The Terrorists Among Us

When an extremist with a violent and irrational grudge against the U.S. government decides to crash a plane into an office building housing Federal agencies, killing a Federal official in the process, there is only one permissible response - immediate, outright and unequivocal condemnation.

Consider, then, the response of former nude model turned Republican Senator Scott Brown, recently elected to fill the seat of the late Ted Kennedy.  Interviewed on Fox News the afternoon of the recent incident in Austin, Texas, he had this to say:

"Well, it's certainly tragic and I feel for the families, obviously, that are being affected by it.  And I don't know if it's related, but I can just sense, not only in my own election but since being here in Washington, people are frustrated."  As his Fox host nodded sympathetically, Brown continued, "Certainly, no one likes paying taxes."

This is about as close as anyone in officialdom can appear to come, without saying so expressly, to endorsing a suicide bombing against an agency of the government they are sworn to uphold.  Others don't bother to mince their words.  White supremacist web forums are reportedly inundated with comments praising the attack and its perpetrator and a FaceBook page has been created in his honor.

So why are the Republicans, who have been all too quick to criticize the Obama Administration on the issue of homeland security, not at the forefront in condemning this latest act of terrorism?  Sadly, it's simple enough.  If the terrorist had been Muslim, dark-skinned and with one of those foreign-sounding names, Republicans would be berating the Administration for its failure to prevent the attack, demanding that those expressing sympathy with it be wire-tapped, or better yet arrested and waterboarded to find out whether they're planning anything similar.  But of course this wasn't a Muslim, a dark-skinned guy with a foreign-sounding name.  It was white, middle-aged Joe Stack from Texas.

And there are plenty more potential Joe Stacks out there.  We've all seen them on the news - demonstrating their "constitutional rights" by showing up to Presidential events with automatic weapons; parading around at the so-called Tea Party rallies with their virulent anti-Obama banners while pandering, vote-hungry Republicans like Senator Brown tell them they have a right to be frustrated, that Obama is destroying their America, that big government is taking away their freedoms and, darn it, we need to put a stop to it.

Some Republicans apparently can't resist the temptation to turn terrorism, and the deaths of innocent people, to their tawdry political advantage.  They repeatedly tell us that while Bush and Cheney's policies (torture, illegal wiretaps and the like) kept the country safe for eight years, Obama's "weakness" invites attacks.  (That should, of course, be eight years minus one day, but some Republicans, including the entire Cheney family, seem to have forgotten who was in charge on 9/11.)  That is contemptuous enough.  But when the Republican response to an act of domestic terrorism is to blame the Obama Administration for creating the climate of "frustration" that they insinuate gave rise to it, then they appear to be legitimizing and excusing terror.  That is beneath contempt, even by the grossly debased standards that govern political discourse in America these days.

I don't think for a moment that Senator Brown intended to condone terrorism.  He seems like a decent-enough type.  He simply isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer.  He apparently has yet to grasp that leadership requires he occasionally put down his Republican talking points, even when appearing on Fox News.

Brown has gone from Republican rising star to empty suit in a few brief weeks.  But for Republicans generally, the Austin suicide bombing should serve as a reminder that the threat of terror is not solely from Muslim extremists, and if they really believe in their so-called war on terror, they can make a very useful contribution to it by toning down their own provocative anti-Obama rhetoric and denouncing the extremist views of those on the fringes of the right-to-bear-arms and Tea Party crowd - even if it costs them a handful of votes this November.