As is the case in all national catastrophes, we can thank liberals for the Christmas Day terrorist attack by Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab. Hundreds of casualties were prevented, not by any action on the part of our government, but rather a courageous Dutchman, Jasper Schuringa, who followed in the lion hearted footsteps of Flight 93’s passengers, this time with a better ending.
Former CIA director, R. James Woolsey spoke to Robert Costa of NRO:
“What troubles Woolsey is that Abdul Mutallab’s name was left off the lists for political reasons. ‘Limiting the ‘no fly’ and ‘recheck’ lists has been a cause of the Left and libertarians for years,’ he says. ‘You’ve got a bunch of people on the Hill and in the NGOs beating on them to have, say, not 5,000 names but only 3,000 names on the no-fly list. There’s a lot of pressure on the system from the Hill, and to some extent the public, to be very, very conservative about promoting anybody from the recheck list of 500,000 to the no-fly list of three or four thousand.’”
Costa questions whether the intelligence community should be politicized:
‘“Well, just as the Supreme Court follows the election returns, you can bet that the bureaucracy does as well,” says Woolsey. ‘If lots of people are beating on them — whether in the Bush administration or in this administration — not to put people on the no-fly list, then that’s the way the bureaucracy is going to behave.”’
Even the LA Times is admitting that the panty bomber is emblematic of the lethality of Marxist style political correctness:
“Some share of responsibility lies with civil libertarian extremists who have ceaselessly lambasted the entire no-fly system.”
“And here is where the political context becomes critical. The Bush administration was subjected to withering criticism for the way it managed the no-fly list. The American Civil Liberties Union put the system on its own list of the ‘Top Ten Abuses of Power Since 9/11,’ asserting that ‘the uncontroversial contention that Osama bin Laden and a handful of other known terrorists should not be allowed on an aircraft’ has been exploited ‘to create a monster.’ In one of several lawsuits the group has filed involving terrorist lists, the ACLU alleged that they ‘violate airline passengers’ constitutional right to freedom from unreasonable search and seizure and to due process of law.”
“Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has been one among a chorus of voices that accused the former administration of being far too sweeping, placing ‘infants, nuns and even members of Congress’ on terrorist watch lists. The writer Naomi Wolf has called travel restrictions such as the no-fly list, ‘a classic part of the fascist playbook’ akin to the depredations of Nazi Germany, where ‘families fleeing internment were traumatized by the uncertainties that they knew they faced at the borders.’ This was hysteria directed against Bush counter-terrorism mechanisms that the Obama administration has left almost entirely unchanged.”
Bending to the demands of political correctness is not only dangerous, it’s stupid. How many times do we have to go through this to figure out that no matter how daft the lengths to which we go, liberals will never think it’s enough.
Flight 253: All Liberals’ Fault
As is the case in all national catastrophes, we can thank liberals for the Christmas Day terrorist attack by Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab. Hundreds of casualties were prevented, not by any action on the part of our government, but rather a courageous Dutchman, Jasper Schuringa, who followed in the lion hearted footsteps of Flight 93’s passengers, this time with a better ending.
Former CIA director, R. James Woolsey spoke to Robert Costa of NRO:
“What troubles Woolsey is that Abdul Mutallab’s name was left off the lists for political reasons. ‘Limiting the ‘no fly’ and ‘recheck’ lists has been a cause of the Left and libertarians for years,’ he says. ‘You’ve got a bunch of people on the Hill and in the NGOs beating on them to have, say, not 5,000 names but only 3,000 names on the no-fly list. There’s a lot of pressure on the system from the Hill, and to some extent the public, to be very, very conservative about promoting anybody from the recheck list of 500,000 to the no-fly list of three or four thousand.’”
Costa questions whether the intelligence community should be politicized:
‘“Well, just as the Supreme Court follows the election returns, you can bet that the bureaucracy does as well,” says Woolsey. ‘If lots of people are beating on them — whether in the Bush administration or in this administration — not to put people on the no-fly list, then that’s the way the bureaucracy is going to behave.”’
Even the LA Times is admitting that the panty bomber is emblematic of the lethality of Marxist style political correctness:
“Some share of responsibility lies with civil libertarian extremists who have ceaselessly lambasted the entire no-fly system.”
“And here is where the political context becomes critical. The Bush administration was subjected to withering criticism for the way it managed the no-fly list. The American Civil Liberties Union put the system on its own list of the ‘Top Ten Abuses of Power Since 9/11,’ asserting that ‘the uncontroversial contention that Osama bin Laden and a handful of other known terrorists should not be allowed on an aircraft’ has been exploited ‘to create a monster.’ In one of several lawsuits the group has filed involving terrorist lists, the ACLU alleged that they ‘violate airline passengers’ constitutional right to freedom from unreasonable search and seizure and to due process of law.”
“Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has been one among a chorus of voices that accused the former administration of being far too sweeping, placing ‘infants, nuns and even members of Congress’ on terrorist watch lists. The writer Naomi Wolf has called travel restrictions such as the no-fly list, ‘a classic part of the fascist playbook’ akin to the depredations of Nazi Germany, where ‘families fleeing internment were traumatized by the uncertainties that they knew they faced at the borders.’ This was hysteria directed against Bush counter-terrorism mechanisms that the Obama administration has left almost entirely unchanged.”
Bending to the demands of political correctness is not only dangerous, it’s stupid. How many times do we have to go through this to figure out that no matter how daft the lengths to which we go, liberals will never think it’s enough.