Can you tell me what’s wrong with Michael Goldfarb’s reasoning faculties? While discussing John McCain’s appearance on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, Goldfarb made the following observation.
My only gripe with the interview: On the one hand, Stewart attacks McCain for taking the Hamas endorsement of Obama at face value. On the other hand, Stewart thinks Bush is ‘al Qaeda’s Rev. Wright,’ i.e. a tool they use to fire up their base. You can’t have it both ways–either you care what terrorists think or you don’t. McCain clearly doesn’t, but like he says, this ain’t beanbag, and the Hamas endorsement was as much a missed opportunity for Obama as it was fodder for McCain. As to whether Bush is a recruiting tool for terrorists–who cares? Al Qaeda was recruiting before Bush was in office and they will continue to do so after he’s gone. The important thing is that we keep killing those recruits. Eventually, one side will give up. And if Obama wins in November, we know which side that will be.
Either Goldfarb just wants to kill Muslims or he just wants to have a good cause to justify bloated military budgets. I don’t know which is true…possibly both. But we can’t kill off every terrorist until there is no more terrorism, and we certainly can’t do that if we are making terrorists faster than we can kill them. It’s obviously safer and more economical to avoid creating a terrorist in the first place than to hunt them down and kill them. That logic is so unassailable that to ignore it is prima facie evidence of an deceitful ulterior motive.
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BAGHDAD (IHT) May 8, 2008 – A Kuwaiti man who complained about maltreatment during a three-year stay in the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was involved in a deadly suicide bombing in northern Iraq last month, the U.S. military confirmed.
Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi, 29, whom the U.S. military accused of fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan and wanting to kill Americans, was involved in one of three suicide bombings that killed seven Iraqi security forces in Mosul on April 26, Defense Department officials said.
They said that after his release in Kuwait, Ajmi traveled to Iraq via Syria — a common way for foreign fighters to enter Iraq through porous borders. Military officials said Ajmi’s motives were unclear, but in a lengthy martyrdom audio recording before his death, Ajmi implores people to take part in suicide bombings to attack Americans.
In portions of the recording translated by the Bethesda-based SITE Intelligence Group, Ajmi decries the conditions at Guantanamo as “deplorable” and urges others to fight.
“Whoever can join them and execute a suicide operation, let him do so. By God, it will be a mortal blow,” Ajmi says. “The Americans complain much about it. By God, in Guantanamo, all their talk was about explosives and whether you make explosives. It is as if explosives were hell to them.”
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Abdullah, 30, had been missing for two weeks and his family learned he left Kuwait illegally for Syria. Abdullah had sent messages to his wife from Iraq, he had a son after he was released from the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the United States holds suspected terrorists.
Summary of Evidence for Combatant Status Review Tribunal — Al Ajmi, Abdallah Salih Ali [pdf]
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."“The important thing is that we keep killing those recruits.” So how many have you killed, Mr. Goldfarb? Signed up yet?
This is what Jane Hamsher described as the “ability to be sanguine about the violent deaths” of others. It exists in abundance on the modern right. (Another reason they deserve to get pounded in November.)
I’ll go with bloated military budget.
Everyone should see The Power of Nightmares.
I think that it’s a point of strength to Obama’s candidacy that most of the “negatives” about him are actually about people that his enemies keep trying to associate with him: Ayers, Wright, Farrakhan, Hamas, etc. Even the Obama-haters in Hillaryland can’t do much more than point their fingers at bloggers who they associate with Obama.