Come, I will show you a wonder: Chris Matthews saying something that most of the people reading this will agree with*. Transcript via Right Scoop (video of all of this over there, too):
[CHRIS] MATTHEWS: Are we killing enough of them [Islamic State cultists]?
[State Department spokeswoman MARIE] HARF: We’re killing a lot of them and we’re going to keep killing more of them. So are the Egyptians, so are the Jordanians. They’re in this fight with us. But we cannot win this war by killing them. We cannot kill our way out of this war. We need in the medium to longer term to go after the root causes that leads people to join these groups, whether it’s lack of opportunity for jobs, whether —
MATTHEWS: We’re not going to be able to stop that in our lifetime or fifty lifetimes. There’s always going to be poor people. There’s always going to be poor muslims, and as long as there are poor Muslims, the trumpet’s blowing and they’ll join. We can’t stop that, can we?
HARF: We can work with countries around the world to help improve their governance. We can help them build their economies so they can have job opportunities for these people…
Bolding mine. Chris Matthews does get credit for being aghast at this, although I think he should have screamed “WHY DID I VOTE FOR YOU FOOLS? NO MORE, BY CROM! NO MORE!” and then flipped the table. Which is, alas, a valid point: we are going to see more and more people on the Left realize that they put far too many chips on Barack Obama and his Happy Fun Time Three-Ring Circus of FAIL. While it will probably be regrettably necessary to eventually let them run the gauntlet and thus rejoin the good guys… well, ‘run the gauntlet’ has a rather specific meaning. One that liberals suddenly rediscovering their inner hawks should certainly learn**.
But I digress. I can’t believe that I have to write this, but here goes: no, people do not burn other people alive, or slit their throats in a mass human sacrifice, or set up slave markets, or crucify other people, or throw them off buildings, or any of the other things that death cultists do, just because those death cultists don’t have access to better jobs. Those death cultists like their jobs. It feeds something in their souls. You’d think that the State Department would know better… well, no, not really: but they used to be better at hiding that. Six years of this administration’s reverse Midas touch is taking its toll.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
PS: My friend and RS colleague streiff has likewise gone off on this.
*Almost. Chris Matthews apparently thinks that we should go with the AUMF that Obama wants, rather than the AUMF that America needs.
**On a metaphorical level only. We’re not death cultists, after all.
“But we cannot win this war by killing them. We cannot kill our way out of this war”
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I can see clearly now the Democrat’s path to ’16 victory. They will continue to say stupider and stupider things until we all have brain aneurysm’s from reading them.
Since they clearly don’t believe in free-market reforms here, there, or anywhere else, how’s that plan supposed to work? More redistribution of wealth to barbarians?
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If you pay the Danegeld, you’ll never be rid of the Dane. The old Danes may even be preferable to this lot.
Well, that’s what they’ve been forthrightly advocating for 6 years…
The Democrats are full of it, a lot of these terrorists actually do have fairly good educations…
Ah, but if you’re a lefty who believes that Karl Marx identified all of the driving forces of human history, then you see the entire world through the lenses of economics and class warfare.
(Modern “progressives” have added the lenses of race and gender for their third and fourth eyes.)
To be specific, western educations in engineering.
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That is a different matter from what she actually fullemploymentsplained.
You know, I used to think there was some truth in the argument that dysfunctional situations with a lot of unemployed young men bred this sort of stuff by way of idle hands.
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I am now absolutely certain that no work, no prospects, rotting from boredom, and dying from lack of purpose does not cause terrorism.
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It comes down to character.
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Yes, economic problems are not wonderful for a society. The differences in results are caused by what begets character.
Eh, I’m not throwing the kitten out with the bathing tongue just yet.
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I don’t think that dysfunctional situations *alone* cause this .. after all, *some* young men escape our domestic rotting urban cores.
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I *do* think that reducing the dysfunction lowers the bar to exit .. but it’s a diminishing-returns kind of thing .. and that, as we still have rotting urban cores domestically, we should perhaps look at eliminating some domestic policies (Davis-Bacon, minimum wage, unions) and see what happens first.
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Who knows, perhaps we’ll spike a sufficient growth wave that boats worldwide will be lifted…
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Mew
I keep waiting for someone to ask this spokesparrot whether she really believes the nonsense she spews.
That might be a good game plan if this Administration knew anything about how to create jobs, but it can’t create jobs here, so what makes them think they can do it in the middle east. Until they figure it out killing ISIS fighters will work just fine. And contrary to their beliefs you can kill your way to victory.
She’s an exemplar for the term “cookie pusher”
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That equivocating “We’re killing a lot of them” tells me that there is no commitment to winning in this administration. The answer should be “Hell yes, we’re going to exterminate every s.o.b. who ever carried a weapon under the ISIS banner, and make their names a curse for the next 200 generations”
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Can we have W. back? Pretty please? Just for like 6 months? Even a quarter …….