On the Islamic State, the voices counseling panic grow louder
Theres a new message coalescing around events in the Middle East, coming from Republicans, the media, and even a few Democrats: Its time to panic. Forget about understanding the complexities of an intricate situation, forget about unintended consequences, forget about the disasters of the past that grew from exactly this mind-set. We have to panic, and we have to panic now.
The centerpiece of every Sunday show yesterday was a sentence that President Obama spoke in a press conference on Thursday. He answered a question about go[ing] into Syria by saying that we shouldnt put the cart before the horse. We dont have a strategy yet. Naturally, Republicans leaped to argue that Obama wasnt actually talking about military action in Syria, but about dealing with the Islamic State (or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) more generally, and who knows what else. Many in the media took the same line. The first rule of a gaffe is that it should be taken out of context, and then the discussion should quickly be shifted away from whatever it was actually about to how, thus decontextualized, it might be perceived.
So on Meet the Press, Andrea Mitchell ignored the fact that the question Obama was answering was about U.S. military action in Syria, and asked Sen. Dianne Feinstein, is the president wrong to signal indecision by saying that we still dont have a strategy against ISIS? When that didnt elicit a sufficiently strong condemnation from Feinstein, Mitchell pressed on: Doesnt that project weakness from the White House? Obviously, theres nothing worse than signaling indecision or projecting weakness. Not even, say, invading a country without having a plan for what to do after the bombs stop falling.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2014/09/01/on-the-islamic-state-the-voices-counseling-panic-grow-louder/
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)bemildred
(90,061 posts)locks
(2,012 posts)If only the Dems would all stand up and say "Wait a minute, didn't we try this in Iraq and aren't we bombing Iraq again after ten years?"