Destroying America in order to save it

It's a cheap exercise to single out videos of people you disagree with making fools of themselves, but I can't resist this time:



Remarkable. Beck, at the end, even explicitly ponders aloud that Bin Laden would certainly refrain from any kind of attack, lest ass-kicking Beck-followers seize power in Washington and..er..start kicking ass--apparently not realizing that Bin Laden not attacking us is, you know, a good thing.

But let's be charitable: what do these guys really think? I think it's something like this: in their view, the country is going to hell in a handbasket, and is on pace to either destroy itself or be destroyed/overwhelmed by outside forces. And so a timely Bin Laden attack would be a nation-saving wake-up call, the harm done to the victims of the attack notwithstanding. That is what they think.

Which is, you know, really crazy and myopic.

Video via Sullivan.

September 11

Seven years ago, Osama bin Laden orchestrated a deadly attack on innocent civilians in downtown New York, murdering nearly 3,000 people. When an aide told President George W. Bush "America is under attack", he responded by sitting and doing nothing for seven minutes. He did not ask where the attack occurred. He did not ask if the attack was large or small. He did not ask if further attacks were expected. He did not ask if the attack was conventional or biological or nuclear. He did not ask for a single further iota of information for a full seven minutes. This was the President of the United States--after being told, simply, "America is under attack".

In the months that followed, President Bush persuaded the American public that Saddam Hussein was partly culpable for the September 11 attacks, and that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed a grave and imminent danger to the United States. Both of these claims were false. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq.

Today, Osama bin Laden remains at large. Somewhere in the mountainous region along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, he wakes up every day and breathes the air we breath and gets warmed by the sunshine we get warmed by and experiences the thousands of subtle joys of being alive--joys that he deprived nearly 3,000 innocent people of on September 11, 2001.

And George W. Bush is still the President of the United States.

Habeas for Bin Laden

Via Matt Yglesias, this bit of ridiculousness from John McCain:

There was no habeas at Nuremburg and there should be no habeas for Osama bin Laden.

Ha! Can you imagine if Osama bin Laden filed for a writ of habeas corpus? He'd be all like, "Uh, why are you detaining me?" And the judge would be like, "Um, I don't know, how about because you declared war on America and fucking blew up the World Trade Center? Back to your cell!" And that would be that. The whole thing would be over in approximately two seconds, and everyone will have had a good laugh about it.

So I'm not exactly sure why McCain thinks it would be so bad if Osama bin Laden had habeas corpus rights.