SARAH PALIN IS LAW, YOU ARE CRIME
Feb. 9th, 2010 11:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
defrog[NOTE: This is one of those posts that will be the equivalent of yr smart but drunk uncle shouting at the TV again, so feel free to skip this.]
And now, a special commentary from Team Def’s Head of Legal Affairs, Lou Heineken:
As a champion attorney, I get asked for legal advice a lot. Sometimes it’s more to do with the day’s headlines rather than personal cases. For example, here’s a question I’ve been fielding since Christmas:
“Why is the Obama admin handling the Mr SizzlePants Christmas Bomber case as though he were some common criminal by reading him his Miranda rights?”
It’s a question almost too idiotic to answer, but now that Sarah Palin has been rocking that meme – most recently at a Tea Party smoker in Nashville – I thought I’d better address this before she gets elected president.
Palin and indeed most conservatives tend to frame their argument thusly:
“Treating this like a mere law-enforcement matter places our country at grave risk because that’s not how radical Islamic extremists are looking at this,” she said. “To win that war, we need a commander-in-chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern.”
We’ve been hearing that one since 9/11, of course, ever since President Bush decided that there was no functional difference between fighting al Qaeda and fighting Nazi Germany – the only snag being that in order to treat terrorists like enemy combatants on a battlefield, you have to ignore all of the laws that treat terrorism as a crime and not an act of war. Bush decided his presidential authority amounted to a workaround of such laws.
In 2008, the Supreme Court said “Oh no it f***ing well doesn’t.”
Palin et al also claim that the Constitution gets in the way of fighting terrorism because once the terrorist “lawyers up”, you’ve lost yr chance to learn of any ticking time bombs or any other info he/she might have.
Except that – as any professor of law could probably tell you – Miranda does come with an exception in which the police can question you before reading you yr rights if they reasonably believe that the suspect knows vital time-sensitive information. Miranda also doesn’t mean you’ve lost a chance to get more info – Mr SizzlePants has been talking plenty even after he lawyered up.
I’m shouting at walls here, I know. And it’s not like I get paid to argue with the mentally unbalanced.
But I tire of this insistence from the usual suspects of treating al Qaeda as though they are so goddamn OMG DANGEROUS that American Rule Of Law is not powerful enough to deal with them. It’s the justification for Gitmo’s legal black hole, and the root of the mind-numbing fear of Congresscritters screaming that you just CAN’T close Gitmo and put the terrorists in max-security prisons in MY state because I will not put MY people in GRAVE DANGER by putting a TERRORIST in the same state where they live.
Which is fucking embarrassing, frankly.
Kit Bond can blather all he wants about Miranda giving aid and comfort to our enemies overseas, but honestly, which do you really think Osama bin Fuckhead finds more assuring – the fact that his followers can have lawyers, or the fact that people like Bush, Cheney and Palin openly admit having zero faith in the Constitution (and the legal system upon which it’s based), and are willing to rewrite or bypass it at will at the expense of any innocent people caught in the net out of nothing more than blind fear of another 9/11?
I suspect the latter, if only because it makes al Qaeda look more dangerous than it really is. Peter Beinart makes a better argument than me, but basically al Qaeda is a weak excuse of an enemy who, you’ll remember, had almost no one’s sympathy after 9/11 until Bush went cowboy on the world’s ass. Why would anyone bother to pump Bin Laden’s ego by treating al Qaeda as the equivalent of the entire Axis military when the best he can do these days is take credit for a radical nitwit with a bomb in his underpants that didn’t even work?
At this stage, the best message we could send al Qaeda and its wannabes now is this:
“You don’t impress us – yr a third-rate criminal organization that made yr name on one ballsy and lucky plan. Either way, yr no different from the murderers, thieves and rapists we lock up every day. So fuck you and yr stupid little half-assed plots – we’ll catch you and we’ll try you and convict you like we do anyone else, and the world will see that in the end yr pathetic dog-and-pony show never really accomplished a goddamn thing. Get the fuck out of my sight.”
But you won’t hear Republicans say that because they’ve done pretty well with the Big Fear meme, and you can’t sell Big Fear when you’ve slagged off the chief villain as a bad joke.
Of course, I say “Republicans”. But they’re not the only ones perpetuating the Big Fear meme. Obama’s appointed national intelligence director, Dennis Blair, said just recently that some of you may die in a terrorist attack before summer break. And even President Obama has been keeping some of the old Bush-era workarounds intact, like assassination, selective due process, renditions, suppressing photos of detainee torture, and civil liberties in general, especially in the field of surveillance.
And Dick Cheney still isn’t happy.
But so what? The Tea Party proves that there’s an audience for this kind of angry, irrational fear and loathing, and there will always be people like Cheney and Palin around to feed the beast whatever it wants to hear in exchange for more power. That ought to keep the al Qaeda juggernaut wheezing along for quite awhile as well.
Still, maybe between Mr SizzlePants and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (assuming he ever sees the inside of a courtroom), we can build up a case showing that the Rule Of Law really does work against terrorism – even if we end up having to resort to really stupid laws like the one in South Carolina requiring terrorist groups to register with the govt.
