By Jonah Goldberg
Monday, September 19, 2016
As I’ve said many times — even if I haven’t always lived
up to it — one shouldn’t feel compelled to win the race to be wrong first.
Fast-breaking events often go in directions the pundits and the public don’t
expect when watching in real time. The silly kerfuffle over the weekend where
people attacked Trump for saying “bomb” but ignored Clinton saying “bombing” or
some such was ridiculous. That’s not to say presidential candidates — never
mind presidents — should get out over their skis during an emergency. But that
whole thing seemed overblown.
At the same time, presidents and politicians can be too
rhetorically cautious. Waiting days, months or years (as in the Fort Hood
shooting), to declare bloodshed a terrorist attack smacks of a deeper
ideological agenda.
Which brings me to Mayor Bill de Blasio’s reaction to the
bombing over the weekend in New York. While Governor Cuomo made it clear he
thought this was an “act of terrorism” the furthest Bill de Blasio was willing
to go (at least for a while) was to call it ”an intentional act.”
I love this. It made me think of Bender in The Breakfast Club explaining that
“screws fall out all the time, the world’s an imperfect place.” But, no this
wasn’t merely an example of the universe tending toward entropy and decay.
This, like the turtle on the fence post, was a result of human action.
On the merits, one could write an opening paragraph of a
report about de Blasio’s response thus: “Mayor Bill de Blasio has forthrightly
ruled out that the explosion in Chelsea was the result of random forces driving
the dust in the restless cosmos to converge in an unforeseen and unfortunate
way so as to cause an explosion. Human will, that great folly, was behind
this.”
I know I’m taking this way too far. But then again, we’ve
spent the last eight years hearing Democratic officials and experts telling us
that we should call terror attacks “man-caused disasters” and whatnot. This
kind of euphemizing is kind of fascinating when you think about it. First of
all, the word terrorism itself is a euphemism, devoid of much political
context. After all we are not at war with a tactic, but an ideology. But
“intentional act” is scrubbed even of terrorism’s negative connotations. There
is no ideological weight whatsoever to ”an intentional act” beyond the
distinction between human will and the cold material forces of an uncaring
universe. Something similar is true of “man-caused disaster,” though at least
we all agree “disasters” are bad. Intentional acts on the other hand, can be
good or bad. Giving a kid a piece of candy is an intentional act. So is blowing
up an orphanage.
So I’m trying to parse out how de Blasio and his crowd
see this stuff. A guy who spills Pepsi on the control board at a nuclear power
plant leading to a calamity is probably guilty of a “man-caused disaster” (so gender
normative!) but he’s not a terrorist (though he could be guilty of work-place
violence). I suppose, therefore, that “intentional act” ranks a notch above
“man-caused disaster” when that act leads to bad things? So if he spilled Pepsi
on the keyboard on purpose, that
would be an “intentional man-caused disaster.” And, if the guy spilling the
Pepsi to cause an intentional man-caused disaster was a white pro-gun
conservative? Well, that would be
terrorism.
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