How Successful Will The Rightists Be In Exploiting Parisian Tragedy For Their Own Career Objectives?

No one was surprised when Marine Le Pen, the head of France's Front National, the country's neo-Nazi party, sought to exploit the terrorist attack on Paris Friday night to gain partisan advantage in next month's regional elections. "France and the French are no longer safe. It is my duty to tell you so," she said at a press conference hours after the attacks. Her racist, xenophobic party is anti Muslim, anti-EU, anti-humanity-- you know... right-wing. She campaigning on closing France's borders permanently and, although she says she merely wants to crush "Islamic extremism," no one doubts her definition of Islamic extremism doesn't include all Muslims. Sounding like a cross between Ben Carson and Trumpy, she accused unnamed countries of having "benevolent" relationships with radical Islam and "ambiguous" ties with terrorist groups.

"Whatever the European Union might say, it is essential that France recover the control of its national borders, once and for all," she said. "Without borders, neither security nor protection are possible."

Ms. Le Pen also said France had suffered a "programmed collapse" of its security and defense capacities, and that it needed to strengthen its military and police forces.

"Finally, fundamentalist Islam must be wiped out," she said. "France must ban Islamist organizations, close radical mosques, and kick out foreigners who are preaching hatred on our soil, as well as illegal immigrants who have nothing to do here."

She said that people who are members of Islamist movements and who have dual citizenship-- from France and another nation--  should have their French citizenship taken away and should be banned from French territory.

Sound vaguely familiar? America's right-wing politicians were immediately out to turn the tragedy into a useful weapon they could use for their own advantage-- an anti-immigrant and pro-NRA shit fest. One particularly deranged Trump surrogate, Ann Coulter, went off on a trademark vicious twitter binge against Muslims, immigrants, Rubio, gun control, France and, of course, for Trump. At his rally in Texas less than two hours ago, Trump, predictably, reminded his followers that France has tough gun control laws and that "if they had guns... it would have been a much, much different situation."

And, among the Deep Bench, it was not just a freak-show like Trump fanning the flames by tweeting about bombing oil fields while hostages were still being shot. Huckabee was shrieking about closing the U.S. borders. Jeb Bush was on the air with Hate Talk Radio host Hugh Hewitt whining that Obama hasn't been spying on people enough. "The conversation on the periphery of the presidential debate needs to be upgraded as well about what the role of the NSA is. What is our counterintelligence capabilities? How do we identify attacks before they happen? What's the balance between our own civil liberties and keeping us safe? That-- we need to have another conversation about that, because I think we have diminished our capabilities at the wrong time."

Although the wormy Rubio blocks DWT from his Twitter feed-- petrified because we've talked about the cocaine parties, prostitutes and free-flowing lobbyist money at his and Rivera's Tallahassee party house-- this is typical of his half dozen exploitative tweets about the tragedy in Paris:

Dr. Ben was at the Sunshine Summit in Orlando and warned the audience that the attacks in Paris "reminds us that there are those out there who have a thirst for innocent blood in an attempt to spread their philosophy and their will across this globe." He was soon calling for American "boots on the ground" and whining about Obama. Yesterday Ted Cruz was at a Tony Perkins Hate Fest in Greenville, South Carolina-- ironically called Defend Religious Liberty, which is all about defending their own liberty to impose their own doctrine on other people, and is especially anti-Muslim. Friday night he issued a statement that read, in part:

We need to immediately declare a halt to any plans to bring refugees that may have been infiltrated by ISIS to the United States. We need to redouble our efforts to prevent ISIS agents from penetrating our nation by other means.

“Such steps, however, are defensive reactions to an enemy that will continue to try to attack us until they succeed once again. We must immediately recognize that our enemy is not ‘violent extremism.’ It is the radical Islamism that has declared jihad against the west. It will not be appeased by outreach or declarations of tolerance. It will not be deterred by targeted airstrikes with zero tolerance for civilian casualties, when the terrorists have such utter disregard for innocent life. We must make it crystal clear that affiliation with ISIS and related terrorist groups brings with it the undying enmity of America-- that it is, in effect, signing your own death warrant.”

Cruz was on Fox this morning trying to scare their moron viewers that the tragedy in Paris will be repeated right here in America (if they don't elect him). Cruz, however, recognizes who his real enemy is-- not ISIS, but Rubio and at his appearance at the thing in Orlando, the Canadian-born Cubano-- a dual citizen until a few months ago-- not only was calling for restrictions on legal immigration, he was trying to tie Rubio's immigration agenda to support for radical jihadi terrorism. No, really... he went there.

Cruz did not detail any plans to handle the cases of the roughly 11 million people in the country illegally. But he heightened an attack on Mr. Rubio’s past efforts to forge a bill in the Senate to overhaul the immigration system, repeatedly assailing those who support “amnesty” for undocumented immigrants by suggesting, among other things, that the approach would help Democrats at the ballot box.

“If you’re supporting amnesty, you’re supporting the Obama-Clinton weakness and appeasement to radical Islamic terrorism,” Mr. Cruz told an often raucous crowd at a large church rally here. “If you are supporting amnesty, you’re supporting the Ayatollah Khamenei having nuclear weapons in Iran.”

...In recent days, Mr. Cruz has reminded voters that Mr. Rubio was one of the “Gang of Eight” senators from both parties who supported the immigration overhaul, which included a path to citizenship but was never enacted. He accused the Florida senator of “trying to jam this amnesty down the American people’s throats.”

Worth remembering, when Cruz attacks the Gang of 8 as traitors, he's not just attacking his main target, Rubio, but also Republican senators Jeff Flake, John McCain and Lindsey Graham. Their bill passed the Senate with votes from 14 Republican senators: besides the 4 from the Gang of 8-- Lisa Murkowski (AK), Mark Kirk (IL), Susan Collins (ME), Dean Heller (NV), Kelly Ayotte (NH), temporary Christie appointee Jeffrey Chiesa (NJ), John Hoeven (ND), Lamar Alexander (TN), Bob Corker (TN) and Orrin Hatch (UT).

Meanwhile, what's important for all the presidential candidates to address is how they will really protect American citizens without dragging us into endless wars. Wouldn't we all like to see candidates rejecting exploitation of nativist bigotry and Islamophobia? And wouldn't we all like to see which candidates have the courage to embrace a defense of civil liberties at this difficult time-- the civil liberties that tend to get trampled by McCarthyite politicians like Ted Cruz? It will be interesting and enlightening to see how Hillary and Bernie handle these issues at the Democratic debate tonight. And how does a sane political leader talk about such a horrible event like what happened in Paris last night? Watch one:




UPDATE: Democratic Debate At 6PM, PT

Hopefully Bernie will reiterate in tonight's debate that he-- unlike Hillary and the other hawks running for president from the other party-- opposed Bush's warrantless attack on Iraq that led to this entire mess, which has gotten us nowhere but deeper into debt and caused tens of thousands of deaths, over and above last night's tragedy in Paris.