Sen. John McCain has been carrying so much water for his friends in the mainstream media that he now has to state for the record to Republican audiences: “I hold no brief for al Qaeda.”
Well, that’s a relief.
It turns out, the only reason McCain is demanding that prisoners like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, the beheading of journalist Daniel Pearl and other atrocities—be treated like Martha Stewart facing an insider trading charge is this: “It’s all about the United States of America and what is going to happen to Americans who are taken prisoner in future wars.”
McCain, along with Sen. Lindsey Graham and Sen. John Warner—or, as the Times now calls him, the “courtly Virginian”—want terrorists treated like Americans accused of crimes, with full access to classified information against them and a list of the undercover agents involved in their capture. Liberals’ interest in protecting classified information started and ended with Valerie Plame.
As Graham explained, he doesn’t want procedures used against terrorists at Guantanamo “to become clubs to be used against our people.” Actually, clubs would be a step up from videotaped beheadings.
Or as the New York Times wrote in the original weasel talking points earlier this summer: “The Geneva Conventions protect Americans. If this country changes the rules, it’s changing the rules for Americans taken prisoner abroad. That is far too high a price to pay so this administration can hang on to its misbegotten policies.”
There hasn’t been this much railing about the mistreatment of a hostage since Monica Lewinsky was served canapes at the Pentagon City Ritz-Carlton Hotel while being detained by the FBI.
The belief that we can impress the enemy with our magnanimity is an idea that just won’t die. It’s worse than the idea that paying welfare recipients benefits won’t discourage them from working. (Some tiny minority might still seek work.) It’s worse than the idea that taxes can be raised endlessly without reducing tax receipts. (As the Laffer Curve illustrates, at some point—a point this country will never reach—taxes could theoretically be cut so much that tax revenues would decline.)
But being nice to enemies is an idea that has never worked, no matter how many times liberals make us do it. It didn’t work with the Soviet Union, Imperial Japan, Hitler or the North Vietnamese—enemies notable for being more civilized than the Islamic savages we are at war with today.
By the way, how did the Geneva Conventions work out for McCain at the Hanoi Hilton?
It doesn’t even work with the Democrats, whom Bush kept sucking up to his first year in office. No more movie nights at the White House with Teddy Kennedy these days, I’m guessing.
It was this idea (Be nice!) that fueled liberals’ rage at Reagan when he vanquished the Soviet Union with his macho “cowboy diplomacy” that was going to get us all blown up. As the Times editorial page hysterically described Reagan’s first year in office: “Mr. Reagan looked at the world through gun sights.” Yes, he did! And now the Evil Empire is no more.
It was this idiotic idea of being nice to predators that drove liberal crime policies in the ‘60s and ‘70s—leading like night into day to unprecedented crime rates. Now these same liberal ninnies want to extend their tender mercies not just to rapists and murderers, but to Islamic terrorists.
Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Ronald Reagan and Winston Churchill had a different idea: Instead of rewarding bad behavior, punish bad behavior. How many times does punishment have to work and coddling have to fail before we never have to hear again that if we treat terrorists well, the terrorists will treat our prisoners well?
Fortunately, history always begins this morning for liberals, so they can keep flogging the same idiotic idea that has never, ever worked: Be nice to our enemies and they will reward us with good behavior.
Never mind trusting liberals with national security. Never mind trusting them with raising kids. These people shouldn’t even be allowed to own pets.
If the Democrats and the four pathetic Republicans angling to be called “mavericks” by the New York Times really believe we need to treat captured terrorists nicely in order to ensure that the next American they capture will be well-treated, then why stop at 600-thread-count sheets for the Guantanamo detainees? We must adopt Sharia law.
As McCain might put it, I hold no brief for al Qaeda, but what would better protect Americans they take prisoner than if America went whole hog and became an Islamic republic? On the plus side, we can finally put Rosie O’Donnell in a burka.
• High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton (1998)
• Slander:Liberal Lies About the American Right (2002)
• Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (2003)
• HowTo Talk To Liberals (If You Must) (2004)
• Godless: The Church of Liberalism (2006)
• If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans (2007)
• Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America (2009)
• Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America (2011)
•Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama (2012)
•Never Trust a Liberal Over Three-Especially a Republican (2013)
•Adios, America: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole (2015)
•In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome! (2016)
•Resistance Is Futile!: How the Trump-Hating Left Lost Its Collective Mind (2018)
She also writes a popular syndicated column every week published at Breitbart, DailyCaller, Townhall, FrontPage, Yahoo, Takimag, VDare, and dozens of newspapers. (As well as the eponymous, AnnCoulter.com!)
Coulter has been a major media personality for more than 20 years, after starting on MSNBC their first day on air in July 1996.
She has appeared on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, PBS’s Frontline, The Today Show, Good Morning America, The Early Show, The Tonight Show, Good Morning Britain, Yahoo News, and a slew of other U.S. and international TV shows. She was the cover story of Time magazine on April 25, 2005, and has been profiled in scores of other publications, including TV Guide, The Guardian (UK), the New York Observer, National Journal, Harper’s Bazaar, The Washington Post, The New York Times and Elle magazine. In 2001, Coulter was named one of the top 100 Public Intellectuals by federal judge Richard Posner.
A Connecticut native, Coulter graduated with honors from Cornell University School of Arts & Sciences and received her J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School, where she was an editor of The Michigan Law Review.
After practicing law for a few, very long years in New York City, Coulter moved to Washington to work for the Senate Judiciary Committee, where she handled crime and immigration issues for Senator Spencer Abraham of Michigan. From there, she became a litigator with the Center For Individual Rights in Washington, DC, focusing on free speech, congressional power, and race discrimination cases.
Within a year, Coulter took a short leave of absence from her law firm to write her first New York Times bestseller, High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton.
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