Scheer Stupidity

Whoever said that blogging is not journalism was apparently not thinking about Robert Scheer. If Robert Scheer, columnist for the L.A. Times, the Nation and other established media organs, can be called a journalist, so too can any blogger, or anybody else with a room temperature IQ for that matter. No, strike that last restriction.

Those who know Scheer's "work" know that it is characterized by lurid distortions, hysterical conclusions, contra-logical reasoning and hallucinatory non-sequiturs. His columns read like those of slacker college newspaper stringer who always scraped by with a C- in Journalism because he was too busy smoking weed and attending teach-ins. Except Scheer has been that way for the last forty years. (David Horowitz worked for Scheer back in the good old days and wrote this fascinating portrait of his former boss)

I had some fun earlier with a few of Scheer's columns from April. See my Mideast Page for the links.

Scheer's current column also deserves a closer look

We've Had Enough Witch Hunts

He starts off with a valid point:

Nothing succeeds like failure. Suddenly, everyone wants to grant the FBI and other intelligence agencies even more power despite the fact that they failed so spectacularly to utilize the expansive powers they had to head off terrorism before Sept. 11.

(At the same time, it would be nice for him to apply the same conclusion to the health care system-- that sprawling government bureaucracies often do fail spectacularly when too much is expected of them -- and reconsider his support for a government-managed universal health care)

Scheer then leaps from Dianne Feinstein's statement that the FBI should be able to use ethnicity as one criteria to investigate suspects, with the statement

"First [civil liberty] to go? Freedom from discrimination based on ethnicity, race or nationality."

He goes on to raise the specter of internment of Japanese-Americans. Sorry, Bob, there is a huge difference between the FBI using ethnicity as one filter to focus its investigation on terrorism that originates in certain parts of the world, and putting people in camps. Scheer's spectacular climax:

If we were to be honest in making the case for profiling, we would go after Saudi Arabians and their business partners and other associates in this country. The Sept. 11 attacks were--from Osama bin Laden to 15 of the 19 hijackers to the money that supported them--an operation with top-to-bottom links to Saudi Arabia, a kingdom our military has protected for half a century and which enjoys close ties with Bush's family. Instead of harassing loyal Arab Americans, the FBI would be better advised to squeeze executives from U.S. corporations, such as the Carlyle Group and Bechtel, that have extensive ties to the Saudis.

What we don't need is a witch hunt against the American people, ferreting through their private lives or detaining them because of their ethnicity...

Now, you're not going to get any argument from me about Saudi Arabia's culpability in international terrorism and September 11 in particular. And yes, I think we should better inform ourselves about U.S. economic ties to the oil-rich desert kingdom. But here's Bob's proprietary Hallucinatory Non-sequitur and Contra-Logical Reasoning (tm) at work -- Unless and until Bechtel is implicated in criminal activity it is laughable to suggest expanding the power and budget of the FBI to investigate them.

I certainly hope that the FBI does not conduct a "witch hunt against the American people" or detain people solely because of their ethnicity, but there is no indication that is about to. I believe that the FBI's primary target is and should be Middle Eastern nationals. The September 11 hijackers, for example, are not "the American people" and they were not "loyal Arab Americans". And we have every right and duty to protect ourselves by being careful about who we allow to enter and remain in this country.

Try again, Bob.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at June 06, 2002 12:32 PM