Ryan Grim: Being 'Hard' Or 'Soft' On Terror Doesn't Make Sense

Ryan Grim: Being 'Hard' Or 'Soft' On Terror Doesn't Make Sense
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HuffPost's Ryan Grim was on MSNBC Tuesday to discuss, along with conservative journalist Jamie Weinstein, whether Obama is "soft on terror."

"I kind of had this naive hope we were done with the 'soft on terrorism/hard on terrorism' idea," said Grim. "Because what we're talking about is a network of ideologues who want to attack the United States. How do you be hard or soft against something like that?"

The idea that a policy is either "soft" or "hard on terror" presupposes that being "hard" is necessarily the way to "win." Therefore, it also assumes that anybody who doesn't advocate being "hard on terror" must, by definition, want to "lose," whatever that might mean.

"The Yemen government the other day bombed a village and said it killed two Al Qaeda operatives," said Grim. "It turned out that there was two civilians and one of them was a child. Is that being hard on terrorism? Because they used, you know, adult weapons and blew things up? Does that count as hard?"

The rest of the clip is dedicated to a shouting match between David Shuster, Tamron Hall and Weinstein over whether Obama has made the United States "less safe."

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