You Could Devote A Career To This Editorial

Here it is. It concerns closing Guantanamo. If you’re with me on most topics, read it as if manipulating a toxic substance via plastic gloves from outside a sealed environment.

If you’re not, do me the favor of noticing the Strib tactic: bending every fact and every interpretation of every fact in as negative a manner as possible. That’s the editors' version of truth and courage. You may approve, but keep in mind that it is what they’re doing.

Why do they do it? They are so consumed with hatred of this administration they are doing everything they can to bring it down, to tear down its moral standing, paying absolutely no heed to the simple fact they W is our president, as we did elect him.

So they insult the integrity of the nation, and of every single one of the man’s supporters; in fact every person who simply dares harbor any sense that perhaps W is trying as hard as he can to figure out the worst problem the country’s ever faced.

He might be a fool, a flawed heir of wealth, but he’s trying? Don’t think that. If you do, you’re an ally of evil.

It's in the way they present the arguments of the administration – in nearly every single case, in editorials going back years – as being morally baseless, and utterly dishonest.

There’s no other conclusion concerning their worldview: W and his crew are pure evil; anyone who doesn’t see that is facilitating it.

In this editorial the worldview reaches some kind of zenith. I won’t pick it apart, I’ll just point out that it operates within a morally bereft context.

It does this by pretending that we do not know what we in fact do know about the prisoners at Guantanamo: most of them are terrorists who we picked up fighting with al Qaeda and al Qaeda's allies.

We can’t label them terrorists formally, because there is no such thing. I’ll nod toward the notion that it’s dangerous territory, to think this way, but I would really like a liberal friend to stare me in the eye and convince me he really, really doesn’t believe that most of these guys are hardcore terrorists.

Meaning we let them go, and some significant percentage of them will return to traveling the globe, searching for ways to kill as many of us as possible. And most of them would have done that a week after they were captured.

Morally bereft: because the editors are pretending there’s no dilemma. Pretending there is no threat. Or – and here’s the doorway to my rage, which is good to realize – that the threat doesn’t matter.

In fact it makes me suspect that the threat for them doesn’t matter, all that much, given that we’re the kind of country that supports a demon like W.

Anyway. On to some sanity. I’ve linked to this article before and I will again. It’s about an enemy I see. It’s not perfect but it is quite instructive. Think of it as a turn of the kaleidoscope.