L.A. Times

I came across a column by Rosa Brooks in the L.A. Times from 7 July titled That's the GOP's big gun? Ok, it's so obvious this is not an impartial column, I wonder if Ms. Brooks ever claims to be unbiased. I don't even know where to start.

Unless I'm really missing something, the problem is not only that the GOP anti-terror strategy has been largely counterproductive. Much of the time, it also seems impressively unfettered by logic.

Oh, you mean like the totally logical strategy of the CUT AND RUN Democrats?

We want to interrogate terror suspects. Who wouldn't? In fact, we want to use "enhanced" interrogation methods (translation: torture) against terror suspects, and when it's inconvenient for us to torture people ourselves, we regularly trundle them off to foreign states that don't mind getting their hands dirty. Yet we don't want to release any of the remaining detainees at Guantanamo because we're worried that their home governments might … torture them!

Why on earth do these people keep insisting that we torture the detainees in Git'mo? Seems to me that there have been enough people, Dems included, who have been down there and found no evidence of torture.

We want to detect terrorist plots and prosecute terrorists for their crimes. That's why we want to undertake ever more sophisticated electronic surveillance and why we want to create military commissions to try suspected bad guys at Guantanamo. But for some reason, the Bush administration prefers to do all this illegally, which I really don't get.

Where's the illegal part? These scum suckers didn't sign the Geneva Convention, they know no rules of engagement, they aren't normal prisoners of war. We've never fought a war like this, news rules need to be created to deal with the detainees. We're learning as we go along.

As he's [Bush]fond of reminding us, terrorists hate us because "they hate our freedoms." And following this weird logic, if the administration throws our freedoms out the window, maybe they'll stop hating us!

I thought that was the liberal strategy. "Can't we all just get along?" Let's just appease the darlings that want to cut our heads off. grrrrrr

But if you think the lack of another major terrorist attack means the GOP approach to fighting terror is working, remember the old joke: A guy is throwing sawdust out the window. Another guy comes along and says, "Why are you throwing sawdust out your window?" "To keep the elephants away," says the first guy. "But there are no elephants around here!" "See? It works!"

I guess she hasn't heard about those guys in Buffalo, has she. Or maybe she missed the 17 up in Canada?

In its annual survey of global public opinion, released in June, the Pew Research Center found that people in 13 of the 15 countries surveyed see the U.S. war in Iraq as a greater threat to world peace than Iranian nuclear ambitions. Overall, the study found, "America's global image has again slipped" and "support for the war on terrorism has declined even among close U.S. allies." Was it something we said?

No Rosie, it was something YOU said.