Overheard on an airplane
The fellow sitting across the aisle in 3B was ardent on our trip yesterday. It was hard not to overhear what he was saying, since he was talking so forcefully:
“I’m not going to listen to Bush tonight. I used to like him and Cheney, but I can’t stand them anymore. You can’t talk about axis of evil and fight a politically correct war. You can’t talk about existential threats and fight like a girl. You can’t talk about the ideological struggle of our time and do nothing about ideology — you have to get rid of every Wahhabi mosque and school, stop the recruiting in our prisons, dump Salafist army chaplains, deport the double-talkers in CAIR and their lawyers too…
If something is an existential threat, you stamp it out. Period. You kill as many people as need to be killed, and that means enough so new recruits won’t sign up. If something is an ideological struggle, you expose the ideology, make it illegal, kick the people who espouse it out of the country — and make life very hard on their fellow travelers. We need more Patton, less patent leather. We need more Panzer, less pansy. Bush and Cheney are either lying or incompetent, since ‘existential threat’ and ‘kinder, gentler war’ cannot possibly co-exist…
An American should be free to walk around like a citizen of the old Roman Republic. Or even the citizen of a century ago. ‘Pedecaris alive or Raisuli dead.’ Actually, I think that time will come again. But as with Rome, we’ll be more like Empire than Republic at that point. Very sad.”
We were going to offer the fellow a beta blocker, but we thought we’d leave well enough alone.
January 24th, 2007 at 12:32 pm
If you’ll pardon me being entirely subjective and squishy, the upcoming elections are starting to “feel” to me less like electing the next president, and more like choosing the first emperor. “Emperor” is probably not the correct word, but there’s something fundamentally different in the wind.
January 24th, 2007 at 2:34 pm
I think people are too focused on increased power and activity in the executive and not alarmed enough about inaction (or more appropriatly only pointless action) from the legislative branch of government.
Bill Clinton was ableto bomb Kosovo without any legislative action. Bush 43 has done what he’s done with no legislative action (And no, non-binding resolutions don’t count). Executive departments simply change Federal rules now as often or more than the legislature actually changes the law.
I’m also irritated about activist judges, but by the same token all too often they are being activist on topics our elected legislators refuse to touch or take a meaningful stand on to avoid re-election problems.
I wonder if the executive and judicial aren’t simply filling the void of the ever more irrelevant legislative.
January 24th, 2007 at 3:34 pm
I don’t listen to Michael Savage, because he sounds like that guy, but the longer these issues go unresolved the more things happen that make the ‘Savages’ extreme predictions accurate.
Specifically, if extremism exists in the mosques, and undercover video in the UK & Checkoslovakia illustates is does there, to ignore it is to nurture it.
After 9/11 even CAIR couldn’t trump-up examples of real Islamophobia but after Van Gogh’s murder in Holland the Dutch retaliated with over 100 fire-bombings of Mosques.
Shouldn’t we pursue transparency with honesty now rather then invite that inevitable excess later?
Oh… and the ‘Wind and the Lion’ was a great movie.
January 26th, 2007 at 2:20 am
I wonder how many people who are unhappy with Bush, are unhappy for the same reasons as this fellow. The Dems think it is because they are against the war, but I know many who would agree with this guy’s sentiments.
He’s not the only one who needs something to maintain a stable blood-pressure.