Wednesday, February 03, 2010
Something else Barry will blame on Bush
There is something that I hadn’t thought about before reading this story, so all credit goes to Ace and James Taranto for the original concept.
Remember how Libtards were accusing Bush of “destroying the Constitution” with his War on Terror, since evolved into a “Police Action Against Man-Caused Disasters”?
Well, they got it exactly 180 degrees wrong. As usual. (If they were merely stupid, the laws of Probability state that they would be on the right side of issues more often. Their choices are deliberate.)
I’m just going to tease…
Obama, by refusing to admit any difference between trials of war criminal illegal combatants and citizen criminals, is accomplishing not one but two despicable outcomes.
The outcome he intends is to treat illegal combatants more sweetly and gently.
The outcome he doesn’t intend—but which he is engendering anyhow—is to treat citizen suspects with less constitutional rights than they’ve ever had in history.
Few judges will, say, demand that KSM be released into the public a free man due to the serious constitutional violations the government inflicted on him. Violations, that is, if you postulate from the outset he had full constitutional rights of a citizen criminal. If you don’t postulate that—if you postulate he was owed a lesser standard due to the fact he was an illegal combatant—then there weren’t any violations (or at least far fewer).
Now, if a judge won’t spring KSM for waterboarding—surely a “shock the conscience” bit of coercion if performed in a police station house—then a judge must necessarily bless it as permissible for a run-of-the-mill US citizen suspect, because that is, of course, [how] Obama categorizes KSM.
Assuming the judge does not want immediate calls for his impeachment, he will find some nonsense explanation as to why it’s okay to waterboard run-of-the-mill citizen suspects in some (rare) situations. Now, I don’t know if any judges will actually follow that precedent, but that precedent will be on the books. In some cases—the law is never very precise about what these cases are—it’s permissible for interrogators to strap a citizen suspect to a board and drip water into his mouth until he squeals about his confederates.
and
The point is: Either the government has the power to do something to a suspect or it does not. Either the Constitution forbids a certain practice or it does not.
Bush, the supposed idiot, established a bright-line distinction between citizen suspects and illegal combatants. Bush, the fascist cretin who couldn’t pronounce “nuclear,” set up an analytical structure wherein it was clear that citizen suspects were owed the full panoply of constitutional protections, and only terrorist illegal combatants were to be treated with lesser protections.
But Obama the Genius With the Nicely Creased Trousers has created a system wherein Mad Maxipad is sorta like me, as far as the law goes, and I, unfortunately, am sorta like him.
And instead of there being a bright-line distinction between us, I sort of have to trust that the Obama Administration will be restrained by its own conscience and judgment, because there isn’t any strong paper command about this any longer.
And how are they doing so far?
Well, gee: If Breitbart’s reportage is true, James O’Keefe was denied a lawyer for a full 28 hours.
Boy I sure feel a lot fucking safer knowing that my government is ready to treat me like a terrorist because they are too afraid to treat the actual fucking terrorists like terrorists. And maybe someone should point out to the “Constitutional Law Professor” that the Constitution is a contract, between the Federal Government and “We The People of the United States of America”. Nothing mentions citizens of other nations, nor those who are waging war against the US.
But Barry, in his zeal to let them Get Out Of Jail Free and back to killing Americans and other infidels, wants all of them released from Gitmo, and granted each and every one of the Constitutional protections that the Islamists are trying to take away from us (as a part of the process of converting to Shari’a Law under the Global Caliphate). Well done, Barry, you fucking moron.