Ted Koppel is producing a special for the Discovery Channel that supposedly focuses on the impact of the War on Terror on our civil liberties. In an interview segment this morning with the NBC morning show host they commingled this topic with the news surrounding the “outing†of the secret CIA prisons and the 14 inmates that have been transferred to Guantanamo to await some form of legal process (yes, the Judiciary demanded and got their piece of the action). How these two so-called journalists, these guardians of the public trust, managed to morph these two stories into one was less than amazing. The trick, it seems is to manufacture and broadcast these wild absurdities before most people have become fully conscious, before their trip to Starbucks (after the commencement of happy hour on Fridays has also been a good time to post dispatches that demand less scrutiny).
After making this intellectually lazy leap across the chasm that separates fact from fiction; after conferring the rights of citizens upon terrorists (they called them “suspectsâ€), Koppel quipped “a Liberal is a Conservative who just got arrested.†????!!!!
What?! Is he saying that after I get arrested for planning and launching a terrorist attack on the United States that I am in danger of forfeiting my rights and freedom?
The terrorists have never found better friends than among the liberals in this nation. First they coddled the criminals creating a permanent criminal class, now they are coddling terrorists ostensibly to create a terrorist class. It does serve their purpose, first as job security for the coverage of disaster news and secondly as new opportunities to plunder the public coffers by dragging non-citizens through the courts.
The irony is that Ted got his big break when the current Iranian President (and the preeminent purveyor of international terrorism) took part in the kidnapping of our embassy personnel in Tehran in 1979. Might his attitude stem from a mild case of Stockholm syndrome? Still, one would think he would know better.
The silver lining in all of this is that even fewer people will be watching Ted on the Discovery Channel than were watching the NBC morning show, fewer even than watched him in the waning years of World News Tonight.