← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · TexasAnarch
Thread ID: 14443 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2004-07-05
2004-07-05 16:49 | User Profile
William Safire, that's who. Prepare to let your jaw drop. folks. (Title line from the late 30's movie classic "Freaks").
[url]http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/05/opinion/05SAFI.html[/url]
July 5, 2004 OP-ED COLUMNIST Rights of Terror Suspects By WILLIAM SAFIRE
ARPERS FERRY, W.Va. ââ¬â "Misadvised by a frustrated and panic-stricken attorney general, a president of the United States has just assumed what amounts to dictatorial power to jail or execute aliens."
So wrote a purpling libertarian kook on Nov. 15, 2001, the day after President Bush issued an executive order cracking down on suspected terrorist captives. "At a time when even liberals are debating the ethics of torture of suspects," this soft-on-terror wimp went on, "weighing the distaste for barbarism against the need to save innocent lives ââ¬â it's time for conservative iconoclasts and card-carrying hard-liners to stand up for American values."
They did not, of course; hard-line commentators dismissed the wimp as a "professional hysteric" akin to "antebellum Southern belles suffering the vapors." Attorney General John Ashcroft said such diatribes "aid terrorists."
..... Liberals, in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib and now with Supreme Court restraints on executive power, are piling on. It's safe; civil liberty is suddenly in vogue, at least until the next terror strike. That's why the bosoms of Bush critics are now heaving in hypocritical hyperventilation. But where were they on Nov. 15, 2001, when due process needed them? In spider holes all their own. .... There's a lesson, too, for conservatives and other hard-liners: Libertarians are not to be despised even when infuriatingly contrarian. Remember our Jeremiah-like presence in your ranks on the privacy issue when you demand a national ID, or when you hamstring embryonic stem-cell research, or when you make a show of festooning the Constitution with a marriage amendment.
Why do I fear no libel suit from that wimpish professional hysteric, that antebellum Southern belle suffering the vapors, that aider of terrorists? Because I'm him. (It's uncool to say I told you so, but I have not had many chances to say it lately.) .......
Comments. So Safire will be the hysterical antibellum Southern belle suffering with the vapors, for us. Ain't that just too sweet.
He finds the only figure in the case evoking human empathy and identifies. He is a Jew, after all.
It may or may not be cool, but he lies, double double time, with the "I told you so". As if he opposed the war -- or had not known of torture-intensive dimension of intelligence-counterintelligence warfare. He, personally, may not have had knowledge of the Israeli torture template used at Abu Ghraig (hoods, genital shocks, sexual degredations, religious defamations) but you can see he is sensitive to the issue. It might, in fact, be just what is needed to wrench the truth out of him and Arik if we can get them under control.
They, of course, would have been head cheerleaders in the war on liberals if any had dared stood up and shouted "Bush is preparing to violate humanity, decency, Christianity, American dignity and respect!" -- the way a rapist would one of those hysterical Southern broads -- calling them wimps, soft-on-terrorism, snakebit with self-hatred as liberals are, infecting others with their weakness.
Not only that: -but deficient in character: wishy-washy flip-floppers, just now getting to what non-neocon conservatives were saying all along. (he must impose imself between the anti-war groups to keep Israel from coming into the focus of the cross hairs, which is what would happen if they ever got together)
One is reminded of Jesus' teaching about the beam and the mote. The beam in the Jew's eye is the actual objective situation they have created by tricking America to go for a war they already knew was unwillable, because it wasn't a war. The mote they would extract from liberal's eye is their inconsistency, which they at least might recognize and admit. Not the beam projector: they absolutize the relative and seal the logical dismemberment of truth in blood. They cannot see themselves, but must make everyone see the world their way, or die.
"Therefore the wisdom of God also said. "I will send them prophets and apostles, and some of them they will kill and persecute. "that the blood of all the prophets which was shed from the foundatino of the world may be required of this generatin. 'from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zachariah who perished between the altar and the temple. Yes, I say unto you, it shall be required of this generation. "Woe unto you lawyers! For you have taken away the key tol knowledge. You did not enter in yourselves, and those who were entering in you hindered." (Luke 11.49f)