It seems that during tonight's debate, Mike Huckabee worried that were Hillary Clinton to become president we might not have "the courage and the will and the resolve to fight the greatest threat this country’s ever faced in Islamofascism." The greatest threat we've ever faced! The astounding thing is that it's barely astounding; at this point, that kind of wild overstatement has become totally banal GOP rhetoric on a par with the random paens to Ronald Reagan.
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Panic Room
21 Oct 2007 09:40 pm
Comments (28)
Matthew can contemplate terrorism without wetting himself, Tim. It can be fought perfectly well by presidents who aren't hysterical with rage and bloodlust--better, even--which you might realize if you pondered the evidence of the past few years with something other than a desperate, pathetic need to believe we're on the right track.
The greatest terror we've ever faced? I am pretty worried about the Hollywood writers strike.
So 500,000 dead Americans in a 4 year Civil War that tore the country apart was... what now?
/wingnuts are totally insane
But Mike, it's Matthew's cowardice that prevents him from wetting himself while contemplating terrorism. Tim has the wisdom to see that. Someday perhaps you will too.
I am braver than any of you. I wet myself when I meet a Muslim.
Al Qaeda is (at best) a few thousand fanatics belonging to a nihilistic death cult living in caves on the border of two of the poorest countries in the world. Clearly a group such as this is a greater threat than the Nazis, Imperial Japan, the invasion of Washington DC by the English, and the secession of the southern half of the country in an attempt to dissolve the Union.
I just wet myself thinking about it. Where's my mommy? And my Teddy-Weddy?
I am a godless librul living in a port city on the eastern seaboard. Who is more at rik from "the terrists"? Me, or some bible-thumping, values-preaching conservative living in Arkansas? The answer is obvious. And yet it's the heartland conservatives who quake in their boots -- who are, in a word, terrified. Over them, at least, Usama bin Laden has triumphed.
Curiously, the god-botherers profess to be seriously worried that "the terrists" will conquer America and establish a caliphate. Perhaps they can console themselves with this thought: abortion, gay marriage, and pornography will all be outlawed, under the caliphate. It won't be so bad :-)
-- TP
SomeCallMeTim: Your post would be quite at home in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Good laugh, thanks.
I've always been astounded that there is no cognitive dissonance there.
The simultanius belief that we have the military ability to covert the Islamic world into Dispensational style Zionism and believers in American exceptionalism and at the same time it's credible to believe that I'm going to wake up some day with some bearded Taliban bastard throwing out my bacon and beer.
I don't know if they are just bullshitting on one belief or another, or if they are really that dumb. I do know it scares the hell out of me that this sort of pandering is what seems to be key to winning the Republican nomination. I saw Idiodcracy awhile ago and these people are starting to seriously worry me.
Obviously, Huckabeee is pandering to the base, or should we say mainstream, of the GOP.
That said, one should not underestmate the Man from Hope. Despite the fact that he does not believe in evolution, he is a very effective politican. He gets away with saying things such as Bin Laden is Stalin/Hitler/Tojo precisely because he has a pleasant demeanor.
Huckabee will be the GOP nominee. Even though he is delusional, do not underestimate him. He is the perfect andidote to HRC. And he can win.
Your time would be better spent, Matthew, analyziing why the seemingly outrageous things he says do not garner more negative attention, instead of pointing out the seemingly outrageous thing he says.
Or are you trying to do that? Please advise.
The "wetting" remarks remind me of the scene in the original "Highlander" movie where the McCleods are riding off to war. And Connor is asked by his kinsmen if he is afraid and he says no. And one of his kinsmen tells him that he "peed my kilt" when he went into battle the first time. And the other kinsman says, "Aye! Angus pees his kilt all the time!"
Kinda reminds me of Matt in some respects...
As for why this rhetoric is prevalent in the GOP camp (let's not forget Hillary and Obama's "Iran is a serious threat" crap, while we're at it, okay, Matt?), again, it should be obvious. First, they don't care what they say, they know they're bullshitting. Second, this kind of bullshit plays with the morons comprising thirty to forty percent of the US population - and probably another twenty to thirty percent wavers toward believing it too when they hear it from a Democrat.
