I’ve openly admitted before that my early and somewhat enthusiastic support for the Bush Administration’s post-9/11 terror policy was a mistake. I didn’t think PATRIOT was that big a deal, and I even got behind the Iraq thing, which was regrettable. To paint as charitable picture of myself as possible, I did think renewal of PATRIOT was wrong, and for the last few years I’ve despised basically everything Bush has done in office: ignoring FISA, prosecuting obscenity, doing his best to take away essential liberty, domestic spying, and the general climate of fear. Not that Bush is singularly responsible for this, even now Congress is willing to bend over backward to grant the Executive more authority, likely hoping their team will get to use it going forward. Essentially, there is nothing about the government to like at the moment.
And that brings me to this little gem from Glen Reynolds in which he writes about some bed-wetting book. A quote from the book, then:
It is unimaginable that Francis Biddle or Robert Jackson would have written Franklin Roosevelt a memorandum about how to avoid prosecution for his wartime decisions designed to maintain flexibility against a new and deadly foe. . . . Many people think the Bush administration has been indifferent to wartime legal constraints. But the opposite is true: the administration has been strangled by law, and since September 11, 2001 this war has been lawyered to death.
Wartime? Has Congress declared a war on anyone other than Iraq? Is there some sort of existential threat of which I am not aware? Please, feel free to edify me on the subject so long as you don’t simply make declarative statements and expect that I will believe them. The assurance that only bad men are being targeted and that we just have to trust the President to “Do The Right Thing” rings pretty hollow, and is antithetical to the very idea of an open, representative government. Furthermore, “Many people X, but Y is really the case” doesn’t exactly add up to evidence, or even really an argument. It’s the thesis of a terrible 100-level composition paper.
The rest of Reynold’s post quotes a few paragraphs that try to use the number of lawyers working on the War Against Funny-Hatted Cave Dwellers as proof that the Bush administration takes legal considerations very seriously. Frankly, it doesn’t surprise me that they have thousands of attorneys scouring the law looking for the easiest but technically legal way to violate over half of the Bill of Rights in one go.
I do, though, have to point out Reynold’s concluding statement:
In his book about the 9/11 aftermath, After, Steven Brill reports that John Ashcroft’s instructions to his subordinates — repeating President Bush’s instructions to Ashcroft — were not to ever let something like that happen again. It hasn’t, but that command certainly affected attitudes — and, now because nothing like that has happened again, we find ourself back in more of a 1990s mindset.
That’s special isn’t it? It’s a complete logical fallacy, post hoc ergo propter hoc to be specific. Reynold’s is assuming that Bush’s post-9/11 behavior is the reason that there have been no further attacks on the US. I think it’s far more likely that a bunch of semi-literate extremists living in caves just aren’t that damn scary.
