Like many of us, Michael Barone is puzzled by the administration’s obvious attempts to avoid linking Islam with the terrorists who have attempted to attack us. He wonders:
Why the reluctance to state the obvious truth, that we are under attack from terrorists motivated by a radical form of Islam?
Whether “lone wolf” or “one-off” or members of a terrorist group, to most Americans recognize they have one thing in common, they are motivated by their religion. The argument can be made that their version doesn’t coincide with the version most Muslims believe in, however that only adds “radical form of” in front of the word “Islam”
So why the reluctance by the administration and much of the left to admit what everyone else has already figured out?
Barone has a fairly interesting theory:
My theory is that these well-intentioned folk see the American people as a howling mob. They think that if Americans find out that Islamists are attacking us, they will go out and slaughter innocent Muslims. They think that Americans are incapable of understanding the simple truth that while most terrorists are Islamists, the large majority of Muslims
are not terrorists.
Now before you start laughing, think for a moment. Which group has been treated as more of a threat by the left than the other – Islamic radicals or … the Tea Parties? Which has received the lion’s share of the left’s vituperation? Demonization? Immediate blame for the Times Square fizzle? As Barone points out, the theory holds some water and it explains some things which, frankly, have seemed inexplicable without it:
The howling mob theory explains a lot of otherwise puzzling things. It helps to explain why Janet Napolitano’s Homeland Security Department, tasked with finding possible terrorists, set about tracking disgruntled military veterans and gun owners. Just the kind of people who turn into a howling mob!
It helps to explain journalists’ desperate search for racist epithets at Tea Party gatherings — and their lack of interest in the actual violence that has been common at rallies against the Arizona immigration
law and antiwar marches. It helps to explain the Justice Department’s decision to drop the case against the New Black Panthers who were violently intimidating voters in Philadelphia on Election Day.
It helps to explain why Solicitor General Elena Kagan was willing to work in the Clinton White House after Bill Clinton signed the law banning open gays in the military — a law Kagan has said she detests. Hey, he was just trying to propitiate the howling mob.
Or said another way – you folks in between the left coast and the Northeast are just violence prone rubes who can’t be trusted with the truth. “Bitter clingers” I believe is the alternate descriptive phrase. Or Tea Partiers. And, in fact, Barone also notes a variant to the “howling mob” theory:
As it became obvious that the Democrats’ health care bills and the Obama big government programs were opposed by most Americans, some liberals resorted to a variant of the howling mob theory: Americans were against these programs because they didn’t like having a black president. This despite the fact that Obama was elected by the largest percentage margin in the last 20 years.
Heh, he’s right – it does explain a lot. It also explains why an otherwise intelligent person like Eric Holder, who (mistakenly I think) called Americans cowards for supposedly not facing the truth about race can’t bring himself to face the truth about the terrorism with which we’re faced. And while Americans are disgusted with the refusal to name the enemy. Meanwhile
the usual suspects are celebrating our cowardice.
~McQ
The theory of the “Howling Mob”
“an otherwise intelligent person like Eric Holder”
Sorry, McQ, I must take issue with this. I see little evidence that Holder is much other than a classic affirmative action baby, i.e., someone promoted beyond his abilities by virtue of the color of his skin. Holder’s most recent pronunciations include what you have noted above, as well as denunciations of the Arizona law which, upon reflection, he admits he has not read.
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Please do not tell me that you think he’s intelligent merely because he’s AG (or because of where he went to school); is there much evidence that he’s competent in any basic way to perform his job? Terror trials in New York, anyone? Also, when did it become the job of the AG to tell us we’re “cowards?”
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p.s. When the Eric Holders of the world tell us that they want an open conversation about race, the law of unintended consequences is sure to follow. Real talk about race on the left is almost nonexistent to the point of epistemic closure. What he means is he wants carte blanche to lecture us on how racist we all are.
I think it’s also consistent with the broader belief that they don’t see the masses as adults. Hence also the paternalism.
