A-Hole Calls Rand Paul "Orwellian" for Supporting the Constitution

Note: here's a bit of what's being referenced in this article



Don't want to be detained by your government for being accused of being a "terrorist" with no recourse?  That makes you a "libertarian extremist" and "Orwellian" according to this douche bag at the National Review:

For one thing, it will be seen as the policy that vested such dangerously misplaced Tea Party credibility in libertarian extremists such as Senator Paul and Judge Napolitano, who, under the Orwellian guise of “constitutionalism,” seek to vest our wartime enemies with the rights and privileges of American citizens (to the full peacetime extent of those rights and privileges).

The quest to quell Islamists by democratic processes has only empowered them.

What this douche bag fails to realize is the Paul is talking about Americans' rights during "wartime."  That's the whole point.  All of this detention without habeus corpus is now applicable to Americans.  (The douche bag does make the argument that this is nothing new, the President already has this power, blah, blah, blah.  The point is we shouldn't be supporting it.)

Some more choice quotes from this gruelingly long 7-page article:

Democracy fetishists have worn threadbare the public’s patience. 

Yes, folks, if you believe in the Constitution, you are a democracy "fetishist."  I wonder what kind of things this pervert does in the privacy of his own bedroom.

They now lend an open ear to anti-constitutional claims by the likes of Paul and Napolitano — and convince themselves that these characters are scoring points because respondents like McCain are inept. 

McCain is inept?  McCain would chew your ear off with his gums if he heard that, buddy. McCain isn't anymore inept than anyone else.  It's that the position makes no sense.

[A]fter almost 3,000 of us were slaughtered on 9/11, the public broadly demanded that the enemy be subdued.

No, freaks like you demanded that the "enemy" be subdued.  As people have pointed out, our enemy is now "terror," and is not finite.  That makes anyone who "supports terror" a potential suspect to be locked up in Guantanamo forever.  Who decides if someone is "supporting terror?"  The government of course, and they've decided that people donating to the wrong charities are supporting terror.

Paul is fond of pointing to Lincoln’s unilateral suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War. What he never gets around to mentioning, however, is that (a) the constitutional prerequisite for suspension of the writ, rebellion, had clearly occurred, and therefore the only legal question concerned which political branch, the president or Congress, had the authority to order suspension;

Bullshit.  The cognitive dissonance isn't interrupted by what he says just a sentence or two later:

(c) after the war, the Supreme Court rejected the executive’s unilateral suspension,

Oh, I guess the prerequisites hadn't been met yet.  But maybe I'm just being a 'democracy fetishist' by insisting that the Judiciary have some roll in the balance of powers.

And back to his point about Lincoln, Lincoln locked up people who published things he didn't like, like a douche bag, during the war, so I don't think it was all wine and roses.

Gitmo, the most scrutinized prison on the planet, is a model of humane treatment, solicitous to a fault in providing for our enemies’ eccentric dietary, spiritual, recreational, and litigation needs. 

Maybe we should put this guy in Gitmo and see how he feels?  Here are a few comments on US detention policy by Glenn Greenwald:

The interrogation and detention regime implemented by the U.S. resulted in the deaths of over 100 detainees in U.S. custody — at least.  While some of those deaths were the result of ”rogue” interrogators and agents, many were caused by the methods authorized at the highest levels of the Bush White House, including extreme stress positions, hypothermia, sleep deprivation and others.  Aside from the fact that they cause immense pain, that’s one reason we’ve always considered those tactics to be “torture” when used by others— because they inflict serious harm, and can even kill people.

I mean, people have been murdered at Gitmo.  Bottom line.  People have also been forced to wear diapers, all that shit.

Oh yeah, most of the people who were in Gitmo were found innocent.  So much for the worst of the worst claim.

Also, McCain's claim about Gitmo detainees' recidivism isn't even close to being true.

And, one final point:

This gives rise to the contention — advanced not by Senator Paul but by Justices Antonin Scalia and John Paul Stevens in the 2004 Hamdi case — that American citizens may not be detained in wartime, even if they are suspected of fighting for the enemy, absent a formal congressional suspension of habeas corpus.

 You're farther right on wartime powers than Scalia: an indication you might need a reality check.