Sunday evening on Bruce DuMont’s “Beyond the Beltway” nationally syndicated radio talk show broadcast from Chicago (and its flagship station WLS-AM 890), the country got a taste of the “new political discourse” emanating from Camp Barack Obama.
The roundtable discussion moderated by former NBC sports anchor Tom Shaer, filling in for the vacationing DuMont, featured a journalism professor from Columbia College in Chicago, Democrat strategist Pete Giangreco, and yours truly.
Giangreco is a hired consultant for the Obama campaign and his firm has been retained by Obama to do the campaign’s direct mail, as he mentioned on the show. Giangreco did direct mail work for John Edwards in 2004 and previously worked for Team Clinton as well.
Early into the first hour as a discussion about the War on Terror in Iraq was underway, a 92-year-old D-Day veteran called in to share his belief in the expansionist nature of radical Islamic jihadists to such an extent that he feared forthcoming attacks on American soil.
From there, Tom Shaer offered his take on the threat posed by radical Islam and summarily turned the discussion over for the panelists’ views.
Here, Pete Giangreco offered the following,
“There are multiple threats from within this country and some of them, you know, do come from the sources that you are taking about (radical Islam). But, you know, Muslims didn’t blow up the building in Oklahoma City or send anthrax through the mail. Those were, you know, some of Dan’s (referring to me) people here, unfortunately, political extremists. They were right-wingers.”
Welcome to Barack Obama’s fairytale land where there are no such things as “blue Americans” and “red Americans”, there are just “Americans” - unless, of course, you disagree with them, and then you are a terrorist.
In the “new politics” we are promised from the Obama campaign, there is evidently no distinction between Timothy McVeigh and William F. Buckley - they are just a couple of “right-wingers”.
But there is something disturbing in addition to the slanderous content of Giangreco’s statement.
Giangreco’s apparent belief - and remember, this is a campaign professional who is advising a leading contender for President of the United States - that a couple of deranged killers is comparable in scale to a global network of terrorists recruiting from a population of one billion Muslims is bereft of any even tangential connection to the reality of the world today.
To compare the Oklahoma City bombers to Islamofacists when discussing the threat of terrorist activity in the U.S. is so intellectually vacuous that it would be deserving of dismissive ridicule were the topic not so serious.
The slanderous aspect of Giangreco’s statement is insulting. The ignorance of it is frightening.
