[antimedia] antimedia: Now that the liberals are in power....

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Posted by antimedia:
Now that the liberals are in power....
http://www.antimedia.us/posts/1170111252.shtml


   ....the [1]mask comes off.

     But it is no disrespect to the victims of 9/11, or to the men and
     women of our armed forces, to say that, by the standards of past
     wars, the war against terrorism has so far inflicted a very small
     human cost on the United States. As an instance of mass murder, the
     attacks were unspeakable, but they still pale in comparison with
     any number of military assaults on civilian targets of the recent
     past, from Hiroshima on down.
     Even if one counts our dead in Iraq and Afghanistan as casualties
     of the war against terrorism, which brings us to about 6,500, we
     should remember that roughly the same number of Americans die every
     two months in automobile accidents.
     Of course, the 9/11 attacks also conjured up the possibility of far
     deadlier attacks to come. But then, we were hardly ignorant of
     these threats before, as a glance at just about any thriller from
     the 1990s will testify. And despite the even more nightmarish
     fantasies of the post-9/11 era (e.g. the TV show "24's" nuclear
     attack on Los Angeles), Islamist terrorists have not come close to
     deploying weapons other than knives, guns and conventional
     explosives. A war it may be, but does it really deserve comparison
     to World War II and its 50 million dead? Not every adversary is an
     apocalyptic threat.
     So why has there been such an overreaction? Unfortunately, the
     commentators who detect one have generally explained it in a tired,
     predictably ideological way: calling the United States a uniquely
     paranoid aggressor that always overreacts to provocation.

   Got that? Attacking Afghanistan and Iraq was an overreaction to a
   comparably small loss of life. Really. Oh, sure, 9/11 was a deplorable
   tragedy, but really, compared to how many people die on our highways
   every day? A minor inconvenience. Nothing to really get too exercised
   about.
   I've seen this argument before, but this is the first time, to my
   knowledge, that a major media outlet has allowed it to be advanced.
   These are the people that tell you that they care about human rights
   -- that they care about freedom -- that they are the true
   representatives of all that is good and right and true.
   Frankly, this type of thinking disgusts me. How dare this professor
   sit in his comfortable chair at Johns Hopkins University, making six
   figures and enjoying all the luxuries that wealthy Americans can
   afford, and tell the families of the people that died on 9/11 that
   their lives, in the grand scheme of things, weren't all that
   important?
   Think about this "logic". The response to mass murder should be
   proportional to the crime. Therefore, in order for us to go to war, we
   must suffer much higher casualties than we have so far. How do we
   decide who has to die before the switch is flipped? Who gets to decide
   what the right number is? Who's going to volunteer to be one of those
   whose life is sacrificed on the altar of proportionality? Such
   hypotheticals are easy to ponder when you're thousands of miles from
   danger and safely out of the line of fire.
   Furthermore, these are the same people who claim capital punishment is
   wrong and the loss of our military's lives in Iraq is unacceptable.
   (Talk about hypocrisy!) Anti-capital punishment advocates claim that
   even if someone kills 20 people, (or in the case of Sadaam hundreds of
   thousands) society has no right to take their life. It has never
   occurred to these geniuses that capital punishment prevents crime.
   Capital punishment provides society with the absolute certainty that
   the person put to death will never kill again. We never have to worry
   about Sadaam and his sons killing again, because they are dead. We
   will always have to worry about bin Laden so long as he is alive.
   The truth is, the response to 9/11 needed to be so completely
   disproportionate to the crime that was committed that not even bin
   Laden would think of doing it again. It needed to be so
   disproportionate that the countries that aid and abet terrorism would
   stop their activities for fear of being "next".
   By coddling them, by refusing to be brutally efficient at killing them
   off, by hesitating to take the only action that will stop them from
   attacking us, we have made them more dangerous and more likely to kill
   us in sufficient numbers that even idiots like this professor will
   finally have to admit, it's time to take the gloves off.
   By then, it may be too late.
   If you want to know the real reason we suffer from terrorism now, read
   my [2]previous post on Iran. Or read [3]Jules Crittendon's elegant
   takedown of Hillary's recent whine.

References

   1. http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-bell28jan28,0,7267967.story?track=mostviewed-storylevel
   2. http://www.antimedia.us/posts/1170031915.shtml
   3. http://www.julescrittenden.com/2007/01/29/hillary-for-democratic-candidate-2008/