From Planet Power Line with Love

So adorable:

JOHN adds: Yes, and remember what Jefferson did to the Barbary pirates. Those days are long gone, of course, but still: if a Democratic administration takes office in 2009, the last thing it will want is a successful terrorist attack on American soil. I think Democrats would be just as energetic, and go just as far as the Bush administration has gone, with regard to defensive measures.

Parsing through Assrocket's nonsense is like trying to unwrap a new CD with mittens on. So does he think that it's a mistake to go just as far as the Bush administration has, or does he think that the Democrats will just hate themselves for doing it? Because I sure as hell know that he doesn't mean to say what I think he just said, and that's that by contrast, a successful terrorist attack on American soil wouldn't be so bad for Republicans.

And I know this really doesn't need repeating, but whatever it is that Jefferson did to the Barbary pirates is quite irrelevant in a day and age when people in the United States can chat online with people from North Africa. The age of being able to get away with certain types of heavy-handed tactics died with modernity. But go ahead and keep beating that dead horse, John.

For example, I think they would use the NSA to monitor international terrorist communications, analyze telephone calling records, etc.

Of course they would, dipshit. And now that Glenn Greenwald's book explaining why that has absolutely nothing to do with the illegality of the NSA's spying is on the bestseller list, hundreds of thousands of Americans will now be able to explain it to you like they're explaining the rules of checkers to a 5-year-old.

Very likely, they would have less regard for civil liberties than the Bush administration has shown.

I'm not even sure how that's possible.

Where I think a Democratic administration would probably fall short is in taking the battle to the enemy overseas.

This part reminded me of this section of "From Beirut to Jerusalem" that I didn't find a way to work into my Mutinyblogging post:

Whenever I heard this explanation from Israelis, I was always reminded of the cartoon by Pat Oliphant from the early days of the [Lebanon] invasion, when the joke making the rounds was "Visit Israel before Israel visits you." The Oliphant cartoon showed an Israeli tank on the border of Tibet, with two soldiers looking across a great divide. On the other side were two little Tibetans firing slingshots at the onrushing Israeli soldiers. Underneath, the little duck says, "Imagine, anti-Semitism even out here."