Why we just couldn't ever let the Transformers out of Gitmo

Via Waldo from a variety of sources, this blog comment nails it:

Can someone remind me what it is the NIMBY crowd thinks these detainees are going to do once transferred to the U.S.? They act like these guys are half-MacGyver, half-Houdini, and half-Lecter. Do they think they're Transformers or X-Men or something, and that as soon as these mostly low-level terrorists touch U.S. soil they're going to shoot lasers from their eyes and throw cars at people?

If this proves anything, it's that the Bush-era scare tactics worked better than we thought. The Republican Party has gone from the party of fear to the party of being afraid. If the left ever acted like pansies about something the way the right has about this, they'd be taken to task and labeled "weak" or "soft".

And as for that party of being afraid part, there's this:

From The Daily Dish, an interesting pathology of today's Republicans- they're closet cases who project their own demons as the solutions to public policy. They scared of learning (keep the kids home Tuesday), scared of things that might scare them (the President's breakfast choices carry subliminal messages), scared of sex (teenagers, gays, overbreeding immigrants, unmarried teens unless a parent is running for vice president), scared of moderation in any form (Christianists might stay home and not vote for them), scared of the idea that a white America could elect a black president....

There's an important process point here: in the 1994 Gingrich Revolution, the Republicans briefly captured the image, as Colin Powell once said, of being the party of ideas.

Most of the ideas didn't work, just like most of the ideas being hawked today by the Democrats won't ultimately work either, but ideas have power. They stimulate the imagination, breed hope, and open minds to new possibilities. For a political party, to develop the public perception that you don't just oppose the other party's policy agenda, but that you don't have any substantive ideas of your own is the kiss of death.

There is also [hint, hint] a message in there for Libertarians and Greens and all would-be third-party types.