Texas Republican Congressman calls for 'nuking' Syria Â-
including my kids' relatives
By Jackson Thoreau
www.OpEdNews.com
I covered Rep. Sam Johnson [R-Texas] when he first ran for Congress
in 1991. He was so "honest" that he didn't even live in the district
- he just rented an apartment in the district to run.
That was technically legal, but many raised questions about him
using a loophole to run. I was one of the few reporters to write
about that at the time, but it didn't stop Johnson from winning the
election.
Now, Johnson wants to kill everyone in Syria in one nuclear swoop,
just because he has some unproven notion that weapons of mass
destruction are being hidden there. That would include the relatives
of my kids - who are part Syrian. Not to mention, the nuke would
probably take out much of the Middle East, including Israel. And it
would affect weather patterns and cause cancer in surrounding areas
for years, if not decades.
His chief of staff says Johnson doesn't really want to nuke Syria,
but I don't buy that. He has said this at least twice, including to
a public gathering in a speech in a church, no less, on Feb. 19, and
privately to Bush himself at the White House. Remember what Bush
once tried to say: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame
Â- won't get fooled again."
What's also sad is that many in the audience at the church applauded
right after Johnson said he wants to nuke Syria. In fact, "the crowd
roared with applause," according to a report in the non-partisan
Roll Call publication that covers Capitol Hill.
Here is the item with more details from Roll Call:
Now we know where Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Texas) thinks the weapons of
mass destruction are buried: in Syria, which he said he'd like to
nuke to smithereens.
Speaking at a veterans' celebration at Suncreek United Methodist
Church in Allen, Texas, on Feb. 19, Johnson told the crowd that he
explained his theory to President Bush and Rep. Kay Granger
(R-Texas) on the porch of the White House one night. Johnson said he
told the president that night, "Syria is the problem. Syria is where
those weapons of mass destruction are, in my view. You know, I can
fly an F-15, put two nukes on 'em and I'll make one pass. We won't
have to worry about Syria anymore."
The crowd roared with applause.
Johnson's remarks were captured on tape, which was played over the
phone for [Heard on the Hill]. While the audience audibly applauded
Johnson's remarks, a few members of the crowd did not. One person
who lives in the district and who attended the service said he was
"shocked and offended" by the Congressman's remarks.
Johnson's chief of staff, Cody Lusk, told HOH to keep in mind that
the Congressman was a fighter pilot in Korea and Vietnam. And he was
a POW for seven-and-a-half years. "Once a fighter pilot, always a
fighter pilot," Lusk said.
He added that, the Congressman's comments aside, Johnson "obviously
does not believe" that nuking Syria is the answer to eliminating
weapons of mass destruction. "He was just speaking to a crowd of
veterans," Lusk said.
What this Congressman said was worse than even conservative
serial-killing artist Ann Coulter saying, ""We need to execute
people like John Walker [the American Taliban] in order to
physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can
be killed, too. Otherwise they will turn out to be outright
traitors."
It was worse than what conservative writer John Derbyshire penned,
when he more than hinted that Chelsea Clinton should be killed as an
"enemy of the state" [see http://www.nationalreview.com/derbyshire/derbyshire021501.shtml].
Johnson, a member of Congress with great power who is invited to
semi-private functions with Bush in the White House, at least twice
called for murdering hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of
innocent people just because he THINKS that country MIGHT be hiding
those weapons of mass destruction that our leaders LIED about to
cajole us into a stupid invasion of Iraq.
No liberal politician or writer I know has come so close to publicly
calling for the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent people
or of Bush's daughters or of conservatives in general.
Some conservatives, like Shawn Macomber, have tried to say liberals
want to kill conservatives. Macomber wrote in a "review" of the dark
comedy "The Last Supper" in the American Spectator last fall that
the movie was an "anthem" of the "left protest movement." He tried
to use this fictional movie to make a point that liberals supported
killing conservatives.
But besides getting several facts of the movie wrong, such as how
the Limbaugh conservative got the last laugh by turning the tables
on the liberals, Macomber missed the point of the movie. Like
Orwell's "Animal Farm," the satire points out how any system from
any side can go corrupt and warns of totalitarianism and taking
things too far, from either the right or the left.
When I sent out Johnson's "nuke Syria" statement to various friends,
family members, media outlets and more, one conservative family
member wrote back, accusing me of being "biased" against
Republicans. That's as if he was not biased against Democrats when
he mostly got his news by reading Free Nazi Republic, a site that
won't allow Americans like me to present a different viewpoint. I
wrote back saying I admitted to being biased against fascist nazi
right-wingers who are turning this country into the nazi Germany of
the modern era. And I won't stop being biased against them because I
think they are dangerous and so wrong that the only thing true
patriotic Americans can do is oppose them.
My conservative family member ended by saying he was "sure that any
well-educated person would not want to 'nuke' any body."
My response: "And when you mention well-educated people not wanting
to 'nuke' anybody, you overlook how we did just that in 1945. And we
are supposedly educated in this country, though that is debatable."
Jackson Thoreau, a Washington, D.C.-area journalist, contributed to
Big Bush Lies, published by RiverWood Books and available in
bookstores across the country. Thoreau's latest electronic book, The
Strange Death of the Woman Who Filed a Rape Lawsuit Against Bush &
Other Things the Bush Administration Doesn't Want You to Know, can
be read at http://www.geocities.com/jacksonthor/know.html. He can be
reached at jacksonthor@gmail.com or jacksonthor@yahoo.com.
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