THE PLANK JUNE 2, 2009
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A couple of weeks ago, Conor Friedersdorf wondered how it could be that a fairly wide array of conservatives could simultaneously believe that Barack Obama "is a dangerous radical with ties to terrorists, or that he is plotting to
transform the United States into a Communist dictatorship, or that he is going
to seize the guns of law abiding Americans, or that he is an extreme leftist who
cannot be trusted" and that he "should continue the Bush era practice of invoking the War on Terrorism to wield
unprecedented executive power."
The assassination of George Tiller has tragically enabled Friedersdorf to ask the same question in more concrete form:
The attack on Dr. Tiller is widely referred to as “terrorism” in the
blogosphere. Agree or not, it is easy to image an ongoing terrorist
campaign run by fringe pro-lifers to shut down abortion clinics. Heaven
forbid that this recent murder is followed by bombings at a few Planned
Parenthood locations, but that scenario isn’t unthinkable — copycat
atrocities are a sad fact of modern life.Should something like that come to pass, I wonder how “War on Terror
hawks” would react.... Would these predominantly
conservative officials, commentators and writers be comfortable if
President Obama declared two or three extremist pro-lifers as “enemy
combatants”? Should Pres. Obama have the prerogative to order the
waterboarding of these uncharged, untried detainees? Should he be able
to listen in on phone conversations originating from evangelical
churches where suspected abortion extremists hang out?
--Christopher Orr
7 comments
This sounds rather like it could easily lead to the logical end result of many discussions about civil liberties I've had with conservatives. Many seem sanguine about consciously completely discarding fourth and fifth amendment rights, arguing the old chestnut, "If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear."
Most nonetheless balk when my next contribution to the conversation is, "All right. I work for the government. Give me your daughter's diary."
- janus
June 2, 2009 at 2:10pm
Interesting, but I believe one of the commentors on the Friedersdorf post said it best: "The rightside is not rational. Not a'tall."
- cspencef
June 2, 2009 at 2:37pm
I know one thing: Jack McCoy certainly had no qualms about that. Personally, I say bring back the thumb-screw, the rack, the estrappado and the coke bottle for abortion terrorists. I mean, it's one thing for a flea-ridden Bedouin to hate our way of life; you really gotta wonder about home grown terrorists.
- icarusr
June 2, 2009 at 3:05pm
"The assassination of George Tiller has tragically enabled Friedersdorf to ask the same question in more concrete form."
I'm primed (Heineken, early Stones), today, to comment on the Plank, but the stupidity of Orr's phrase "tragically enabled", and the syntax, stopped me in my tracks.
- cvillekid
June 2, 2009 at 3:48pm
"it is easy to image an ongoing terrorist campaign run by fringe pro-lifers to shut down abortion clinics"
No, it isn't. A terrorist movement like that needs a quasi-military organization, weapons stockpiles, training camps, initiation rituals, chain of command and so forth. This is the case with terror groups as disparate as the KKK, the provos in Ulster, FARC, the taliban, Serb militias etc. With most terror groups there's also a subcurrent of criminality involved, be it garden variety robbery or else white collar theft, and with it, the usual mafia/gangland codes, enforcers, thuggery.
What evidence is there of any such organization or behavior among the right to lifers? If there were such a degree of organization, discipline, weaponry, larceny etc, it would have existed decades ago. What reason is there to think it's about to or is coalescing now?
- teplukhin2you
June 2, 2009 at 8:25pm
According to the murderer's ex-wife, he was a pretty normal guy until he got involved with the Freeman movement -- there's your link to criminality, wack-job militia organizations, etc. Not to say that he might not have acted on his own (I haven't heard any evidence to the contrary), just that his life spiraled out of control once he got seriously involved in nutjob fringe movements.
Fortunately, most of the nutjobs are too paranoid to really cooperate on a mass scale, so I doubt anything serious would coalesce without a charismatic leader.
- JEFF FREY
June 3, 2009 at 3:52am
Tep, good points all about how a lone wack-job anti-abortionist gunman is different from Al Qaeda or the Ulster provos. Do you have any evidence that the Bush Administration, and its present defenders, have used this categorization as some kind of standing criteria for directing the NSA to obtain phone records without warrants or to designate people as "enemy combatants" and deny them Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights?
- wildboy
June 3, 2009 at 10:22am