Democrats are soft on terror

This week’s Right Hook comes via the Hawaiian Islands. The fact that I actually made it here without tripping my proverbial circuit breaker and running amok with a meat cleaver is a testament only to my intestinal fortitude in handling the absurd. Because these days, you see, traveling by airplane is roughly equivalent to sticking pins into your eyeballs. Actually, that would be eminently less painful.

You may recall the recent news that several male, Muslim terrorists hatched a plot to board and blow up airplanes using liquid explosives in London. As a result, otherwise sane government bureaucrats came to the politically correct and utterly moronic conclusion that, to make us all safer, Homeland Security would ban all liquids from being carried onto airplanes. (Muslim males between the ages of 17 and 40, however, are apparently still free to come and go onto airplanes with relative impunity.)

Of course, my 4-year-old with the surname “Lafferty” was singled out for a random security check as was an 80-year old grandmother, a Presbyterian minister and a troop of giggling, pre-teen Girl Scouts. OK, those were all gross exaggerations, although my offspring was, in fact, singled out for a random security check on a similar trip two years ago. (But in light of recent events, I half expected a repeat from the department of politically correct homeland nit-wits.)

I mean, exactly what is the predominant characteristic that the overwhelming majority of terrorists have had in common for, oh, say, the last 30 years of hijacking airplanes?

Are they uptight Mennonites? Psychotic evangelicals? Pissed off Mormons? Jaded Jews? Or perhaps it’s all those Jehovah’s Witnesses who’ve finally flipped out from having doors slammed in their faces so many times?

If I were to go fishing, it would seem common sense (if not an example of outright intelligence) to fish where I might actually have a chance of catching something. Therefore, it would seem equally intelligent that, were I seeking to catch a terrorist, I would actually look at people who share the same demographic information as past terrorists.

So, applying the law of averages here, one would assume that the application of scarce resources—such as TSA agents—would be best spent intensely looking at (as in “profiling") those who fit the terrorist model, to-wit, Muslim males between the ages of 17 and 40.

As DNC Chair Howard Dean put it, however, “The occupation in Iraq is costing American lives and hampering our ability to fight the real global war on terror.”

Assuming for the sake of argument that Dean is correct and the Democrats have any assertions with merit, let’s look at what they oppose regarding the “real global war on terror.”

They oppose the NSA listening in on specific telephone calls between terrorists vis-a-vis warrantless wire-tapping. They oppose any form of “torture” against any terror suspect. They oppose profiling. They want the prison at Guantanamo Bay shut down. And they don’t like the USA PATRIOT Act. As a matter of fact, when it came time to renew it last December, the Democrats almost universally voted against it, 43-2. Immediately thereafter, Senate minority leader Harry Reid, D-Nev, said, “We killed the PATRIOT Act.” Which, in and of itself, is a curious statement for a party so principled about fighting the “real” war on terror and considering they universally voted for its passage the first time around, when it passed the Senate 98-1.

Perhaps the Democrats could save time and just tell us what part of the real war on terror they actually do support.