Monday, December 15, 2008

The Crisis-Mongers

It's an "emergency" – do as I say. Or else…

By Justin Raimondo

"Did you, too, get that frisson of déjà vu when you first heard about the bank bailout and its rationale? If you don't hand over untold trillions of dollars in the next five minutes, the economy is going to explode. This was how the PATRIOT Act got rammed through Congress in record time, before anyone had a chance to even read the voluminous bill, surrendering what's left of our liberties and giving the president dictatorial powers: give us your freedom, or else the terrorists are going to blow the country up. This was also how the Bush administration and its neoconservative amen chorus whipped up war hysteria against Iraq: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Unless we invaded Iraq immediately, we were told, Saddam would unleash his legendary "weapons of mass destruction" – yes, even against the continental United States.

The methodology at work here might be called the Dershowitz Principle, after America's most famous theoretician of torture, who maintains that what qualifies as torture is defensible in an extreme situation. That is, when life suddenly morphs into a Jack Bauer-like scenario, in which the clock is ticking and you have to torture the evil terrorist or else they'll l blow up the White House, Capitol Hill, and the corner grocery for good measure....."

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