Cross posted from It Affects You
Yesterday Bush mouthpiece and asshole Trent Duffy just said those opposed to Bush’s policies want to lose the war on terror. No, really, that’s what he said in response to a question during yesterday’s press gaggle:
Q Is the White House concerned about the protests that are planned in Salt Lake City today?
MR. DUFFY: The President addressed that directly. He can understand that people don’t share his view that we must win the war on terror, and we cannot retreat and cut and run from terrorists, but he just has a different view. He believes it would be a fundamental mistake right now for us to cut and run in the face of terrorism, because if we’ve learned anything, especially from the 9/11 Commission Report, it is that to continue to retreat after the Cole, after Beirut and Somalia is to only empower terrorists and to give them more recruiting tools as they try to identify ways to harm Americans.
What Duffy is saying quite clearly is that people who oppose the president’s flawed Iraqi policy, unlike the president, don’t want to win the war on terror. Duffy wants the press to print his quote, so that people read that protesters like Cindy Sheehan want to lose the war on terror. He wants you to believe they line the president’s route carrying signs which read, “Let’s lose the war on terror!” and “If the president opposes terror, I oppose the president!” He wants you to know politicians like Chuck Hagel want the terrorists to win. He wants you to forget everything else and just believe that the entire reason they are protesting, in fact, is to lose the war on terror.
But it’s not just the Sheehans and Hagels he’s targeting. A majority of Americans now oppose the war in Iraq, so isn’t he saying that a majority of Americans are terror supporters? That likely includes you, your neighbor, and the guy who sells you your paper in the morning. You might not have realized it, but according to Duffy, you are all terror supporters.
Some may object to me bluntly calling Duffy an asshole, and I understand where they are coming from, but I’m not going to apologize for it. Duffy’s answer is not political discourse, and there is no attempt at honest debate. He has elavated talk show and online political forum discourse to the White House breifing room (or its vaction equivilent.) If he were a random wingnut, we could just ignore him. But he is not, so here we are.
Duffy is using the age old technique of identifying with an idea, not a specific plan. The president is not someone with a plan to fight terror, Conservatives want you to see him as someone who embodies the fight against terror. Therefore if you criticize the president, you are not criticizing his plan, you are criticizing the very idea “that we must win the war on terror.” It’s not only a way of immunizing yourself from any criticism, it’s also backhanded way of pretty directly villanizing your opponents, with an emphasis on backhanded. If you’re going to call people like Cindy Sheehan and Chuck Hagel terror supporters, at least have the stones to do it straight up without any word games. That makes Trent Duffy not only an asshole, but a weasely asshole.
Oh, and my rant is not over just yet. This whole bit about how a reason to support Bush is because we must not “cut and run in the face of terrorism” in Iraq is getting old. Imagine a fire fighter dedicated to stopping forest fires. For whatever reason (maybe he’s bored, maybe he’s afraid the Fire Dept. will lay him off if there isn’t enough work, maybe he just made a colossally stupid mistake) he takes to starting his own fires, spreading them to parts of the forest which would otherwise have been completely unaffected. And then to top it off, he uses the need to fight those fires as the primary justification for why we need him. What we do is clear, isn’t it? We may need to fight the fires he started, but we don’t keep him around to do it. You can be sure of that.
