Because there’s this bizarre belief that Barack Hussein Obama might secretly be a radical Muslim. The GOP actually doesn’t want Obama to use that phrase because it will take away an incredibly effective weapon.
Nah, it wouldn’t change anything. They’d say that he made some secret gesture to let his terrorist allies know he was just doing it to keep his alliance with them secret. You can’t win the game you are suggesting he play.
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Religion is big, messy, and complicated. Terrorists can be religious representatives. Muslim farmers building a church for their Christian neighbors are also religious representatives.
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You can’t win the game you are suggesting he play.
He also can’t not play it. For GOP nutters, saying nothing is speaking volumes. You’re right that there’s nothing he can say or do that will appease 100% of the people, but he can at least say enough to hold back the insanity and maybe reverse some of the damage.
Ask these acquaintances if Muslims immigrating to the US is such a deadly problem, why have there been zero Muslim perpetrated terrorist attacks in Detroit or Toledo where middle eastern, predominantly Muslim, immigrants have been moving for two generations? You may mention to them that there have been a handful of white, Christian terrorist attacks on mosques in both cities over the last 15 or so years, though.
@Nightflyer: I got an enhanced ID specifically to go to Spitfires games in Windsor without dragging extra/important documents with me.
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But with the knowledge that you can’t appease 100% of the people, why would you focus your efforts on people who will never support you no matter what you do? Why not say, “Fuck those guys” and do things to make people who aren’t crazy support you. Try to get 1% of the 35% people of people who hate you most on your side at the expense of alienating 10%, 5% or even 1% of the 50% who already support you? What sense does that make?
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Because by refusing to engage, you make the argument against you more powerful. For the die hard haters or lovers of Obama, it really makes no difference. For the most important voters (those that can be swayed), it matters.
Yeah, I brought that up, as well as the many yahoos who have had the brilliant idea of protesting outside Mosques and confronting unarmed Muslims with loads of guns and body armor while claiming they were being terrorized. It got shrugs. There’s an incredibly strong reality denial field built up with some of these people, unfortunately.
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But, are these voters the ones who care about whether he utters a specific phrase? I posit that they do not. The ones who care about the phrase will not be swayed, the ones who could be swayed care about a lot more than a single phrase.
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Until I see that guy do an ollie over a railing, he’s not particularly “radical” in my book.
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Well I can agree with that. In theory saying terrorists aren’t real Muslims is plainly a no-true-Scotsman thing, as a few of them are plainly part of the diverse part of humanity that identifies as Islamic, and there is hardly a good arbiter of who truly counts.
But you know, the presidential administration doesn’t have the luxury of speaking in the abstract like that; what they say, and the subtext of what they say, are things that have real impact on real people. This is plainly the objection. The only reason anyone might care whether Obama specifies terrorism as Islamic is because they would like to reinforce a link between the two. That gets other terrorism, like the common right-wing Christian terrorism, neglected and gets other Muslims marginalized. You need only look at the results of Trump and his team talking it up.
So at worst this is a lies-to-children kind of thing, a technical wrong for very good reason. Here the administration is trying to deflect real bigotry against real people. Yes, this may make them less popular among bigots who want to see those people marginalized, as the Republicans have been rallying. But if they think that percentage point isn’t worth throwing that minority under the bus, I don’t see why you should fault them for it.
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More secret muslim?
Or hs Trump finally decided to take the theory republicans have profited most from terrorism and flipped it around to point at Obama being a profeteer of human misary?
EIther way I don’t care, he’s speaking to try riling people like my family and they’l believe it. He’s just doing these things to keep the spotlight no matter how damaging it is. He doens’t care, you’re still paying attention to him and is now in a position where we can’t afford to not pay attention to what he’s doing.
I don’t think that’s the worst outcome. I would say the worst outcome would be that the Obama-is-weak-and-doesn’t-recognize-the-threat-from-radical-Islam narrative leads to a Trump victory. Consider the impact of that on real people.
I meant at worst in terms of whether it was true, which is what it seemed you were arguing.
As for political expediency, sure, maybe they’d be more popular if they played into the terrorism is Islamic narrative, despite the consequences. And maybe they’d be doing even better if they called for registering them, or to exclude refugees of that religion from the country. I’m sure you could justify it by saying Trump would do worse if he won on those notions. But you know, whether it amounted to good politics or not, it would still be awful and damaging policy.
That the sociopaths are so anxious to hear the White House declare radical Islam their antagonist, instead of their trying to distance Muslims from ISIS in the public eye, should tell you whether it’s the casual posturing you seem to make it. At some point you have to do the sensible thing, and hope there aren’t quite enough bigots to force the opposite, instead of abandoning people to appease them.
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He is! That’s why he used Sharia law to have Anwar Al-Awlaki and other US citizens assassinated extra-judicially. I’m assuming it must have been Sharia law, because it sure wasn’t done in accordance with the Constitution. But he was officially a Bad Guy, so it’s okay.
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It’s not an all-or-nothing proposition.
“Wow, he really is human garbage”. Out of the mouths of guinea pigs…
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Always room for that kind of radical Islam, of course!
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Why do you think that? Seriously. How does refusing to grant legitimacy to lies make the lies more powerful?
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