Quote:He made very short work out of the preposterous notion that if he uses the magic conjuring words, then the entire Middle East will turn into Sweden.
Been saying the same thing for years. In one ear and out the other. WTF difference does it make what you call the assholes we ARE killing.
Obama has to say the 'magic words' to what, make the people who hate his guts change their minds about him, make them feel like tough guys? That ain't gonna work, ever.
This Is How Obama Destroyed Trump's Racist Arguments
"Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away."
BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
JUN 14, 2016
When are people going to realize that the big bag of fcks to give at 1600 Pennsylvania is not only empty, but it's sitting in a back closet somewhere and nobody's going to find it until the midway point of Sasha Obama's second term in the White House? Why does this continue to surprise people?
On Tuesday, right around lunchtime, the president came out and parked He, Trump onto a rooftop across Waveland Avenue. In brief, the president informed the vulgar talking yam that he, the yam, was screwing with the country's heartbeat because he, the yam, is an ignorant, ridiculous man who doesn't know shit from tunafish about anything beyond where to find good-quality, child-sized gloves in a hurry.
He made very short work out of the preposterous notion that if he uses the magic conjuring words, then the entire Middle East will turn into Sweden.
"That's the key, they tell us, 'We can't beat ISIL unless we call them radical Islamist.' What exactly would using this label accomplish? What exactly would it change? Would it make ISIL less committed to trying to kill Americans? Would it bring in more allies? Is there a military strategy that is served by this?
The answer is none of the above. Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away. This is a political distraction…Not once has an adviser of mine said, 'If we use that phrase, we're going to turn this whole thing around.' It's a political talking point. It's not a strategy.
And the reason I am careful about how I describe this threat has nothing to do with political correctness and everything to do with defeating extremism.""We now have proposals from the presumptive Republican nominee for president of the United States to bar all Muslims from entering the United States. To bar all Muslims from emigrating to America. We hear language that singles out immigrants and suggests entire religious communities are complicit in violence. Where does this stop?... These are not religious warriors. They are thugs and they are thieves."
And that is a point lost in the noise and the mongering of the fear since Omar Mateen shot up Pulse.
(I am not going to go along with the silly notion that we shouldn't name the killer out of respect for his victims or something. That is not journalism. That's therapy.)
As we learn more about him, he seems to have had a staggering mixture of motives; he was such a tightly wound ball of hate that we never may truly untangle the real cause of why he did what he did.
He didn't much like any minorities.
He slapped his first wife around. He broke chairs. He threw angry fits at the office. He may have been a self-loathing gay man.The real tell is that, instead of the customary reaction by the people who knew him as to how Mateen was "a quiet guy who kept to himself," his friends and co-workers have said pretty much to a person that they expected him to go off somehow somewhere, and soon.
As to politics, at one point or another, Mateen expressed support for Daesh, for Hezbollah, and for the Tsarnaev brothers, which proves only that he knows just as little about Middle East politics as He, Trump does.
This act had about as much to do with religion as it had to do with horticulture. The guy was an unstable time bomb who hated everyone who wasn't him, but who nonetheless had no trouble at all buying an AR-15 rifle and a handgun because freedom and America, that's why.
As for Daesh's ex post facto expression of support, I commend to you the work of Ruth Sherlock, an intrepid reporter for The Daily Telegraph who's done time covering stories all over the Middle East. Sherlock makes the salient point that Daesh is now a convenient casus nutso by which any maniac can gussy up his crimes with geopolitical nonsense.
Isil may at its heart be a nexus of commanders in Syria and Iraq. But its power is not as a coordinated army. It is, rather, the strength of its poisonous ideology. It has become an umbrella term by which psychopaths feel they can justify deranged acts.
Mateen did not travel from Syria or Iraq. His hatred was bred in the New York streets where he grew up…Isil has become a way for the dangerously mentally ill to find meaning in their madness. They adopt the Isil flag as a cover for their own private motives.
(And can it really be that hard to understand why Daesh would claim credit for this bloodthirsty crazoid? As the president pointed out Tuesday, they're losing ground badly in the actual war over there, so why wouldn't they claim credit for a slaughter over here, especially since there's an entire political party, and a presumptive presidential nominee, willing to inflate their claim into something that ought to waft down Fifth Avenue in the Macy's Parade?
I fully expect their next communique to explain that they have the Lindbergh baby and how there were three of their fighters on the grassy knoll in Dallas. Are they dangerous? Yes. But if they're so damn dangerous, how does calling them something, or not calling them something, make them less so? I do not know how these people think. Truly, I don't.)
That is the great blessing of having a president whose big bag of fcks is empty and gathering dust up in the Residence. His great gift in the first place was to be the chillest president who ever lived, and that was when he was trying to find his way out of the mess the last guy left behind.
Do they really still think they can roll him now, when his approval rating is in the mid-50s and their party is about to nominate a vulgar talking yam, and now that the president never will face the voters again?
He has developed a great ease with power, and a consummate respect for the damage that power can do, which is the only way to wield it in such a way as to do the least amount of damage to democracy. (Yeah, I know. Drones.) The presumptive Republican presidential nominee couldn't learn that if you spotted him Marcus Aurelius and three terms in office.
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