A Win-Win Scenario

It’s hard to see understand the controversy over closing the terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay. Those who want to play the fear card—which includes 90 senators—act like the Obama Administration is going to drop these guys off in Miami with bus tickets for the Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. How placing a couple of hundred alleged terrorists into solitary confinement can endanger a nation of three hundred million seems to be a more relevant question than what Obama plans to do with them. (Shackle them and move them under heavy guard seems a reasonable answer to the latter.)

Here’s an idea that should please everyone: build a facility in Texas. I’m sure Crawford’s economy could use a lift, now that all the media and protesters are gone. It’s too bad Bush is gone, too, but his gated community in Dallas is close enough for him to feel a sense of accomplishment for creating this “all locked up with no place to go” scenario. (Funny how his “just folks” attachment to the ranch disappeared about the time it was no longer politically profitable.)

Here’s where we satisfy the Senate: If Rick Perry has his way, Texas will no longer be part of the United States by the time we get the detainees moved, so they won’t be coming to the United States after all.

I don’t know why they just don’t come to me to settle these things.

Be Careful What You Ask For

For years Democrats in Congress refused to deny George W. Bush the finding to do anything he anted. For the last two years of his administration they had the votes; prior to that they have parliamentary procedure to stop any programs they truly objected to, of which they claimed there were many.

Now they have a Democratic president who wants to do something most of them have been claiming they want to do—close the Guantanamo Bay terrorist holding facility—and they’re denying him the funds to do it.

What it comes down to is fear. Which are they more afraid of? Is it the chance one of these 241 alleged terrorists will be too much for the American prison system to handle? That these terrorists, who will be dispersed all over the country to dilute the effects of their less than one-in-a-million status here, will somehow be able to defeat out best efforts to neutralize them? Are these terrorists from Krypton, with superhuman powers that would make them invincible to our military?

Or is their fear of Republicans greater? That one of these guys will do something—run a red light, shoplift a CD—and the Republicans will scream, “See?! We told you it wasn’t safe!”

What scares me most is Harry Reid. Nothing new; I’ve been after Reid’s ass for years. (Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Oh, and here.)The Senate majority leader was rolled on a daily basis when he was the minority leader. Now he has 59 votes, and they still roll him. Here are Reid’s comments on why the Guantanamo detainees can’t be placed into the federal prison system:

REID: I’m saying that the United States Senate, Democrats and Republicans, do not want terrorists to be released in the United States. That’s very clear.

QUESTION: No one’s talking about releasing them. We’re talking about putting them in prison somewhere in the United States.

REID: Can’t put them in prison unless you release them.

QUESTION: Sir, are you going to clarify that a little bit? …

REID: I can’t make it any more clear than the statement I have given to you. We will never allow terrorists to be released in the United States.

This is someone who could hire James Harrison as his press secretary. Harry’s not just incompetent; he’s senile.