Comin’ To Get Us

by digby

Josh Marshall posted this interesting quote, showing that Bush’s comments today (and a gazillion times before)are not exactly original:

If we quit Vietnam,” President Lyndon Johnson warned, “tomorrow we’ll be fighting in Hawaii, and next week we’ll have to fight in San Francisco.”

That’s just as crackled as Bush’s nonsensical statement that the “oceans don’t protect us anymore” and that kind of dumbass reasoning is why Johnson was booted out. Jesus. The truth is that we lived under the possibility of nuclear annihilation with intercontinental ballistic missiles for decades. All it would have taken was one little slip-up or a bad moment of judgment and most of the planet could have gone up in smoke.

There is no existensial threat today that comes close to that, short of being hit by an asteroid, which means we have already proved that we can handle the problem of terrorism without turning into a bunch of hysterical ninnies squealing that they are coming to kill the children every five minutes. Here’s our tough guy in chief wringing his lace hankie and calling for the smelling salts just today:

Q Mr. President, yesterday you discussed Osama bin Laden’s plans to turn Iraq into a terrorist sanctuary. What do you think your own reaction would have been five years ago had you been told that towards the end of your term he would still be at large with that kind of capability, from Iraq, no less, and why — can you tell the American people — is he still on the run? Why is he so hard to catch?

THE PRESIDENT: … My point is, is that — I was making the point, Jim, as I’m sure you recognized, that if we leave, they follow us. And my point was, was that Osama bin Laden was establishing an external cell there, or trying to, and he’s been unable to do it. Precisely my point. That’s why we’ve got to stay engaged. Had he been able to establish an internal cell that had safe haven, we would be a lot more in danger today than we are. His organization is a risk. We will continue to pursue as hard as we possibly can. We will do everything we can to bring him and others to justice.

We have had good success in the chief operating officer position of al Qaeda. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi al Rabium — there’s a lot of names, some of whom I mentioned yesterday, that are no longer a threat to the United States. We will continue to work to bring him to justice — that’s exactly what the American people expect us to do — and in the meantime, use the tools we put in place to protect this homeland.

We are under threat. Some may say, well, he’s just saying that to get people to pay attention to him, or try to scare them into — for some reason — I would hope our world hadn’t become so cynical that they don’t take the threats of al Qaeda seriously, because they’re real. And it’s a danger to the American people. It’s a danger to your children, Jim. And it’s really important that we do all we can do to bring them to justice.

(This is what Al Gore is really talking about, by the way, in his “Assault On Reason” — powerful people fearmongering in complete gibberish.)

Update: Speaking of presidential blasts from the past, a reader happened to send this in to me today.

Which chickenshit Democrat said this?

“Once the terrorist attacks started there was no way that we could really contribute to the original mission by staying there as a target just bunkering down and waiting for further attacks. I don’t think we have lost as yet, although I know things don’t look too bright. As long as there is a chance we are not bugging out. We are moving to deploy into a more defensive position.”

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