Figure It Out

This week the Supreme Court decided that the law of habeus corpus applied to detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Almost immediately GOP stalwarts like Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani started in with how this decision puts American lives at risk. Getting by the simple factual issue that the gulag at Gitmo has yielded us absolutely no valuable intelligence, the unspoken assumption here is that as long as we feel our lives may be in some sort of danger -- even vague and unspecified -- we can cut away at our traditions of liberty.

Horse Puckey. This is the thinking of cowards.

As I recall, the entire American project was started by a group of folks who were quite ready to sacrifice their lives in the name of liberty and believed in a government that did not have the right to arbitrarily imprison anyone. As I recall they had some saying about "give me liberty of give me death," they devoted their "lives and fortunes" to their cause. They believed living unfree was something less than living. In other words, the American project was started by, and can only be sustained by people who are not afraid at the possibility of someone getting hurt.

Note to Newt: If you want to defeat terror, stop acting like a scared nancy ready to concede our nation's defining tradition with every little bump in the night. Living in a free society has a lot of advanatges and a few disadvantages. One of them is we are not so able to slip into the security state mode favored by Russia and China. That may make us more vulnerable to terrorist attack. I can live with that trade off.

(By the way, aren't these the same guys who hate the idea of a "nanny state" when it comes to public welfare? Isn't that just a little inconsistent?)