This Wouldn’t Have Happened if We Had More F-22s
Jeebus. It should go without saying that if you’re interested in the latest updates on the situation in Oslo, you shouldn’t be here.
And Jeebus. It’s one thing for nutcase wingnut bloggers to decide Oslo is the latest front in their jihado-crusader fantasy, quite another for a columnist at the Washington Post to suggest that terrorist attacks on Oslo mean we can’t cut the defense budget.
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Well, maybe we ought to be spending more money on defense against domestic rightwing terrorists . . .
My favorite is TBogg’s link to “The ‘Astute’ Bloggers (“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”).”
They perform what I call “A Triple Putz-Lutz.”
This maneuver is not as difficult as it sounds, and happens pretty frequently.
“A Triple Putz-Lutz) is where some Conservative individual or group blames someone or something they hate (which is pretty much everyone except for themselves) for something that happens, find out it’s actually someone who is also a right wing nut (usually Christian), and then try to blame it on Liberals who are trying to discredit Conservatism – because, as we all know, Conservatism is perfect, and can only be discredited by Consrvatives being insufficiently Conservative, or by Liberal infamy.
Here’s the money quote from those “Ass-toot” folks:
“I THINK MAYBE THERE’S A POSSIBILITY THAT THIS BREIVIK IS ACTUALLY A PSYCHOTIC LEFTIST WHO DID THIS HORRIFYING ACT TO DISCREDIT THE RIGHT. DO YOU THINK THIS IS TOO WEIRD TO BE TRUE!?!? BELIEVE THAT IT COULD NEVER HAPPEN!??”
This would all be LOL if it wasn’t so pathetically stupid, ignorant, and xenophobic.
And, yes, Ms. Rubin, you’re right – maybe if we had kept our troops, jets, tanks, helicopters, and a few tactical nukes at Norway’s 60th Parallel, they would have been able to stop these horrendous attacks.
Sheeeeeeeeesh…
And the natural corollary, of course, is that unless you believe it could *never* happen, then it *must* have happened.
Check the link in the last posting here – http://www.document.no/anders-behring-breivik/
Yesterday, I was thinking that at least the Oslo bombing wouldn’t lead the Norwegians to invade Iran.
Little did I suspect that it might eventually lead us to invade Iran.
Heck, Iran had as much to do with yesterday’s events in Norway as Iraq had to do with 9/11…and our new SecDef is still telling our troops in Iraq that they’re in that country because of 9/11.
Think how much more efficient this game will be if, even in the absence of attacks on the US, we can conjure imaginary existential enemies into existence!
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20078552-503544.html
Ehhh . . . the Post story the CBS report is based on takes pains to paint Panetta as one who does not put a lot of thought into what he says publicly, and both he and his office backtracked when reporters pressed them on it. It seems like this is just Panetta lettin’ loose with the troops and not watching his language, and not an indication of a view he or Obama will base policy on or promote publicly.
Well he’s right in the sense that 9-11 allowed the nutjobs in charge to do more or less whatever they wanted and they had wanted to re-invade Iraq since GHWB didn’t get ‘er done in 1991.
Now our Leon probably didn’t mean it that way, as he explains
“I wasn’t saying, you know, the invasion, or going into the issues or the justification of that,” Mr. Panetta said. “It was more the fact that we really had to deal with Al Qaeda here.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/12/world/middleeast/12military.html?_r=1), which is pretty sad for the most recent CIA director to be so misinformed
Panetta also thinks we just need to kill 10-20 key leaders to strategically defeat al-Qaeda. Which would be great because we could then end the war on terror — http://www.stripes.com/mobile/news/middle-east/u-s-nearing-strategic-defeat-of-al-qaida-panetta-says-1.148742
He’s right in an even more important way: those poor bastards who are still stuck in Iraq in 2011 (or any time after 2003-2004, really) are there dealing with the problems Bush and Rumsfeld’s botched occupation unleashed on Iraq, which includes the keeping a large part of the country from being al Qaeda central.
so one of the problems Bush unleashed was the keeping a large part of the country from being al Qaeda central? I don’t get what you are saying here. Please use smaller words that I can understand as it’s Saturday morning and Cadell Evans just did a great time trial
No, keeping a large part of Iraq from being al Qaeda central is dealing with one of the problems Bush unleashed.
