Theo North

Theo’s taking off his gloves and his glasses, ‘cuz he’s about to provoke a blog slap fight. Gop3.com writers Katie and Brandon, you’ve been led like sheep to the slaughter, like every South Carolinian idiot in the Koger Center last night. I could find other sources saying similar things to complain about, but I’ve chosen Gop3.com for two reasons: one, Brandon never refuses a challenge and two, Katie is new to the blog and change scares me.

I know that Paul’s internet warriors have already been all over this, but they’re bungling the defense of their candidate the same way their candidate bungled his own defense in the debate. Giuliani twisted Paul’s words — Paul’s intention was not to blame America for 9/11 or to say that we “invited” the attacks, but simply to use the well-established theory of blowback as a support for his isolationist position.

Isolationism is, certainly in the twenty-first century, the wrong response to the risk of blowback from foreign ops. Any time you engage another country, be it for reasons of trade, war, or politics, your actions will give rise to malcontents, who may in some situations organize and arm themselves. There will even be malcontents in your own country (the malcontents who organized after the Iraq war are called Democrats). What you need to do is ensure that these malcontents are dealt with and prevented from militarizing. If in the Middle East the US had been supporting democratic regimes for the last thirty years, or at least regimes with reasonable understandings of liberty and freedom, we’d be living in a very different world today.

What is so offensive about this entire exchange is not that Paul can’t communicate effectively or that Giuliani jumped on Paul’s verbal flub with no mercy, but that when Giuliani thumped his chest and shrieked, “NINE-ELEVEN, NINE-ELEVEN, NINE-ELEVEN!!!” the crowd in the Koger Center, Republicans in their living rooms around the country, and bloggers at their keyboards around the world immediately began thumping their own chests and bellowing, quite literally aping Rudy’s own display. There is a sickness in the GOP, and one of the symptoms of this sickness is that we’ve allowed debate to be stifled by the apes in our party who think foreign policy is explained best and completely by “national defense.” These are the same people who won’t talk about immigration policy untill there is a moat of lava separating the US from Mexico, and the same people who are chatting up Fred Thompson because the media has propagated the “conservative Reaganesque knight on a white stallion” meme. It is disgusting to see this 9/11 horse and pony show pass for a “debate” and more disgusting to see Republicans eating it up.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 16th, 2007 at 10.59 am and is filed under Ron Paul, Fred Thompson, Rudy Giuliani, 2008 Republican Primary, Terrorists. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.