"mostly harmless" (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference)

In the Washington Post editorial that says, on balance, the U.S. did the right things after 9/11 - including going to war - we read:

At home, vigilance must be coupled with tolerance and economic growth, so that the nation can remain both welcoming and strong. Altogether that is not an easy strategy for a democracy to sustain, because it is expensive, unproven and guaranteed to encounter setbacks. Given the scope of the challenge, the country should give itself some credit for what it has achieved.

There was in fact no large-scale assault on personal freedoms — no equivalent to the Supreme Court-sanctioned roundup of Japanese Americans, no repeat of the Red Scare infringements on freedom of speech and association. The Patriot Act enabled a modest, mostly court-supervised expansion of law enforcement vigilance.

Hey, your civil liberties are assured under a mostly court-supervised surveillance.

Fell better?

As to that Iraq War thing:

The United States went to war in Iraq on the basis of faulty intelligence ...

Wow! That faulty intelligence was just sitting there, inert, and yet look at what it was able to do. Got the nation to go to war. No humans were involved in that process.

The editorial is pretty much 100% neocon and wouldn't be out of place in William Kristol's Weekly Standard, or Dick Cheney's book.


posted by Quiddity at 9/10/2011 05:44:00 AM