Is NewsBusters concerned about my take on a new war?
Last Sunday I wrote the article “Reaction to France’s 9/11 in Paris is déjà vu” at DailyKOS.com. It is an important article pointing out that we could be making the same mistakes that led up to the war in Iraq. Just like we were led to that war on false premises then, the same apply to the current ramp up to yet another war.
The Right Wing Rag NewsBusters attempted to trivialize the premise of my article. They tend to stalk my articles every so often. I actually think it is a badge of honor. I will have a hard hitting one on the damage we do to our society and our security based on what we arbitrarily call terrorism. I hope my friends at NewsBusters will encourage their readers to check it out.
Tom Johnson sort of a rebuttal is titled “Daily Kos Writer: Republican Response to Paris Attacks ‘More Tragic’ Than Attacks Themselves.” He said the following.
Liberals sometimes say that law enforcement’s approach to the Mafia offers a model for how to deal with jihadists, even though the latter tend not to limit their demands to protection money. This past Sunday, Egberto Willies of Daily Kos claimed that if terrorist attacks were “treated as they should be, like organized crime, it would neuter ISIS. After all…the group is no more powerful than a large band of thugs with weapons.”
But crimefighting methods weren’t the main concern of Willies’s piece. Rather, it was his belief that “neocons” wish to exploit fear of terrorism in order to start a war which would “transfer wealth from the masses to the few owners of the defense industrial complex.” Willies also ranted that conservatives don’t take a back seat to Islamist fanatics when it comes to lethality: “America’s right-wing mass killers and gang bangers have killed more people in the West than ISIS has.”
Johnson then went on to quote other sections of the piece by highlighing what he must have considered objectionable. Read the article and Tom’s piece and let me know what you think.