Brother Tom Gets It Right Again; Atrios Apoplectic

I think Tom Friedman is on the mark today--as he often is--when he argues that we must shut down Guantanamo Bay. Our actions there are likely to go down as one of the blackest black marks on our history--a history with entirely too many black marks on it as it is.

The administration's policies with regard to the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay seem to indicate that their commitment to human rights is shallow at best, a mere smokescreen at worst. What's going on at Guantanamo Bay is consistent with the general orientation of American conservatives in my lifetime: they have been all too willing to engage in egregious violations of the rights of non-Americans in order to purchase even miniscule--and sometimes purely fictional--improvements for security for Americans. This is what happened, for example, when conservatives backed the Nicaraguan Contras.

But our government is underwritten by a theory according to which all human beings have certain inalienable rights. Our constitution guarantees that our government must recognize these antecedently-existing rights, but the constitution itself is not taken to create these rights, and, so, these rights are not limited to American citizens. Here's a good place to use the "what if the tables were turned?" test: how many of us would tolerate the abuses of Guantanamo Bay if the prisoners held without trial there were Unites States citizens? How many of us would tolerate it if another country were holding our citizens under such conditions?

As the most minor of footnotes to all of this, I notice in passing that Atrios now exists in a state of near-constant apoplexy. I hate to be too harsh toward the guy who gave me my first big link, but I have to say that I consider Atrios to be little more than the Instapundit of the left anymore. And although the comments are sometimes amusing, they are almost uniformly shrill and irrational, an exercise in the worst kind of groupthink Atrios, like many others on the left, has nothing but contempt for Tom Friedman--and, apparently, anyone else who dares to be a centrist and refuses to toe the party line. I frequently disagree with what Friedman has to say, but he certainly doesn't warrant the kind of sneering disdain that Atrios heaps on him.

But, sadly, such seems to be the polarizing and snarkifying effect of the blogosphere. Whereas we more-or-less leftish types spend a good deal of time complaining about Fox "news," Atrios and his ilk make Fox look like Frontline.

Atrios is, however, right to say that it would have been better to see this column two years ago. Still, better late than never. Let's hope that Darth Dubya is listening.