Surprisingly, the liberals want a fight for the future of America over the issue of national security. In their world there is no war, simply crimes to fight in court. In their world we cannot monitor communications from people who are willing to die to kill as many of us as possible. We must protect the terrorists’ rights to plan and execute deadly attacks once they have crossed our borders.
The left is West Wing, the rest of want something like 24. The liberals are for the Gorelick Wall that ensures we will not be able to stop a future 9-11 attack, since they are desperate to pretend 9-11 changed nothing.
The NY Times is crowing about the results of their leaking of classified material and the fact we now will fight the future in the courts.Defense lawyers in some of the country’s biggest terrorism cases say they plan to bring legal challenges to determine whether the National Security Agency used illegal wiretaps against several dozen Muslim men tied to Al Qaeda.
The lawyers said in interviews that they wanted to learn whether the men were monitored by the agency and, if so, whether the government withheld critical information or misled judges and defense lawyers about how and why the men were singled out.
The NY Times is expecting to put terrorists back on the street again. And they seem giddy about it
AJ has been all over the story of the NSA leak and FISA (see here and here) and he has even theorized that the leaker may be the FISA Judge who "quit in protest" from the FISA court (did he really quit? Because he has been unusually quiet about it....).
ShrinkWrapped pursues the story from the psychological perspective and exposes the motives of both the Democrat opportunists as well as the "civil liberties absolutists" and their different quests:
The opportunistic Democrats need to hold onto their power; they need the fawning MSM elites to confirm their conviction that they are smarter and better than their opponents, and they are often willing to do anything to regain that power, even if it damages their country and harms other people.
The civil liberties absolutists, on the other hand, present a more complicated scenario. They are much more like my young female patient. They insist that the world should be the way they want it to be, and further, try to force others to collude with them in imagining the world is the way they wish. If they win one victory, they need to escalate; this is the logic of the pursuit of perfection. Thus, if the administration agrees to allow lawyers to visit inmates in Guantanamo, they cannot be satisfied, but then must escalate to demanding full rights of access to the American legal system. If they ever were to become successful at getting people to agree with them, their logic insists that the West effectively disarm; we must stop all NSA intercepts, stop monitoring Mosques and other locations, and maintain the inviolability of personal privacy from any government intrusion. Because their true demands are so extreme, they can only face marginalization by pressing their agenda; further, if they truly cared about civil liberties, they would find a way to compromise because the greatest risk to civil liberties would be posed by a second attack on the scale of 9/11 or worse. Were such an attack to occur, all notions of acceptable limits of governmental intrusion would be jettisoned, with the agreement of the vast majority of the American people. In either case, whether they win or lose the current argument, they ultimately must lose.
What is a reasonable person to make of this suicidal clash of perspectives? The Democrats and the Left have long since gone around the bend in demonstrating over and over again that they will do anything--even to the point of putting the entire nation at risk--to destroy Bush and get revenge on the Republicans. They have committed themselves to this goal above freedom; above reason; above the lives of their fellow Americans. For them, there is no compromise--there is only the destruction of their enemy -- Bush.
If only they could direct some of that fierce single-mindedness toward fighting the country's true enemy--you know, the ones that are trying to destroy America and western civilization? The ones that killed 3000 Americans on 9/11? The ones that DAILY state the goal of destroying America and the eradicating our culture by any means possible?
But that would require insight and a willingness to examine their own motivations--and the revelations that would result are unacceptable to their self-concept.
ShrinkWrapped's essay is an appeal to the more reasonable civil libertarians (of which I count myself) who have justifiable legal arguments regarding the potential loss of civil rights as we fight the war on terror. The pursuit of the kind of "perfection" in civil liberties is folly in a time of war. We have appropriate checks and balances and the powers to intrude on indivdidual rights ebb and flow from one branch to the other, depending on the nation's needs. Most of the time, it seems to me, that the legislative and judicial branches are the ones who are far too intrusive and blind to the civil rights implications of their actions.
It would be optimal if this hysteria were brought down to a reasonable level and discussed with the reality of the Islamofascists and their international collaborators in mind. The Democrats and the Left have long since abandoned reason and wholeheartedly embraced hysteria and self-delusion; but those of us who have our eyes open and our vision unimpaired clearly see the suicidal and self-destructive implications of adopting their talking points.
As AJ says, if it is a war they want, bring it on. We will just have to gird our [intellectual] loins and fight the insurgents, dead-enders and terrorist-enablers here at home. I hope that someday, when the Democratic leadership faces the consequences of their behavior and the complete irrelevance of their opportunistic ideology; that they come to appreciate how they were the authors of their own self-destruction.
Always assuming, of course, that they haven't dragged the rest of us down with them.
UPDATE: In case you have forgotten the attitude of the Islamic fanatics we are dealing with, Solomon2 gives us a revealing glimpse of these moral monsters and the casual indifference they display about killing those who don't believe as they do. You can ignore this kind of rhetoric and its call for mass murder only at your peril.
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