As I noted in a comment on one of those blogs, the seriousness of Mitt’s answer can be gaged by the credibility of the person posing the question, in this case an anti-war activist who really isn’t interested in seeing Mitt’s son’s join the military to fight for America.

Several of these posters call Mitt and others in the Bush Administration “Chicken hawks,” in reference to the lack of military service on the part of several of the war’s supporters. Now, I understand fully that the assertion is a non-sequitur, that it is simply more evidence of Liberalism’s latent violence and illogic. But as I believe that not addressing a question because it’s not formulated according to philosophically correct formulae is itself a red-herring, I will address it briefly here.

Why is it necessary to serve or have served in the military in order to support the war on terror? Why does the Left think that it can call Republicans and Conservatives who have not served, but who support the War on Terror, “chicken-hawks?” It can be easily demonstrated that the vast majority of our Nation’s leaders in wartime never served in the military. Many of our great founding fathers did not serve in the military during the Revolutionary War, yet they fully supported it. Why are things different now?

The Left prides itself on being the “intellectual elite,” so you know this non-sequitur is not designed to affect anyone but those on the Right who may not be acquainted with the forms of logical fallacy. Liberals are hoping for one of three outcomes:

1. The person targeted will be pressured into a change of position on the War.
2. The person targeted will join the military under pressure from his or her fellow Conservatives and will drop out of the public light.
3. The person targeted will join the military and be killed in action.

In any of these scenarios, the person targeted is no longer a political threat to the Left. That’s the primary motivation for this absurd demand on the part of these “pacifists” and anti-war activists. They want their way, and they will stoop to ridiculous measures to get it. They know they can’t win at the ballot box, despite all their cries of “Democracy,” so they resort to more disingenuous methods like anti-war activists suggesting that we increase the scope of the war by sending more soldiers into battle.

Some of these posters have attempted to paint Romney as egotistic or self-righteous because of this statement. My first response is that they put too much credence in the seriousness of the question. That is the natural and expected reaction for the Liberal, given the ideology of the person asking the question. But, let’s assume the question really is serious, and Romney’s response was equally serious. Why is it either egotistic or self-righteous to state that someone is serving our country by campaigning for a man that they believe will be an excellent President? Would these people say that about Hillary’s campaign workers? Obama’s? Edward’s? I’m guessing they wouldn’t.

Of course, the expected backlash is both abundant and revealing.

Dean is spot on when he says, “the 2,000 word story was about the 9/11 Generation, not the Baby Boomers. But rather than wanting to talk about Joe Moseley, they wanted to talk about themselves.”

Of course, the idea that Guantanamo is a gulag is silly. The Gulag is where the Soviets kept political prisoners to keep them silent. People who spent time there usually did so without the benefit of a jury trial, or the chance to dispute the evidence against them. In almost all cases, the prisoners of the gulag were Soviet citizens and the Soviet government violated its own Constitution to put them there.

At Guantanamo, there were exactly two (out of nearly 1,000) prisoners that had some claim to American citizenship. The men being held there are prisoners of war. They were all caught engaging in warlike activities against American soldiers during wartime on the battlefield. Guantanamo is a POW camp, just like the POW camps in which we held German prisoners during WWII. Were we operating a gulag then, too? No reasonable observer would say we were.

The author, “daedalus,” acknowledges the exceptionally fine treatment the prisoners receive there, but has a problem with the fact that these characters are being held there without trial. One wonders why? My attempt to post a comment to the site was unsuccessful, due to a problem with their security features, but during the course of crafting my response to the post, I was struck by a thought that brightly illuminated the reasoning behind the actions and methods of the modern Left in America.

The Left demands that we treat prisoners of the war against Jihad with the same Constitutional protections afforded to American citizens, i.e. the right to trial by jury of your peers, the right to an attorney, the right of habeas corpus, etc. Now, I will concede the right to habeas corpus, which is the right to be presented before a judge who will determine if there is sufficient evidence for the government to detain you. Habeas corpus should be limited for non-citizens, however, to ensure that the government need not divulge sensitive information in the course of presenting its evidence. You cannot depend on the loyalty of judges anymore it seems.

