As noted in this CNN.com article, President Bush is quoted as saying: “If you listen closely to some of the leaders of the Democratic Party, it sounds like they think the best way to protect the American people is, wait until we’re attacked again.”
This is just more of the same fear-mongering, logic-defying, overly divisive language that the Bush administration has been pushing for years. The only sad surprise would be if it is still effective in winning votes.
Here’s why Bush’s quote is so worthy of ridicule:
What Bush is saying is no different than if he said: “The best way for police to protect us from criminals is to arrest them and put them in jail, without a trial and without any means of protesting their incarceration — even before they commit a crime. Democrats want us to wait until they actually do commit a crime. But by then it’s too late!”
Is there any reasonable person who would agree with this idea? I mean other than most of the Republicans in Congress and the Bush administration. I certainly hope not. Doing so would violate just about every civil right and due process we have in place in this country. Not to mention, that there is no guarantee that we would not mistakenly imprison innocent people. Heck, we have routinely executed innocent people, even after they get a trial — as DNA testing has now proven. We certainly can’t assume we would never make a mistake about merely putting someone in jail.
Finally, just because the police don’t arrest people whose only crime is that they may be thinking about committing a crime (which, by the way, was the subject of the movie Minority Report, where the idea didn’t work out so well!), doesn’t mean the police sit on their butts and do nothing until a crime is reported. Ideally, they are working night and day to prevent crimes.
In the same way, the Democrats are not suggesting that we do nothing to prevent future attacks — just because they don’t agree with the excesses put forward by the Bush administration. Not even close. Democrats are just suggesting that there needs to be some limit as to how far we can go in this regard. Otherwise, who knows, we may someday start a war based on a completely false assumption, such as the presumed existence of weapons of mass destruction. Let’s all hope that day never comes.