Politics & Power Quote by Randy Neugebauer

Neugebauer’s line is built to turn an abstract, endless conflict into a simple home-address question: do you want danger “there” or “here”? It’s a rhetorical trap dressed up as common sense. By posing only two options, the quote collapses a complicated post-9/11 security debate into a binary that flatters the listener’s instinct for self-preservation, then labels that instinct “the right choice.” The argument isn’t just about strategy; it’s about moral sorting.

The key phrase is “where they are,” a deceptively tidy locator that smuggles in a whole worldview. “They” suggests a coherent, geographically fixed enemy, as if terrorism were a nation with borders rather than a tactic, a network, and a set of grievances that mutate under pressure. The line also implies that overseas military action is a form of domestic defense, converting foreign intervention into a kind of perimeter fence. That framing launders the ethical and financial costs of war by presenting them as the price of keeping the homeland intact.

The subtext is political triage: skepticism about military action becomes indistinguishable from willingness to invite an attack. It’s a message tailored for an era when “support the troops” functioned as an all-purpose credential and “homeland security” language saturated campaign messaging. Neugebauer isn’t offering a plan so much as a posture - one that treats distance as safety and certainty as leadership, even when the underlying conflict refuses both.