The Bush Administration at first balked at allowing this limited right to those captured on the battlefield, but the Supreme Court ruled otherwise in Rasul v. Bush (2004), and the administration initially respected the ruling. Since then, Congress has nullified the ruling with the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, which denied jurisdiction to federal courts to hear habeas corpus claims from Guantanamo prisoners, which Congress can do under Article III of the Constitution. There is an excellent article by James Taranto in today’s Opinion Journal on this issue, or watch video of Mr. Taranto talking about it.

We must keep in mind that these detainees were not just people that our military grabbed off the street because they looked Arabic. These men were caught engaging in warlike activities against our soldiers in wartime. They do not meet the Geneva Conventions requirements for enemy combatants because they fight for no specific nation, they wear no uniform and no identifying insignia. This puts them precisely under the definition of unlawful enemy combatant under the Conventions. The laws Congress has passed regarding our treatment of these prisoners is largely based upon the Conventions. To say that we are denying these people their basic Human Rights is misinformed or deceitful.

The complaint that the Left has had even before the ruling in Rasul is that these prisoners should be given a full jury trial in a civil court with the full panoply of rights recognized in citizens, which would necessarily include a right to full discovery and access to the government’s most sensitive information regarding its activities in the War on Terror. Why they should have this level of rights afforded them is never explained beyond vague claims of human rights. But whether or not these are even “human rights” is a subject for another article and won’t be treated here.

The difficulty arising from the extension of these rights to non-citizen, enemy combatants should be easily apparent. In fact, I believe that most observers would readily recognize the difference between the rights of citizens and the rights of prisoners of war. The Left is not making this distinction, however. The call for enemy combatants to be extended the same rights that citizens enjoy includes two flaws that, if implemented, would prove fatal to our system of government and which, I think, exposes the character and motives of those making the call.

First, extending the rights of citizens to enemy combatants degrades the rights of citizens. It puts citizens on the same legal standing as (and therefore viewed by the law as) enemies of our government. If there is no distinction between the legal standings of citizens or enemy soldiers, then citizens must be viewed (and thus, treated) by the government as enemies.

It also means there are rights that are above those which citizens enjoy. To illustrate, we know that our rights to free speech are balanced by our enjoyment of the blessings of society. We give up a portion of our freedoms to be part of our society. An example of this is the limitation on speech which says you can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater. If we assume that the rights of citizens are the same as an enemy’s rights, we must infer that there is a level of rights above that enjoyed by citizens. How is one to obtain that level of rights? How is the obtaining of those rights decided, and by whom? Are these higher rights simply the rights which citizens enjoy, except without any limitations whatever? If so, then society is not society at all but merely people living in proximity to one another with a common government.

Second, if we accept the premise that enemies can be granted these rights by the government, we must assume that those rights are also a grant by government to the citizens. And if we accept that premise in turn, we must reject the founding principles of our nation, which include the concept of rights as a gift from God, superseding government. “Rights” granted by government, especially to non-citizens, are historically called “privileges” which can be granted and revoked at the whim of government. If we elevate privileges to be equal with rights, we destroy rights altogether.

The rights we enjoy under the Constitution are a subset of the natural, inalienable rights with which we are “endowed by [our] Creator.” Indeed, inalienable rights are the hallmark of our western Anglo-Saxon civilization. Belief in these God-given, inalienable rights distinguishes our society from every other on the planet and is the foundation of our system and institutions of government. Without this belief the entire system crumbles, resulting in a catastrophic paradigm shift toward unlimited governmental control and power over the lives of ordinary citizens. In this paradigm, government becomes illiberal, oppressive, venal, and controlling, and “We the People” are no longer our own masters.

But this is the Liberal view of government. It is this paradigm which the Left insists we adopt, and which they have spent 40 of the last 50 years in control of Congress trying to create. Now that their majority in Congress is no longer a given, they have resorted to legislating through the courts with the help of judicial activists in the justice system. Either way, their aim is the overthrow of our traditions and institutions in favor of a new governmental system founded in political radicalism. It is indeed a war.