No surprise here. Most Americans think the Republicans who run Congress will be to blame if Congress doesn’t fund the Department of Homeland Security:
Republicans in Congress would shoulder the blame for a shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security if they are unable to enact a new spending bill to keep the agency running, according to a new CNN/ORC poll. The survey finds 53% of Americans would blame the Republicans in Congress if the department must shut down, while 30% would blame President Barack Obama. Another 13% say both deserve the blame.
If a spending bill is not passed by Feb. 28, the agency’s funding will run out.
A majority says a shutdown at DHS, even if it’s just for a few days, would be a crisis or a major problem.
Of course, Republican voters are absorbing some of the right-wing talking points, so their belief in the importance of funding the DHS is eroding relative to the rest of the population.
Republicans are less likely to see a shutdown as a big problem, 46% say so compared with 66% among Democrats. Among all adults, slightly fewer see a DHS shutdown as a problem or crisis than said so in November when asked about a possible shutdown of the whole government, 55% now vs. 59% in that poll.
This is almost amusing when you consider the wingnut’s outrage du jour. This would be the appearance that Deputy State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf made on Hardball with Chris Matthews last night in which she tried to tamp down Matthews’ lust for ISIS blood:
MATTHEWS: Are we killing enough of them?
HARF: We’re killing a lot of them and we’re going to keep killing more of them. So are the Egyptians, so are the Jordanians. They’re in this fight with us. But we cannot win this war by killing them. We cannot kill our way out of this war. We need in the medium to longer term to go after the root causes that leads people to join these groups, whether it’s lack of opportunity for jobs, whether…
MATTHEWS: We’re not going to be able to stop that in our lifetime or fifty lifetimes. There’s always going to be poor people. There’s always going to be poor muslims, and as long as there are poor Muslims, the trumpet’s blowing and they’ll join. We can’t stop that, can we?
HARF: We can work with countries around the world to help improve their governance. We can help them build their economies so they can have job opportunities for these people…
A typical response to this comes from a diarist at Red State:
On the killing side, the near term problem is that we aren’t killing enough. She is quite wrong that “we cannot kill our way out of this war.” The administration is choosing not to try to do so, but every single time it has been tried “killing your way out of a war” has worked. The big brains in the White House are enamored drone attacks and tightly controlled airstrikes. These can kill a small number of people and knock off selected leaders. This is only effective so far as it goes. It means that ISIS command and control facilities are co-mingled with civilian targets and ISIS leaders know where to go to be safe. Our attacks are terrorizing ISIS fighters and aren’t discouraging others from joining them. Far from “killing a lot of them” we are only scratching the surface.
Unless these folks happen to be planning to travel abroad, the only way these ISIS fighters are going to harm them is if they get past our domestic defenses, which means that they ought to be very concerned that our Coast Guard, customs, immigration and counterterrorism officials have the funding they need to operate. But they’re the Americans least likely to see this as a serious threat because they’re just playing at partisan politics. If they were really afraid, they’d be bellowing at John Boehner to stop dicking around with our security. Or, in some cases, they’re just too stupid to understand that two plus two equals four.
