Jane Norton’s lurid Web video about winning the war on terror has upset Democrats, they will tell you, but the video is more curious than outrageous. Republicans such as Norton understandably object to the Obama administration’s reluctance to call a terrorist a terrorist and a jihadist a jihadist, yet that’s not why elections have been breaking their way.
Together with political independents, Republicans have been spurred by worries about federal spending, deficits and debt, job losses, corporate bailouts, and economic insecurity. All of the polling says so.
But winning the war on terror? What does that even mean after nearly nine years in Afghanistan? For that matter, does anyone seriously believe the likes of Major Nidal Malik Hasan won’t still be shouting “Allahu Akbar” before a murderous rampage 10 or 20 years from now?
“First they tried to close Guantanamo,” Norton, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, intones above an ominously throbbing soundtrack. “Then they said jihadists had the right to remain silent. Now President Obama has renamed our war on terror the ‘overseas contingency operation.’ Contingency operation? The liberals in Washington seem to have forgotten. [Sound of aircraft in background, perhaps evoking 9/11.] But we haven’t. Let’s win the war on terror.”
Actually, the Obama administration hasn’t forgotten the war on terror so much as sought to narrow its scope, rename it, sterilize it of terms such as “jihadist” and downplay or deny its origins in radical Islam.
After Hasan’s rampage at Fort Hood, for example, the president cautioned the nation that “we cannot fully know what leads a man to do such a thing,” even though by then we absolutely did. And Attorney General Eric Holder’s reluctance to admit to the House Judiciary Committee this year that “radical Islam” might have motivated three recent terrorist attacks is one of the more infuriating videos you will ever see.
Yet the story is more complicated than Norton’s unvarnished tale of appeasement, since the president has not only doubled down in Afghanistan, he’s also authorized a string of successful missile attacks on al-Qaeda at a pace exceeding that of his predecessor.
And while Norton is correct that Obama’s FBI has offered would-be terrorists such as the Christmas airplane bomber and the Times Square bomber the right to remain silent, the latter happened to be a U.S. citizen. Some of us who are perfectly comfortable calling a jihadist a jihadist still believe that all citizens, even the evil ones, possess the same constitutional rights.
“I like Jane Norton. I like her a lot,” Rep. Joe Rice, D-Littleton, told me, but added that he was “offended” by the ad. Rice, who’s spent more than two years serving with the Army in Iraq and plans to return there next year, argues that the administration’s “increasing shift to counterinsurgency is an attempt to get at radical Islam in a very targeted way . . . . We can disagree about nation building but the Obama administration is at least resourcing it in a way the Bush administration was not willing to do it in Afghanistan. That’s frankly the discussion we ought to be having.”
Well, that’s certainly part of the discussion we should be having. But of course, Norton’s video — which is highlighted on her home page — has a more practical purpose: to appeal to hard-core conservatives in a year in which she is seen by some as suspiciously soft because of her association in 2008 with John McCain.
That’s why, at a time when Coloradans are focused on jobs, government spending and debt, Norton’s revamped campaign website now has the feel of 2002 or ’03, with its mantra of winning the war on terror. Given its highly partisan content, it’s no wonder Democrats are offended. The more interesting question is whether members of the other party will be impressed.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
