OPINION - Shields and Brooks 11/20/2015

"Shields and Brooks on how Paris changed the political debate" PBS NewsHour 11/20/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks join Judy Woodruff to discuss the week’s news, including the political and psychological aftermath of the Paris attacks, 2016 candidates speak out on the refugee crisis and fighting the Islamic State, plus reassessing President Obama’s strategy in Syria.

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  And to the analysis of Shields and Brooks.  That’s syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Welcome, gentlemen.

So, this entire week, we have spent looking at what happened in Paris.

My question is, David, has this — what has this done here in the United States?  Are we now in some kind of new normal, as we were after 9/11?

DAVID BROOKS, New York Times:  I think what ISIS has done psychologically is, it’s like a drug, you have to take more of it to get the effect.

And so their malevolence, their viciousness, their violence, they have ratcheted up a level.  And they started doing that from the first moment we became conscious of them, with the beheadings, with setting people on fire, and then this killing.

And while they haven’t achieved the super al-Qaida 9/11, they have created a more menacing atmosphere, I think, in this country, certainly in Europe and around the world, in Nigeria, Boko Haram.  And so I think there is a sense of living with violence.

And so I think about Israel, with, whatever you think of Middle East policy, the citizens there live with violence.  And you adjust in some ways, you develop rituals in some ways, but it preys on the consciousness in a lot of complicated ways.  And I think we’re now more or less in that world.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  How do you feel it has changed things?

MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated columnist:  I don’t think it compares with 9/11; 9/11 was a profound traumatic experience in this nation.

And just in the reaction, I think that there’s — you can see what 14 years of conflict has done, and 14 years of being at war has done, as well as what ISIS has done.  Fourteen years ago, when the United States suffered the greatest infliction of loss of life on its own soil in our history, the President of the United States, George W. Bush, visited a mosque.  He said, Islam are our friends.  These are — the people who do this are traitors to their faith, and we must remind and remember that.

He looked like Abraham Lincoln, compared to the reaction of politicians in this city, and particularly in Lisa Desjardins’ piece tonight, which was small, petty, vengeful, un-American, unserious and irresponsible.