Author
This week: a fresh contrast in Opinion reflections on the Bush presidency and the Boston bombings and Islam in America.
Reflections on Bush Presidency
Snippets:
From the Right “...it is important to remember what a good man with a good heart George W. Bush is.
I know from personal experience. ...I recall an evening when a group of us was sitting in the common room outside the college dining hall after dinner and a fellow Yale student walked by who was known to be gay, but in those days was not “out.” Someone said some ugly homophobic slurs.
I didn’t like it, yet sat silently. But Bush snapped, saying something like 'Hey, knock it off. Why don’t you walk in his shoes awhile and feel what he feels?'" Lanny Davis, Fox News
From the Left "...Bush was warned in an intelligence briefing about the threat of terrorists flying planes into buildings in New York and treated these warnings with contempt.
Bush did receive these warnings. He did treat them with contempt. He did not take action that was called for. The rest is history. Perhaps Republicans obsessed with Benghazi might convene hearings about this.
After the attacks on September 11, 2001 Bush used those attacks to create fear and win votes and drive America to war in Iraq. It was an unwise war." Brent Budowsky, Huffington Post
See the stories here.
Boston Bombings and Islam in the US
Snippets:
From the Left "...radicalization does not happen to young people with a strong grounding in the American Muslim mainstream; increasingly, it happens online, and sometimes abroad, among the isolated and disaffected.
...what’s most obvious to anyone who has spent time in these [U.S.] communities is that whether they are devotional or educational, focused on the arts or on interfaith cooperation and activism, this mediating set of American Muslim institutions is keeping impressionable young Muslims from becoming radicalized.” Suhaib Webb and Scott Korb, The New York Times
From the Right “Now, in America, we have an untamed religion with calls for submission not tempered by the extra 600 years Christianity has had to temper, a liberalism that has left a cultural vacuum wherein many find themselves adrift looking to their own cultural connections to find their place in the world, and young Muslim men who, in that cultural vacuum, look not just to Islam, but an empowering Islam that can fill deep voids through demands for submission.
Boston is just the beginning." Erick Erickson, Fox News
See the stories here.