QOTW: Trumpie
by digby
Talking about the “bad people”:
We can’t let it happen anymore. We have to be strong, we have to smart. We have to be fair, we have to be fair to all side. And it’s tough. You know, if you’re Muslim — and there are so many, they’re so great, they’re such good people — but we to be smart, because it’s coming from this area. I mean, there’s something going on. There’s some nastiness, there’s some meanness there. There’s something going on in the mosques and other places. And we have to at least say there’s a problem so we can solve it. We can’t close our eyes.
I don’t know what’s wrong with Obama — he wants to close his eyes and pretend it’s not happening. Why is he so emphatic on not solving the problem? There’s something we don’t know about! There’s something we don’t know about. (Shouts from the audience can be heard, declaring that Obama is a Muslim.)
So, we have to go out — and again, the greatest source for this is our local police. And the really greatest source is all of you, because you have all those eyes. And you see what’s happening. People move into a house a block down the road — you know who’s going in. You can see. And you report them to the local police. You know, it’s too complicated — call the federal government, who do we call? it’s a big bureaucratic mess, nobody knows what they’re doing, okay?
But you people, and me and everybody, you know when somebody moves to an apartment near you, or to a house near you — you’re pretty smart, right? We know if there’s something going on. Report them! Most likely you’ll be wrong, and that’s okay. But let the local police go in and check out [sic], and you’ll get rid of this stuff. That’s the best way. Everybody’s their own cop, in a way — I mean, you gotta do it, you gotta do it.
We might like to think that’s way outside the mainstream. But unfortunately, it isn’t:
“Mississippi is a great state, but like all 50 states it has troubled souls that might look to find meaning in this sick, misguided way. The challenge that we face in law enforcement is that they may be getting exposed to that poison and that training in their basement,” Comey said. “They’re sitting there consuming and may emerge from the basement to kill people of any sort, which is the call of ISIL, just kill somebody.”
So he stressed that the threat is very real, not just for military or law enforcement or the media, all of whom have been warned by the FBI that ISIS could be gunning for them, but for ordinary citizens as well.
“If you can video tape it all the better, if it’s law enforcement all the better, if you can cut somebody’s head off and get it on tape, what a wonderful thing in their view of the world,” he continued. “That’s the challenge we face everywhere.”
Comey expressed particular fear that restrictions on information gathering could give terrorists more leeway because they are harder to track.
“I’m very worried about where we’re drifting as a country in respect to law enforcement’s ability to, with lawful process, intercept communications. I’m not talking about sneaky stuff. I’m talking about situations where we have probable cause to believe that somebody is communicating with a terrorist group,” he said. “… We’re drifting into a place where there are going to be large swaths of this country beyond the reach of the law.”
Because of that, Comey said, citizens need to be constantly on the watch. The current climate of the world does not make it acceptable to see something and not report it.
“Ordinary folks should listen to the hair on the back of their neck,” he said. “We’ve gone back through every homegrown violent extremist case in the United States and studied it. In every single case, someone saw something online, at a religious institution, in a family setting, at a school, that was weird, that was out of place, this person was acting in a way that didn’t make sense.”
No word on whether or not we should report armed Trump voters but they sure make the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I’m going to guess that’s not what either FBI chief Comey or Donald Trump have in mind.
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