In today’s Daily Progress, they’ve talked with Laurence Verga about his remarks about President Obama:
Laurence Verga, one of the seven Republicans hoping to unseat U.S. Rep. Tom Perriello, D-Ivy, has clarified recent remarks that he said have been “mischaracterized as racist.”
[…]
On Tuesday, Verga released a statement with an unedited transcript of his remarks at the debate. The transcript, he said, shows he meant that Obama’s foreign policy is “political correctness run awry” because it is too soft on terrorism.
[…]In Verga’s statement clarifying the remarks, he said the full transcript of his comments show he meant that political correctness has damaged the nation’s ability to fight “global war against jihad.”
To consider the veracity of his defense, let’s look at the text of his remarks, in the context in which he’s saying that they need to be placed:
The biggest threat to our country right now is ourselves. Not the people in this room, but the people that voted the current administration in are the biggest threats. And what that is, is political correctness run awry. We are in a war. There is a global jihad against the United States of America. This jihad wants to take away our freedom. They don’t like our freedom, they don’t like our religion, they don’t like anything about us. And what we need to do is stand up, forget the political correctness and fight this war. To win this war. And make sure that Americans on our soil and internationally are secure.
He goes on a little longer, about Israel and Iran.
Reading this over, one sees Verga’s trouble. He’s making two separate statements. The first is about politics:
The biggest threat to our country right now is ourselves. Not the people in this room, but the people that voted the current administration in are the biggest threats. And what that is, is political correctness run awry.
And the second is about war:
We are in a war. There is a global jihad against the United States of America. This jihad wants to take away our freedom. They don’t like our freedom, they don’t like our religion, they don’t like anything about us. And what we need to do is stand up, forget the political correctness and fight this war. And make sure that Americans on our soil and internationally are secure.
These are two barely related thoughts. The first is the patently stupid assertion that a majority of Americans hate America, led by the president, and that electing him is “political correctness run awry.” The second is the usual pap that terrorists hate us because they “don’t like our freedom,” that we have to “stand up” and “fight this war.”
Now, we’re fighting precisely as many wars as when George Bush was president, Guantanamo is open for business, the Patriot Act remains the law of the land, etc. Unless he’s advocating that we invade a third country, I can’t understand what he’s promoting here.
Verga’s difficulty here is that he’s claiming that his prior statement encompassed—beforehand—the seemingly unrelated one that he made a minute later. By way of comparison, imagine that he said this:
You can tell that President Obama is on the side of terrorists because of his race. We are in a war. There is a global jihad against the United States of America. This jihad wants to take away our freedom. They don’t like our freedom, they don’t like our religion, they don’t like anything about us. And what we need to do is stand up, forget the political races and fight this war. And make sure that Americans on our soil and internationally are secure.
Imagine that Verga said that, and then said “golly, I didn’t mean the president’s race, I was talking about political races, as I mentioned a minute later.” Yeah. Bullshit.
We’re left with two possibilities here. The first is that Laurence Verga was attacking President Obama along racial lines. The second is that Laurence Verga is perhaps the most incompetent public speaker that has ever graced a stage in the Fifth District, who made a gaffe of stunning proportions. I don’t know the man, I don’t know his character (other than that he’s publicly accused me of being the biggest threat to America’s national security), and so I figure it’s theoretically possible that he’s just accidentally said something enormously stupid. I think the evidence supports pretty strongly that he’s racist, but not being psychic, I can’t know his heart.
Best case, Verga (along with Jim McKelvey) merely accused half of the district’s voters of being America’s worst enemies. Worse case, he did that and he’s racist. Either way, with Bradley Rees out of the race, Verga’s now my man for the nomination. Whether racist or incompetent, this is definitely the guy I’d like to have as the face of Fifth District Republicans.
Not in many Republican minds, which is the mind from which he is speaking. For the most part, I don’t agree with the Cheney attacks on the Obama administration’s national security record, but you’d have to agree that it is a much parroted idea in conservative circles that the political correctness of the Obama administration is causing them to be soft on terrorism vis a vis Guantanamo, torture, etc, etc.
So while that connection might not be logical for a liberal mind (or my mind), it’s a very common thought among conservatives. Thus it seems probable that he was honestly connecting those thoughts.
Hey Waldo, your former favorite Bradley Rees is calling you out for calling Verga out. http://bit.ly/cyVVH3
Any rhetoric about Obama being somehow soft on terrorism has long since been disproven. The Taliban HATE Obama. They hate him more than they ever hated Bush. Obama upped the use of drones way beyond what Bush had allowed, which has resulted in Taliban fighters living in a constant state of fear and paranoia. The Taliban would trade Obama back for Bush as an opponent in a heartbeat.
Obama has increased the number of troops and the amount of resources devoted to the war in Afghanistan against the perpetrators of 9/11. He authorized the biggest offensives against Taliban strongholds since the initial invasion. Dude has been an extremely strong President on foreign affairs and defense.
Don’t confuse them with the facts Jack! This is about losing their grip on power and the fear that Obama just may at some point decide to pull the sheet off of the Bush Administration corpse.
Jack, I kind of want to clarify because…well, it’s actually kind of important to our military strategy: the Rules of Engagement (ROE) is incredibly tight on the use of Predator drones as missile platforms. There were proposals made late last year which might have lead to an increased reliance on these platforms. Most of these proposals were backed by Vice President Joe Biden, who perceived our strategic interest in the region to be limited solely to disrupting AQ and the Taliban’s leadership structure. Fortunately (in my opinion) his office lost that debate. We rely upon strategic presence now much more than UAVs and missiles.
Recent changes made since Obama took over dictate that missiles cannot be used unless any physical structures nearby are verified to be vacant of noncombatants. A similar rule existed during the Bush administration, but the level of proof required has changed significantly. A few years ago, if a drone operator didn’t see evidence of noncombatants at the time of engagement, this was considered sufficient to prove that the risk of civilian casualties was low, at which point the target would be prosecuted. Current ROE, by contrast, requires a much more strident verification before any aerial attacks can be initiated.
Tighter ROE should not be misconstrued as being soft on the people at the other end of the missile’s flight path, however: because modern COIN doctrine is population-centric, the tactical application of any weapon that results in civilian casualties within the population we’re trying to secure is in direct contradiction to our military strategy. Furthermore, while we’ve decreased our reliance upon drones, we have compensated by finding other tactical solutions: for example, readers may recall a recent SEAL team operation in Somalia that was directed at a high-value AQ organizer when we received intelligence that he was in transit and away from population centers. While ordinarily this sort of situation would have been solved with a Tomahawk or a Predator just four short years ago, the Obama DoD has recently remembered that for all of the smart weapons in our arsenal, the smartest of all is a highly-trained rifleman.
During the Bush administration it was widely accepted that the Afghan civilian should assume a greater preponderance of risk than the US infantryman, leading to more aerial operations and more civilian casualties. The Obama administration recognizes that not only is this kind of a dick move — the preponderance of risk should always be born by the combatants and not the noncombatants — increasing the risk to the civilian population undermines our cause, which is why I want to clarify that we are actually doing as much as possible to avoid civilian casualties w/r/t drones and any other tactical solution.