Calvin Rees’ DemoOkie

Remember 4 years or so when the Republican line was “Bush has kept us safe since 911 - no successful domestic attacks since then”? I had a libertarian friend who used to follow it up with, “Yes, and this pencil keeps me safe from Tigers. Haven’t been mauled once while carrying it.”

Well, the new GOP line is that on the terrorism front we are all horribly unsafe now that they don’t hold the presidency, and Obama is just lucky.

Now, when I was a wee soccer player of about 12 I thought I was hot stuff as a defender. I remember marking a guy one game who managed to get a perfectly placed pass past me, take a shot from an incredibly difficult angle that I let him have, and put it in. Total luck. When he did the exact same thing to me a second time, it was clearly total luck again. Then he did it a third time. At first I got POed that anybody could be so damn lucky. Then I saw him start to do it a fourth time, and decided luck or not, I’d better not give him the shot.

Ever since then I don’t believe in luck. There is no such thing. You make your own “luck” in this world. If you put yourself in the right spot and take enough shots, some will go in. There’s perhaps chance involved, but positioning yourself to take advantage of chance is what skill is all about.

Obama is doing a lot to make us safer now. The absolute top is improving our image around the world. Not only does that take the wind of out terrorist sails, it makes foreign intelligence and law enforcement more willing to cooperate with ours. In addition, he’s stopped the Bush torture policy, and gone back to the FBI’s proven interrogation techniques. During the previous administration suspects would just throw any name they knew at their interrogators to make the torture stop. Then we’d go pull in that poor sap and the vicious cycle of torture would start all over again, with no gain whatsoever for America.

The FBI’s real interrogation techniques don’t make for very gripping TV. Jack Bauer wouldn’t look like much of a hero by offering deals to suspects, or just sitting down and having friendly conversations with them. But it works. This means on those occasions when chance does throw a bone our way (eg: we capture a failed bomber), we are doing all the right things to get the maximum advantage out of the situation. We are getting names, training camp locations, you name it. Rather than taking out our pound of flesh on suspects, we can instead roll up some more of those people and get even more information. And we can get good information out of these contacts for years.

The proper response to the Republican luck angle here is, “The more Democrats we elect, the luckier we get.”

Filed under: Editorial, MuleSkinner