Former Governor Mike Huckabee, who I don't heart, believes that "most of us would think that a beheading is a far greater threat to an American than a sunburn.”
That's statistically disprovable, I am pretty damn sure. I myself have had +/- 100 sunburns over the course of my red-headed, freckled life, and exactly zero beheadings. A poll of all the people I have ever known personally would result in several sunburns for them and zero beheadings. All the people I know have some kind of SPF product in their medicine cabinets, and exactly zero things to prevent beheadings.
I am calling bullshit.
While it is true that Islamic extremism is very bad I will go out on a limb and say that the way we impact the environment and the way that the environment can impact us is way, way...badder. Take a look at this pretty picture:
Oil is spilling into the Yellowstone River. Into the Black Sea. Fracking wastewater is spilling in North Dakota. We are poisoning water we could use. We are spoiling our ocean ecosystems. We need to find better ways to do things. If Huckabee doesn't notice all the ways we're doing it wrong, sorry--he simply isn't right for president.
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And beyond that, can someone explain to me why a conflict 8000 miles away somehow represents a threat to the US? How is this supposed to work? We're paying attention - you don't get on a plane in Damascus or Baghdad or Riyadh or Tehran and fly, no matter in how roundabout a fashion, into the US without our having tracked that passport all the way.
Are Islamic terror attacks in the US impossible? Of course not. But there's no military action we can take in Iraq or Syria that can have ANY impact on their likelihood - other than to make them more likely.
Conflating the Syrian civil war and Islamic sectarian conflict with terror attacks on the US without some explanation of the mechanisms in place is ignorant.
And yet, we are getting dragged in to those conflicts, for reasons no better than what this drooling Neanderthal is offering up...
And there's the fun "either/or" aspect--as if one can't possibly care about climate change and terrorism, too. When, as I see it, replacing use of fossil fuels gives us less incentive to muck about in Middle Eastern affairs--a big driver in anti-Americanism. I view the two things as complementary.
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