Commenter Wallster reminds uf who the real enemy is:
It amazes me how ignorant right wingers can be – you do realize we caused this attack, don’t you? The blood of 200 innocent Spaniards is on the hands of GWB and ignorant asshat warbloggers like John Cole.
Damnit- and I thought the root cause was poverty. Or the Israeli/Palestine issue.
Of course, Wallster has a high-ranking ally in this vile line of thought:
Former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean said Tuesday that President Bush’s decision to send troops to Iraq appears to have contributed to the bombing deaths of 201 in Spain…
“That was what they said in the tape,” Dean said. “They made that connection, I’m simply repeating it.”
Dean’s comment came as he was defending former rival John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, from a Bush campaign ad accusing Kerry of turning his back on U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq.
Dean said it is the president who has not supported the troops. He said Bush sent soldiers to Iraq unequipped, misled the country on the reasons for war and made the United States less safe by focusing on a target that wasn’t a threat. And, he said, “The president was the one who dragged our troops to Iraq, which apparently has been a factor in the death of 200 Spaniards over the weekend.”
Dean issued a statement later to The Associated Press that said, “Let me be clear, there is no justification for terrorism. Today I was simply repeating what those who have claimed responsibility for the bombings in Spain said was the reason they carried out that despicable act.”
What is that word again? Oh yeah:
shark
It amazes me how ignorant right wingers can be – you do realize we caused this attack, don’t you? The blood of 200 innocent Spaniards is on the hands of GWB and ignorant asshat warbloggers like John Cole
It’s a very small step from that to THIS: “We caused this attack. The blood of 2,000 innocent Americans is on the hands of GWB and bloggers like John Cole because they didn’t support placing America under Sharia law”
And here I was being silly and always thought the responsibility for the terror deaths lay with some scumbags who have no problem blowing up trainfuls of innocents. Guess I was wrong after all…
JPS
I want to carefully limit the group of people I’m referring to here: Only people like Wallster who assign principal responsibility to GWB and anyone who supports him, rather than said scumbags.
I really think they’re chickening out. If you can’t handle the reality that there are people out there who want you–yes, you–stone cold dead, not even having met you, not knowing what a great guy you are, not caring how much you sympathize with their plight, whatever the hell it is, then you choose to believe that there MUST be something we can do to make it better without a fight. Which leads to the line of thinking: What do they say they’re mad about? Well, come on, is that really so unreasonable? They have a point….
Kimmitt
I think those people exist and that the bombing in Spain is evidence that Bush is doing a criminally poor job of going after them.
ScotchZombie
Terrorism is evil and there can be no doubt that terrorists will continue to strike at us and our allies. However, any sensible person would at least make some effort to understand WHY these terrorists continue to strike against us. “They hate us and they hate freedom” is an idiotic and childish response. The reality is that they hate the way that western nations conduct foreign policy. If we want to effectively put an end to terrorism, we should at least discuss and explore these issues rationally. I think the Bush administration has utterly failed to do this.
Kimmitt
Well, some of them just hate us and hate freedom. Bush has chosen something of an appeasement process on the whole “freedom” thing, though.
JPS
ScotchZombie, you’re falling into exactly the trap I tried to describe. In order to make sense of these people, you need to see their actions as hatred of our foreign policy.
Sure, our policies piss them off. But they’d hate us anyway. I don’t know what your proposed foreign policies are, ScotchZombie, but I guarantee that if we adopted them wholesale, there would still be Islamic terrorists wishing to kill us both.
Remember that “tragedy of Andalusia” blather? Remember bin Laden gloating over how our soldiers were murdered in Somalia? We were there to save Somalis from a famine, then from each other (not really different, given how the famine came about). Regardless of the merits of the mission, it was one of the less self-interested actions in U.S. foreign policy history. And they hate us for it, and gloat over killing us and driving us away.
“They hate us and they hate freedom”, to my mind, exactly describes the main players in Islamic terrorism. Call me idiotic and childish if you will (maybe you just did), but tell me how it isn’t true before you dismiss it. It may be an incomplete explanation, but all the complex, nuanced understanding in the world doesn’t change that fact, though it does sometimes flinch from recognizing it.