REAL JOURNALISTIC BULLSHIT; Send Chrissy over to have a beer with the bastards!
Chris Matthews: Fallujah Terrorists Are "not bad guys especially, they're just people who disagree with you"
Unbelievable quote on Matthews last night. Matthews committed a gaffe as defined by Mike Kinsley-- accidentally revealing what you really believe.
VERBATIM TRANSCRIPT-- ACE OF SPADES EXCLUSIVE (as far as I know)
Speaking to Col. Ken Allard, Ret., about the shooting of the playing-dead terrorist, Matthews calls a terrorist an "enemy soldier," and is immediately uncomfortable with his belligerent, warmongering terminology. He thus begins to walk back the cat from the hateful term "enemy," employing a series of increasingly-charitable euphemisms for "enemy terrorist killer":
MATTHEWS: Well let me ask you about this. If this were on the other side, and we were watching an enemy soldier-- a rival, I mean, they're not bad guys especially, they're just people who disagree with you; they are in fact the insurgents fighting us in their country -- if we saw one of them do what we saw our guy did to that guy [the playing-dead terrorist], would that be worthy of a war-crime charge?
Kind of a leftwad variation of Glenn Reynolds' "They're not anti-war, they're just on the other side." Now terrorist murderers are "just people who disagree with you," sort of like the guy at the end of the bar who claims that Steven Young was better than Joe Montana.
Let us sum up.
The terrorists who hide among civilians, murder civilians, behead civilians, hang civilian contractors trying to get the power running, etc., are, in Chris Matthews estimation:
1) mere "rival[s]"
2) "not bad guys especially"
3) "just people who disagree with you"
Has any prominent commentator on the left so clearly given away their worldview, despite their best efforts to hide it?
They simply do not accept that terrorists are necessarily "enemies" or even "bad guys." They're just people "who disagree with you."
None of this is to defend what that Marine did. That's a separate issue. I'm only making a point here about the left's rather latitudinarian views on Third World murderers. If their skin is a little swarthier than the typical Anglo-Saxon, or they wear colorful native dress, they're to be given a pass on all that silly Rules of War/respect for human life stuff.
They're not killers. They're not terrorists. They're not monsters. They're always just "people who disagree with you." And it's our fault we haven't done a better job of "communicating" with them, so we can have some "closure" on our various "disagreements."
As Ann Coulter observed in a slightly different context: The heart of this disagreement seems to be that they want to slaughter us and we don't want to die. Thus our perpetual, mutual "cycle of violence."
I've said it before; I'll say it again. The left treats internal political opponents as enemies to be opposed with all tactics short of war (and sometimes even those), while external hostile enemies are treated as fellow-citizens with whom must resolve all issues peaceably.
Or else it's something close to murder. |
