The arrest of the leader of the attack on our embassy in Benghazi and the FoxNews reaction to it demonstrates the bubble in which conservatives live. The new conspiracy theory now is that the Obama administration could have picked this guy up at any time but waited until “Obama’s crisis in Iraq” and Hillary’s difficulties on her book tour to exploit it to distract the media. Their proof? Reporters had met with this guy. So…. true Twenty-Four and Homeland TV show fashion, we should have swooped in and grabbed this terrorist.
Well, sure, we could have. But we wanted to do something that never occurs to the GOP lynch mob: try him in a court of law following national and international legal procedures so we could nail him, rather than the GOP water-boarding technique which would have seen him walk.
Why don’t conservatives see this? Because they cannot tolerate their world of privilege ending I used the phrase ‘lynch mob’ advisedly and prefer living in the bubble. Meanwhile, Obama is keeping us out of wars, working toward a rapprochement with Iran and Russia, and developing allies around the world. Admittedly, McCain’s approach is easier: just bomb the hell out of them.
Now I’ll do what the conservatives call “play the race card”. The subtle subtext of all this (I’ll interpolate the origin of “subtext” in Russian!! Who knew? ““underlying theme of a work of literature, 1950, from sub– + text. pod + tekst. Originally a term in Konstantin Stanislavsky’s theory of acting. Earlier it was used in a lit. sense of “text appearing below other text on a page” (1726).) is that Khattala would not be sophisticated enough to track who he was meeting with and talking to. Here is a typical example, stated explicitly by the great George Will, the intellectual of the conservatives, speaking of the Boko Haram forces who kidnapped the school girls:
Are these barbarians in the wilds of Nigeria supposed to check their Twitter accounts and say, ‘Oh, Michelle Obama’s very cross with us, we better change our behavior?”
To which Eugene Robinson retorted, “Yes, exactly, all these people have twitter, facebook, smart phones – what is it with these people?” referring to conservatives, not the barbarians in the wilds of Nigeria.
It could not have illustrated better for me the mindset of conservatives; you could almost put a pith helmet on them and hand them the flag of empire. No wonder they don’t see the point in educating Mexicans (“a mixed race born of miscegenation” – I blogged long ago on the book one of my professors wrote in which he said the mating between Whites and Blacks in South Africa had to be explained, i.e. why would a White man have sex with a Black woman?)
So, yeah, conservatives, race is an issue for you. Next we’ll hear that Russians can’t use cell phones because they are “ham-handed” (that was used in WW II to explain why we shouldn’t send the Soviet forces sophisticated equipment). You may be more cautious in your statements now due to what you call political correctness, but once-in-a-while, a God-send like Will comes along. Praise Him!