Wednesday, January 21, 2009

What Will Obama Do About the Detainees?

President Obama made many interesting statements yesterday, but one that caught my ear was that America would no longer make a "false choice" between "our safety and our ideals." Be warned, this is merely a linguistic trick Obama uses: establish two polar extremes that don't exist and plant himself firmly in the middle in order to play the role of the Sage.

Just the same, I found myself trying to figure out exactly when over the last eight years we have done that, then I realized that one of the reasons I didn't vote for this guy was that he and I just have fundamentally different views about how to deal with terrorists.

The mistake that Obama and his liberal friends make is that they are trying to pass along our values to the very terrorists who are trying to kill us. "What about the rights of the detainees? What about their Constitutional rights?" I'm no legal scholar, but I don't believe we are required as a nation to extend our Constitutional rights to our enemy.

The big irony here is that liberals scold us for supposedly imposing democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, yet they want to impose our system of law upon a transnational network of killers who will use that very system against us to make our country less safe.

I am hopeful that pragmatism will win the day. But it is difficult to hold out that hope when the liberals who now run the show have such a fundamental disconnect with the realities of our dangerous world.