Harold's Left:

The conservative marching band has done what we all knew they would. They can't help it. The impulse to be overly intolerant is so strong it's like a vampire looking for its next feed. The National Review Online has called for this to be the strategy for detainees:

Step (1): Return all Gitmo detainees to Yemen.

Step (2): Use Predator missiles to strike the baggage-claim area 20 minutes after they arrive.

Cute right? Yeah... not so much.

Moreover, former U.S. general officer Tom McInerney calls on Fox News for all 18 to 28 year old Muslim men to be strip searched.

Okay, so let's get this straight first. It is a reality that the majority of the threats from people who are both American citizens and foreigners in the last decade to the sanctity of American life have been folks of Muslim decent (while I would argue also right-wing extremism has been a formidable threat as well). We would indeed be ignorant to ignore the fact all of the 9/11 terrorists were Muslim and this young Nigerian man was also Muslim. However, the problem with profiling Muslims is the same one that would be true if we were profiling Christians; everyone looks different. Furthermore, only about 1/4 of Muslims are of Arab decent, there are simply millions and millions of others that are black, white, and everything in between. Not only that, blanket profiling, which has been a stalwart of the right-wing since America's inception, nearly always leads to negative consequences. During World War II, conservatives, in an effort to "keep America safe", put tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans in internment camps even though some of them were the family members of men serving in that very war.

The job of progressives is to ensure that American safety is the ultimate issue, but American values are equally as paramount. President Obama has said it time and time again that "our values are our security".

The fact is that this young misguided terrorist, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, looks just as likely to be from Balitmore as Nigeria, and given that he was traveling from a European country, and not some failed-state terrorist sponsoring nation, it seems that the calls for profiling, save his name, would have been fairly unsuccessful. Moreover, how much damage will we do to other law abiding citizens because of their names? Will we strip search the woman who has the matron of honor at my wedding who is Muslim, or my college buddy who is a graduate of the Wharton School of Business and works on Wall Street who is also Muslim with a Muslim-sounding name? Or even better my good friend who is a Special Forces soldier and has a Muslim-sounding name?

As we monitor the knee-jerk from this unsuccessful attack lets be sure to point out the ongoing buffoonery of the conservative movement.