DISCLAIMER: The views expressed here are that of Lou Heineken and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Team Frog International or its subsidiaries (though honestly, they might as well).
Know yr rights,
This is dF
And now, a special commentary from Team Def’s Head of Legal Affairs, Lou Heineken:
As a champion attorney, I get asked for legal advice a lot. Sometimes it’s more to do with the day’s headlines rather than personal cases. For example, here’s a question I’ve been fielding since Christmas:
“Why is the Obama admin handling the Mr SizzlePants Christmas Bomber case as though he were some common criminal by reading him his Miranda rights?”
It’s a question almost too idiotic to answer, but now that Sarah Palin has been rocking that meme – most recently at a Tea Party smoker in Nashville – I thought I’d better address this before she gets elected president.
Palin and indeed most conservatives tend to frame their argument thusly:
“Treating this like a mere law-enforcement matter places our country at grave risk because that’s not how radical Islamic extremists are looking at this,” she said. “To win that war, we need a commander-in-chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern.”
We’ve been hearing that one since 9/11, of course, ever since President Bush decided that there was no functional difference between fighting al Qaeda and fighting Nazi Germany – the only snag being that in order to treat terrorists like enemy combatants on a battlefield, you have to ignore all of the laws that treat terrorism as a crime and not an act of war. Bush decided his presidential authority amounted to a workaround of such laws.
In 2008, the Supreme Court said “Oh no it f***ing well doesn’t.”
Palin et al also claim that the Constitution gets in the way of fighting terrorism because once the terrorist “lawyers up”, you’ve lost yr chance to learn of any ticking time bombs or any other info he/she might have.
Except that – as any professor of law could probably tell you – Miranda does come with an exception in which the police can question you before reading you yr rights if they reasonably believe that the suspect knows vital time-sensitive information. Miranda also doesn’t mean you’ve lost a chance to get more info – Mr SizzlePants has been talking plenty even after he lawyered up.
I’m shouting at walls here, I know. And it’s not like I get paid to argue with the mentally unbalanced.
But I tire of this insistence from the usual suspects of treating al Qaeda as though they are so goddamn OMG DANGEROUS that American Rule Of Law is not powerful enough to deal with them. It’s the justification for Gitmo’s legal black hole, and the root of the mind-numbing fear of Congresscritters screaming that you just CAN’T close Gitmo and put the terrorists in max-security prisons in MY state because I will not put MY people in GRAVE DANGER by putting a TERRORIST in the same state where they live.
Which is fucking embarrassing, frankly.
Kit Bond can blather all he wants about Miranda giving aid and comfort to our enemies overseas, but honestly, which do you really think Osama bin Fuckhead finds more assuring – the fact that his followers can have lawyers, or the fact that people like Bush, Cheney and Palin openly admit having zero faith in the Constitution (and the legal system upon which it’s based), and are willing to rewrite or bypass it at will at the expense of any innocent people caught in the net out of nothing more than blind fear of another 9/11?
I suspect the latter, if only because it makes al Qaeda look more dangerous than it really is. Peter Beinart makes a better argument than me, but basically al Qaeda is a weak excuse of an enemy who, you’ll remember, had almost no one’s sympathy after 9/11 until Bush went cowboy on the world’s ass. Why would anyone bother to pump Bin Laden’s ego by treating al Qaeda as the equivalent of the entire Axis military when the best he can do these days is take credit for a radical nitwit with a bomb in his underpants that didn’t even work?
At this stage, the best message we could send al Qaeda and its wannabes now is this:
“You don’t impress us – yr a third-rate criminal organization that made yr name on one ballsy and lucky plan. Either way, yr no different from the murderers, thieves and rapists we lock up every day. So fuck you and yr stupid little half-assed plots – we’ll catch you and we’ll try you and convict you like we do anyone else, and the world will see that in the end yr pathetic dog-and-pony show never really accomplished a goddamn thing. Get the fuck out of my sight.”
But you won’t hear Republicans say that because they’ve done pretty well with the Big Fear meme, and you can’t sell Big Fear when you’ve slagged off the chief villain as a bad joke.
Of course, I say “Republicans”. But they’re not the only ones perpetuating the Big Fear meme. Obama’s appointed national intelligence director, Dennis Blair, said just recently that some of you may die in a terrorist attack before summer break. And even President Obama has been keeping some of the old Bush-era workarounds intact, like assassination, selective due process, renditions, suppressing photos of detainee torture, and civil liberties in general, especially in the field of surveillance.
And Dick Cheney still isn’t happy.
But so what? The Tea Party proves that there’s an audience for this kind of angry, irrational fear and loathing, and there will always be people like Cheney and Palin around to feed the beast whatever it wants to hear in exchange for more power. That ought to keep the al Qaeda juggernaut wheezing along for quite awhile as well.
Still, maybe between Mr SizzlePants and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (assuming he ever sees the inside of a courtroom), we can build up a case showing that the Rule Of Law really does work against terrorism – even if we end up having to resort to really stupid laws like the one in South Carolina requiring terrorist groups to register with the govt.
DISCLAIMER: The views expressed here are that of Lou Heineken and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Team Frog International or its subsidiaries (though honestly, they might as well).
Know yr rights,
This is dF
