George McGovern Speaks
Lieberman supporters keep saying that Lamont's win signifies a dangerous leftward swing by the Democrats towards failed McGovernite ideas.
McGovern just spoke on the matter to Newsweek. When the guy says stuff like this, I have to wonder why we assume being McGovernite is such a bad thing:
Q: The Republicans are saying Lamont’s win means the Democrats are anti-war and weak on national security.
McG: They’ve done that for 50 years—saying Democrats are soft on communism. Now they’re saying Democrats aren’t tough enough on terrorism. That argument is beginning to wear thin. In the time we’ve been in Iraq, the insurgents have gotten stronger and we’ve weakened our standing in the world. I used to say we were never more isolated than in the deepest jungles of Vietnam; now I add the Arabian Desert to that.
posted by Mike M. @ 3:13 PM
2 Comments
2 Comments:
Yeah, I've about reached the barfing point on "soft on terrorism," "soft on crime," "soft on communism," blar de blar.
For one, there's the obvious embarrassing psychoanalytic nonsense of guys who are soft in the middle and probably soft a little farther south getting up in public and insisting that they're hard on something. And I'm not really joking, here. There's something desperately compensatory about guys who avoided combat their whole lives suddenly insisting that the nation needs a war or two. While it's not just about literal dick-swinging, it is on some pretty primal level about virility, and that's just a lousy basis for foreign policy.
But mostly, I'm sick of people pretending that being a violent hardass is automatically the most effective way of preventing violence. Sometimes you have to meet violence with violence, absolutely, but you have to do so as a last resort and you have to be smart about it. If you don't, you cause more violence than you prevent. And mindlessly bellowing "tough on terrorism" while you're following policies that might as well be designed to foster terrorism is ludicrously dumb. It would be hilarious if it weren't getting people killed.
Also, all you Bill Clinton groupies should click on the link to the McGovern article. There's a picture of Clinton there looking like a Ralph Lauren model.
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