Who's the White House's Enemy?
If you said, bin Laden, of course, then you haven't been paying much attention to the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfled/Rove & Co. operations over the past six years. In today's NY Times, Thomas Friedman's editorial, "Swift-Boated by bin Laden," argues that if Bush really saw bin Laden as the primary enemy, the administration would give him the swift-boating treatment they reserve for democratic candidates.
"How could the Bush team Swift-boat John Kerry & Max Cleland -- authentic Vietnam war heroes, whom the White House turned into surrendering pacificsts in the war on terror -- but never manage to Swift-boat Osama bin Laden, a genocidal monster, who today is still regarded in many quarters as the vanguard of anti-American 'resistance.'
Dive into a conversation about America in the Arab world today,k or even in Europe and Africa, and it won't take 30 seconds before the words 'Abu Ghraib' and 'Guantanamo Bay' are thrown at you. Yes, both are shameful, but Abu Ghraib was a day at the beach compared to what Al Qaeda and its Sunni jihadist supporters have been doing in Iraq, yet none of their acts have become one-punch global insults like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
Consider what happened on Aug. 14. Four jihadist suicide-bombers blew themselves up in two Iraqi villages, killing more than 500 Kurdish civilians - men, women, and babies - who belonged to a tiny pre-Islamic sect known as the Yazidis.
And what was the Bush team's response to this outrage? Virtual silence. After much Googling, the best I could find was, 'We're looking at Al Qaeda as the prime suspect,' said Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a U.S. military spokesman.' Wow.
Excuse me, but what exactly are we fighting for in Iraq, or in this wider war against Islamist extremism, if the murder of 500 civilians can be shrugged off? Even if we don't know the exact perpetrators, we know who is inspiring this sort of genocide - Al Qaeda and bin Laden - and we need to say that every day.
Ask yourself this: If Osama bin Laden were running against George Bush for president, how would Karl Rove and Karen Hughes have handled the Yazidi murders? Within an hour, they'd have had a press release out saying: 'This genocide of Iraqi civilians was inspired by bin Laden. We accuse bin Laden of the mass murder of 500 women and children. Bin Laden has killed more Iraqis and Muslims than any person alive. Support bin Laden and you support genocide against Muslims." And they would have repeated that point on every network, every day.
. . . So why don't we say that? If you can't win a P.R. war against bin Laden, you have no business fighting a real war anymore in Iraq."
"How could the Bush team Swift-boat John Kerry & Max Cleland -- authentic Vietnam war heroes, whom the White House turned into surrendering pacificsts in the war on terror -- but never manage to Swift-boat Osama bin Laden, a genocidal monster, who today is still regarded in many quarters as the vanguard of anti-American 'resistance.'
Dive into a conversation about America in the Arab world today,k or even in Europe and Africa, and it won't take 30 seconds before the words 'Abu Ghraib' and 'Guantanamo Bay' are thrown at you. Yes, both are shameful, but Abu Ghraib was a day at the beach compared to what Al Qaeda and its Sunni jihadist supporters have been doing in Iraq, yet none of their acts have become one-punch global insults like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
Consider what happened on Aug. 14. Four jihadist suicide-bombers blew themselves up in two Iraqi villages, killing more than 500 Kurdish civilians - men, women, and babies - who belonged to a tiny pre-Islamic sect known as the Yazidis.
And what was the Bush team's response to this outrage? Virtual silence. After much Googling, the best I could find was, 'We're looking at Al Qaeda as the prime suspect,' said Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a U.S. military spokesman.' Wow.
Excuse me, but what exactly are we fighting for in Iraq, or in this wider war against Islamist extremism, if the murder of 500 civilians can be shrugged off? Even if we don't know the exact perpetrators, we know who is inspiring this sort of genocide - Al Qaeda and bin Laden - and we need to say that every day.
Ask yourself this: If Osama bin Laden were running against George Bush for president, how would Karl Rove and Karen Hughes have handled the Yazidi murders? Within an hour, they'd have had a press release out saying: 'This genocide of Iraqi civilians was inspired by bin Laden. We accuse bin Laden of the mass murder of 500 women and children. Bin Laden has killed more Iraqis and Muslims than any person alive. Support bin Laden and you support genocide against Muslims." And they would have repeated that point on every network, every day.
. . . So why don't we say that? If you can't win a P.R. war against bin Laden, you have no business fighting a real war anymore in Iraq."
posted by Anonymous at 11:07 AM
2 Comments:
We might not be able to trust the White House (even when the troops have cornered bin Laden in Tora Bora), but we have absolutely no reason NOT to trust Glenn Beck, even though he executed the losing dog by wetting the dog down with water and electrocuting the animal.
In court papers, Glenn Beck admitted that he fantasized about killing Michael Moore, and that he participated in the killing of dogs in his dogfighting operation. But he tried to deflect much of his culpability in the grisly enterprise onto his friends.
LP, Bush and bin Laden are good for each other. Bin laden gives Bush his fear card to play, and Bush is the best recruiting tool bin Laden could have.
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