Your first inclination might be to become angry at the idiotic drivel spewing from Blackburn's mouth. But, frankly, I'm over that. The Republican party line is so predictable as to be boring at this point. The war's critics are unpatriotic. All the terrorists in the world jumped on a big happy bus and went to Iraq and forgot about harassing the American public for some reason. Etc. Whatever. It's stupid, and probably anyone listening to NPR knows it's stupid. It's a pointless exercise. Like being in the White House press corps.
What really frustrated me was the largely incoherent and ineffective rebuttal Meehan offered. This is really not that hard an argument to refute, and the fact that the Republicans rely on carefully staged events that involve stump speeches is a testament to this. If you can just get a Republican in a debate at all, you're 3/4 of the way to showing the world they're all idiots. And yet Meehan managed to screw up that last 1/4.
Welcome to being a Democrat. It's like having a gun set up on a tripod pointing at a guy who raped your sister and is now being held motionless by iron clamps, the trigger of which is wired to a giant red button labelled "WIN", and then watching in horror as the guy you picked to press the botton climbs up on the tripod, drapes himself upside-down in front of the gun with the muzzle pointed squarely between his eyes, and smugly stretches to try to press the button with his toe. It's really hard to figure out whether you hate the guy in clamps who raped your sister or the idiot trying to press the button with his toe more.
(aren't my analogies colorful?)
Anyway, the problem is that Meehan wasn't contradicting the complete horse shit Blackburn was saying. Blackburn would say something like, "Iraq is the central battlefield in the war on terror, and we have to win," and then Meehan would say something like, "Iraq isn't just about terror. It's about a flawed strategy." And then he would ramble on about tangential shit for the next few minutes (e.g., we haven't caught Osama, blah blah blah). What a fucktard. Look:
- "isn't just about terror" is a terrible phrase. How about just "isn't about terrorism." Or even better, "has nothing to do with terrorism at all and never did." Is that so hard? How is it he managed to take a rather simple rebuttal point and make himself sound like a whiney 6-year-old?
- Clearly terror and fear resonate with a significant part of the population. The Republicans have been feeding off it for 5 years now. Don't say "it's not about terrorism." You're just inviting Republicans to accuse you of being soft on defense. It's standing in front of a giant tunnel with a big red sign that says, "Turn Here To Make Me Look Like an Asshole!"
How about instead you say something like, "Look, this isn't about fighting terrorism versus not fighting terrorism. This is about fighting terrorism intelligently, as we want to, or fighting terrorism stupidly and ineffectively as the Republicans have been doing. Iraq has been plunged into a civil war that claims the lives of American soldiers every day while the terrorists make advances in Afghanistan, Lebanon, and elsewhere. This administration desperately needs you to believe that Iraq is part of the war on terrorism, because otherwise they might actually have to admit the magnitude of the mistake they've made, the resources they've squandered, and the lives they've sacrificed to their own ineptitude and arrogance. I want to support our troops by making sure they're put in a place where they can make the United States the most secure and by giving them the supplies and armor they need to do their jobs. I think will do far more good than repeating the same, tired talking points and rhetoric we've been hearing for the last 5 years. The lives of our soldiers and the security of the United States are more important to me than the hurt feelings of a few people in Washington."
See? Was that so hard?
