Tag: Terrorism
Obama Sends Unifying Message After Boston Bombing
I’ve updated leaders of Congress in both parties, and we reaffirmed that on days like this there are no Republicans or Democrats — we are Americans, united in concern for our fellow citizens.
— President Obama, speaking about the Boston bombings.
King: Boston Bombing Should Slow Immigration Reform
Some of the speculation that has come out is that yes, it was a foreign national and, speculating here, that it was potentially a person on a student visa. If that’s the case, then we need to take a look at the big picture. … We need to take a look at the visa-waiver program and wonder what we’re doing. If we can’t background check people that are coming from Saudi Arabia, how do we think we are going to background check the 11 to 20 million people that are here from who knows where.
— Rep. Steve King (R-IA), telling National Review that Congress “should be cautious about rushing immigration reform, especially after Monday’s bombing in Boston, where three people were killed.”
In Politicizing Benghazi Attack, Republicans Ignore Their Own Terrible Security Record – 9/11 Happened on Their Watch, As Did Seven Attacks on U.S. Diplomatic Sites Overseas
The Fox News-generated hysteria among Republicans over the government’s handling of the Benghazi attacks relies heavily on the assumption that Fox viewers have incredibly short memories. Watching Fox present this issue, you might quickly assume that the attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya was unique — that nothing like it had ever happened before. You might also assume that, if there had been other similar attacks in the past, American patriots and their representatives in Washington would be entirely justified in politicizing the attacks and using the failures that led to them, whether real or imagined, for partisan gain.
In the wake of the attacks on their country on Sept. 11, 2001, liberals reflexively saw themselves as Americans first and partisans last.
In reality, of course, there have been many attacks on U.S. embassies and consulates — more than 40 in the past half century, according to The International News, a newspaper based in Pakistan.
The chart above from Mother Jones, for example, shows the frequency of attacks on U.S. diplomatic sites over the past 40 years. What Fox would like to erase from its viewers’ memories is that, as the chart shows, there were many attacks on U.S. missions overseas during the administration of the most recent Republican president, George W. Bush. It is crucial to Fox’s politicizing of Benghazi to make those attacks disappear down the memory hole, because there is an inconvenient fact associated with them: In the wake of the seven or more attacks on American overseas interests on Bush’s watch, Democrats did not politicize them the way Republicans are politicizing Benghazi today.
In particular, no Democrat ever suggested forming a Watergate-style select committee to investigate the attacks during the Bush era, like the one Republicans are demanding now.
There was one full-scale investigation — the one that looked into the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, which were the most egregious national security failure in U.S. history — but that investigation was outsourced to a bipartisan commission controlled by Republicans.
Speaking of 9/11, Republicans need to be reminded that after the attacks that September day, Democrats rallied around George W. Bush, a president they rightly viewed as an illegitimate Supreme Court appointee, because, in the wake of the attacks on their country, liberals reflexively saw themselves as Americans first and partisans last.
A Look Inside the Al Qaeda-Style Attack on the U.S. Compound in Benghazi in Which Ambassador Stevens and Others Were Killed
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Mitt Romney’s deliberate attempt to big foot the news coverage of the protests and violence in North Africa elsewhere this week obscured the most important aspect of the story from a parochial American perspective, at least: the organized assault on the U.S. compound in Benghazi in which Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others were killed. In the video above, Rachel Maddow provides a tick-tock of the al Qaeda style attack in Benghazi .
Saving America From Itself
A lot of hypotheticals made the rounds after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. “What would you do if” questions were a way to process all the horror, as were scenarios of how to go forward.
My boss back then was a young Jewish woman, raised by her Orthodox rabbi grandfather. She had spent time in Israel, where she said the kind of invasive security procedures that eventually became codified as the Patriot Act were necessary to protect the country. “But if it isn’t America after you’re done protecting it,” I asked, “what’s the point?”
At its core, our country changed. The Tea Party of the Flies and its, “There’s not enough for everyone so I’m gonna get mine” scarcity mind-set with racist, homophobic, fundamentalist undertones took hold.
Ten years later, I still wonder about the answer to that question. When Bush suggested that average Americans could best defeat terrorism by going shopping, we responded. We flooded sport utility vehicle show rooms, and gawked as Hummers and Lincoln Navigators attempted to squeeze into parking spots like paunchy football coaches trying to wear their high school uniforms. We distracted ourselves with the antics of second-rate celebrities as they bounced from sex tapes to drug binges to rehab and back. We went along with invasions, with shock and awe, with rigged videos of statues falling and blond female service members being rescued. We were at war but we were never quite sure with whom: Insurgents? Dead-enders? Enemy combatants?
Beck Compares Norway Camp to Hitler Youth
Maybe we should thank Glenn Beck for comparing the Utøya, Norway camp where rightwing zealot Anders Behring Breivik killed 68 people and wounded many more to a Hilter youth camp.
“There was a shooting at a political camp, which sounds a little like the Hitler youth, or, whatever. I mean, who does a camp for kids that’s all about politics. Disturbing,”
Tea party camp counselor: ‘Some of the kids will fall for it. Others kids will wise up.’
We should thank him because – ignoring the American Legion’s Boys State and Girls State summer camps, which have provided civics leadership to such alumni as Neil Armstrong, Tom Brokaw, Bill Clinton, Mike Huckabee, Michael Jordan, George Pataki, Jane Pauley, Harry Reid, and even Rush Limbaugh since 1935 – his incendiary and ignorant comment allows us to shine a light on a far more disturbing phenomenon.
Tea party groups are holding their own camps this summer, where children and young people are being indoctrinated with anti-social and scarcity-based beliefs. Take this Florida camp.
