[Vision2020] A Shameful Retreat from Our Values

[nickgier at adelphia.net]

Greetings:

Garrison Keillor is a national treasure and is America's best humorist since Mark Twain, but he is just as good when he is serious as when he is funny.

Keillor: A shameful retreat from our values

Garrison Keillor

I would not send my college kid off for a semester abroad if I were  
you. This week, we have suspended human rights in America, and what  
goes around comes around.

Ixnay habeas corpus.

The U.S. Senate, in all its splendor and majesty, has decided that an  
"enemy combatant" is any noncitizen whom the president says is an  
enemy combatant, including your Korean green grocer or your Swedish  
grandmother or your Czech au pair, and can be arrested and held for  
as long as authorities wish without any right of appeal to a court of  
law to examine the matter.

If your college kid were to be arrested in Bangkok or Cairo,  
suspected of "crimes against the state," and held in prison, you'd  
assume that an American foreign service officer would be able to  
speak to your kid and arrange for a lawyer, but this may not be true  
anymore. Be forewarned.

The Senate also decided it's up to the president to decide whether  
it's OK to make these enemies stand naked in cold rooms for a couple  
days in blinding light and be beaten by interrogators.

This is now purely a bureaucratic matter: The plenipotentiary stamps  
the file "enemy combatants" and throws the poor schnooks into prison  
and at his leisure he tries them by any sort of kangaroo court he  
wishes to assemble and they have no right to see the evidence against  
them, and there is no appeal. This was passed by 65 senators and will  
now be signed by Mr. Bush, put into effect, and in due course be  
thrown out by the courts.

It's good that Barry Goldwater is dead because this would have killed  
him. Go back to the Senate of 1964 -- Goldwater, Dirksen, Russell,  
McCarthy, Javits, Morse, Fulbright -- and you won't find more than 10  
votes for it.

None of the men and women who voted for this bill has any right to  
speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high  
moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Idea.

Mark their names. Any institution of higher learning that grants  
honorary degrees to these people forfeits its honor.

[Here Garrison Keillor lists all the senators who voted for this  
shameful bill, including Idaho's senators Craig and Crapo, but NOT  
including Washington State's senators Cantwell and Murray.]

To paraphrase Sir Walter Scott: Mark their names and mark them well.

For them, no minstrel raptures swell. High though their titles, proud  
their name, boundless their wealth as wish can claim, these wretched  
figures shall go down to the vile dust from whence they sprung,  
unwept, unhonored and unsung.

Three Republican senators made a show of opposing the bill, and after  
they'd collected all the praise they could get, they quickly folded.  
Why be a hero when you can be fairly sure that the court will dispose  
of this piece of garbage?

If, however, the court does not, then our country has taken a step  
toward totalitarianism. If the government can round up someone and  
never be required to explain why, then it's no longer the United  
States of America as you and I always understood it. Our enemies have  
succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

They have made us become like them.

I got some insight last week into who supports torture when I went  
down to Dallas to speak at Highland Park Methodist Church. It was  
spooky.

I walked in, was met by two burly security men with walkie-talkies,  
and within 10 minutes was told by three people that this was the  
Bushes' church and that it would be better if I didn't talk about  
politics.

I was there on a book tour for "Homegrown Democrat," but they thought  
it better if I didn't mention it. So I tried to make light of it: I  
told the audience, "I don't need to talk politics. I have no need  
even to be interested in politics. I'm a citizen. I have plenty of  
money, and my grandsons are at least 12 years away from being  
eligible for military service."

And the audience applauded! Those were their sentiments exactly.  
We've got ours, and who cares?

The Methodists of Dallas can be fairly sure that none of them will be  
snatched off the streets, flown to Guantanamo, stripped naked, forced  
to stand for 48 hours in a freezing room with deafening noise, so why  
should they worry?

It's only the Jews who are in danger, and the homosexuals and  
gypsies. The Christians are doing just fine. If you can't trust a  
Methodist with absolute power to arrest people and not have to say  
why, then whom can you trust?

------
Keillor is host of "A Prairie Home Companion" Saturday evenings on  
public radio.