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A Response to PunditGuy

I wrote earlier today about President Bush’s most recent expressions of disdain at the actions of our nation’s free press. In my post, I highly recommended anyone interested in this topic to read Glenn Greenwald’s post that sums up the facts in the best way I have yet seen.

The PunditGuy has responded to Mr. Greenwald, and he clearly had a different reaction to Mr. Greenwald’s piece than I did. Specifically, he says

1. The Left no longer believes a genuine terror threat exists against the United States.

The above statement is inane. It’s clearly not true, and it shows precious little regard for the intellectual honesty of those with whom the PunditGuy disagrees. In fact, Mr. Greenwald clearly recognizes the constant terror threats under which New Yorkers (and everyone else in this country) live:

The reason the intersection of 42nd Street and Broadway has the name “Times Square” is because it is the home of The New York Times. There are few people more at risk in the event of a future terrorist attack then the reporters and editors of The Times, who work (and often live) in the middle of Manhattan, at the epicenter of one of the most obvious terrorist targets in the country. Nobody would be less likely to want to aid terrorists in committing a terrorist attack than the reporters and editors of The New York Times. That’s just obvious. And yet all sorts of people who live and work in distant places that are far less likely to ever be the target of a terrorist attack so whimsically and stupidly accuse the journalists at the Times of wanting to help terrorists stage attacks against America.

The PunditGuy makes a second claim:

2. The Left believes that Bush, Cheney and Rove are the real terror threats to the United States.

First, I don’t know who “The Left” is, so I can’t speak for him (her? them?). But, I can say that my political beliefs are largely strongly opposed to those of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, but in no way do I consider them “real terror threats to the United States”. Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney threaten the United States, not in the sense of terrorists, but in the sense that their almost complete disregard for our country’s separation of powers threatens our constitutional form of government.

Elizabeth Drew recently wrote about this threat in The New York Review of Books:

James Madison wrote in Federalist Paper No. 47:

The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many…may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

That extraordinary powers have, under Bush, been accumulated in the “same hands” is now undeniable. For the first time in more than thirty years, and to a greater extent than even then, our constitutional form of government is in jeopardy.

The PunditGuy continues:

They presuppose that effective anti-terrorism programs are illegal and must be exposed and stopped for the sake of ‘the public interest’.

This statement, like almost all the others from PunditGuy, is plainly false. It’s not that these “anti-terrorism program” are presupposed to be illegal, it’s that the Bush administration is much too keen on keeping them shrouded in secrecy and away from our nation’s adjudication process. This administration has done everything in its power (and more) to keep the courts from ruling on many of its most highly kept secrets, and I do presuppose this is the case because the administration is scared that the courts will not rule in its favor. However, if the programs are perfectly legal, let’s allow the courts to deem them as such and move forward from there.

They encourage sympathetic career officials in the CIA and NSA (hired by the previous administration) to leak classified information.

I have never encouraged anyone in the federal government to leak anything, so I can’t really respond to this.

They demonize our men and women in uniform, painting them as the purveyors of terror by singling out events at Abu Ghraib, Haditha, and Guantanamo Bay.

Here is another spun statement that would be well appreciated by the likes of Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh. I don’t personally know anyone who singled out American troops as “the purveyors of terror” by isolating such instances. Have some servicemen and servicewomen made mistakes in Iraq? Certainly. Are some of these mistakes worth punishment? If the courts deem them so. But by and large, any thinking person can realize the American troops in Iraq are doing an exceptionally admirable job under an extreme set of adverse conditions. President Bush and Vice President Cheney could put our soldiers in a better position to succeed, but they choose not to. It’s not the politically expedient move.

They downplay or completely ignore the many U.S. led successes in Iraq.

Not so. The good news of al-Zarqawi’s death was trumpeted around this country and around the world, as it should have been. The Iraqi people are free of a brutal and malicious dictator in Saddam Hussein. These are successes. However, President Bush and Vice President Cheney have compromised such successes with incompetent move after incompetent move. This administration has neglected Afghanistan to the point that crisis is on the immediate horizon. The war on terror is being bungled, and not because The New York Times is performing its duty as part of our country’s free press.

When terrorists attacks are thwarted by U.S. authorities, they explain the success away by calling into question the timing of the announcement as just another “wag the dog” moment.

You can’t have your cake and eat it too. I thought we were fighting in Iraq so that we didn’t have to fight the terrorists here at home. Are you admitting that we’re fighting terrorists here even though we’re fighting insurgents in Iraq? Really? I thought that wasn’t supposed to happen. Did the terrorists not get the memo? “Terrorists, stay away from the United States while we’re fighting insurgents in Iraq.” Maybe we should have made that one clearer.

Luckily for us, the Left’s efforts to destroy Bush have not resulted in a post-9/11 terrorist attack on our Nation.

Yet.

Do you know why that’s the case? First, because responsible members of “The Left” aren’t trying to “destroy Bush”; they’re trying to protect this country from the president’s lack of respect for constitutional law and basic civil liberties. Second, as Mr. Greenwald pointed out in his post, attacking the Bush administration’s politics is not the same as attacking this country’s national security. It’s a shortsighted view to claim otherwise, and the PunditGuy appears quite willing to adopt this erroneous view.