Santorum calls Obama “weak” for apologizing for burnt Qurans

Rick Santorum

You know, I’d love it if I could understand the bizarre notion held by Republicans that apologizing somehow indicates “weakness” and that it’s something so utterly beneath the U.S. President:

Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum criticized President Barack Obama's apology for the burning of Qurans in Afghanistan, adding that Afghanistan should apologize to the U.S. for the deaths of four U.S. soldiers during six days of violence sparked by the incident.

"There was nothing deliberately done wrong here," Santorum said Sunday on ABC's "This Week". "This was something that happened as a mistake. Killing Americans in uniform is not a mistake. It was something that deliberate."

More than 30 people have been killed in clashes since it emerged Tuesday that copies of the Muslim holy book and other religious materials had been thrown into a fire pit used to burn garbage at Bagram Air Field, a large U.S. base north of Kabul. Protesters angry over Quran burnings by American troops lobbed grenades Sunday at a U.S. base in northern Afghanistan and clashed with police and troops in a day of violence that left seven international troops wounded and two Afghans dead.

The fact that reactionary Islamists act like a bunch of barbarians at the slightest provocation, while deplorable, is nothing new. But whatever might be said about the necessity for apologizing for burnt copies of a stupid holy book, it was unquestionably the decent and diplomatic thing for the Commander-in-Chief to do in this situation and any other like it. That’s what mature and reasonable people do when they or others in their charge screw up: “Sorry, honest mistake, won’t happen again.” It doesn’t translate to defending the violence from the usual fanatics, but simply taking responsibility for an error, especially on the international scene. Nothing could possibly be more uncontroversial.

Unless you’re a demagogue on the war path in the electoral season, of course. (Or a Republican, which always seems to compound the issue.) And better yet is this typical display of hypocrisy:

"The response needs to be apologized for by (President Hamid) Karzai and the Afghan people for attacking and killing our men and women in uniform and overreacting to this inadvertent mistake," Santorum said on NBC's "Meet the Press". "That is the real crime here, not what our soldiers did."

So because what some Afghan nuts did is worse than what some U.S. soldiers did, the Afghanistan leader should apologize instead. How very GLaDOS-like of him. “We both said a lot of things that you’re going to regret.”

Again: Yes, the U.S. soldiers simply made a mistake (if you can even call it that – as far as I know, Qurans burn just like any other garbage); it’s not exactly like the recent corpse-pissing incident, here. And the insane (albeit exasperatingly predictable) reaction from reactionary Islamists is absolutely unconscionable. But the need to apologize for an offense rendered, especially in the interest of not sounding like a dick on the international political stage, does not disappear simply because it was all an accident, or even because a bunch of thugs went apeshit over it. Two people who offend each other don’t then play Rock-Paper-Scissors to decide who gets to apologize for the wrongs they or their underlings caused. It’s absurd to think that expressing regret for a mistake is somehow “weak” just because people do bad things to you, too.

Yet sadly, this sort of fourth-grade-level illogic and bravado is entirely representative of the state of affairs currently permeating the Republican Party and its current batch of wannabes.

Tags: Rick Santorum • Barack Obama • Republicans • GOP • Quran • Islam • soldiers