Be sure to catch Gene’s stellar performance on Newshour last night. Watch it online here.

The arguments from Gene’s opponent in the debate are about as Washington-Beltway as they come. His entire argument for expanding the military into domestic policing boils down to (a) we’ve been doing it anway, and (b) it’s a different world after September 11.

Even conceding the point that September 11 justifies a more militaristic policing of the domestic front (a huge concession, of course) September 11 doesn’t justify using the military to respond to natural disasters, nor does it justify using the military to police the Drug War. The guy’s argument seems to be that because hurricanes can kill and destroy property on the same level as or worse than a domestic terrorism attack, there’s no real reason why the powers we’ve given the government solely in reaction to September 11 shouldn’t also be extended to similar situations unrelated to terrorism — the very epitome of mission creep.

I also like the curious fallacy often employed by government-loving Washington types, “we’re already doing it.” So what? We shouldn’t be. This guy, for example, bizarrely argues in favor of domestic “peacekeeping” missions because our military has already carried out such missions in Kosovo (!) and Somalia (!!!!). Never mind that both were catastrophic failures. The mere fact that we’ve tried military policing on foreign soil is reason enough to do it here at home, too.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 28th, 2005 at 12:26 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.