At Slate Will Saletan mocks the Republican presidential candidates for thinking that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of DAESH, is as good as his word:
One of the hot issues in the 2016 presidential election is how to deal with terror and slaughter in the name of Islam. President Obama and Hillary Clinton refuse to call such violence Islamic. They insist that Muslims are victims, not allies, of ISIS and al-Qaida.
The Republican candidates for president say this reluctance to associate Islam with jihadi violence is naïve, wimpy, and dangerous. “We need a commander in chief who will once and for all call it what it is, and that is that radical Islamic terrorism is a threat to us all,†says Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. Rick Santorum agrees: “Islam is an ideology. And we need to be honest about the American public about what the nature of our enemy really is.†Sen. Marco Rubio promises a Reaganesque crusade…
[…]
Republicans who talk this way think they’re being tough. In reality, however, they’re aiding the enemy. They’re doing for ISIS what they did for al-Qaida: assisting its recruitment, social media, and political strategy. Rhetorically, ISIS and the GOP are in perfect harmony.
He goes through the Republicans’ talking points one by one, finding support for their views in al-Baghdadi’s statements.
At Instapundit Elizabeth Price Foley retorts:
So given all these statements from al-Baghdadi, somehow this guy concludes that this is not a religious war being waged by ISIS and that we if we’ll all just chill, we can peacefully coexist with them? And more specifically, if anyone tries to suggest–such as, say, a Republican–that ISIS is waging a religious war and isn’t interested in peace, they are somehow “determined to prove Baghdadi right†and “working for†the ISIS leader?
Isn’t there some view other than these two polar opposites—on the one hand that there is no threat and on the other that we should rush in, guns blazing? Indeed there is and it’s what I think about the subject. I think that DAESH is an existential threat to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, worrisome to Iran, Israel, and Europe, and a nuisance to us. We can mitigate whatever threat it poses to us by other means than going to war.
If there’s anything that’s “aiding the enemy” it’s peddling the idea that there are only two points of view on this subject.
If there’s anything that’s “aiding the enemy†it’s peddling the idea that there are only two points of view on this subject.
Welcome to Twenty-First Century American Political Discourse ™.
“If there’s anything that’s “aiding the enemy†it’s peddling the idea that there are only two points of view on this subject.”
Sad but true. In our modern political discourse, notions of complexity only come up in arguments defending shortcomings or failures.
In our modern political discourse, notions of complexity only come up in arguments defending shortcomings or failures.
Not just in our political discourse. Long before the Obama Administration cooked up the notion of “Jobs Created _OR_SAVED_” I had seen a similar concept at work in the business world.
At Disney, some ambitious exec dreamed up the idea that the company would save a bundle if all the full-time hourly employees were replaced by hourly part-time employees. (The reason is obvious.) So they cooked up a notion whereby as full-time hourly employees (of CAST, as they like to call them) attritted (by death, retirement, or quitting to take another job/opportunity) each one would be replaced by two or three part-timers.
I got to sit in on one of the last meetings before this plan got implemented. Another young manager, a junior exec hopeful, put on a masterful display of explaining why the plan couldn’t work. He had a reputation as a kiss-ass, so it was surprising to see him do this.
What I realized latter was that while he appeared to kiss ass, he never failed to tell things how he believed them to be. But he was masterfully adept at telling people (not just superiors) unpleasant things while making them feel like he had agreed with everything they said. I’ve not seen the like before or since.
Anyway, he cited everything from demographics to the local geography to past & future development patterns for why it wouldn’t work, why it couldn’t work. His trump was that the local UE rate was something like 3.5% at the time. There was no way people were going to pass up full-time work elsewhere to work part-time at Disney. Or even part-time work elsewhere!
But the muckity-muck in charge of the meeting waved all of that aside with the assertion that of COURSE people would crawl over broken glass to work for Disney.
So the plan was implemented. It failed miserably. And over the last two years of my job I spent an insane amount of time trying to show that even while the plan had failed by every possible metric (full-time hourly employment increased both in terms of absolute numbers AND as a percentage of the relevant part of the workforce), things would have been much, much worse WITHOUT the plan. I just can’t quite remember what we called the phantom savings, but it was something like “Full-time jobs not created”.
Turns out our work justifying the bullshit was good, though, as everyone involved in the plan got promoted.
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Also, I’ve been thinking ever since late 2008 that the plan probably succeeded during and after the recession. I’d LOVE to see their actual numbers now and compare them to the old numbers, I really would. I suspect their plan was golden, just so long as the economy for the bottom four-fifths collapsed. (And yes, I’m sure the execs involved would all be happy with this outcome. Hell, THEY got promoted!)