Excerptcize

The title ‘Naive Me’ has so much breadth and depth that it would probably make for a good regular feature, but in this particular case I am referencing Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab’s failed attempt to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight on Christmas Day. After my initial sigh of relief that this was a failed attempt, resulting in no casualties, I feared the impending drum beat of how unsafe we are, how if this attack had been successful it would have been ‘devastating’ and of course, how all of it inevitably was the fault of President Barack Obama. Matt Yglesias had a post up that had a very cogent response to the attack which also illustrated the potential for misuse of the incident for partisan political gain:

Obviously, people shouldn’t be lighting anything on fire inside airplanes. That said, all the big Christmas airline incident really shows to me is how little punch our dread terrorist adversaries really pack. Once again, this seems like a pretty unserious plot. And even if you did manage to blow up an airplane in mid-air, that would be both a very serious crime and a great tragedy, but hardly a first-order national security threat.

And then there’s Peter King:

“This was the real deal,” said Representative Peter T. King of New York, the ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, who was briefed on the incident and said something had gone wrong with the explosive device, which he described as somewhat sophisticated. “This could have been devastating,” Mr. King said.

Ultimately, it does no favors to anyone to blow this sort of thing out of proportion. The United States could not, of course, be “devastated” by anything resembling this scheme. We ought to be clear on that fact. We want to send the message around the world that this sort of vile attempt to slaughter innocent people is not, at the end of the day, anything resembling a serious challenge to American power. It’s attempted murder, it’s wrong, we should try to stop it, but it’s really not much more than that.

Exactly. Rep. Pete King has demonstrated time and again that he is an unserious moron not deserving of the media platform his office gives him and Matt voiced a perfect response to his nonsense. The Canadian media seemed to report on the incident as it happened and it received no more attention than it deserved. I didn’t notice too much other trumped up hyperbolic speak on the ‘dread terrorists’ from the American media and usual suspects on the right, and very prematurely figured that perhaps the US had grown and matured, responding in a responsible manner to this criminal act.

Boy was I wrong. I see now that at the time I was just enveloped in a Christmas cocoon of family and friends and I was unplugged from the US news machine/blogosphere; the madness was still there, I just wasn’t paying attention. Here’s another genius from the GOP House caucus, Pete Hoekstra, pivoting off the failed attempt straight to fearmongering and fundraising in this letter soliciting funds for his gubernatorial campaign in Michigan. Here’s an article from Politico that features both of the Pete’s mentioned above as well as the lovely Senator from South Carolina, Jim DeMint,  amongst other things “telling FOX News that the Christmas attack proved President Obama’s talk-to-your-enemies approach might actually be encouraging terrorists.” Dick Cheney (you wouldn’t believe how often this guy is in the media; W. at least has the dignity to mostly remain silent after his travesty of a Presidency) also joined in by issuing a statement saying “[W]e are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe.” I must have just imagined the speech Obama gave in December while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize defending the idea of ‘just war.’ Thanks for making that clear Dick.

If you are at all like me, and the idiocies from these right wing armchair warriors more often than not leaves you struggling to even comprehend the stupidity and crassness of their statements and actions, there are thankfully many intelligent observers out there cataloging and debunking the dangerous bile that flows from them. Steve Benen, writing at The Washington Monthly, Matt Yglesias at Think Progress, and Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish at The Atlantic are some of the sane commentators available through the tubes that have insured I don’t end up catatonic, in the fetal position when wading into the beast that is US politics. I’m sad my naivette shone through so easily in this matter but thankful for those writers, amongst many others, who, when they have no other options blog and blog…and blog.

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