I must admit, I had thought the days were over when Republicans could scare the bejeezus out of the citizenry (and force acquiescence from lily-livered Democrats) with bullshit tricks like “threat levels” and smoking gun/mushroom cloud demagoguery. But this week a USA Today/Gallup poll found that Americans now oppose closing the Guantanamo Bay prison by a 2-to-1 margin, and that even more Americans are afraid of Gitmo detainees being moved into prisons in their own states.
This spike in public pants-wetting comes in the wake of the recent 90-6 vote in the Senate forbidding President Obama from spending federal money to close Gitmo until he presents an acceptable plan for relocating the 240 detainees still held there. Democrats, cowed by GOP taunts and ever-fearful of the dreaded 30-second ad painting them as weak on national security, voted for the amendment in droves. And their feckless leader, Harry Reid, went so far as to pronounce that Democrats, like Republicans, would never agree to move the detainees into prisons onto American soil.
Even Obama has begun to backslide from the fortitude he displayed during the campaign, when he demanded that the detention regime (like other unconstitutional elements of Bush’s “war on terror”) be brought under the rule of law. Now Obama suggests that, despite the military’s inability to try and convict these detainees – either because the cases were flimsy to begin with, or because even military judges won’t convict a suspect based on evidence obtained via torture – our inhumane treatment has turned them into such monsters that we can’t afford to release them. After all, if we did they might become involved in the types of terrorist activity we can’t pin on them now! So we’re just going to continue holding them, without trial, until such time as … I don’t have a conclusion to that sentence, and apparently neither does the president. He’s also suggested that he’s willing to perpetuate the Bush Administration’s military commissions, continuing their perfect record: They’ve never secured a major conviction, nor have they once withstood a court challenge.
Simply put, Americans (and their elected representatives) have allowed their balls to retract so far into their pelvises that what was once convex is now concave. Eight years of the Bush Administration’s relentless fear-mongering has succeeded in turning us into a nation of pussies. (more…)
