Saturday, July 25, 2009

Thawing Another Plastic Turkey

President Bush, according to our Left, was an evil president who lost no opportunity to expand federal government powers illegally and who was clearly a puppet of the even more evil Cheney.

So I'm sure wet dreams on the Left are sproutin' all over with this news:

The Bush administration in 2002 considered sending U.S. troops into a Buffalo, N.Y., suburb to arrest a group of terror suspects in what would have been a nearly unprecedented use of military power, The New York Times reported.

Vice President Dick Cheney and several other Bush advisers at the time strongly urged that the military be used to apprehend men who were suspected of plotting with al Qaida, who later became known as the Lackawanna Six, the Times reported on its Web site Friday night. It cited former administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The proposal advanced to at least one-high level administration meeting, before President George W. Bush decided against it.


So what does this story tell us?

It tells us that in 2002, still newly at war and unsure of what we faced, we considered a broad range of actions to protect our people (Can this be doubted?).

It tells us that President Bush decided that it would be better to use civilian forces to make the arrests (I agree. I'm not sure why we'd think our civilian agencies weren't up to the job.).

It tells us that the president was not, in fact, determined to gather power to himself just for the sake of gathering power (This was always fantasy-land thinking for the extreme Left in the reality-based community, who predicted martial law for the 2004 elections and never really explained how a dictator would allow his losses in the 2006 midterms and leave office in 2009).

And it tells us that Cheney was not the evil puppet master pulling the president's strings (why dignify that with comment?).

Shoot, the way things are going with the continuity of many Bush policies, had President Bush done this, President Obama would probably still be doing this.