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It's September 10th in America, and birds are singing as butterflies and rainbows color the sky...
My first question: where does Sept. 11 rank in the grand sweep of American history as a threat to national security? By my calculations it does not make the top tier of the list, which requires the threat to pose a serious challenge to the survival of the American republic.Sure, it was awful, but face it - subsequent events have proven it wasn't that big a deal. Those silly wars in the Middle East don't get consideration in this discussion. Real men walk away from fights. There have been no other attacks on US soil, so our responses obviously were a result of hot headed over reaction. And that, by the way, is just what the terrorists want - fearful. over. reaction. We played right into their hands.Here is my version of the top tier: the War for Independence, where defeat meant no United States of America; the War of 1812, when the national capital was burned to the ground; the Civil War, which threatened the survival of the Union; World War II, which represented a totalitarian threat to democracy and capitalism; the cold war, most specifically the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which made nuclear annihilation a distinct possibility.
Sept. 11 does not rise to that level of threat because, while it places lives and lifestyles at risk, it does not threaten the survival of the American republic, even though the terrorists would like us to believe so.
As we do by monitoring their terrorist communications - which is the real point of this column:
My second question is this: What does history tell us about our earlier responses to traumatic events?It's like that silly communist thing that collapsed under it's own weight. But not nearly as deadly as the Cuban missile crisis, which was an over reaction to that silly communist thing.My list of precedents for the Patriot Act and government wiretapping of American citizens would include the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, which allowed the federal government to close newspapers and deport foreigners during the "quasi-war" with France; the denial of habeas corpus during the Civil War, which permitted the pre-emptive arrest of suspected Southern sympathizers; the Red Scare of 1919, which emboldened the attorney general to round up leftist critics in the wake of the Russian Revolution; the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, which was justified on the grounds that their ancestry made them potential threats to national security; the McCarthy scare of the early 1950's, which used cold war anxieties to pursue a witch hunt against putative Communists in government, universities and the film industry.
The argument boils down to this: All those draconian measures we've taken to prevent another 9/11 have been proven useless - because there haven't been any more 9/11s!
By fighting them, we are losing. By fighting, we reveal our weakness. We only fight them out of fear, and fear is what they want. By killing them we make more of them. If we fight them, they win.
BECAUSE OF BUSH!!!!
Fearless Lefty bloggers weigh in here here and about 50 more here. But as a military guy/Iraq vet still stationed overseas and thus likely to have my every phone call home heard by Karl Rove I have DOUBLE ABSOLUTE MORAL AUTHORITY.
Oh how they must wish they were me.
Update: While I'm on a roll, now that we have DNA technology that could prove guilt or innocence conclusively, we must abolish the death penalty! I demand you take these arguments seriously!
