You've all been in relationships before. Does this sound familiar? You come to a fork in a road (real or metaphorical) calling for a decision, and one person says "if we don't do it my way, disaster will ensue!" The other person thinks that the opposite choice is better, but can't so confidently predict doom, so the doomsayer gets his/her way.
I was in a bad relationship with Condoleezza Rice in September 2002 (from afar, as a mere citizen, I must add!) when she made one of these relationship-killing comments about going to war with Iraq to prevent Saddam from developing nukes:
There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.
She got her way, of course, as conservative doomsayers often do, so her prediction went untested. But when they don't get their way, they play an even nastier game: preparing to blame whatever happens on a failure to heed their warning.
So now they warn against trying KSM in New York, staking out political ground to capitalize on eventual disaster. It's disgusting. Let's call them out over it.
The most egregious examples of the genre, of course, are the religious prophets -- the Pat Robertsons saying that if we don't persecute gays and feminists enough God will send another hurricane to hit ... the South (?), or the Rod Parsleys who say that a failure to adopt ultraconservative (and preacher-enriching) policies will bring forth even wider divine retribution. But I'm not taking seriously those who speak, with whatever degree of bonkers, in the prophetic voice. My concern today is with the politicians who get taken seriously for making much the same move.
I want to compare the arguments not to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in New York City with the almost as absurd arguments that transferring the Guantanamo prisoners to rural Thomson Illinois creates dangers for the residents there. That "almost" is really important, because it hines a light on just how craven the Republicans are.
I, like Illinois Governor Pat Quinn and Senator Dick Durbin, think that moving the Guantanamo prisoners to the sleepy Illinois-Iowa border would be a good idea. It would help us heal the wound of Guantanamo itself and it would provide badly needed jobs to the local community. Now local Republican Don Manzullo says that the prison shouldn't receive the prisoners from Guantanamo because it might make Thomson and the rest of Carroll County a terrorist target. And, you know what? It might! Not a big one, in all likelihood, and we have no realistic worry about the accused terrorist prisoners breaking out and ravaging the countryside, but it is possible that some sympathizes might blow up a building or something in Thomson to make a symbolic point. Thomson does, in a minor way, become a target rather than a place that 99% of the country will never have thought about even once in their entire lives.
My answer to that is: sir, we impose dangers on communities all the time. We blow up their mountaintops, locate dangerous factories near them, we send our hazardous waste overseas, we put our military bases in places that guarantee a rousing prostitution and drug trade, and you're worried that someone's going to blow up a building or two? Grow up, sir. This is America, the people in your district, if they want the benefit of a federal prison nearby, have to accept a tiny bit of risk.
I don't, however, write to abuse Rep. Manzullo, because at least he has a viable theory. It's true that Thomson, Illinois -- both square miles of it -- becomes a potential target to an extent that it was not before; that's the price of being "on the map." He doesn't need to faint or gibber over it, but at least it's a theory.
Now, what have the Republicans like Rudy Giuliani have? Nothing.
Can they say with a straight face that New York City becomes more of a target because this trial takes place there? No. New York City is always and already a target. That's the price of living there. One gets used to it, even embraces it to an extent as a sign of one's toughness and savoir faire.
Might a bomb go off somewhere near (but probably not very near) the Federal Building downtown? Yes. That could happen every day. You want to take away tempting targets? Close Yankee Stadium, Broadway, Goldman Sachs, ya meatball. Rudy knows this stuff. He has no real theory of why New York City becomes that much worse off by holding a trial in the sunlight rather than in secret? So why is he saying this?
Well, for one thing, he likes the secrets. Rudy is a totalitarian, at his core -- a corrupt one, naturally, as the police who had to drive around Judy Nathan Giuliani and her friends on city time can attest -- and totalitarians like secret trials. But there's a worse reason, as I alluded to above:
Rudy Giuliani and people like him are just providing for the possibility that New York City does get attacked again, because if and when it happens they want to be able to blame it on the Democrats.
It's that simple, it's that easy, you don't have to look further for an explanation. They're buying a long call option to cash in in the event of a disaster. I won't say that they're hoping for disaster -- though I might not put it past some of them -- but they just want to be ready with the political PR if and when it comes.
It is disgusting. It is an outrage.
We on the Left, sometimes we can be on a hair trigger, but at least we generally worry about things that are real and that are not to our political advantage. Do we get to make political hay from warning about global warming and how it means that people may cut back on what they want to do? No we do not -- it's the people who promise that we don't need to make any lifestyle adjustments who are appealing to popular prejudice. Do we win the hearts of the fishing industry by saying "hey guys, if we don't regulate you now then you are going to run out of fish!" No -- they don't like to hear that at all -- until it's too late and their political community (and power) has dispersed.
But what the Republicans are doing is asking the public to sacrifice nothing of their own, to sacrifice other people's rights, and holding out the notion that if we don't agree to do so the "smoking gun" may be a terrorist attack on New York City.
If, God forbid, that day comes, you'll hear about nothing else on Fox (for a month), on the other cable channels (save for the usual few exceptions), and on the network and other broadcast news. We get hit and the Republicans win their bet -- and they know it. The truth about why such an attack would have come to New York -- that it was the continuation of the international blowback spurred on by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld's and Condoleezza Rice's threats of mushroom clouds -- is too subtle for these people, "old news," as if grudges don't last, and as if they themselves don't still try to tie policy failures back to Clinton, Carter, and beyond.
That's all we're seeing. It's not about policy, it's not about realistic fears, it's all about placing a bet that sometime down the line they will be able to say "I told you so," and then exchange their political winnings for some extra political power that they can use to help make things even worse, once more.
Well, I'll tell you this. If the Republicans ever take over Congress again, there will eventually be a major earthquake in California. Tens of thousands dead, interruption to commerce from Asia, threats to the food supply. Do the American people really want to risk that?
Well then you know what you have to do, don't you?