A Glimpse Into the Sick, Twisted, and Anti-American Conservative Mind

As you may have heard, former McCain advisor and current Palin adviser Michael Goldfarb tweeted on Wednesday that convicted terrorist Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani should have been executed without a trial:

Ghailani never should have been allowed to leave that CIA black site with a pulse.

We should be used to this sort of anti-Americanism from the right. The so-called war on terror has made it pretty standard fare. It was Bush and Cheney and their unitary-executive minions trampling all over the Constitution and turning the U.S. into a torture state (a sort of gated community for the plutocracy), and it's been any number of conservatives pushing for the immediate transformation of the country into a totalitarian national security state, supposedly for the sake of freedom. As Think Progress notes:

Maybe Goldfarb has taken Glenn Beck's advice a little too seriously. The radical Fox News host once said that as President, he wouldn't detain terror suspects, he'd "shoot them all in the head." Perhaps Goldfarb is an avid National Review reader, where one writer once said that all Gitmo detainees should be let go and then killed. Or maybe Goldfarb has been listening to his former boss over at the Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol, who said last year of Maj. Nidal M. Hasan after his attack on the Fort Hood Army Base: "They should just go ahead and convict him and put him to death."

It seems execution without trial is fairly popular in conservative circles.

As Digby writes, "[t]hese are the people the founders worried about when they wrote the bill of rights." And yet these people ran the country and want to run it again. They will not stop, apparently, until America turns into the neo-fascist corporatist paradise of conservative longing, and perhaps not even then.

The Ghailani trial was a victory for the rule of law and, more broadly, for American democracy. No wonder conservatives hated it.

Cross-posted from The Reaction.