Unclaimed Territory – by Glenn Greenwald: Will the real cowards please stand up?

Excellent piece, this.

Do you want to hear what a person sounds like when they really are — to use Steyn’s words — “weak, that there’s nothing — no core, no bedrock — nothing it’s not willing to trade”? Here is Bush loyalist Sen. John Cornyn, explaining why we should allow the President to break the law and eavesdrop on our conversations without any oversight: “None of your civil liberties matter much after you’re dead.” And here is Pat Roberts, showing how willing he is to trade all American values in the hope of being protected from the things he fears: “I am a strong supporter of the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment and civil liberties. But you have no civil liberties if you are dead.” That “rationale” means we do anything — give up all freedoms, relinquish all values — because desperately trying to stay alive is the only thing that matters.

So someone — like Centanni or Wiig — who recites a few words that they don’t mean in order to avoid death is a wretched, feminine coward who has no core values and nothing they are willing to die for. But if that’s the standard, then people like Steyn and his fellow neoconservative warriors — who want to place blind faith in the Government in exchange for promises of “protection,” vest in the President the most unlimited powers, and fundamentally change how our country functions and the values which define it, all because they think that doing so is necessary to increase their chances of living — are drowning in a self-protective cowardice that dwarfs by many magnitudes that which they mock in others.

The creepy spectacle of watching one warrior after the next insist that we must risk other people’s lives and bomb more people so that we don’t feel girlish and scared and submissive is repugnant enough, in itself, to have to witness on a daily basis. But the fact that these same people are the ones whose deep, irrational fears of The Terrorist override virtually all other considerations, and who demand that we change our nation and relinquish all of the values and liberties which have always defined it and which make it worth fighting for, all because they believe that doing so is necessary to allow them some marginally greater chance of avoiding death, renders their accusations and warrior dances — on top of everything else — an exercise in the grossest and most absurd hypocrisy.