At Salon.com at 10:28 a.m., Amanda Marcotte wrote that "It will likely be days, perhaps weeks, before we know much about the horrific terrorist attacks on an airport and subway in Brussels on Tuesday morning that killed dozens of people."
Actually, dear, as of when I began this post about 90 minutes later, we alreadly know plenty. Most crucially, the Associated Press reported that the Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attacks roughly an hour after Marcotte's post. Once that's verified, and it almost certainly will be in short order, what else beyond the names of the de facto soldiers of the Islamic State will remain of the "much" that we don't know? But the most important thing to Marcotte, who is clearly blind in one eye and can't see out of the other, is that the United States has "a grown-up in charge" (links are in original; bolds are mine throughout this post):
We need adult leaders: Brussels attack is a sobering reminder of how important it is to have grown-ups in office, not Cruz or Trump
The Brussels attack drives home how critical it is to have adults, like Clinton or Sanders, in charge
... But one thing is absolutely certain: It is a good thing that we in the United States have a grown-up in charge. No doubt whatever President Barack Obama does will come under scrutiny (some useful, most not), but we can rest assured that whatever it is, it will be a considered decision, informed by good faith assessments of intelligence and rooted in an understanding that these situations are too complex to be dumbed down to a bunch of bigotry towards Muslims, the vast majority of whom have no relationship to terrorism.
This is an election year, and these attacks should serve as important reminder of how critical it is to have a grown-up in the Oval Office. Looking over the viable presidential candidates in the race, it’s clear that narrows the field down to Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. They have their differences, of course, and some of those are around foreign policy.
But both will assuredly approach the ongoing and complicated problem of international terrorism in the same spirit that Obama does: As adults who make decisions based on information and who both understand that the ISIS situation requires a military response (yes, even Sanders), but who show no interest in exploiting these situations in order to start adventure wars or push bigoted opinions about immigrants.
The same can not be said for Donald Trump or Ted Cruz, both of whom are using this attack as an excuse to strike meaningless poses and engage in magical thinking. The idea of either of these clowns being in charge during a crisis should strike a cold jolt of terror right to the heart.
Trump is already acting like an absolute child about all this, literally equating the bombings with the leveling of the entire city of Brussels.
“Brussels was a beautiful place,” he said on Fox News. “And now you look at it, and it’s a disaster. We have a worldwide situation that is out of control.”
The bombing was terrible and the damage, both in terms of lives lost and to the city’s infrastructure, is extensive. But contrary to what Trump says, Brussels is still there and still beautiful. Brussels and Paris survived the frigging Nazis, but Trump would have you believe that these cities will be torn to the ground because of attacks orchestrated by scattered, stateless terrorist organizations.
Of course, it doesn't occur to Ms. Marcotte that the rise of the Islamic State and its increased ability to endanger Europe and the U.S. can be traced to the alleged grown-up who is currently in charge, capsulized nicely early this morning by Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds (links are in original):
... Obama blew it in Iraq, which is in chaos, and in Syria, which is in chaos, and in Libya, which is in chaos. A little history:
As late as 2010, things were going so well in Iraq that Obama and Biden were bragging. Now, after Obama’s politically-motivated pullout and disengagement, the whole thing’s fallen apart. This is near-criminal neglect and incompetence, and an awful lot of people will pay a steep price for the Obama Administration’s fecklessness.
... Yes, I keep repeating this stuff. Because it bears repeating. In Iraq, Obama took a war that we had won at a considerable expense in lives and treasure, and threw it away for the callowest of political reasons. In Syria and Libya, he involved us in wars of choice without Congressional authorization, and proceeded to hand victories to the Islamists. Obama’s policy here has been a debacle of the first order ...
Those three debacles, all of which must be considered U.S. foreign policy failures, and all of which have been grossly under-reported in the establishment press as the failures they have objectively been, have created a horrible vacuum, and the Islamic State has moved in. The disaster in Syria has been especially damaging. Almost a half-million people have died in five years of civil war. That situation has led to the "refugee" problem which is bringing Europe to its knees and making it much easier for the Islamic State to move more of its adherents into Europe to spread terror throughout that continent.
Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and the Obama administration's foreign policy team are more responsible than anyone on earth for the rise of the Islamic State and the spread of its terrorism. Far from being the "scattered, stateless, terrorist organization" Marcotte wants us to believe it is, it is fast becoming a sophisticated, deadly worldwide menace.
As to her statement about Brussels being fine after all of this, what John Hayward had to say this morning about the future towards which Europe is currently heading would certainly apply to Brussels right now:
If this is indeed Brussels' future, Trump's contention that "Brussels was a beautiful place," in past tense, has some basis.
Oh, and by the way, Amanda, Brussels "survived" the Nazis because grown-ups who do not think and behave like Barack Obama and John Kerry — in other words, people who think and act like genuine adults — liberated it from the Nazis at a terrible cost in human life and treasure.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