I other words, Bush and Rumsfeld unleashed an al Qaeda problem on Iraq – by guaranteeing the place would be flooded with them, and by screwing up the post-war so that no effective government could emerge, and American troops had to deal with it.
I suppose except for the point that US troops HAD to deal with it.
Somewhere was going to be al Qaeda central. I can see why we don’t want that to be the US, but was making this somewhere other than Iraq really worth the American, coalition and Iraqi lives that were taken in this pursuit
I think my terminology (al Qaeda central) is misleading.
It is not the case that al Qaeda was going to have a large-ish area where they enjoyed the support of the local populace, could operate with relative impunity, and could destabilize and entire country such that the government was incapable of ousting or controlling them. That is a specific circumstance that developed in Iraq as a result of our invasion/occupation and their decision to exploit the situation.
Maybe this guy did it because he’d heard that Friday is supposed to be Oslo news day?
Yes, I am a horribe, horrible, human being.
I just couldn’t resist.
I am sorry…
There is norway that is the case! Europe to your old tricks, I see.
Thanks, I needed that.
Anyone who would post that is just Bergen to be permanently banned.
From the last two post on this subject I have learned that you know that Bergen is a city in Norway, that Denmark produces butter cookies and Lego and that you have heard of minor characters in Hamlet, but for some reason think that that minor Norwegian character for some reason would get his payback by killing young Norwegians. Also I’ve learned that your ability to empathize with people far away is not that incredibly developed, and that you apparently can’t imagine that people closer to the event than you is also reading this blog. For the life of me, I do not understand why you don’t just shut your dumb tasteless mouth.
It’s a gift.
We all can’t be Aristotle.
Different people react differently to tragic situations. Humor is quite often a part of it.
Yes I am aware of humor as a classic way of dealing with a tragic situation. The thing is that if you mainly use it to “deal” with the tragic situation of others, you might just end up looking like an asshole that doesn’t really care.
Just to put this event into some context. We have now 92 confirmed dead. Add to this some 20 wounded that are still in a critical condition.
Compare this to the 29 homicides in Norway in 2010.
And now you can compare that to the more than 15.000 yearly murders in the US, and try to remember the reaction after 9/11, and the impact that little bump in the murder rate had on the American society.
Freddie boy,
Don’t sit down.
The stick up your ass might cause severe damage.
They’re jokes.
J-O-K-E-S!
They’re sometime used to lighten up an otherwise sad or horrible situation.
You might want to go to an Irish or Russian funeral to understand how this works.
It’s a joke – just Lego of it!
Yes I realize they are jokes, and not incredible mistakes of spelling. That’s why I’m not amused.
And I’ll probably skip the hilarious Russian and Irish funerals, and spend my time on the Norwegian funerals in stead.
Also I have an idea that the Russian and Irish mainly joke about their own tragedy, not the tragedy of others.
But I’ll leave you all in peace with your jokes now, and spend my time removing the stick up my ass, I’m tired and want to sit down.
He was fjordman, guest blogger for Atlas Shrugged, Gates of Vienna, and Jihad Watch. No Shit.
http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2011/07/22/rightist-wreaks-terror-through-norway/
apparently that is disputed, Anders Breivik claimed to be fjordman to another right wing blog. However, the fjordman identity is still talking.
That he would claim to be fjordman, truthfully or not, would seem to pretty clearly show he’s a big fan of Pam Atlas. As to whether he is fjordman, or was, who knows?
He’s clearly somewhere on the crazy right, but I think he’ll be very difficult to place within any known and somewhat coherent political thinking. In his own crazy manifesto of no less than 1500 pages with Smileys, LoL’s and incoherent political ramblings that he released on the day of the attacks, he calls himself a cultural conservative nationalist, but his use of political terms is somewhat outside the mainstream. He’s apparently against islam and “multicultural marxists”, and he wants a revolution that can lead to a Europe governed by some kind of Order of the Knights Templar, and he sees the years from 1999 – 2083 as the “European civil war”, where finally all multicultural cities will be defeated and all muslims deported.
