Monday, March 10, 2008

What Would You Say?

David Kurtz at TPM isn't impressed with Obama's response to the claim by bottom-feeder Republicans that if he wins, it would be a victory for the terrorists.

But Kurtz doesn't follow that up with any suggestions as to how he thinks Obama should respond.

What do you think? What should Obama say? Does responding to a low-life like King (or Limbaugh or Hannity or Coulter) do more to elevate his ridiculous claims? Or are there some options that would make sense to defuse this kind of talk?

One option might be to say knee cap King as the bottom-feeder that he is, and at the same time bring the issue back around to the current administration's failure to get Osama been forgotten, while also creating more terrorists in Iraq.

Anything else?

2 comments:

Steve M. said...

Obama's instincts are good. This didn't get much attewntion, except among bloggers and, of course, the mouth-breathers who watch Fox. Sooner or later, King or some other hatchetman will repeat this, and it will get more attention, and then Obama can rebut it.

King quotes a line out of context -- "a botched and ill-advised U.S. military incursion into a Muslim country." I hope, if Obama gets that line quoted to him again, he quotes it back in context:

Osama bin Laden understands that he cannot defeat or even incapacitate the United States in a conventional war. What he and his allies can do is inflict enough pain to provoke a reaction of the sort we've seen in Iraq--a botched and ill-advised U.S. military incursion into a Muslim country, which in turn spurs on insurgencies based on religious sentiment and nationalist pride, which in turn necessitates a lengthy and difficult U.S. occupation, which in turn leads to an escalating death toll on the part of U.S troops and the local civilian population. All of this fans anti-American sentiment among Muslims, increases the pool of potential terrorist recruits, and prompts the American public to question not only the war but those policies that project us into the Islamic world in the first place.

That's the plan for winning a war from a cave, and so far, at least, we are playing to the script. To change that script, we'll need to make sure that any exercise of American military power helps rather than hinders our broader goals: to incapacitate the destructive potential of terrorist networks
and win the global battle of ideas.

Oh, and by the way, I love the way King and the Fox anchor pretended that that was an interview rather than a scripted exchange meant to deliver right-wing talking points efficiently to the booboisie. Very convincing job.

Steve M. said...

I meant "and then Obama can really rebut it."