From Sweet Jesus I Hate Bill O'Reilly comes a referral to a Newshounds piece about O'Reilly taking on Rep. Dennis Kucinich earlier this week. The piece it pretty funny. The upshot is that O'Reilly wanted to "prove" that Democrats have no terror-fighting strategy, they only bash Bush. Kucinich showed up with a four-point plan and O'Reilly had to talk over him to prevent him from getting it out. O'Reilly trying to talk over Mr. Big Volume must have been quite the bit of theatre.
The Newshounds piece notes that Kucinich has penned more thoughts on terrorism on his website. What's really sad about all this is how badly O'Reilly could have cuffed Kucinich if he had just done his homework. Imagine for example, if he had bothered to unearth this nugget:
- NAFTA and the World Trade Organizations have only served to increase global poverty, thus deepening one of the most virulent causes of terrorism. This is why I am calling for immediate cancellation of NAFTA and U.S. withdrawal from the WTO.
All in all, Kucinich writes wooly-headed root causes nonsense, almost exclusively. Here on the left, we are well aware that people can hate other people for just being different. We sometimes forget that that malady is not restricted to straight White Americans. There exist in the world Muslims who hate non-Muslims. A fundamental tenet of jihadism holds that Western secular government is evil because it’s secular. Islamists may hate Americans generally, but they would hate liberals most of all. No counter-terrorism strategy can garner credibility or can hope to work without acknowledging these controlling facts.
The root causes card is a cop-out. If Kucinich can devise a non-military strategy to address Muslim hatred toward the West, he should have at it. But if his strategy is simply to make them like us – Really like us!!! – he’s nowhere.
1 comments:
Come on, don't laugh. If our souls weren't owned by greedy capitalists, we could be doing so much more to help other parts of the world raise their standard of living instead of just dropping bombs on them when their unrest gets out of control.
And of course that's not ALL it takes, but it's a part of the problem that isn't being very well addressed.
Another part is to revive the art of muscular diplomacy, which does not, I repeat NOT, translate as "appeasement" or "surrender." Unfortunately, nobody in the current power structure seems to know what it DOES mean. Woe is us.
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