It was bound to happen. Free-floating right-wingers and their Republican allies in public office are so filled with automatic and mindless hate for President Obama their they've finally blundered by condemning the U.S. system of justice.
These morons cover the gamut.
There's William Kristol, a leading, strident promoter of attacking Iraq whose magazine, The Weekly Standard, is subsidized by Fox News' Rupert Murdoch. Kristol dismisses a courtroom trial for 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as irrelevant and unnecessary. "They should just go ahead and convict him and put him to death."
But the most morally bankrupt of all is former New York Mayor and GOP presidential wannabe Rudy Giuliani, who is so freaked out in his hate for Obama that he was caught in a revolting contradiction. After condemning the scheduled trial of Mohammed as too dangerous for New York City security forces and insulting to the city, reporters dug through the archives and found this Giuliani quote after the 2006 New York trial of would-be highjacker Zacarias Moussaoui.
"It shows we can give people a fair trial, that we are exactly what we say we are. We are a nation of law."
Betwixt Kristol and Giuliani are GOP members of Congress babbling about a trial being a sacrilege to the 9/11 dead and suggestions eerily similar to Fidel Castro's command, "Paredon!"—"To the wall!"—when executing his foes.
The stench in GOP rhetoric was too much even for former Republican Congressman and presidential candidate Bob Barr, American Conservative Union President David Keen and Club of Growth President Grover Norquist, who condemned it as "scaremongering."
Republicans are accustomed to playing fast and loose with constitutional justice, having been conditioned by the Bush-Cheney-Alberto Gonzalez illegal wiretaps, the kidnapping and torturing of suspects and sheer disregard for their rights.
But the chorus of critics condemning a New York City trial also are engaged in ugly politics. Over the past several years, 195 terrorist suspects have been tried in U.S. courts. Of those, according to the Justice Department, 91 percent have been convicted and sentenced and are doing time in U.S. prisons with no threat to anyone.
No one can recall any Republican's spreading alarm about the dangers of terrorists' trials on America soil, or threats to the safety of women and children, or demands for immediate execution of defendants.
This concocted alarm is occurring because Barack Obama is now president.
After trashing the U.S. justice system to get at Obama, what next?
