Fox News cable analyst Bill O'Reilly returned to his perch on the O’Reilly Factor last night. Somewhat by default, In 2009, Bill O’Reilly became sort of the senior statesman of the Fox Family in that unlike Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck, his fellow travelers , O’Reilly didn’t reflexively blast every little thing that came down the pike when it involved Barack Obama.
(Actually, Shepherd Smith has been known to break down in moments showing his humanity from time to time).
So I’ll take the cable commentator at his word that he doesn’t think Obama is doing a good enough job in keeping America safe (a la Dick Cheney) after the failed terrorist attack on Christmas Day in Detroit.
O’Reilly used the entire half hour of his program last night – usually the highest rated in cable news- to present commentators who essentially agreed with his world view that Obama doesn’t get it when it comes to national security. (And this was without Dick Morris making an appearance!). Among his guests were pollster Scott Rasmussen, whose polls have been criticized more and more by Democrats of late. You may recall I mentioned something about not trusting Rasmussen entirely, since his polls always seem to skew roughly 5 % points worse for Obama, through 2009. I wasn’t the only one who noticed that. Politico reported over the weekend that a lot of Democrats have been trash talking Rasmussen. Anyway, O’Reilly had Rasmussen on to say that 71% of Americans which obviously includes Democrats, disagree with prosecuting some terrorists – ilke Khalid Sheik Mohammeed and now Umar Farouk Abdulmmutallab in criminal courts, vs . putting them in Gitmo like settings.
One of the best political analysts in the country in my opinion, Michael Kinsley , writes about this in today’s NY Times:
Republican critics like Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich have raised these questions in the past few days. There’s a gruesome anomaly here, to be sure: the United States government will blow you to smithereens and consider it a good day’s work if you’re a Qaeda member dreaming of jihadist glory while residing somewhere outside the United States, but will pay for your lawyer if you get caught in the act within our borders. But this anomaly didn’t arise with the Obama administration. It is built into our dual role as a liberal democracy and as a legitimately aggrieved superpower.
The charms of liberal democracy sometimes need to be defended by war, and Mr. Obama’s critics are right that war can’t be conducted with a high level of concern for individual justice. A liberal democracy aspires to punish only the guilty. But war is inherently unfair — it distributes suffering arbitrarily among enemy combatants, civilians and one’s own soldiers. A line has to be drawn somewhere to determine which of these utterly different standards of government behavior is applied where — and the nation’s border is as good a line as any.
Members of Al Qaeda are not the only ones affected by this double standard. The most repulsive and obviously guilty child molester — or drug kingpin who may also have information that the government could use — gets American justice, while an innocent child killed accidentally in our pursuit of terrorists gets no justice at all.
This article appears in Dec 30, 2009 – Jan 5, 2010.