Addendum to the preceding

Consider these three items:

First: In July, Rep. C.L. "Butch" Otter (R-ID) got the House to approve a measure rolling back that part of the TRAITOR Act that allows so-called "sneak and peek" searches.

Senate and House leaders, though, refused to place that provision in the massive omnibus spending bill coming up before Congress next week, killing it for the year. ...

[Justice Department spokesman Mark] Corallo said he doesn't expect the House to pass Otter's amendment again. "We knew that most members of the House who voted for it didn't realize what it did," he said. "When it was explained to them that it would have a disastrous effect on law enforcement if it would have become law and that the Supreme Court had ruled in 1979 that it was totally constitutional and that arguments to the contrary were frivolous, we were confident that Congress would not move that bad piece of legislation forward."

Second: In 1944, the Supreme Court ruled in Korematsu vs. United States that the interment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans, based solely on their ethnicity, was legal. The Christian Science Monitor's useful Daily Update blog (accessed via the home page) quotes Jonathon Turley of The Washington Post this way:

"The Korematsu case has been largely taught in law schools as an abomination, a case in which the Supreme Court yielded to fear and pressure in sending tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children into camps. Then came 9/11. Soon, the Bush administration was relying on the arguments from the Korematsu case to assert the same authority exercised by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to put individuals into detention without trial or access to the courts."

President George Bush I (the first one, the one who was really elected) apologized to Japanese-Americans on behalf of the US and Korematsu himself was given the Medal of Freedom in 1998.

Third: The Justice Department had a response to Lord Steyn's criticisms of Guantanamo:

His comments were criticized by a legal advisor to the Pentagon who said Steyn does not understand the type of battle the U.S. in engaged in.

"These are people who intended to kill innocent civilians in our opinion," lawyer Ruth Wedgwood said.

Okay. In the first case, what the Supreme Court ruled on in 1979 was not the same as what is allowed under the TRAITOR Act, which permits "black bag" jobs for intelligence purposes rather than criminal ones. That is a significant expansion of investigatory authority, which is of course why it had to be in the bill in the first place instead of relying on existing law. In the second case, it's hard to imagine how the White House can successfully base it's arguments on a case now specifically rejected as public policy. And in the third, it seems to me the UK has sufficient experience with terrorism and bombings to understand "the type of battle" going on.

So all three arguments are flawed. But what really ties them together, what really strikes me about them, is the level of utter arrogant conceit, of sneering condescension, of truly frightening egomaniacal pomposity, they reveal. Contrary arguments are "frivolous." Previous public policy is irrelevant as "abominations" are embraced. No one understands what we're going through and the DOJ's "opinion" is sufficient to keep people locked up for as long as the White House feels like it. Ignorance of alternatives is not only accepted, it is celebrated.

Sometime during Ronald Reagan's second term, I remarked to a friend that I was no longer so disturbed by Reagan as I was by our eagerness to believe him. Now, it appears, there are enough such true believers to fill the entire Executive Branch.

Someday, someday, these days will be looked back on as a time of madness. It will be compared to the Salem witch trials in psychological thrust if not in precise practice. And we will wonder, as I have wondered, and we will speculate, as I have speculated, on "How could they possibly think that way?"