Adam Serwer at TAPPED has a nice response to Richard Cohen’s latest hyperventilating bed-wetting over the upcoming trial of several terrorists. I’m disappointed that NYC has successfully lobbied to have the trials held elsewhere, though I’m glad that the main reason seems to be that the extra security would be overly disruptive to city life and not that we are afraid the city would be attacked. (As if Al Qaeda needs another reason…)
But I simply cannot abide the weak-kneed wimps who think that “the paramount civil liberty is a sense of security”. How absolutely bat-crazy stupid do you have to be to write something like that? Note that it’s not even that the ultimate right is actual security — it’s only that we have a sense of security. So apparently, in order that Richard Cohen can sleep at night without worrying about the monsters under his bed, we should sacrifice legal standards, integrity, freedom itself. It turns out I wrote my rebuttal of his argument about two and a half years before he even wrote his article, and I stand by it:
We are stronger than that.
We are smarter than that.
We are better than that.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.