Better to Remain Silent and be Thought a Fool…
Remember this gem the next time a Kool-Aid Konservative tells you what a wonderful President Tom Tancredo would be. Via Captain Ed.
UPDATE: Michelle Malkin, Hugh Hewitt and Dafydd ab Hugh (no relation) have more. Baldilocks and LaShawn dissent.
July 18th, 2005 at 4:55 pm
So let me get this straight. A country that assists terrorism by giving money, sanctuary and succor to Wahabbists is not responsible for Islamic terrorists attacking this country. Uh huh. You know a way to stop terrorism against Israel??? Whenever a terrorist kills an Israeli civilian, you find his house, find his family and wipe out both. Terrorism stops because terrorists don’t want their families to be hurt. Same thing with terrorists in this country. However, a nuclear hit requires a more devastating response. Tancredo was right.
July 18th, 2005 at 6:17 pm
I think you’re incredibly naive if you think terrorists love their families more than they hate us, the “Jooos,” or any of their other perceived enemies. Even if I did think that threatening to nuke Mecca were a remotely sane foreign policy, it would still be a hollow, empty threat coming from Tancredo, who doesn’t even have the power to carry that threat out. Of course, every potential al Qaeda recruit doesn’t know that; all they know is that the U.S. just threatened to nuke Islam, and when we don’t, it will be because we are a paper tiger that lacks the guts to do what “we” said we were going to do. Thanks, Tom.
July 18th, 2005 at 7:39 pm
That foreign policy makes about as much sense as a suggestion to solve the dispute over Israel by razing the entire area and make it uninhabitable by poisoning the land and water. Which is to say: not much.
Besides, if the terrorists don’t love themselves enough to not blow themselves up, what should make a person believe they carry much more love for their families?
July 19th, 2005 at 10:07 am
The cooler heads are right. Vaporizing the Ka’ba would clearly be “non-proportional”. We shoud rather take a more moderate approach: Every bomb that goes off in our country will result in the destruction of one city in Saudi Arabia. The bigger the bomb, the bigger the city.
July 19th, 2005 at 11:08 am
There appears to be some misunderstanding over who such a threat would be directed to.
It’s not directed to the terrorists.
It’s directed to the non-terrorists who we want to get rid of the terrorists in their midst.
Oddly enough, in looking at a few “liberal” sites, there seemed to be some people - perhaps even real “liberals” - who understood the value of MAD.
Of course, those who favor open borders or are BushBots see this as their big chance. Actually, it shows them to be even less trustworthy than before.
July 19th, 2005 at 11:14 am
Mike, it’s not about proportionality; it’s blind fury vs. controlled, measured fury. Blow up all the military targets you want, starting with Iran’s “non-military” nuclear facilities, but don’t blow up cities just to make ourselves feel like we’ve “done something” about an attack. If you are going to adopt a strategy of tit for tat, city for city, fine, but even then, at least we should go after a city in the country most closely associated with the attack, which is far more likely to be Syria or Iran than Saudi. And if the chief culprit does turn out to be Saudi, bomb Riyadh. If the logistics don’t work quite right for Riyadh, bomb some other city in Saudi instead, but unless the objective is to swell the ranks of al-Qaeda members and sympathizers exponentially, we might want to pick a city that a billion people around the world don’t pray to every day.
July 19th, 2005 at 2:54 pm
Defending Tancredo
Maybe… all Tancredo was doing was promising the American people that, should the unthinkable happen, if he had his way, we would get our payback…. and we’d end the war. A bit late. But we’d end it.
July 19th, 2005 at 10:52 pm
Has threatening a religion with destruction ever been anything but a step toward making that religion more popular and less likely to respond to whatever request accompanied the threat?
I can’t think of one case where “… or we’ll kill massive numbers of people who go to church with you” was ever even the least bit effective as a threat.
In fact, I think it’s the equivalent of saying “yes, your God does hate us, and you will prevail.”
July 20th, 2005 at 10:00 am
Thank god for the cooler heads that would seek to understand the motivations of terrorists after they nuke a city and leave millions dead. We mustn’t over react. We must have done something to make them hate us. Muslims aren’t all terrorists.
Yeah right until its your family that goes bye-bye. What a moron.