Which is probably why we STILL have no answer from Matt as to: 1) does he believe Iran has a nuclear weapons program, and 2) does he think a military attack on Iran is justified even if it DOES have a nuclear weapons program?
Why don't we hear an answer? Because I think he does believe it. He just doesn't have the balls to say it, because he got nailed on supporting the Iraq war.
So he's wetting himself over committing to an opinion...
His kilt is yellow.
Well nobody was going to vote for Huckabee for his foreign policy anyway. But check out Christopher Hitchens' moist paean to the "Anglosphere" in the latest City Journal (http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_4_anglosphere.html) where after giving the Anglo-American crisis the credit for defeating Imperial Germany, the Third Reich and the Soviet Union breathlessly announces "The world now faces a challenge from a barbarism that is no less menacing than its three predecessors—and may even be more so."
I bet Hillary could kick his ass without working up a sweat. Damn, these tough guy Republican't types sure are afraid of a lot of things, aren't they?
I'm guessing SomeCallMeTim was being snarky.
Although such statements are indeed pretty idiotic if taken at face value, it is probably worth keeping in mind that at root, this is just an attack on Hillary Clinton (and similar statements are often expressed in the context of attacking liberals, the Left Wing, Democrats, etc.). And a sizeable minority of people in this country are willing to overlook the details of such attacks precisely because they enjoy anything that makes the target look as bad as possible. In other words, if you say that Clinton lacks the courage to fight a serious threat, that is OK, but if you say that Clinton lacks the courage to fight the greatest threat the country has ever faced, that is much better, because it makes Clinton sound much worse.
Y'know, there were times in this country's history when you could reliably tell the snark from the national discourse.
I miss those days.
-fred
With the planet cooking itself to death (viz, the fires in Southern California), you would have imagined that climate change/energy policy is really the defining challenge of this century, not 1000-10000 jihadi idiots.
Not to take anything away from your rightful criticism of the GOP's pandering, you might want to examine the beam in your own party's eye... Pete Stark? Bushitler? The democrats are not particularly virtuous or statesmen-like these days either.
SHINING PATH! SHINING PATH! They're in Peru and they could be HERE NEXT!
I'm sure that when a Democrat said that Reagan's nomination raised the spectre of white sheets, everyone found that just as stupid.
Cue a bunch of commentators who explain that Reagan really was sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan, or at least a lot of his supporters were, or . . . blah blah blah.
The return of bedbug infestations. Super, pesticide resistant bedbugs. That's the greatest threat our country has ever, or will ever, face.
I'm sure that when a Democrat said that Reagan's nomination raised the spectre of white sheets, everyone found that just as stupid.
Aug 1980. And go do what Mr. Goodbar suggested. And do it today.
I feel far more threatened by fascism of the type practiced by the current administration than I ever did by Al Qaeda.
Y81,
pathetic republican apologist.
I heard that sound byte on NPR on my way to work this morning, and my immediate reaction was, "What are you claiming? That Hillary Clinton is going to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids?" Sadly, I fear that a sizeable chunk of the GOP base believes exactly that.
Lee Atwater, advisor to President Reagan:
You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.Reagan started his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964, saying, "I believe in states' rights."
Well nobody was going to vote for Huckabee for his foreign policy anyway. But check out Christopher Hitchens' moist paean to the "Anglosphere" in the latest City Journal (http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_4_anglosphere.html) where after giving the Anglo-American crisis the credit for defeating Imperial Germany, the Third Reich and the Soviet Union breathlessly announces "The world now faces a challenge from a barbarism that is no less menacing than its three predecessors—and may even be more so."
The greatest threat to the world right now are conservatives in the Anglosphere. They are the most likely to kill the most people, now that Communist famines won't do it.
Comments closed November 04, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
It's your cowardice that keeps you from facing the truth, Yglesias.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | October 21, 2007 10:30 PM