There may be something to that “howling mob” theory. Remember how, after 9/11, innocent muslims across the country were being assaulted by angry mobs of Americans, in retaliation for the terror attacks?
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Wait… that didn’t happen? Oh, never mind.
Well, shortly after 9/11, a fathead in Mesa, AZ shot and killed a Sikh convenience store clerk, mistaking him for an Arab.
He now sits on death row in the state pen in Florance, AZ. Jury deliberation time: 2 1/2 hours.
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The Vanguard of the Proletariat always thinks the proletariat lacks the necessary knowledge and awareness of its own best interests (they are too dumb). Thus the Vanguard, being more educated and aware, must advance the cause of the proles in spite of themselves, even if this means forcing them to do what they do not wish to do.
It’s really quite easy to understand if you have the correct revolutionary outlook. Of course you bourgeois capitalists can’t see it. Being a member of the Vanguard requires a deep spiritual (not religious, of course) commitment to the good of the great unwashed masses and an altruistic willingness to accept the burdens of leadership  even if it means suffering insults and derision from you ignorant right-wing ideologues.
If you would only commit yourself to a serious study of political science (yes, it is scientific) and development of your spirituality (not religion, of course)the scales might fall from your eyes and you too could rid yourself of the bad engrams of bourgeois capitalism  and become an enlightened thetan of the vanguard.
Since I am such a spiritual and profoundly educated person (as opposed to those who disagree with me) I understand and forgive you in advance for the scurrilous abuse you will no doubt heap upon me for collapsing that house of cards you call a logical, unbiased and objective argument.Â
Power to the People!
Right on!
For the Children!
you forgot to say, “Stop Laughing!” and “I decree it!”
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This all “projection”
Most Progressives don’t know or have any conservative friends, so they are forced to imagine what their scruff friends, who did all those anti-war marches and groupied with the “Dead,” Uriah Heep & Marilyn Manson, would do if a conservative politician got them all worked up.
It’s a load of crap. If the “howling mob” didn’t go off on muslims following 9/11 (hint: WE DIDN’T) then I’m pretty sure we’re not the threats they say we are.
My theory is that it’s a question of what the libs, especially those in the regime, see as an “existential threat”. If we believe their rhetoric from the past several years, they simply don’t see Muslim terrorists in that light. However, they must assuredly DO see an angry, politicially-engaged right as an existential threat to their phony-baloney jobs and possibly their personal liberty: how long would Charlie Rangle be walking around a free man with Republicans in charge of the Congress? Or Tax Cheat Timmy? How long with JaNo last if she was subject to very detailed, very public grillings over her performance as SecDHS? For that matter, how long would Imeme last if there was a Congress inclined to seriously examine such issues as the Sestak bribery, his links to ACORN and SEIU, his involvement with Goldman-Sachs and BP, his appointees, etc? Think of how the dems investigated and threatened to investigate Bush and Co.: they know very well the power of a Congressional investigation, and they also know that, unlike their jihad against the Bushies, there’s actually quite a lot of dirt to be dug up on Imeme and his gang. They are also very aware that the Tea Parties aren’t interested in just returning good ol’ boy incumbents to office, people who are “collegial” (and have their own skeletons): as we’ve seen in Utah, the Tea Party people are interested in putting fresh blood into Congress, people who are outraged about how DC works and are very interested in cleaning house.
The democrats are trash, and like all trash, they fear most being throw out. So, if I was one of them (yuck), I’d be far, far more afraid of “the angry mob” than of some yahoos with car bombs.
Yahoos with car bombs provide a rallying point that even the mob will get behind, Republican or Democrat, elite or flyover. They know that too.
Or said another way – you folks in between the left coast and the Northeast are just violence prone rubes who can’t be trusted with the truth
>>> Except we had the disgraceful spectacle of Nanny Bloomberg who - upon being informed that it in fact was not Tea Partiers but Muslims who tried to set a car bomb in Times Sq.- basically scolding New Yorkers not to go all hate-crime on Muslims as well. Â
These idiots think EVERYONE except them is the howling mob.  Our political betters in action.