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June 30, 2006

The smell of fear in rightydom

Now that the Supreme Court has smacked down W's power grab on detainees, the righties have gone absolutely postal:

The liberals must be doing cart wheels right about now. They wanted the terrorists who chop off the heads of our captured soldiers, who bomb innocent people on purpose, who fly planes into buildings containing thousands of civilians, to be treated as POW’s. They received their wish today.

WELCOME BACK 9/10/01. (Don’t cite me as coming up with that one, saw it on a blog)

The court has decided that the war on terror will now go back to being treated as a “law enforcement” issue. Lets go get Bin Laden and put him in front of a jury of his peers….I know, ludicrous.

Ah yes. Law enforcement. We can't actually go after individuals who commit heinous acts that the world community finds illegal using tried and true investigation tactics. Then the righties wouldn't get to do the jackbooted thug bit. And they do look so fetching in their brown shirts and snappy jackboot accessories.

Not to mention that law enforcement is actually proved to work against terrorism. Bill Clinton demonstrated that when he brought the perps of the first World Trade Center bombing to justice.

Imagine that. Bringing them to justice instead of allowing them to remain on the loose and still planning acts of terror. All of a sudden that "jury of his peers" thing doesn't seem so ludicrous for Bin Laden after all.

But the real weenie of the rightysphere on this issue is Jeff Goldstein who appears to be sitting in a puddle of his own piss:

In fact, we may have just witnessed the SCOTUS overreach that loses us the war.

and

I don’t wish to sound too conspiratorial here, but it seems to me that a case can be made that under Lederman’s reading of this decision, we’ve now effectively empowered an alliance between the intelligence community and the press to determine our national security posture by setting up an atmosphere wherein leaks will be even more effective and more coveted by partisans who disagree with a given administration.

Beyond that, though, granting Geneva Convention protections to out of uniform combatants who hide among civilian populations completely devalues the Convention itself, and renders being a signatory a liability rather than a protection (beyond that, the judiciary has made us a de facto signatory to Protocol 1 by judicial fiat—which may be reason enough for Bush to refuse to honor the ruling; any lawyers want to comment?). By turning the Conventions into a moral judgment rather than a pragmatic treaty agreement, a SCOTUS majority has in one fell swoop destroyed the very nature of treaties as such. In this case, the US has assumed that “moral authority” Andrew Sullivan is after by SCOTUS fiat—but in order to reach that point, the Court had to essentially advocate for leveling the playing field between us and the terrorists, who are not required to sign onto the treaty in order to receive the protections granted by and through the treaty.

Jeezus. Why do these guys have to be such chickenshit assholes?

The idea that the United States of America should treat prisoners humanely is completely beyond the reach of Goldstein. He sincerely cannot fathom the idea that we're better than terrorists.

His entire post is predicated on the foundation of retribution because he's so damn scared. He's a coward--unwilling to hold on to principles of decency because it doesn't assuage his fear.

He's terrified of terrorists. Which means of course that the terrorists are doing their job.

Posted by Carla at June 30, 2006 06:21 AM