To the Spoilers Goes the Victory
Although it will become a law that will eventually be struck down, the news tonight is that the Senate has passed a terrorism detainee bill by a 65-34 vote.
Which is somehow a defeat for the Bush Administration
The vote showed that Democrats believe that President Bush’s power to wield national security as a political issue is seriously diminished.
as well as a signal loss of all those rights and liberties that we Americans hold so dear.
This law will be overturned, of course, because it gives the President —and the Secretary of Defense!— the power to say who and who is not a terrorist. This is a dangerous power to give to the executive because, when we make him the Commander in Chief of the most powerful military on Earth, as well as the arbiter of a thousand different aspects of domestic policy, we are really saying that our trust in his judgement to determine who is trying to destroy us is conditional. It’s just so dangerous to give him the authority to call spades spades and pull the trigger.
The issue of habeas corpus is another reason why this thing will eventually be overturned. Americans want to deny terrorists the right to, you know, post bail and flee the jurisdiction; Democrats want to preserve the terrorists’ rights to use our legal system and the Geneva Conventions themselves —neither of which the Islamofascists even recognize or respect— to game us and make a mockery of our own right to self-preservation.
And it’s this that really pisses me off. Is it so that when we deny these mass murderers their alleged legal rights under our system of jurisprudence that we are somehow abrogating our own rights and are, in fact, lowering ourselves to their level by abandoning our ideals? That’s not a concern for me because I am not trying to murder innocent Americans or otherwise trying to destroy or undermine the government or the wider interests of the United States. If I were, then what possible right could I expect to the protections normally afforded by those I intend to harm?
Yeah, I know. The belief that treason exists is so old school —and the belief that we face real enemies who do not observe our laws is just an example of American intolerance.
