Just after MSNBC's Brian Williams reported that the man driving the truck was a 31-year old male known to local police as a petty criminal but not as a radicalized terrorist, Brian Williams hosted former CIA Director James Woolsey to share his thoughts about terrorism.
Terrorism, in the sense that BriWi means it, is an act of terror perpetrated by a person of Middle Eastern descent who follows Islam, and who is some kind of existential threat to everyone else. It doesn't especially matter whether the man in the truck is actually one of those. It is only enough to assume he is, which is why Williams brought on the calming presence of the former CIA director to help the audience understand this.
Williams opened his segment with Woolsey by quoting a friend of his, who texted him a question. "Any chance we can crank up the Manhattan project back up again?" Williams quoted.
No hyperbole there at all, right? Williams went on to say to Woolsey, "People are angry, and raw and wounded and I want to hear you out on what we're facing."
Okay, well, first of all, WE aren't facing anything other than a shared grief with the people of France right now. And yes, we're sad. But "raw and wounded" is how I feel when I see the Philando Castiles and Alton Sterlings murdered, to be honest. This act of mass murder in France just makes me profoundly sad for all of us. I don't pretend to be speaking for anyone but me, but come on. lay off the hyperbole, already.
Woolsey was all ready with his pat answer, which of course included the complaint that our president will not utter the magic incantation "radical Islam."
Next, the exaggerations. "ISIS is a theocratic totalitarian genocidal empire and it wants to be a bigger empire, a caliphate and have areas such as the places it used to completely control such as Spain and part of France."
Is he talking about 500 years ago? Because that's the last time I'm aware of any "caliphate" in Spain and France.
Remembering that a thing happened in France tonight, Woolsey went on to make it all about the United States instead. "And [ISIS] is just totally in favor of destroying us in every way that it can."
Woolsey continued down his path to the scold. "And we on the other hand are treating it sometimes sort of like a crime with all the procedural rights and so forth, that criminals have. And sometimes we regard it as more serious than that but the President won't call it a war, he won't say it's Muslim terrorists, there is just a disjunction between the seriousness and our response."
Just for the record, the President can't call it a war, because Congress won't declare it a war. It isn't like he didn't ask nicely a few times.
Staying true to his warmongering neocon ways, Woolsey concluded, "I thought 9-11 would end up being the Pearl Harbor in this, more or less, third World War. But it hasn't really turned out much that way. And we have a lot of things that we should do if we admit that we're at war. And we can win it, but we can't win it by fiddling around."
So, nukes then?
To summarize, the former warmongering CIA director whom BriWi identified as a Clinton administration official but who was really a Bush 41 holdover, is still warmongering about something that happened in France.
And did you notice that he, too, likened this series of desperate attacks by desperate thugs to World War III? They really, really want another one, don't they?
