Rachel Maddow is Soooooo Wrong on Prisoner Detention

Rachel, Rachel, Rachel. How can you be so smart and yet get it so wrong on the issue of unlimited detention of some Guantanamo prisoners?

For those of you who do not have an on-going love affair with MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, or more likely never even heard of her, let me say that she is my very favorite TV Talking Head. She is really, really smart; on top of every issue; knows the facts, history and context about everything. I am constantly in awe of the arcane information that tumbles from her mouth. Where does she find this stuff and how does she retain it?

So why am I distraught?

A little background. Rachel, and so many of my leftie contemporaries, have hopped all over President Obama's recent decisions to maintain a sizable residual force in Iraq through 2011, to not release addition photos of prisoner atrocities and to refine but maintain military tribunals all on the advice of his commanders in the field. Further, they are exercised about the president's desire to grab the momentum he's been handed to accomplish some of the left's most cherished aspirations like healthcare reform, environmental protection, energy enlightenment and democratic capitalism instead of getting bogged down prosecuting the scumbags who wrote the torture memos and other war criminals in the Bush regime like Cheney and Rumsfeld.

Okay, so those are legitimate policy differences with the president...and me. Indefinite prisoner detention however is a completely different animal.

Lefties, reinforced by others of similar mindsets in their urban enclaves and cosseted campuses, are able to pretend that their vision of America is one widely shared by everyone else except, of course, the lunatic right-wing fringe. For years the left has believed it is just a matter of time before the vast American center sees the truth and turns to it for its salvation. What so many in the left simply don't understand is that they and many of the opinions they hold are not just a minority but almost an inconsequential minority. It is also why I don't hang around them. I love 'em but they are fruitcakes.

Since November, they've deluded themselves that Obama's victory was the permanent political realignment they have dreamt of for decades. That the majority of Americans finally has seen the light and the errors of its Republican-leaning ways. But Obama's win says a lot more about Americans' anger at the opposition and disgust over the Iraq war than about any mass awakening.

Don't kid yourself. America is at its base a center-right nation; compared to Europe and Canada -- imperialistic, aggressively religious, anti-socialist and belligerently capitalist. Instead of comprehending that Obama may be the last best chance the left will ever have of fulfilling its dream of universal justice and equality by exquisitely straddling the fine contour between liberal ideals and centrist sensibilities, the left has set about harping about everything the administration undertakes that doesn't toe the "correct" line.

But back to Rachel and her reaction to Obama's comments that while most Guantanamo prisoners will receive civilian or military trials or be repatriated or released, some who remain a danger to the U.S., but for security or other reasons cannot be tried, will be detained indefinitely. Obama has made clear that such determinations will not be arbitrary or the purview of some faceless gnome in the Pentagon. They will be made only in consultation with courts and congress to ensure due process, habeas corpus and humane treatment proportionate to their prisoner of war status.

Rachel and many on the left among human rights activists and civil libertarians are aghast. Aghast!

Lefties are hewing to the same course on treatment of terrorists as they did in the 70s on treatment of street criminals. Their defense of terrorists' rights today is the same left-wing insanity that destroyed the Democratic Party then. Their defense of criminals based on socioeconomic circumstances turned the country against liberal ideas for three decades. But the pragmatic consequences isn't the point. The point is they were wrong then and are wrong now. There's not a legitimate voice on the left who would any longer excuse the actions of hardened murderers, rapists and armed robbers as was the case 35 years ago. Some people are simply bad seeds. Our obligation as a society to attempt to salvage as many as possible from a life of crime aside, unrepentant evil doers need to have the book thrown at them.

So it is with the detainees. Some are truly Bad Guys. As it is, one in seven Gitmo prisoners released under the ham-handed Bush policies returns to the battlefield against American troops. I'm less concerned with released low level grunts (although the GI shot by one clearly would be) than with those bomb makers, logisticians, tacticians, financiers and others who serve as the nerve center of al-Qaida. They are unrepentant. They are a continuing threat. They are prisoners of war and just as in every war, prisoners are not released until the cessation of hostilities.

The left is acting irresponsibly by pressing to extend constitutional guarantees to a group for which such guarantees were never intended and doesn't deserve them. Lefties ceaselessly referenced the Geneva Conventions in their criticism of the Bush administration's prisoner policies. Now that Obama is bringing the nation into line with the Third Geneva Convention that deals with prisoners, the left needs to accept that America has the right to hold them under the conditions set forth by Geneva.

I've argued in a previous post, Boo!, against Republicans and the Limbaugh-Hannity morons who are trying to scare Americans over closing Guantanamo and moving some prisoners into supermax prisons here. Rachel, you are wrong in principle -- as well as undermining the very Obama social agenda you support! These are not citizens, not even residents. They were captured on foreign battlefields. They have no rights beyond those enumerated by Geneva. As I warned the righties in Boo!, get over it!