After the Underwear Bomber, Republicans Have Shown Their True Color: Weakness

[kpete]

After the Underwear Bomber, Republicans Have Shown Their True Color: Weakness

Remember when Republicans portrayed themselves as tough guys? The party of John Wayne? Hard to picture now, right? Ever since an Islamic fundamentalist tried to blow up a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, Republicans have, as Steve Benen eloquently put it, engaged in a "collective display of pants-wetting."

The naked politicization of the attempted attack has been both shameful and hypocritical. (Can you imagine what these same Republicans, from Dick Cheney to members of Congress, would have done if Democrats criticized George W. Bush and sent out fund-raising mailers after 9/11?) As angry as the GOP response should make any American, what is even more important is that the Republicans are making us less safe.

It's as if the Republicans don't understand why fanatics use terrorism (something Bush definitely didn't seem to get after 9/11). The Islamic fundamentalists who wish us harm do not have the firepower to prevail against the power of the United States. But what they can do is try and unsettle us, so that we will hurt ourselves. When al-Qaeda leadership put together the 9/11 plot, there was no danger that the 19 terrorists who hijacked the four planes would defeat the United States military. But by perpetuating the tragedy, the goal was to unsettle Americans and the U.S. government, so that we would ourselves do the damage al-Qaeda didn't have the power to inflict.

.................

Where are the tough-guy Republicans now? When did fear and whining replace the gunslinger persona? If it was just hypocritical and repugnant, maybe we could just laugh at these cowards. But the Republican reaction has been to give the terrorists exactly what they want (just as Bush did after 9/11). And that's not funny at all.

more:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mitchell-bard/after-the-underwear-bombe_b_412134.html

[morningglory]

1. Joe the Scar this morning equated the underpants bomb with Katrina, in effect

He characterized Napolitano's "The system worked" with "heckuva job, Brownie". Har de har har har. Yuk yuk yuk, weeeeeeeeeeehaw them dems are funnier than shithead the idiot ever was. See, *bush didn't react well to Katrina and Obama didn't react properly to an underwear firecracker of mass destruction. We are not safe, I tell you.