I’m not sure it’s possible to put a political label on that. His defining feature seem to be the paranoid fear of the coming muslim Caliphate in Europe, a Caliphate made possible by the treason of the political correct “multicultural marxist” elite…
Not possible? Is that offer only valid in Europe?
In the United States, what you describe is one of the shibboleths of the fringe element we call “Contemporary Republicans”.
The thing I’m trying to suggest is that if your goal is to understand a paranoid islamophobic Norwegian, that for several years was a member of “Fremskrittspartiet”, but now has killed 93 people and rambles about a great European civil war, the order of the knights templar, his hatred of the Norwegian Social Democrats and his own issues with women, you might do better than to force him into the political concepts of US domestic politics.
Riiiight. Because there’s no similarity whatsoever in the rhetoric or the belief set between our anti-Muslim anti-tax anti-welfare-state nativists and the anti-Muslim anti-tax anti-welfare-state nativists in Europe.
There’s no crosstalk, the interwebs don’t exist which would allow for the cross-pollination of those sorts of ideas, etc. Can’t be possible.
Just another psychotic far-right lone wolf, no relation to any larger movement or ideology.
Anti-tax and anti-welfare is not a defining feature of the islamophobic parties of Scandinavia. Very often the irate islamophobia of these parties is justified as a defense of the welfare state.
I think he is very much a child of the islamophobia of Scandinavia (and Europe(and the US), and the political parties and groupings that advocate that especially in Norway, Denmark and Sweden. I see no reason to place him within a context of american politics. All though I have no doubt that he has been in contact with American islamophobes different places on the internets. Just like I read what Americans like you write on these here nets.
Look, you plainly don’t understand how ethnic politics work in the US — you have Muslim immigrants. We have Muslim and Latino immigrants, and our own internal non-white minorities. Conservative Republicanism includes all of those groups in slightly different ways to promote attacks on the welfare state for non-white non-elderly people (“Those People Get Stuff, which means that they’re stealing from your Social Security and Medicare”) and the permanent military state, anti-liberal politics, and an assertion of nativist cultural superiority: “Mooslims are stealthily taking over the US because the liberal multi-cultis want them to! ShariaTakfiriShariaTaqiyyaSharai!”
Ok I was wrong. A large chunk of text in his manifeso ’2083. A European Declaration of Independence’ is apparently copy/paste from the UNA bomber.
Most of the manifesto is apparently copy/paste from different sources, more or less reputable, some attributed and some not.
The sad thing is I don’t think even Jihadi terrorists would shoot children at point blank range in the head with a shotgun. That unfortunately takes “one of our own” as it were.
I get being so pissed you wish someone would die, I do, but f-ing children? Really – I mean, children?
In the end we can go back and forth about the motives and whether this reflects on religion, politics, gun control, whatever – but the answer is he was psychotic. That’s the only way you can murder, regardless of count (normal people don’t murder, ergo, killers are abnormal psychologically). The rest is really just “talking head” stuff.
Oh, that is extremely not crazy. Those kids represented the best and brightest social democratic youth in Norway. He destroyed an entire generation of leaders. He wiped out the entire seedcorn of his political enemies. It’s incredibly evil. He is not psychotic at all. In the U.S. our anti-muslim morons are in disarray at the moment and want to pretend that he was just crazy.
The European versions on the other hand seem to recognize him as one of their own and are bundling up and translating his writing and more or less condoning his actions. This is not going to be the end of this.
I agree. He is evil. And so are those in the media who knowingly spread lies and poison this world with their lies. Knowingly spreading lies includes not doing due diligence or posting corrections.
Yes his killing of over 80 politically-engaged teenagers was not an accident. He didn’t go over and start killing brown people in Oslo.
