Tuesday - October 12, 2004

Terrorists as Nuisances, Another Take

By now the story about Fuckface and his comment that he wished terrorists were just a nuisance as they were before 9-11 has probably been beaten to death.  But WAIT!  There’s life still in that beast!!

Thanks to Steel, we bring you this: Scrapple Face, in its ever-satirical way has A “PLAN” that Fuckface and The Breck Girl would wholeheartedly endorse.

What a hoot!!!!!  Just think, the scum-sucking bottom feeders in this country would have a field day suing terrrosists!  I could be convinced to support this “plan” if I knew we’d tie the terrorists up so much in legal maneuverings that they’d be rendered ineffectual.

In case you missed it or were in a drug induced coma the past few days, here it is done up in a way only the folks at Best of the Web could do.  They start with the now-infamous quote given the New York Times Magazine:

When I asked Kerry what it would take for Americans to feel safe again, he displayed a much less apocalyptic worldview [than President Bush]. “We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance,” Kerry said. “As a former law-enforcement person, I know we’re never going to end prostitution. We’re never going to end illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn’t on the rise. 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.”

Then then go on to, as our over-educated meritocrats like to say, “deconstruct” it:

Eugene Volokh calmly dismantles Kerry’s argument:

What remarkable analogies Kerry started with: prostitution and illegal gambling. The way law enforcement has dealt with prostitution and illegal gambling is by occasionally trying to shut down the most visible and obvious instances, tolerating what is likely millions of violations of the law per year, de jure legalizing many sorts of gambling, and de jure legalizing one sort of prostitution in Nevada, and de facto legalizing many sorts of prostitution almost everywhere; as best I can tell, “escort services” are very rarely prosecuted, to the point that they are listed in the Yellow Pages.

These are examples of practical surrender, or at least a cease-fire punctuated by occasional but largely half-hearted and ineffectual sorties. It’s true that illegal gambling and prostitution aren’t “threatening the fabric of [American] life,” but that’s because they never threatened it that much in the first place.

And James Lileks is outraged:

A nuisance? . . . Mosquito bites are a nuisance. Cable outages are a nuisance. Someone shooting up a school in Montana or California or Maine on behalf of the brave martyrs of Fallujah isn’t a nuisance. It’s war.

But that’s not the key phrase. This matters: We have to get back to the place we were.

But when we were there we were blind. When we were there we [were] losing. When we were there we died. We have to get back to the place we were. We have to get back to 9/10? We have to get back to the place we were. So we can go through it all again? We have to get back to the place we were. And forget all we’ve learned and done? We have to get back to the place we were. No. I don’t want to go back there. Planes into towers. That changed the terms. I am remarkably disinterested in returning to a place where such things are unimaginable. Where our nightmares are their dreams.

We have to get back to the place we were.

No. We have to go the place where they are.

There’s not much we can add to that, so we’ll just quote an anecdote from the Times piece that gives a window into Kerry’s character:

On an evening in August, just after a campaign swing through the Southwest, Kerry and I met, for the second of three conversations about terrorism and national security, in a hotel room overlooking the Ferris wheel on the Santa Monica pier. A row of Evian water bottles had been thoughtfully placed on a nearby table. Kerry frowned.

“Can we get any of my water?” he asked Stephanie Cutter, his communications director, who dutifully scurried from the room. I asked Kerry, out of sheer curiosity, what he didn’t like about Evian.

“I hate that stuff,” Kerry explained to me. “They pack it full of minerals.”

“What kind of water do you drink?” I asked, trying to make conversation.

“Plain old American water,” he said.

“You mean tap water?”

“No,” Kerry replied deliberately. He seemed now to sense some kind of trap. I was left to imagine what was going through his head. If I admit that I drink bottled water, then he might say I’m out of touch with ordinary voters. But doesn’t demanding my own brand of water seem even more aristocratic? Then again, Evian is French--important to stay away from anything even remotely French.

“There are all kinds of waters,” he said finally. Pause. “Saratoga Spring.” This seemed to have exhausted his list. “Sometimes I drink tap water,” he added.

By campaigning against America’s war effort, Kerry has abandoned the old idea that politics stops at the water’s edge. For him, it apparently doesn’t even stop at the water glass.

Posted by Ranting Right Wing Howler     on 10/12/2004 at 05:48 AM   
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