I don’t know what it has to do with “truth telling”, but it sure sucks. It reminds me of the lady I heard on a radio talk show once, screaming at Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s son, “You’ll know the love o’ Jesus when you’re burnin’ in Hell!”.
Oh but this isn’t any old ‘truth telling’. It’s GOP style truth telling. The whole article is about what this guy thinks the Republican party needs to regain Arkansas and-- by gum, he’s gonna be honest and tell us-- another attack! Pure GOP gold!
Of course, if there is another attack before the 2008 elections (the odds of which, I predict are slightly better than me nailing Marilyn Monroe between now and then), the Dems could quite easily point out that Shrub’s gotten everything he wanted in terms of funding, the Patriot Act, etc., etc., etc., and we still got attacked again, so perhaps it’s time we put someone else in charge of things. (I realize that the Democratic party as a whole, might not have the balls to say such a thing, but I’m sure Hillary does, as do a few of the other Dems running for the White House.)
Are you kidding? He’ll blame it on the Democratic Congress You see, everything was fine until *they *took over the legislative branch.
The quote in the OP is a bit scary. I don’t think the guy quite understood what he meant about the “need” for terror attacks on US soil. At least I hope he didn’t… :eek:
Oh yeah, Shrub’ll totally blame the Democratic Congress, but that doesn’t mean they can’t blame back. If we’re lucky, they’ll annihilate one another! (Congress and Shrub, that is.)
[del]Ah, it’s 21st century GOP-style truth telling[/del]
yeah, I got nothin’. Except that’s damn creepy. “Gosh, I wish we could have a horrible disaster so you knew how bad you needed us!” Smacks of abusive husband speak.
He’s not saying we need an attack. He’s saying the naysayers won’t come around unless there is another one.
I certainly don’t endorse his choice of words, but if we condemned a political party every time one of its spokesmen misspoke, Joe Biden would singlehandedly put the Democrats away.
I do hope he clarifies his remarks, because I cannot support what he said, certainly. But let’s not make more of this than what it was.
I was pretty charitable when the aforementioned Joe Biden misspoke, and when Barack Obama misspoke, so maybe we can show similar charity here.
I’m trying to see how this is much better. In order to prove that the president’s policies are working, they need to fail? All we need to do is to instill another big helping of fear to the American public so that they can come around to my way of thinking? Naysayers will become yeasayers with the right amount of explosives to push them along?
If you read the article, it’s clear that the Arkansas GOP hasn’t had a good year. And apparently there’s a lot of internal bickering among Republicans about who’s to blame and what direction they should be going. Mr Milligan is apparently part of the group that believes they should quiet down on some social issues and reach out to moderates. Other Republicans believe they should put more focus on these social issues to fire up their base. It appears that the local Republicans have gotten used to easy victories and things have gotten ugly in the face of some adversity. It was in the context of this debate that Milligan made the comment in the OP. I sense that he was thinking how nice it would be if some big external event came along so he could avoid this argument.
Personally, I figure Republicans are going to have a lot more problems like this. For the last fifteen to twenty years there’s been a growing reliance on the tactic of fighting enemies rather than making friends. The GOP had become masters at winning elections by identifying some group that they convince voters are a threat and then running against that threat. The problem is that this had led to a mindset where they think “who do we blame for this problem?” rather than “how to we solve this problem?” In a situation like this, where there is a question about internal policies, that attitude doesn’t support the necessary sense of compromise needed. The Democrats will benefit if Republicans spend all their energy attacking other Republicans.
I am, to put it mildly, not a fan of the Republicans.
Nor am I a fan of uber-parsing someone’s statements to move them in any particular direction. Many posters on both sides of the spectrum do that, and on a board where ignorance-fighting and high regard for logical argumentation are ostensibly paramount, it somewhat serves to lower a transgressing poster in my (and, I suppose, the many non-lurkers who call them on it) esteem.
however
I think Mr. Moto is right in this instance, right to point it out, and right in the rest of his post.
I don’t think the guy in the OP really wishes harm to the country as much as he wants to yell “told ya so” like a crack-fed howler monkey.
The problem with this pipedream is that if we are hit with another attack, the naysayers will see more vindication than Bush will. I don’t know of any Bush detractors who doubts that the US is in a terrorist bullseye. Their position is that Bush’s actions have made us more likely to get hit. So if that happens, it’ll probably be the naysayers saying “told ya so”.
As much as I loathe Joe Biden, I don’t think he’s ever misspoken on anything remotely approaching this scale.
Dunno if any major GOP figures have openly wished for another 9/11-style attack on the U.S., but it seems to be one of those desires that keeps on bubbling up from the righty blogosphere and other lower-level wingnut locations.
