"See, if I'm President, I got probably another 50-60 thousand with orders to shoot on sight anybody violating curfews. Shoot them on sight. That's me... President O'Reilly... Curfew in Ramadi, seven o'clock at night. You're on the street? You're dead. I shoot you right between the eyes. Ok? That's how I run that country. Just like Saddam ran it. Saddam didn't have explosions - he didn't have bombers. Did he?
............................
Not long ago I was only appalled by this kind of faux tough guy talk.
Now it fascinates me.
When a faux tough guy shouts O'Reilly-style nonsense he's trying to sell an audience on two, closely linked ideas:
* I'm a bad-ass
* I see things realistically, unlike my weak-minded critics
Ironically, without fail, it's the tough guy rhetoric that's a flight of fancy.
For example...
A 'shoot to kill' curfew policy in Ramadi would not only be cruel and barbaric, it would also be extraordinarily difficult to enforce because skillful and truly tough-minded jihadists, militias, guerrillas and assorted criminals are well armed, combat tested and ready to return fire.
The death squad maneuver is much trickier to pull off in a place where rival death squads freely roam.
But fabulists such as O'Reilly are incapable of taking such down-to-earth strategic considerations (never mind the moral problems) into account when they spew.
There are episodes of Star Trek that are more useful.
.d.
--------- They say evil prevails if good men do nothing. What they should say is, evil prevails.
Lord of War