Let Me Get This Straight...

I try not to do pile-on posts, and I'm not saying anything here that people aren't saying all over the place...I have nothing original here.  But I have to say: you mean, there are people now who are honestly suggesting that the government should be able to grab someone off the street, take away their citizenship, and send them off to rot indefinitely in an off-shore prison camp?  With no judicial constraints at all?  And not only suggesting it, but attacking the president for not doing it?

And those same people are also complaining that the presidency of  Barack Obama is the end of liberty and the beginning of tyranny. 

TNC says, "I get the sense that very few of these people have ever been on the other side of law enforcement."   Well, yes, but you would think that some of them have, well, read their own complaints about government oppression and made some connections.  Or, I don't know, read a book or watched a movie or TV show some time, and absorbed a little understanding.  Or: you wouldn't think that, but you sure wish we lived in a world in which that might happen, that the same people who are so dedicated to waiving around copies of the Constitution might stop and think a little about the consequences of being selective about who those rights are for.

Yeah, as I said, nothing here that you can't read in a million other places.  Let's try to work something a bit more analytic in...you know, I am actually totally fine with the idea that Constitutional rights are contested.  In fact, when I teach civil liberties, that's actually the first point I try to make: these rights are very difficult to nail down, and that contesting the meaning of basic rights is a legitimate part of the American political system. 


Really, though, this is just sad, sad, sad.