Ever the dutiful parrot of Republican talking points, Hart’s latest column announces that the recent failed plane bombing proves “we cannot protect our country if politically correct bureaucrats are too afraid to address the issue of assessing certain risky airline passengers … The Obama administration is too afraid of offending any other nationality to protect us” and is “being slowly taken down by deluded notions of political correctness while bestowing rights on our sworn enemies”
Mixed in with this is the usual pointless snark such as saying Janet Napolitano “dresses like a small-town lesbian”—which hardly has anything to do with her qualifications for Homeland Security—but we’ll skip the cheap shots and focus on what passes for Hart’s logic.
First off, I agree with him that the system screwed up badly (the good news is, if the only way al Qaida can get this close is when we screw up, they’re obviously not the deadly adversaries right-wingers scream about). However, part of the problem is precisely because we’ve thrown out any sort of probable cause for watching on, spying on or listing people as dangerous: We can’t join dots because there are too many dots.
The kid was on the no fly list. There are medal-bedecked Korean War veterans and constitutional scholars who are also on the list. And nobody knows the standards by which people are assigned to the list. And that was set up by Bush, which doesn’t excuse Obama from not fixing it, but should be kept in mind, since Repub mouthpieces like Hart like to pretend everything was fine before Obama was sworn in.
More to the point, how would profiling help? We don’t require people to register their religious faith before they fly, so how would singling out Muslims help? And if what he means is “frisk Arabs,” Richard Reid, John Walker Lindh or Jose Padilla would have slipped under the radar.
As to the claims this is all PC—bullcrap. PC implies that Muslims are getting some sort of special treatment because they’re a minority, and that can easily be disproved.
Take the anti-abortion movement’s long history of bombings, murder, harassment and terrorism, all of which can be linked with conservative, right-wing Christian anti-abortion activists. Using the logic by which conservatives are squealing to give Muslims a special spotlight, we should keep conservative Christians away from abortion clinics and doctors, send FBI agents to infiltrate the legitimate right to life movement and torture Dr. George Tiller’s murderer to find out what he knows about other possible attacks (he warned there would be some).
Do we see the non-Muslim terrorists getting worse treatment than Muslims? Nope. So political correctness is not the issue. No surprise; political correctness serves little purpose other than to give people an excuse to say something racist (”We’re not locking Muslims in prison camps because we’ve become too politically correct!”).
And let’s not forget, the vast majority of American Muslims are not terrorists or radical militants.
Two other points:
“The Obama administration is too afraid of offending any other nationality to protect us.” Ahh, another Republican theme delivered by a dutiful sock puppet, that Obama isn’t aggressive enough in defending us. Mr. Hart, Obama’s currently waging wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, threatening sanctions on Iran and our government is openly discussing whether to go into Yemen. How exactly does that constitute fear of giving offense?
•”bestowing rights on our sworn enemies” Our enemies, like our friends, have inalienable rights. They don’t need our government to bestow them. Please remember this the next time Hart discusses how he wants our government limited by the Constitution.
But of course, he’s not alone. For all conservatives lecture about the evils of big “nanny state” government, they’re the ones who squeal the loudest about how government should have unlimited power to spy, arrest, lock up and torture, all so they can sleep safe in their beds like little children under the nanny state’s care.
Conservative philosophy at its finest.
from Priority Two to Priority One.
