More episodes in the ongoing program The Political Twilight Zone continues: over-the-top, in accurate in some cases downright dangerous rhetoric,
EPISODE ONE: Republican presidentrial wannabe Rick Santorum who in effect is calling Barack Obama a traitor or a fellow-traveler of ISIS:
Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum said on Wednesday that President Obama’s rhetoric about containing ISIS “sounds like” Obama “is in cahoots with the strategy of ISIS to maintain their territorial integrity.”
“This president has been following, this president makes excuses for not acting, and if you look at what this president has done with ISIS, it is the worst foreign policy in the history of America,” the former senator told Brian Kilmeade during an episode of his program Kilmeade and Friends. “The president’s policy toward ISIS is to contain ISIS. ISIS’s policy in order to gain credibility as a caliphate, in the Middle East, and around the world, is to maintain their territorial integrity.”
“Let me repeat that: The president’s policy is to keep ISIS within their bounds; ISIS’s objective is to keep their territorial integrity,” continued Santorum. “Now, what does that sounds like? It sounds like president Obama is in cahoots with the strategy of ISIS to maintain their territorial integrity.”
Your seeing a lot of this in 21st century politics. Rhetoric that seems aimed at or could easily trigger some voters’ fight or flight mechanisms. And some nutcase who has this absorbed rhetoric could go out one day and due to his fight or flight mechanism being triggered pull an actual triggee and take someone he or she deems a threat to the nation’s survival out. That is the bottom line in American politics now. No. We’re not getting simply passionate discussion over policies. Demonization and defining are the order of the day. A certain amount of it is grounded in America’s feisty political history. But suggesting a President is “in cahoots with” terrorist strategy is saying the country’s survival is at stake.
You can’t say “shame on you,” because “shame” is a word that doesn’t compute with many politicians, ahead in the polls of behind.
EPISODE TWO: Billionaire and GOP Presidential nomination front runner Donald Trump, who should have his own Political Twlight Zone spin off. According to Trump, why if there had just been someone in the crowd with a gun, they could have stopped more than 130 people from being slaughtered by terrorists with suicide bomber backpages whose number one goal was to get as high a body count as possible:
Donald Trump said on Wednesday that, if he or somebody else with a gun had been present during last Friday’s attacks in Paris, things would have gone differently.
“So they were just shooting people: ‘Next! Next!’” the former reality TV star told Boston radio host Jeff Kuhner. “Just people were totally defenseless. If you had a guy like you or me, or some other guys in that room that had guns, it wouldn’t have been that way, Jeff. You know. It wouldn’t have been that way.”
Makes sense, doesn’t it? If someone had a gun and took it out the terrorist wouldn’t use his automatic weapon and would be afraid that the crowd member with a gun would a kill him.
Wait! They wore suicide bomb packs.
Oh, well many Trump supporters and others who are making this argument will say. It isn’t the logic that matters; it’s repeating the political mantra that fits in with other parts of the political mantra. Repeat several mantras (who cares if they’re true) long enough, and they do a mind meld and (in the eyes of partisans) become a fact? Why, ISIS probably never thought or was prepared for someone in the crowd who might have a gun. How could they ever plan for that?
Here’s a little factoid: well-organized, well-trained, coordinated terrorist teams out there won’t be fought by trite bumper sticker slogans aimed at winning the votes of primary voters.
And, yes, there are serious, solution oriented people in American politics in both parties who can study an issue and make some decision on a course of action.
If Santorum’s and Trump’s comments are any indication — and they are a part of their rhetorical, polemical pattern, repeated over anbd over — then they are not on that list.
But they are in The Political Twilight Zone.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.