Isn't Christianity wonderful, folks?
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March 2, 2005
Welcome to the Bizarre World of Rep. Sam Johnson
Texas Republican Congressman: "Nuke Syria"
By JACKSON THOREAU
I covered Rep. Sam Johnson [R-Texas] when he first ran for Congress in
1991. He was so "honest" that he didn't even live in the district - he just
rented an apartment in the district to run.
That was technically legal, but many raised questions about him using a
loophole to run. I was one of the few reporters to write about that at the
time, but it didn't stop Johnson from winning the election.
Now, Johnson wants to kill everyone in Syria in one nuclear swoop, just
because he has some unproven notion that weapons of mass destruction are
being hidden there. That would include the relatives of my kids - who are
part Syrian. Not to mention, the nuke would probably take out much of the
Middle East, including Israel. And it would affect weather patterns and
cause cancer in surrounding areas for years, if not decades.
His chief of staff says Johnson doesn't really want to nuke Syria, but I
don't buy that. He has said this at least twice, including to a public
gathering in a speech in a church, no less, on Feb. 19, and privately to
Bush himself at the White House. Remember what Bush once tried to say:
"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame won't get fooled
again."
What's also sad is that many in the audience at the church applauded right
after Johnson said he wants to nuke Syria. In fact, "the crowd roared with
applause," according to a report in the non-partisan Roll Call publication
that covers Capitol Hill.
Here is the item with more details from Roll Call:
Now we know where Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Texas) thinks the weapons of mass
destruction are buried: in Syria, which he said he'd like to nuke to
smithereens.
Speaking at a veterans' celebration at Suncreek United Methodist Church
in Allen, Texas, on Feb. 19, Johnson told the crowd that he explained his
theory to President Bush and Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas) on the porch of the
White House one night. Johnson said he told the president that night,
"Syria is the problem. Syria is where those weapons of mass destruction
are, in my view. You know, I can fly an F-15, put two nukes on 'em and I'll
make one pass. We won't have to worry about Syria anymore."
The crowd roared with applause.
Johnson's remarks were captured on tape, which was played over the
phone for [Heard on the Hill]. While the audience audibly applauded
Johnson's remarks, a few members of the crowd did not. One person who lives
in the district and who attended the service said he was "shocked and
offended" by the Congressman's remarks.
Johnson's chief of staff, Cody Lusk, told HOH to keep in mind that the
Congressman was a fighter pilot in Korea and Vietnam. And he was a POW for
seven-and-a-half years. "Once a fighter pilot, always a fighter pilot,"
Lusk said.
He added that, the Congressman's comments aside, Johnson "obviously
does not believe" that nuking Syria is the answer to eliminating weapons of
mass destruction. "He was just speaking to a crowd of veterans," Lusk said.
What this Congressman said was worse than even conservative serial-killing
artist Ann Coulter saying, ""We need to execute people like John Walker
[the American Taliban] in order to physically intimidate liberals, by
making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise they will turn
out to be outright traitors."
It was worse than what conservative writer John Derbyshire penned, when he
more than hinted that Chelsea Clinton should be killed as an "enemy of the
state".
Johnson, a member of Congress with great power who is invited to
semi-private functions with Bush in the White House, at least twice called
for murdering hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of innocent people
just because he THINKS that country MIGHT be hiding those weapons of mass
destruction that our leaders LIED about to cajole us into a stupid invasion
of Iraq.
No liberal politician or writer I know has come so close to publicly
calling for the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent people or of
Bush's daughters or of conservatives in general.
Some conservatives, like Shawn Macomber, have tried to say liberals want to
kill conservatives. Macomber wrote in a "review" of the dark comedy "The
Last Supper" in the American Spectator last fall that the movie was an
"anthem" of the "left protest movement." He tried to use this fictional
movie to make a point that liberals supported killing conservatives.
But besides getting several facts of the movie wrong, such as how the
Limbaugh conservative got the last laugh by turning the tables on the
liberals, Macomber missed the point of the movie. The satire points out how
any system from any side can go corrupt and warns of totalitarianism and
taking things too far, from either the right or the left.
When I sent out Johnson's "nuke Syria" statement to various friends, family
members, media outlets and more, one conservative family member wrote back,
accusing me of being "biased" against Republicans. That's as if he was not
biased against Democrats when he mostly got his news by reading Free Nazi
Republic, a site that won't allow Americans like me to present a different
viewpoint. I wrote back saying I admitted to being biased against fascist
nazi right-wingers who are turning this country into the nazi Germany of
the modern era. And I won't stop being biased against them because I think
they are dangerous and so wrong that the only thing true patriotic
Americans can do is oppose them.
My conservative family member ended by saying he was "sure that any
well-educated person would not want to 'nuke' any body."
My response: "And when you mention well-educated people not wanting to
'nuke' anybody, you overlook how we did just that in 1945. And we are
supposedly educated in this country, though that is debatable."
Jackson Thoreau is a Washington, D.C.-area journalist.
http://www.counterpunch.org/thoreau03022005.html
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