It's always an enlightening experience to take a road trip and be left with little or no choice in trying to find disparate political discourse on talk radio.
While scanning in northwest Maryland, I came across Rush Limbaugh blathering on four separate AM channels. Bill O'reilly was spinning away on two others. Their topic of the day? The defense of incarceration and interrogation of "enemy combatants" down in Guantanamo Bay.
First of all, does anyone else find it ironic that we use the island of Cuba, one of the last vestiges of Communism, to hold individuals, uncharged, who were swept up in a vaguely defined war against an amorphorous enemy? Amorphorous in the sense that our government can change the identity from radical Islam-fascists to a secular leader who holds completely divergent views. With everything in between as fair game, it leaves the entire Arab and Muslim world in their sights.
O'Reilly repeatedly stated that those who are in support of the shuttering of Guantanomo just couldn't see the big picture. He claims that the great uninformed are comlpletely blind to the dangers being posed by those who mean us harm, whomever they may be. It matters little if they may have been innocently caught up in random sweeps, or even sold to their American captors as has been reported.
Torture is a-okay with O'Reilly because it saves thousands of American lives. In fact, he claims that the torture of one individual alone has been attributed with saving 10,000 lives. Say what? Where is his evidence of this beyond the word of one of the interrogator's superiors? If we would have put O'Reilly and the many other war shills in stress positions prior to the invasion of Iraq, how many lives could have been saved after they admitted it was all an ideologigal charade?
Speaking of ideologues, Frank Gaffney was on Washington Journal this morning showing support for Bush, Bolton, and his other neo-conservative cronies. Much like O'Reilly, he defended Gitmo and torture based on the premise that Democrats (his term for anyone opposed to the war)just don't have the bigger vision thing. Islamo-fascism is going to get all of us if we dont take the fight to them, although he was rather sketchy on just how Iraq fit into this premise.
The talking points these guys use are so easy to deconstruct if you just take more than 5 seconds to think about them. Here are a few examples:
- Clinton was for regime change in Iraq, so Bush's action is just an extension of existing policy. They fail to mention that Clinton was getting his intelligence from the same people (Tenet for example) who cooked the evidence to convince Americans to back the recent invasion.
- If we provide a timetable for leaving Iraq then the insurgents will wait for that date and rise up after we leave. Wouldn't the same theory apply if the insurgency stopped fighting and made it appear that they backed the new government? If Iraq were peaceful wouldn't it have been likely that we would have been asked to leave shortly after a government was in place? Wouldn't that provide an easier scenario to assume power than to try and expel a better trained and better equipped occupying force? Then ask yourself just who is the occupation benefitting? The answer can be found over at the Projectr for a New American Century.
- We're fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here. The thing about terrorism that they leave out in this possibility is that terrorists tend to choose the time and place of their actions. If they are not attacking us here it certainly has nothing to do with our improved security at home. Nearly all of the exposures (chemical plants, nuclear facilities,etc. are still as open to attack as they were prior than taking the fight to them in Iraq - a country who never orchestrated and attack on America.
It used to be the liberal elitists who were held out as the ones to be scorned for claiming to be superior to ordinary Americans. Now a new breed of elitism has reared its ugly head. It is the antithesis to Islam-fascism, and it should be properly called Ziono-fascism. Just listen to O'Reilly, Gaffney, Kagan, Feith, Perle, et al and their agenda is apparent. Seize the natural resources in the Middle East and let Allah sort out all them terrorists later.