Wiping out leftists is not only this guy’s plan. We have thousands of people in this country that think exactly along the same lines. Yet the government doesn’t give a shit about rightwing violence in this country. Republicans in Congress make sure of that.
Fox News: FBI: Eco-Terrorism Remains No. 1 Domestic Terror Threat.
The date on that story is March 31, 2008.
Despite the fact that white, rightwing Christian extremist have committed more terrorist acts in this country than everyone else combined.
Apparently sociopathic behavior can be the result of extreme conditions rather than an underlying mental condition: which is to say, just because he did something which defies normal rational moral explanation doesn’t mean that he’s insane in any meaningful way. He thinks he’s at war, fighting for the life of himself, his race, and he’s willing to do what it takes to win. He’s not insane. He’s not a “madman” or somehow unaccountable for his actions. He’s a political actor who made a tactical decision in what he believes is a time of crisis.
And he should be required to watch a continuous loop of home movies and tributes of his victims in a jail cell from now until the end of his natural life.
Yah, there’s some widget in the brain that enables one to empathize with others, and this joker may well have lacked it. At least, that seems the only way to keep pulling the trigger as you murder 80+ teenagers.
Which makes the reports of his internet comments about sympathy for supposedly persecuted whites in Norway seem like the effort of someone who’s heard about this empathy stuff but doesn’t fake it very convincingly.
IIRC, a substantial % of people are probably sociopaths, but manage not to express it by mass murder. Insert your ex-boss/lover/colleague/roommate here.
It’s not as simple as that. If it were, all soldiers and police officers would be sociopaths.
It’s entirely possible to be a functional person, mentally speaking, but still view a subset of people as lacking humanity and therefore undeserving of empathy or other consideration. It’s even possible to decide someone deserves to die even if you consider them fully human, because the situation is such that their death is preferable to seeing them do great harm to others.
The “othering” of the people you are allowed or encouraged to kill is a fundamental part of human tribalism. Some struggle against othering, some embrace it.
Are you serious? Wow. Wouldn’t it be nice if that were true?!
No shit. I’d love to live in fancy unicorn land where killings are all committed by subhuman monsters. There’s just way too many murders in the world for that to be true.
I’ve covered premeditated murder cases and the people who commit them tend to be generally sad bastards who drive themselves to desperate measures, usually through their own whacky thought processes, but they have relatable or at least understandable goals.
I’m not sure that WaPo op-ed writer is much less of a psychopath than this Breivik …
… at least, if by “psychopath” we mean “people who find that everything that happens everywhere always already supports their ideological agenda.”
OK maybe *you* don’t mean that by “psychopath,” but I’m sticking with it.
I fail to grasp the distinction you do me the honor if sharing.
Quite.
[...] attack. Because it must be those Muslims. Except when in this case it’s not. And clearly we cannot cut the defense [...]
Commentators over at The Atlantic are predicting that, now that the guy has been identified as a right-wing nutcase instead of a jihadi nutcase, the identifier of “terrorist” will go out the door in the media, to be replaced by “psychotic.”
It happened with Loughner, after all.
Rubin is just demented. And WaPo has become the worst of rags.
Who reads the WaPo anymore for serious content?
It’s not a reliable source for anything except disinformation.
Major stupidity from Jennifer Rubin and WaPo on Oslo. I mean, its Paul Krugman and NYTimes on Az level stupidity. Which is about as stupid as stupid gets.
Thankfully, we have a President who enjoys pissing on these idiots.
Wow. In her most recent post she sorta admits she was wrong, and then doubles down on how large tanks forces will defend us.
If you assume her purpose is to find a way to justify large tank forces, that behavior makes perfect sense. What is confusing is why so man confuse efforts to legitimate a predetermined set of policies as a serious argument about how the world works.
Do dogs bark?
Re the defense budget vs terrorism, leave us not forget that NORAD, i.e., the Defense Department, in the person of North American Air Defense Sector, after fifty years of existence as our “shield” against external attack, failed utterly and miserably to protect us against
Oopsie! But you get my point.
Since the F22′s are grounded indefinitely, every single one of them, it seems unlikely that they would have made any difference.