Marco Rubio seizes on Hillary Clinton’s ’60s debate line to highlight

Just as the killing of Katherine Steinle in San Francisco turned the spotlight of the US politics onto immigration reform, Friday’s deadly terror attacks in Paris have redirected the focus of 2016 presidential race onto terrorism and the Islamic state.

Donald Trump blasted Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the other Democratic presidential candidates for not using the term “radical Islamic terrorism”.

JOHN DICKERSON: Secretary Clinton, you mentioned radical jihadist. I don’t think we at war with all Muslims. This is clearly an act of war, an attack on one of our North Atlantic Treaty Organisation allies, and we should invoke Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation agreement and bring everyone together to put together a coalition to confront this challenge. Have conservatives seriously convinced themselves that those who use “radical jihadists” will fail to keep them safe, while those who say “radical Muslims” are strategic geniuses? Do you agree with that characterization, radical Islam?

DICKERSON: Just quickly, do either of you, radical Islam, do either of you use that phrase?

If we had more of these planes – I know a few are flying out of Turkey – we should be requesting areas in Iraq. We should make women third-class citizens, that we should allow children to be sexually assaulted, that they are a danger to modern society. And led to the rise of Al Qaeda- and to- ISIS. We heard the president’s assistant, Ben Rhodes, say this is an act of war by isil and the U.S. Will have to be nimble in its response.

There’s real work to do when it comes to foreign policy, national security, and counter-terrorism. So, if this language, if you don’t call it by what it is, how can your approach be effective to the cause?

We are at war with violent extremism.

The Republicans have watched, and many of them have learned. Steve Schmidt, I was looking at the guest this morning and they’re mainly Republicans coming on. “That’s not American. That’s not who we are”. We’ve seen that as well used by the enemies of Israel on repeated occasions. After seven years in executive power, they are wedded to the policy premises of the Obama White House, but unaffected by their empirical outcomes.

But it can not be an American fight.

The reason for this is that Democrats are no longer a popular entity in the true sense of the term.

If the comparison seems silly, it’s simply a reflection of the state of the debate. And now, like never before, we need our Muslim American neighbors to stand up and to – and to be a part of this. A Democratic candidate for the Presidency can not.

Or, at least, she can not say that she shares that understanding. In order to fully comprehend the dynamic on stage at Saturday evening’s Democratic president debate, understand that every one of the aspirants on stage is wholly dependent upon an activist class that has spent most of the past year eradicating thoughtcrime and historical monuments in the summer, and then concocting moral crises to destroy academic institutions in the fall.

DICKERSON: Governor O’ Malley, you have been making the case when you talk about lack of forward vision, you’re essentially saying that Secretary Clinton lacks that vision and this critique matches up with this discussion of language. Instead, you profess allegiance to the lie.

What exactly would you do?

“They hate us because of our values”.