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August 07, 2007

Tancredo's Passion is Dangerous

CAIR is calling on GOP Presidential candidate Tom Tancredo to retract his statement of a few days ago to the effect that if he was President he would make it very clear to Islamic terrorists that if they dared nuke an American city, he would bomb Mecca and Medina, the holiest sites of Islam. Bay Buchanan, sister of Pat Buchanan and senior advisor to Tancredo, said, "This shows that we mean business." Mark Santora at the New York Times called Tancredo's statement a "tough stance," but a number of prominent Republicans are publicly criticizing him, for which CAIR is publicly thanking them.

Tommy Thompson said bombing holy sites and artifacts "would do nothing but unify one billion Muslims against us." Mike Huckabee said the idea was like something the Nazis would have done. Duncan Hunter disavowed the approach. State Dept. Spokesman Tom Casey called it "absolutely crazy" and State Dept. Spokesman Sean McCormack said it was "simply outrageous." Interestingly, Tancredo thinks all this opposition is a good thing and basically proves he is right.

Now Tancredo happens to be one of those hot-blooded, passionate people who leans just a tad in the fundamentalist extremist direction himself. I suspect he wouldn't mind in the least if we did engage in an overt religious world war between Christianity and Islam. After all, he has said that Islamic terrorism is "a dictate of their religion."

If one believes that another's religion itself dictates nuking an American city, then it's a very short leap of reason to advocate destroying the holy sites of that religion. As Tancredo's spokesman explained it, "We have an enemy with no uniform, no state, who looks like you and me and only emerges right before an attack. How do we go after someone like that? What is near and dear to them? They're willing to sacrifice everything in this world for the next one. What is the pressure point that would deter them from their murderous impulses?"

The cautious and rational response would, of course, be to find out why the terrorists are angry with us rather than assuming it is because they view us as infidel Christians and hate our freedom. Only if you understand what has them so angry can you be in a position to actually do something to either diffuse that anger or address it constructively.

But if you are, as Tancredo has proven himself to be for many years, a very emotional person who leaps passionately to conclusions and doesn't have one of those little common sense warning lights that goes off in your brain, you should not be making public policy because you will tend to escalate problems rather than solving them. This is particularly important when hundreds of thousands of lives, billions of dollars, and thousands of years of cultural and religious artifacts are at stake.

The public responds to the passion of people like Tom Tancredo, Ron Paul, and Mike Gravel. We like it when people say what we are feeling straight up. But that isn't what makes for a good leader. A good leader is one who can keep his or her blood cool in a crisis, make a careful decision based on the facts, and then clearly explain it to the public and win their support.

Posted by Becky at August 7, 2007 11:43 AM