The aftermath of the Times Square bombing attempt is providing a classic example of why a huge swath of the general public is fed up with our political and intellectual elites. It is a mistake to conflate this dissatisfaction with the willfully ignorant anti-elite/anti-intellectual sentiment that always exists on the fringes. This anger and frustration is targeted only at some elites and some legal intellectuals. In this case it's the ones who, for eight years now, have made a hash out of what should by now be a solid and common sense legal foundation for dealing with terrorism.
On the left, they have worked hard to blur the distinctions between the rights of US citizens and foreign terrorists under US law, and the protections for lawful combatants versus those whose very purpose spits on the Geneva Conventions. On the right, we've seen years of policy overreach, a lost opportunity to bring clarity to many legal issues, and the failure to establish a viable military commissions process. The left has worked hard to hobble the latter, but the Bush administration should have worked harder, faster, and smarter to get the job done.
And so now we seem to have a polarized political elite that on one side says everyone, US citizen and foreign terrorist alike, is entitled the protections of the US Constitution, and on the other says that no one is. It's ridiculous.
This is one more area where our political and intellectual elites in general have screwed up by resorting to gross partisanship and squishy legal theories that fly in the face of common sense. The US legal system is not theirs, it's ours, and it's time we take it back. We can do that by electing representatives who understand and are willing to defend the distinctions between US citizens and foreigners, between lawful and illegal combatants, and between the rights and protections that apply on US soil, and to whom, versus the rest of the world.
Eight years of hysteria, intellectual dishonesty, and incompetence have left us with what I fear will prove to be an ineffective legal system for combating terrorists. The danger here is that if or when the next successful attack occurs on US soil, those flaws will be exposed and an overreaction will erode our own civil liberties. We see glimmers of that today in the calls by some Republicans that Faisal Shahzad, a US citizen, should not have been Mirandized.
Republicans should be horrified at that. And Democrats should put away their smugness, they are doing more than their fair share in driving us off that cliff.
Enough.
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