Tweety wants to unleash hell
by digby
Via FAIR:
Now, this sounds pretty tough, but when are we going to stop this? I mean, we get a person over there, we all know who they are, what happens then? Do we change the rules? Do we go into it with a Rambo-style attack and do what we can to get them out?...
I just don't know how long we can take this as human beings. I just think it's a real problem. And I'm thinking of Rambo kind of stuff, because at some point you have got to go in there with what you got and do the best you can, or you're not going to be very proud of yourself.
Matthews, like most of Washington apparently, thinks movies are real. And I'm guessing he thinks that because Seal Team 6 famously executed bin Laden and the "American Sniper" could kill they can also go in and pick off the bad guys. And because he's probably seen all those Marvel movies he also thinks they can use supernatural powers to magically extricate hostages.
But then there's this:
MATTHEWS: What do we make of this? And what's it going to do to us?… I'm just wondering how long we're going to put up with this, Michael…. If we hadn't been through these wars of Afghanistan and the two Iraq wars…. We would just, all right, we're going to war, you know? All right, you're doing this to our people — like, even Jimmy Carter, who could be pretty pacifist — and I worked for him — if they had started executing our diplomats back in the '70s, I think we would have gone to war.
And I think — when do we say enough?
SHEEHAN: Well…
MATTHEWS: And just start bombing the hell out of them?
SHEEHAN: Well, we are…
MATTHEWS: Are we bombing the hell out of them?
SHEEHAN: We are…
MATTHEWS: Are we really prosecuting a real war there?
SHEEHAN: We are bombing the hell out of them, and I think we might be able to expand that bombing more into Syria, as well...
And finally:
Are we going to let this continue? This is my conundrum here…. Are we going to let them keep executing people, pouring gasoline? Wait until they get somebody over there, a nun over there, and start pouring gasoline on her.
At what point are we going to say we're going to blow that place up with anything we got, even if we don't win? When do you just explode as a country and say we're not going to take that anymore? When is that going to happen?
I guess nuclear war really is on the table. Or at least a massive bombing campaign waged out of anger and revenge that will turn the whole middle east into a burning conflagration.
So they won't pour gasoline on a nun.
Because we're good and they're evil.
It would just be another Tweety moment except he's hardly the only one who sounds like a puerile hysteric:
Update: Here's your isolationist GOP, btw. I'm going to guess they aren't going to stand in Obama's way. But then we knew that didn't we?
Update II: In response to the alleged political historian Chris Matthews' contention that if they had started killing our ambassadors back in the 70s we would have gone to war, real political historian Rick Perlstein produced this list of Ambassadors who were killed in the 1970s:
* John Gordon Mein, in Guatemala, on August 28, 1968
* Cleo A. Noel, Jr., in the Sudan, on March 1, 1973
* Rodger P. Davies, in Cyprus, on August 19, 1974
* Francis E. Meloy, Jr., in Lebanon, on June 16, 1976
* Adolph Dubs, in Afghanistan, on February 14, 1979
Out of the 8 ambassadors killed in the line of duty in the past 65 years, two were in plane crashes, one was Ambassador Stevens in Libya and the rest were those listed above. I'm sure you noticed where they happened too.
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