Habu – as Democrats, Republicans and Independents say. We have to be right 100% of the time; they only have to get it right once.
Habu, I’m sorry, but since every US government official down to a local cop calling him or herself a “anti-terror hero” started spouting that brainless phrase off in 2003, I am continually awestruck at the arrogance and the vapidity and the dishonest appeal of “perfect safety” as possible with “perfect heroes” like Dubya keeping us all safe. Otherwise, they also said “The terrorists will have won!”
It’s a stupid slogan. We are at war with an intelligent, adaptive foe. They are pretty good at killing people. We will likely have minor to medium civilian casualties, and we are losing our ability to borrow 80-170 billion a year just to save a small number of lives when we need the funds put elsewhere after 8 years of Bush II disaster.
We are not perfect 100% of the time. Certainly not the DC idiots of the last 8 years, the local “1st Responder” or hero cop out banging some housewife.
We lose soldiers every day to them and likely will lose more civilians. It’s war.
The origin of the original phrase was by the IRA Provo terrorists. They were wrong. They were lucky several times and British soldiers and cops were less than perfect and hundreds of “precious” civilians died…The Provos lost the war. The criteria for victory and defeat was not “being lucky once”.
From the Belfast Telegraph It has become one of the great clichés of the presidential election, yet nobody seems to know that they are quoting the IRA.
It’s a phrase the American public has heard so many times this year it’s like an election year mantra.
It comes from the IRA’s Brighton bombing statement 20 years ago this month, in which it lamented not killing Margaret Thatcher.
“Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.”
The phrase re-emerged on a huge scale after 9/11, as terrorism experts were drafted in to conference after conference to explain why America needed to be better prepared for terrorist attack.
It was gradually picked up by the Bush administration and spread across the political spectrum, President Bush used it in the first debate with John Kerry, when advocated a renewal of the Patriot Act:
“The enemy only has to get lucky once, we must be right 100% of the time,” he said, paraphrasing the IRA’s spokesman, P O’Neill.
It is also a favourite of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who used it many, many times this year. In February 2005, he admitted he had no idea where it came from.
“This is a poor quote from somebody, and I forgot who said it, but somebody once said that “a defender has to be right every time, and an attacker, a terrorist, only has to be lucky once in a while.”
Of course we know how Bush II and his dear amigo Rummy fared on the matter of being “right, 100% of the time”.
