Tom Tancredo Defeats Charles Logan
David Weigel | May 15, 2007, 11:48pm
(I changed this post around after I realized I'd mixed up the order of the debate Qs.)
Jesse's basically
got it right on the Ron Paul-Rudy exchange, but I noticed something else from the debate round it led up to.
In the fourth round of the debate (defined by far, far better questions than the Chris Matthews belch-fest in early May), Brit Hume asked the field to answer a hypothetical question: What if terrorists detonated nukes in American cities, we captured some of the terrorists linked to the attack, and you were the Decider? It sounded a lot like Charles Krauthammer's defense of torture in the
Weekly Standard, and unsurprisingly John McCain used the chance to stake out his stance against that. The rest of the field took the chance to brag about their theoretical terrorist-slaughtering skills: Mike Huckabee bravely (in his mind) said we should call attacks on Americans "murders."
Basically, it was a question about how the candidates would behave
if they were president in an episode of 24. Tom Tancredo cleared that up with his answer: "I'd be looking for Jack Bauer at that time." Please note that this was perceived in and outside of the debate hall as an awesome answer.
Stephen Green:We all are, buddy. We all are.
Sister Toldjah:LOL!
Guys, I hate to be the one to break this to you, but Jack Bauer is a fictional character. He's played by Keifer Sutherland, star of such classics as
The Lost Boys,
Young Guns, and
Brotherhood of Justice. He can't save us and neither - again, I'm sorry - can Green Lantern. Michael Brendan Dougherty tried to get at the GOP's Bauer obsession in a
recent, brilliant American Conservative cover story, but here's the short version: too many conservatives fantasize about the war on terror in lieu of studying the actual war on terror and making morally uncomfortable decisions about whether we can "win it." What's it say about the GOP field that they're more comfortable answering hypothetical questions about a terrorist plot on a TV show than answering questions about the Iraq War - which, you know,
actually exists? Nothing good.
But did Paul win the debate? As Mitt Romney might say: Golly oh-gosh, heavens no! If it wasn't for the reanimated corpse of Tommy Thompson or Jim Gilmore, the clown costume that walks like a man, Paul would been the obvious loser of the debate. As is, he merely tied for 8th place and will be remembered as "Rudy's pinata." He has less chance of winning the GOP nom now than ever, which is really something. If the other 9 candidates plus Fred Thompson died in a horrific baking accident, the GOP would draft Lyndon Larouche before nominating this guy.
(BTW, I didn't liveblog because I attended a debate-watching party with a small group of Rudy supporters.)
Brad | May 16, 2007, 4:25am | #
"If Islamic extremists terrorized the USA because of its foreign policy, why do they terrorize Israel? What's wrong with Israel's foreign policy? Why did they terrorize Spain? Why did they terrorize Indonesia?
It can't just be foreign policies of all of those countries. I think the USA was targeted because the USA's such a prominent target and has symbols like the World Trade Center."
Some of you people are truly clueless. Not being hateful here, just stating facts as I see them.
Have you not heard of Palestine? How about Lebanon? Do you recall that it was Israel that invaded Lebanon in 2006, not the other way around? Do you realize that Palestine is still for all practical purposes an occupied territory? Do you recall that until 1947, the state of Israel didn't even exist? Did you know that the same family who owns a large stake in our central banking systems, the Rothschild family, funded the Zionist movement to create the state of Israel?
I realize that even saying the word "zionist" flags me in many of your minds as some kind of terrorist nut, but I'll forgive you your ignorance. You can't help if you've been brainwashed by corporate media all your lives.
Let me put it to you this way...Israel gets its weapons from the United States of America. This is a good deal for us since our primary manufacturing export these days (since everything else has been shipped to China, that is) is MILITARY ARMS. Israel keeps the same interventionalist policies we do, and there is plenty of evidence to support this if you simply utilize a search engine and do some reading.
The Israeli lobby is a powerful one in this country because they have successfully tied the fate of Israel in the minds of dispensationalist (aka Apocalyptic) Christians with the fate of all mankind.
It is a cheap persuasion, particularly since the antichrist could just as easily be an Israeli Jew as an Iranian, a Russian, or an Italian. But, hey, it works. As long as the pastor says so, many believe it without question.
I, myself, am a Christian, and I am openly opposed to the idea that we must follow the whim of Israel, which is oftentimes used as cover to gain support for an oil and land-grab campaign anyway.
grylliade | May 16, 2007, 10:15am | #
I'm almost embarrassed for Ron. He truly doesn't get it that these Islamo-Fascists want to convert us or kill us. It's not our foreign policy they hate; it's our culture!
Bullshit. Had we never been involved in the Middle East during the Cold War, and never tried to play power politics to get the "right" people into power, then terrorists wouldn't hate us. Hell, even if we'd just played power politics with a little more subtlety and understanding of the region, 9/11 (and other terrorist attacks) would never have happened. Absent our interventionism in the Middle East, we'd get sermons about how evil culture in America was on Friday, while the congregants (or whatever the members of a mosque are called) went out the other six days of the week and enjoyed American culture. Only in neo-con fantasy land are suicide bombers motivated by hatred of American culture, rather than
maybe being encouraged by that hatred. In the absence of American intervention, the Islamic fundies would be just as isolationist as the paleo-est of paleo-cons; they wouldn't want to risk losing power over their congregations by exposing them to American culture.
Eric's comment was so absurd I was sure he was being sarcastic. I though the commenters above were idiots for taking what he said at face value...then I checked out his website :-(
Yeah, Mr. Dondero doesn't appear to be the sharpest tool in the toolshed. He's just an average, ordinary, everyday tool.
However, I think Europe in particular does have an ongoing problem with radical enclaves that DO "hate 'em for their freedoms," as evidenced by the cartoon riots, Theo Van Gogh murder, altering school lesson plans, and a whole laundry list of other actions that go against western liberal freedoms that tend to skirt under the radar.
I think a large part of that can be explained by the major differences between Europe and the US. For starters, casual racism seems to be far more common in Europe than here, and is certainly more socially acceptable. It's hard to feel welcome in a culture where everyone hates you.
Secondly, assimilation in Europe means something different than here. It seems worst to me in France, where there's only one way to be French that's acceptable. In Britain, Spain, Germany, etc., they have some experience of different cultures within their countries, and have learned to live with them; France has been France of Borg since the eleventh century or so. But even in those countries where there are
some different cultures, they're still pretty similar. It doesn't seem to me that there's any experience with dealing with a pretty radically different culture. In the US, whatever our problems, we've been able to deal with different cultures, and assimilate them without erasing them. Hmmmm . . . there's an essay there about the history of American immigration; suffice it to say that we started with the most similar cultures, and got experience dealing with dissimilarity. Now we could probably allow anyone to come here, and that group would be able to adapt to America without
too much violence. I suspect that even Islamic fundies would adapt, because (like Orthodox Jews) they'd just close themselves off from the rest of the country. Europe's response to ethnic tension has always been violence (witness the trigger for the first World War). America's response has been accommodation.
Don't really have a third point, but I think that the violence in Europe has less to do with the Muslims and more to do with cultural patterns that go deep in European history. It's not that they hate Europe for its freedoms; it's that those freedoms offer a convenient excuse for deeper problems.
