In short, the procedural protections afforded the Guantanamo detainees under the statute before the Supreme Court in Boumediene substantially exceed those accorded the Nuremberg defendants. Obama's unfavorable comparison of the legal treatment of the Guantanamo detainees with that of the Nuremberg defendants suggests either that he does not know what he's talking about, or that he feels free to take great liberties with the truth.Agreed.
(via National Review's Andy McCarthy)
8 comments:
Much more of this and I'm going to be losing all sense of humor.
I have deep respect for those who are genuinely worried about civil rights and how to maintain the protections of the Constitution. I worry greatly about the potential misuse of internal surveillance, etc, under a truly malign president. Nor did I ever approve of the torture theory.
BUT - trying to extend internally guaranteed constitutional rights to the battlefield and combatants is such an insane procedure that my mind boggles. It's impossible; one cannot even start with the "presumption of innocence" which underlies the requirement for proof. Some of this is clearly generated by radicals who truly are the enemies of the constitutional state itself.
As for Obama, I have come to believe that he's completely out of his depth and saying whatever he thinks a particular audience wants to hear at the time. I don't think he has a chance in hell of getting elected; his obfuscations and contradictions are piling up at a rate that "shocks the conscience" of those who would vote for him.
If the average American citizen ran his or her life the way Obama running his campaign, the average American citizen would end up bankrupt and indicted for bad check charges.
> I don't think he has a chance in hell of getting elected; his obfuscations and contradictions are piling up at a rate that "shocks the conscience" of those who would vote for him.
I believe and hope you are right, but then there are clueless idiots like Anony (10:56) here out there to further boggle the mind.
As I note there, we have indeed drifted into RAH's "Crazy Years".
About 3-4 decades late, but we're there, nonetheless.
> the average American citizen would end up bankrupt and indicted for bad check charges.
Unfortunately, that makes him perfect for government service, these days, don't it?
"...suggests either that he does not know what he's talking about, or that he feels free to take great liberties with the truth."
Or both.
As to "I don't think he has a chance in hell of being elected," would that this were true. I direct your attention to the elections of 1992 and 1996.
AVI - what's different now is the level of pain tied to things the US population can readily identify. In other words, we are entering a political era of deflating BS. Clinton was able to talk convincingly about things the population had little independent means of assessing. Everyone understands the price of gas and utilities. Further, Obama is worrying a lot of people with his odd foreign policy pronouncements.
If you look at polls on domestic drilling and opening new energy plants, it is clear that the public has an Obama disconnect. Interesting that the poll numbers for Obama are cliffdiving in tandem with this discussion.
OBH - the question is not whether there are idiots out there. The question is whether the idiots predominate in the voting population, and I don't think they do.
All:
I agree with M_O_M except--and here I depart from OBH as well--in downplaying Obama's chances. Foreign policy isn't his strong point, and I assume when he returns to the U.S. he'll resume talking about domestic issues. Still, unless his inexperience leads him to open-mouth-insert-foot in some major gaffe, I fear that he need only consistently to refer to McCain as "the third term of George W. Bush" to win. I worked on the 1992 George H.W. Bush campaign, and remember polling results hating our healthcare policy--but when we poll-tested the same policy labeled Clinton's healthcare policy, they loved it.
It's not that I think the people are idiots--I don't. But, as AVI suggests, I think this year could see a shift.
Carl - You may be right, but in fact Obama is worse on domestic policy than on foreign policy. At the current time, he favors restricting domestic energy production, which policy is absolutely crushing at least 15% of the citizenry.
I don't think they are that dumb. People who live off government will believe anything, but people who live off low-wage jobs are actually pretty politically canny.
M_O_M:
I agree. But this election will be decided by the voters of West Virginia, Ohio, Tennessee, Arkansas, Colorado and Arizona. And I'm not sure they see it that way.
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