re: #414 Euler

Jonah Goldberg sees it as “nakedly ideological”, and one of his readers notices a White House spokesman was willing to use the T-word (“terrorism”) so long as this includes domestic threats.

Goldberg has had even more to say since then. You all have to read this correspondence on NRO.

This correspondence points out that to judge best the DHS report, it has to be compared with whatever reports came out at a comparable time in prior Presidencies. As it happens, there are such reports; the most noteworthy is Bush’s on Leftist extremism in July 2001. NRO’s correspondents have compared the 2001 Left report against the 2009 Right report. What they have found in 2001 was an honest appraisal of Left versus Right extremism from the Bush administration ; in 2009, a one-sided and near-paranoiac view of Right extremism from the Obama administration today, “laundered” from the hardly-impartial SPLC.

It is as if in 2001, Bush regurgitated a press release from David Horowitz. Sure, there might be facts in it, and it might be useful as a hint as to where our administration’s priorities lay; but there would be so much sensationalism, and so little perspective, that we’d (rightly) wonder if the administration was more interested in protecting the Right than in protecting the nation.