white paper policy proposals soberly adjudicated by voters who furrow their brows at community forums. It’s a quirk of certain types of journalists, good government advocates and centrist think tank gurus to believe this about elections, and to favor uninspiring candidates.
But that’s frankly not how major elections work, nor how they have ever worked at least since the advent of television.
There’s nothing different in the press environment in 2015 than there was in 2011. This supposed media-driven reality TV campaign hasn’t seemed to turn the Democratic primary into a circus–rather, the Democratic primary has so far been conducted mostly with grace and the seriousness the issues deserve, in spite of a media that seems far more concerned with Clinton’s emails and the precise definition of socialism, than in the actual policy problems the country faces.
The difference this year isn’t the media. It’s the GOP base. Something has happened over the last 15 years in the American conservative psyche that most journalists and centrist political observers don’t want to admit. Conservatives are locked in an increasingly hostile defensive crouch against reality and demographic trends. Supply-side economics, once unquestioned in its Reagan ascendancy, has been shown to be a failure on multiple levels. President George W. Bush’s signature war in Iraq turned out to be a bungled disaster. Secularism is on the rise, gays can legally get married, and America is fast becoming a minority-majority nation. Climate change and wealth inequality are the two most obvious public policy problems, neither of which has even the pretense of a credible conservative solution. This, combined with the election of the first African-American president, has had a debilitating effect on the conservative psyche, which now sees itself under assault from all directions.
Conservatives have responded by creating their own alternative reality in which rejection of basic facts and decency in the service of ideology is a badge of merit and tribal loyalty. That has created an environment in which the most popular voices tend to be the most aggressive and outlandish.
In this context, the fact that Trump, Carson and Cruz have a stranglehold on the GOP presidential race has almost nothing to do with the media and everything to do with the state of the GOP base.
That the turn toward extremism seems so sudden is a mere accident of history. In 2004 George Bush rode to a narrow victory on the strength of a still-terrified American public. 2006 saw Republicans get shellacked across the board, and the financial crisis took the wind out of GOP sails and made a 2008 Democratic victory almost certain. Even then, the trend was apparent when John McCain selected Sarah Palin as his running mate to wild applause, and then she overshadowed him among conservatives and became the better-loved figure. Barack Obama’s election was followed by a grandiose temper tantrum over a Heritage Foundation, Mitt Romney-inspired healthcare law, leading to a Tea Party insurgency that provided huge gains to Republicans in 2010 and demonstrated where the true power in the Party lay.
That Mitt Romney became the nominee in 2012 was almost a fluke: for months the collection of anti-establishment candidates had more support then Romney, and toward the end Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum of all people combined for greater support than Romney achieved. Romney only won because the real GOP base split its vote. And the rest is recent history.
This is what the GOP base really is and what it has become. The media has little to do with it, except insofar as it has hidden and failed to report the Republican Party’s unilateral march toward reality-free extremism.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, November 22, 2015
“Fear Is Electoral Gold For The GOP”: Will The GOP Candidates Try To Reignite Voters’ Fears?
It’s easy to believe that the way things are today is the way they’re going to stay, to be swayed by the momentary intensity of a situation into thinking its effects will be longer-lasting than they are. So it might be that a few months from now, the attacks that took place in Paris on Friday will have exerted no meaningful pull on American policy and American politics. But a few days out, it sure feels familiar. Fear—its presence among the people, but even more so its exploitation by politicians—is back.
No one was more energized by the news from France than the Republicans running for president, who fell all over each other trying to see who could sound the toughest. Marco Rubio declared, “This is a clash of civilizations,” as though ISIS were in fact its own civilization. Ben Carson, displaying his usual commitment to factual accuracy, attacked the Obama administration for “bringing 200,000 people over here from that region,” even though the actual number of refugees we plan to take in is only 10,000. Speaking of which, Ted Cruz said that we should accept only Christian refugees, a position made all the more heartwarming by the fact that he said it at a “rally for religious liberty.” Mike Huckabee released a statement saying that because of the attack we should revoke the nuclear agreement with Iran, I guess because all Muslims are scary.
And Jeb Bush, super-macho-man that he is, said “We should declare war” on ISIS, apparently because he doesn’t know what it actually means to declare war. And that’s not to mention the inane attacks on Hillary Clinton for her unwillingness to repeat the words “radical Islam,” as though doing so would actually accomplish anything.
Watching these candidates talk about an unexpected terrorist attack overseas, it’s hard not to think they feel just a bit of relief that the discussion can move back to more advantageous ground for them. I found myself thinking about September 2004, when Chechen terrorists took control of a school in Beslan, and in the end more than 300 people died, most of them children. The two situations are not the same—we don’t have much to fear from Chechen separatists, while it’s possible ISIS could try to mount an attack in the United States. But at the time, I heard from pollsters that voters, particularly women, kept bringing up the Beslan school massacre in focus groups and citing their general feeling of fear and unease.
That fear almost certainly helped George W. Bush get re-elected that year, despite the fact that Osama bin Laden was still at large and neither the Afghanistan nor Iraq War was going well at all. The Republicans worked hard to convince voters that their lives were still in danger from terrorists, and only Bush, their strong and vengeful father figure, could keep them safe from harm. No television ad was aired more often in that campaign than one called “Ashley’s Story,” which told of a young girl whose mother was killed on 9/11 and whose life was changed when Bush came to her town and hugged her. “He’s the most powerful man in the world,” she says in the ad, “and all he wants to do is make sure I’m safe.” In fact, psychologists exploring “terror management theory,” which looks at how our fear of death affects our thinking, found in experiments that simply reminding subjects of their own mortality could increase the degree to which they supported Bush over John Kerry.
Republicans understand full well that having sober, detailed discussions about foreign policy and terrorism don’t play quite as well for them. Fear, though? Fear is electoral gold for the GOP.
Just to be clear, I’m not arguing that we have nothing to fear from ISIS. There’s no question they’ve changed their strategy, and now they’re striking out beyond the areas they control to conduct terrorist attacks against those countries opposing them. We’re on that list. Geographic distance makes it somewhat harder to mount an attack in the United States than in Europe, but on the other hand, anyone wanting to commit a terrorist attack here has only to walk into a gun show and they can leave with all the tools they’ll need, no matter how grandiose their ambitions. On this web site I counted 41 gun shows around the country just this past weekend; there’s a show very soon not too far from you, wherever you are and whatever you’re looking to buy.
As Kevin Drum helpfully documented, prior to the Paris attacks the Republican candidates were actually quite tentative when it came to how we ought to fight ISIS; most insisted that we wouldn’t need ground troops, or if we did it would be a small number. But as Michael Hirsh wrote, “It’s safe to assume we’re about to grow more even more interventionist in mood, and Obama, as is his wont, may well follow the public temper, stepping up the minimalist approach he’s taken to countering Islamic State in Iraq and Syria so far.”
That may be, and it’s fair for anyone, Republican presidential candidates included, to say that the attacks in Paris should fundamentally change the approach we take to ISIS, and we have to be willing to commit ground troops—some of whom will die—to that effort. They can make that case, and we can judge how persuasive it is. But what’s more likely is that they’ll once again appeal to voters’ basest emotions—their anger, their suspicion, and most of all their fear. After all, it’s worked before.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, November 15, 2015
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