| Wednesday, October 6, 2004 |
13:13 - Whittle's election essay
http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/000107.html
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Looks like Bill was up late writing this; seems it was worth it:
We don’t want [9/11] to happen again.
We want to deter it from happening again.
And all of this rage and fury and spitting and tearing up of signs, all of these insults and spinmeisters and forgeries and all the rest, seem to come down to the fact that about half the country thinks you deter this sort of thing by being nice, while the other half thinks you deter this by being mean.
Exactly. See the MoveOn.org post below about how they want to spin the debate: Cheney was mean, so he sucks. Edwards was warm and charming and nice, so he rules.
Maybe if we were fighting bunny-rabbits or fields of sunflowers or an invasion of Darth Vaders that feed on wrath and hatred and use it to grow ever stronger.
But not if we're fighting people who laugh at our "tolerance" and call us weak and subhuman for it. It's not by being nicer that they'll change their minds and become nice in return. These aren't Pokémon villains; they're the reincarnations of the Nazis and the imperial Japanese, and there's only one way to deal with such people.
Once upon a time we understood that.
UPDATE: Oh, and he also covers what I and Matteo had been writing about: what is Bush's game plan? Why hasn't he told us about it? Why are we the ones tasked with keeping his September 20, 2001 speech's fire burning?
UPDATE: It's rather spooky how closely today's rather excellent Bush speech echoes Bill's essay in places.
If Americans can understand how the MAD doctrine kept the world from getting nuked, they can grasp how it's more important and effective to deter people who come from a completely different universe than to please people who are already from ours.
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Brian Tiemann
