Posted by
Grampus on Friday, November 17, 2006 2:19:52 PM
This is an issue that I have often wondered about...why aren't our legislators mentioning anything about the seriousness of the fight we are engaged in with Islam? If Boehner's attitude is representative of our other legislators...we as a nation should be very alarmed.
Yesterday the blogosphere’s series of interviews with the leadership candidates for the Republican House Conference came to a close.
The last member to walk into our virtual interrogation center was John Boehner, a candidate for minority leader.
When asked about reading blogs...I expected an answer of Powerline or Instapundit, etc., however, as with the three previous candidates...he answered none, instead, he leaves that to his staff and then reads their briefs. As was the case with three previous conference call attendees, I asked Boehner this question:
What books have you read about Islamic terrorism against America and the West?
None of the three were able to name a single book. Boehner followed suit, saying that he had read books on the subject but that he couldn't’t give me any names.
The questioner then fired off a follow up: From where does the congressman get his news? Boehner told us that he gets his news mostly from the newspapers.
When you think about it, Boehner’s series of answers regarding his reading habits and the insight we’ve received regarding other members’ reading habits (or lack thereof) can help us make sense of a lot of things.
Now imagine if you didn’t read blogs and didn’t read books. Picture all the things that you know now that you wouldn’t know if you left your news gathering to the tender mercies of the mainstream media’s editorial decisions. You’d probably be unaware of the ghastly fate that awaits 200 French automobiles each evening at the hands of rampaging “youths.” You’d definitely be unaware of the youths’ affiliation with certain religious practices.
If all your news came from newspapers, you wouldn’t understand how numerous, determined and flat-out crazy our enemies are. You wouldn’t know how widespread the phenomenon of Radical Islam is because the New York Times, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal don’t report it. Every now and then you would stumble over an editorial or op-ed piece highlighting a particularly pathological incident, but you would have no concept of how massive the problem is.
AND THIS IS WHERE WE CLOSE THE LOOP. I’ve long wondered how our leaders can be so uninformed about the fight we’re in given the existential stakes. Now I get it – they just don’t understand the stakes. The newspapers haven’t told them that we’re in a fight for our lives. Lord knows the intelligence agencies don’t get it. And now we know the congressmen themselves take either no or precious little initiative to educate themselves.
So on the left you get relentless partisanship because they don’t understand that there are larger issues involved. On the right you get mantra-like chanting of “We must win in Iraq” but with little understanding of how the battle in Iraq fits in with the greater war. This explains why we haven’t heard a single one of our leaders offer a vision of how we’re going to not only “win” in Iraq but how we’re also going to “win” in Iran, Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, etc. They do not grasp the size of our challenge.
So what to do? If our congressmen have no interest in educating themselves, we must take it upon ourselves to do it for them. For too long our congressmen have been victims of the soft bigotry of low expectations. We’ve allowed them to skate by kissing babies and appearing on Hannity & Colmes without insisting that they actually bring themselves up to speed on the most pressing issue of our day.
Grampus