On Barbies and Bad Guys

Congress and the President have been trying, for the past couple weeks, to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. As happens all too often, the debate has descended into a mishmash of half-truths and outright misrepresentation that have completely obscured what has happened to bring us here. Worse, the blathering of alarmists have prevented us from discussing what our intelligence agencies should be doing and being clear about who should and should not enjoy the protections our civilized society can offer. The New York Times today decides to bloviate on the ongoing debate with its usual partisan and undeniably hypocritical point of view. Karl takes the editors to the woodshed. Here’s how he finishes:

The editors of the NYT apparently believe that the ability to study sophisticated data and immediately inspect suspicious international communications requires judicial involvement in all cases, while no such intervention is required in the case of a suspicious imported Barbie doll. Both issues — as well as the issue of border security with respect to illegal immigration, where the NYT is famously indifferent — implicate the general principle that the routine searches of the persons, effects and data crossing the US border are not subject to any requirement of reasonable suspicion, probable cause, or warrant.

The editors of the NYT are under no obligation to explain how they reconcile their opinions on such issues. Nor are they under any obligation to reconcile their opinions with what their own journalists have actually reported. That they fail to do so, however, undermines their credibility in claiming that it is the Bush administration that is insufficiently nuanced in its approach to debating such issues.

The Times is being extremely disingenuous with its editorial today and we should not allow them to get away with it. There is one area, though, that Karl does not explicitly touch, and it answers much of the Barbies vs. Bad Guys comparison. The editors of the Times believe that imported Barbie Dolls present a legitimate danger to Americans, but that Islamist terrorists do not. They imagine tens of thousands of tainted dolls in the hands of children but they can not envision those same children in chunks, blown apart by Islamists bombs or dead in agony from Islamist biological or nuclear weapons.

The things is, no one has died from a Chinese Barbie Doll. Lots and lots have people have died at the hands of Islamist terrorists. Nevertheless, the editors of the Times and their fellow travelers on the left would rather treat them as figments of the neocon imagination. So much for being “reality-based”.

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Category: Fighting the Islamists