GITMO NIMBYs

It goes without saying that the Republicans’ problem is not, as the punditocracy claims, a “lack of ideas”; it is a surfeit of stupid, base and servile ideas. But who can fail to be impressed by the sheer obstinacy of the Party of No, and by their adeptness in leveraging their power, notwithstanding their unpopularity! Stupidity and shrewdness are starkly evident in the so far successful campaign of Republican legislators to keep GITMO “terrorists” away from anywhere near where their constituents reside; indeed, off American soil altogether. Their rationale is not that American prisons cannot contain GITMO inmates; such a contention would be too reasonable for the stalwarts of the Greater Evil Party, not to mention too difficult to defend inasmuch as the claim is transparently false. That’s why the Republicans have gone NIMBY – attacking Obama, and rousing their “base,” by exploiting the well-known Not In My Back Yard sensibilities we denizens of the Home of the Brave so often evince.

Thus the Republicans demonstrate, yet again, how fiendishly clever they are – almost to the point of sublimity. If only the “democratic wing” of the POP, the Party of Pusillanimity, had been half as obstinate, how many Cheney-Bush era evils might the world have been spared! If only they would learn from their GOP counterparts even now, we might now be spared having to live in a country where real terrorists -- the Cheneys and Rumsfelds and, of course, the George W Bushes of the world – are free to live the high life and to amble freely about in between appearances on Fox News.

But that’s not the way of our Democrats; they’re too forgiving, too “bipartisan,” too (stupidly) “nice” for anything like that. Thus yesterday’s spectacle -- where the Democrats joined the Republicans in denying the Obama administration the funds to shut Guantanamo down until Obama comes up with a plan for resettling GITMO inmates that NIMBYs can live with. Yet again, “bipartisanship” translates into POP capitulation and GOP rule -- as Democrats, in true Pelosiite fashion, take everything that might actually implement genuine lesser-evilism “off the table.”