Blinders, the essential item for a leftist life.
It's official: a substantial portion of Americans are in denial of the fact that madmen want to kill us. I could explain away a certain percentage of the self-imposed blinders after 9/11 as shock, emotional overreaction, and so forth, but what to make of people pooh-poohing the news of the latest airline bombing plot?People really and truly don't believe that Islamic Fundementalists want to kill Westerners for no other reason than the fact that they are Westerners. They think that dialogue and diplomacy could solve everything, and that George Bush simply hasn't tried. One blog post recently lamented the fact that we hadn't faced the 9/11 situation with "Candor and intelligence" - apparently, this would have been all it took to straighten everything out with Bin Laden and his merry men. How I would love to know what this author thought "Candor and intelligence" actually meant in the real world, but of course it wasn't explained, most likely because the author had failed to ask himself precisely what these notions entailed.
But he is only one among millions, those same people whose memory of security concerns in the '90's has already gone fuzzy - those for whom the Khobar towers, the USS Cole, and American embassies in Africa are non-entities. If such an episode is remembered for some reason, it is explained away. Clinton's actions or lack thereof is neither cited nor indicted. George Bush, however, is instantly judged as having "Radicalized" young muslims for overthrowing Saddam Hussein - never mind that ordinary Muslims had the same reasons to loathe Hussein as did the rest of the world.
But just to make things easy for those who think that radical muslims would love us if only they were approached by "Candid and intelligent" diplomats, let's pretend we left the Taliban intact in Afghanistan, allowed Hussein to continue his inexorable violation of U.N. resolutions (with its preposterous "Oil-for-food" scam intact), and elected John Kerry by a landslide in 2004 - do you still believe that radical muslims would not be plotting to kill Americans at random?
They say that a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged. I truly hope that this definition won't be updated to say that a conservative is a liberal who's had a family member beheaded by a jihadist or blown up in a plane, but after listening to people react to the announcement of the latest terror plot with declarations that Bush and Blair cooked up the whole thing to further consolidate their power, I have very little hope left.
posted by ET @ 3:36 PM
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