More disturbing, the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. is handing over millions of federal dollars and the keys to that building to some of the very same people who consider the post-9/11 provisions of the Patriot Act more dangerous than the terrorists that they were enacted to apprehend--people whose inflammatory claims of a deliberate torture policy at Guantanamo Bay are undermining this country's efforts to foster freedom elsewhere in the world.Notice how neither the validity of the claims nor the quality of the "efforts" is discussed... in fact, it's treated as nothing less than irrelevant. It's not that it's wrong, it's that it "hurts the efforts" and dares to claim that the Patriot act could be dangerous, despite the fact that provoking a state overreaction is one of the key tools of terrorists, and almost certainly a key goal of Al-Qaeda.
It should be flabbergasting that one of the leading conservative voices in the United States is espousing a point of view that the country's founders would consider odious. It's not. I had almost stopped believing that neo-conservatism is really about denying the importance of the truth in the face of fictions useful for social control... but how else, honestly, can you describe it? It's all that Instapundit says these days, and Jeff Jarvis certainly doesn't care about the dangers of this position, or he wouldn't have linked to the story without at least a passing mention of the issues involved.
Now that the War on Terrorism isn't really that anymore, but some nebulous "war for freedom" (or whatever rubbish the Bush White House is tossing around these days), there is no reason to believe that the current conflict will end, or that it was even intended to end in the first place. Endless conflict, endless control, and the death of the freedom to disagree and to even proclaim the truth in America.
If you listen closely, you can hear the death rattle of the American dream.
No comments:
Post a Comment