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 Dems
Must Believe Bush Made U.S. Safer
Partisan logic…
[by Mac Johnson] 12/20/05
In October
of 2001, the Patriot Act, giving the federal government increased
power to monitor and prosecute suspected terrorists,
was passed in the U.S.
Senate with only one dissenting vote. Forty-Seven Democrats voted for the bill.
They justified their support of the measure, rightfully, by explaining that
terrorism posed a grave threat to America and more potent policing would be
needed until we could get the long-term problem under control.
Last week
the Senate blocked renewal of much of the Patriot Act. Only
two Democrats supported renewal of the law, while 41 Democrats
voted against renewal -- including 35 who had voted for the
same law in 2001.
Contributor
Mac
Johnson
Mac
Johnson is a freelance writer and biologist in Cambridge,
Mass. Mr. Johnson holds a Doctorate in Molecular and
Cellular Biology from Baylor College of Medicine. He
is a frequent opinion contributor to Human
Events Online. His website can be found at macjohnson.com [go
to Johnson index]
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Obviously
then, we can assume that most Democrats believe that the threat
from
terrorism is now well under control. This would
be quite a testament to George W. Bush, who has evidently taken
America from the September 11 era of vulnerability to such comparative
safety in just four years. It is also a little confusing to those
of us who have had to listen to the Democrats claim for some
time now that Bush’s policies have made America less safe.
For example, Sen.
Ted Kennedy, who voted for the Patriot Act in 2001, has made
many statements such as this one: “Are
we safer today because of the policies of President George W.
Bush? Any honest assessment can lead to only one answer, and
that answer is an emphatic no.” Yet Kennedy voted against
renewal of the Patriot Act last week.
Now, if we are not safer, and the Patriot Act was intended to
obstruct terrorists until we could be made safer, then one would
have to believe that allowing the act to expire would make us
vulnerable again to the terrorism from which Ted Kennedy says
George Bush has not made us safer. So why then did Kennedy vote
to allow the act to expire?
One possibility is that Kennedy and the other Democrats are
playing partisan political games with our safety, by opposing
pretty much anything Bush supports as part of a cynical campaign
to inspire Democratic donors and denigrate the President in preparation
for the 2006 elections. Obviously, that cannot be true.
So then we must conclude that Kennedy -- despite what he says
-- really believes that Bush has made America safer. So safe,
in fact, that we can now begin to re-hobble our law enforcement
agencies with the sort of restrictions they suffered before September
11.
And it’s not
just the Patriot Act that makes me draw this conclusion. Democrats
are aghast at all sorts of anti-terror
activity lately.
Consider the “shocking” revelation
by the New York Times last week that, shortly after September
11, President Bush
authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to monitor the
international phone calls and emails of terror suspects within
the United States. The whole point of the NSA is to monitor international
phone calls and emails and such, but because one half of the
international phone calls and emails in question originated within
the United States, the NSA had previously been restricted from
monitoring them under a strict interpretation of a ban on domestic
spying by the NSA.
After a failure of intelligence allowed 3000 people to die on
September 11th, President Bush decided that such a strict interpretation
was ridiculous and immoral. Why should the NSA have the power
to tap a foreign communication from Afghanistan to Iran, but
be prohibited from tapping a foreign communication from Afghanistan
to New York? Which is more likely to be related to terrorism
against the United States?
So, with special approval and oversight, the NSA was given permission
to monitor only the international communications of terror suspects
within the United States. Your calls to Grandma in Michigan are
still perfectly safe and under the jurisdiction of the FBI and
the courts. But any calls by one of a few hundred suspicious
persons to remote shack #452 in the tribal territories of Pakistan
can now be monitored. This seems reasonable to me. But the New
York Times and their groupies in the mainstream media see it
as a major theoretical civil rights conundrum worthy of congressional
investigations.
The story was enough
to make Ted Kennedy spout out, “This
is Big Brother run amok” -- a phrase he also used at several
late night White House parties in the early 1960s. In this case,
however, he was using it to imply that monitoring the overseas
communications of a small watch-list of people with ties to terrorist
organizations was worse than the all-powerful all-controlling
marxo-fascist police state envisioned by George Orwell in his
masterwork 1984.
Strange, how the fear
of an all-powerful state never seemed to occur to Kennedy when
he has previously proposed socialized
medicine, expanded welfare state taxation and income redistribution,
business regulation, hate crimes legislation, race-based hiring
in government, and the most extreme gun control measures in our
nation’s history. But maybe he just read “1984” recently.
Clearly, though, when we can worry about fine details -- such
as how many international participants must be involved before
a communication becomes international enough to fall under the
jurisdiction of the NSA -- we must be in a much safer position
than we were. Or else the Democrats are behaving irresponsibly
in a world that remains dangerous -- which they would never do.
Never.
Likewise, would Democrats
(both in and out of the media) worry so much about a single
soggy Koran and the thermostat settings
at Guantanamo if we were under a real threat from terrorists?
Would they seek to expose secret CIA interrogation facilities
overseas if America were in any true danger? Would they obsess
about how private your library receipts should be if our enemies
were still at large? Of course not. They’re not so partisan
or blinded by hatred of President Bush that they would endanger
our nation’s safety just to score a few points in the polls.
Right?
After September 11,
America watched and waited for the next attack. We marked each
anniversary and holiday with dread and
a sense of resignation. It was not a matter of “if,” it
was a matter of “when” they hit again. But they did
not hit in the weeks after 9/11, or that Christmas, or on the
first anniversary of the massacre. They did not strike in all
of 2002 or 2003 or 2004 or 2005.
For over four years, through two wars, and dozens of events,
they have not struck. During that time they have attacked Madrid
and London, Bali and Baghdad --but not here. We know they want
to attack here, yet no attack has come.
The same people that
carried out 9/11 haven’t been able
to overturn an apple cart in the United States since then.
This is our greatest success in the War on Terror
Either the terrorists just got really, really lucky on 9/11,
or else something we did after that attack actually made us safer.
We may soon find out which it was, by rolling back all the measures
we took after the 9/11 attack and restoring the pre-September
11 mentality to our politics and our intelligence agencies. -one-
copyright
2005 Mac Johnson
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