If we had been told several years ago, that, in the future, checkpoints would be set up at our airports where uniformed government officials would be checking our baggage, X-raying our bodies, and manually searching us to the point of groping our genitals--but that government officials would be exempt from such procedures and soldiers would still be able to take their weapons on board planes--we would take this as a prophecy that we would be taken over by some despotic foreign power.
Who else would do this to us?
In other words, we are doing things to ourselves that we always feared our enemies would do to us. And our enemies are laughing about it.
In an NPR report on Monday, the group responsible for the last two significant terrorist plots said that they considered that they had already won, since they didn't need to get explosives onto planes to succeed: all they had to do was to make us spend billions of dollars doing things to our own people that they could never succeed in doing themselves.
We should be trying to defeat these people, not helping them win.
Facebook readers can access Vital Remnants, Martin Cothran's weblog on politics and culture here.
Who else would do this to us?
In other words, we are doing things to ourselves that we always feared our enemies would do to us. And our enemies are laughing about it.
In an NPR report on Monday, the group responsible for the last two significant terrorist plots said that they considered that they had already won, since they didn't need to get explosives onto planes to succeed: all they had to do was to make us spend billions of dollars doing things to our own people that they could never succeed in doing themselves.
We should be trying to defeat these people, not helping them win.
Facebook readers can access Vital Remnants, Martin Cothran's weblog on politics and culture here.
3 comments:
the group responsible for the last two significant terrorist plots said that they considered that they had already won
Well, duh. This was apparent in the last election campaign season, when the (then yet-to-be-elected) new House majority essentially jettisoned the First Amendment.
America's enemies goaded the USA into a war that bankrupted the US and created a mountain of debt that will saddle generations of Americans. And they topped this achievement by fomenting a wide-scale movement to abrogate the First Amendment rights of many, many Americans. And now we have this, the government stripping away what few vestiges of privacy that the Bush Administration had left us with.
Bin Laden et al. couldn't have accomplished more if they had launched a full-scale invasion with millions of soldiers. Of course, they had a very powerful weapon - stupid and greedy politicians for whom the next election is all-important, and the long-term safety, security, and soul of the country an irrelevancy.
Art,
I'm not sure where the yet-to-be House majority jettisoned the First Amendment, but as to your point that both the Bush and Obama administrations have combined to give the terrorists the victory they wanted, I'm right there with you.
I'm not sure where the yet-to-be House majority jettisoned the First Amendment,
That would be when they embraced the "Ground Zero Mosque" hysteria.
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