9/11 Commission Co-Chair Lee H. Hamilton: "Unless Congress provides immunity, the clear message will be that private citizens should help only when they are certain that all the government's actions are legal. Given today's threats, that is too high a standard."

Are you fucking kidding me?

"...THAT IS TOO HIGH A STANDARD..."?!?!?!?!?!?!

Jeebus ... What the fuck happened to "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself..."?

I personally would feel a lot more secure knowing that EVERYONE would only help the government when they were certain that the actions were legal.

I can understand that there may conceivably be isolcated situations in which the government, or its agents, in hot pursuit of some national security epidemic or situation, might need to skirt the bounds of legality. BUT THIS PROGRAM WAS GOING ON FOR YEARS. THIS IS NOT A DRAMATIC SITUATION. THIS IS POLICY, GOD DAMMIT.

Are there any good arguments for the immunity provisions? Does anyone know of anyone capable of making these arguments with any type of coherence and logic?

I am not joking, I really would like to see this.

So far as I can tell, the best argument for these provisions seems to be that "If we don't protect them this time, the next time we have a program of questionable legality, they might be less helpful."

That is the argument for which 60 senators are willing to sell out the rule of law? Really?

The persuasiveness of an argument can often be determined by the willingness of its advocates to confine themselves to the truth when making it.

I am not sure how well this would hold up in a Philosophy 101 course (in a "the Devil can quote Scripture for his own reasons" kind of way), but I certainly like it, and agree with it. Thanks, Glenn.

Oh, and thanks for ruining my Monday.

The Bush administration committed last May to admitting 7000 refugees from Iraq last year. 7000 out of a displaced population over 4 million. And does anyone wanna bet that that figure was not even remotely close to how many were actually admitted?

Someone really ought to remind these idiots about the sad story of Breckenridge Long and the US State Department during the Holocaust.

http://motlc.learningcenter.wiesenthal.org/text/x15/xm1506.html

On the other hand, Bush learned from Vietnam that the US withdrawal caused/enabled the Khmer Rouge's mania.** I guess any lessons from forty years prior to that shouldn't be based on fact or reason, either. Hooray for us! We're great!

What's the quote? "Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it." Or something like that.

We are becoming a nation of idiots, a confederacy of dunces, goddammit.

**Rationally, I would think that our dropping of thousands of tons of bombs, thereby disrupting and displacing the agrarian populace and enabling the communist recruiters, might have been more responsible for that, but that's just me.

All this talk of being "strong and tough", avoiding "being depicted as weak" strikes me as an intrinsically Republican, neocon, faux-masculine way of framing a discussion about what is, after all, party political legislation, not some WWF cagematch.

While this surely goes back at least to Tories and Whigs, I thoroughly believe that the current vapidity of this language is directly traceable to Kennedy, really. His cynical exploitation of a completely non-existent and fraudulent "missle gap" in the 1960 race vs. Nixon exploited exactly the same types of "weak" and "soft" rhetorical accusations that we see now. And back to the rhetoric of LeMay and the other bomber generals when they were foisting the development and ridiculous expansion of the Nuclear arsenal on Truman and Eisenhower in the 40's and 50's. And back to the idiots who accused Roosevelt of being in Churchill's pocket. And ...

The neo-cons did not invent this type of demagoguery. They use it all the time, admittedly, but let's not give them credit for originality, please.

That being said, I think your overall point is not only well stated, but fundamentally the most important one to be made these days. We desperately need a shift away from this brinksmanship which passes for flourish these days.

"Give War a Chance", my ass.

There is a piece available on YouTube of Hagel in the Senate sometime last year emphatically decrying this type of speech - where it is acceptable to question someone's patriotism based on their suppport for the President or a particular policy. Hagel has a lot to answer for in terms of his ties to voting machine companies and he is somewhat right of attila on many social issues, but I am sorry he is leaving the Senate, based on my belief that he demonstrates the type of strength that Glenn talked about in his reply to your original comment.

But true strength means adhering to your convictions and pursuing your principles even when doing so is difficult, when it's not always the most risk-free course. That is an important trait; it has nothing to do with machismo or anything else; and it is this form of authentic, meaningful strength that Democrats lack almost completely, and everyone can see that.