Blistering, mind-numbing stupidity at Newsweek.

Decades from now, perhaps on a slow-news week during the Timberlake administration, historians will look at the first years of the 21st century and study how, in the United States, temporary erosions in government accountability and civil liberties were accompanied by a staggering reduction in the probative and intellectual standards of the Establishment press. Exhibit A could likely be yesterday's inexplicable posting of an internal discussion amongst the Newsweek editorial staff, regarding the use of the word "terrorist" in our common discourse in the light of last week's Texas suicide bombing/plane crash directed at the IRS. For reasons that surpass understanding, the leadership at Newsweek decided to make available for public consumption an exchange of ideas that would have any reasonably demanding tenth grade civics instructor throwing up her hands in disgust. Here are a few tastes, but by all means read the whole thing:

Kathy Jones, Managing Editor (Multimedia)
Did the label terrorist ever successfully stick to McVeigh? Or the Unabomber? Or any of the IRS bombers in our violence list?

Here is my handy guide:
Lone wolfish American attacker who sees gov't as threat to personal freedom: bomber, tax protester, survivalist, separatist

Group of Americans bombing/kidnapping to protest U.S. policies on war/poverty/personal freedom/ - radical left-wing movement, right-wing separatists

All foreign groups or foreign individuals bombing/shooting to protest American gov't: terrorists



Patrick Enright, Senior Articles Editor
Yeah, maybe the distinction depends too on whom you're attacking — if it's the people you think wronged you (like the IRS), you're a protester/separatist/etc., and if it's indiscriminate killing of clearly innocent people, you're a terrorist.

A managing editor at a national news magazine, thinking about whether Timothy McVeigh can still be called a terrorist, and proposing that the word only be used when scary foreign people do bad things. For Americans who maim and kill their fellow civilians, we'll just call those people radicals, separatists, protesters, and survivalists. (Funny, I had no idea those things were crimes.) Then, a helpful suggestion that if the perpetrator thinks he's only killing people who wronged him, then that's not really terrorism. Like if you're just trying to kill anyone happening to work at the IRS that day, as opposed to say, the people who worked at the Pentagon on 9/11, then that's not terrorism. But this one's my favorite:

Dan Stone, Reporter
Yep, comes down to ID. This guy was a regular guy-next-door Joe Schmo. Terrorists have beards in live in caves [sic]. He was also an American, so targeting the IRS seems more a political statement – albeit a crazy one – whereas Abdulmutallab was an attack on our freedom. Kind of the idea that an American can talk smack about America, but when it comes from someone foreign, we rally together. Or in the case of the Christmas bomber, vie for self-righteousness.

Bombing the IRS, if you're an American, is just a crazy political statement, whereas true "terrorists" are easily identifiable because they have beards.

And it goes on and on like that. None of these august members of the Fourth Estate, oddly, have the idea to Google the federal statutes, which define terrorism thusly:

the term "Federal crime of terrorism" means an offense that
-
(A) is calculated to influence or affect the conduct of
government by intimidation or coercion, or to retaliate against
government conduct

No mention of a rhetorical pass if the suspect is making a decent political point, or if he's a scary foreigner. But here we have journalists, partly responsible for guiding public opinion, actively proposing that terrorism, against which we are generally at war, should be defined solely as acts perpetrated by foreign madmen who just hate our freedom and couldn't possibly have a coherent political thought in their heads, whereas if an American takes it upon himself to kill his fellow citizens to make a political statement, that's different. We certainly shouldn't apply any terms that inspire our universal outrage and repudiation - that guy's just a protester, and since he's an American, maybe therefore we ought not to dismiss his point of view entirely. I suppose I should be happy on some level that we aren't going to war with everyone who hates the tax code in response to Texas - but is it any wonder how wars in Muslim countries get started and sustained when people think this way?

This double standard isn't limited to Newsweek. To wit, here's Rep. Steve King, R-IA, talking to ThinkProgress (what is it about Republican Congressmen names King):

KING: I think if we’d abolished the IRS back when I first advocated it, he wouldn’t have a target for his airplane. And I’m still for abolishing the IRS, I’ve been for it for thirty years and I’m for a national sales tax. [...] It’s sad the incident in Texas happened, but by the same token, it’s an agency that is unnecessary and when the day comes when that is over and we abolish the IRS, it’s going to be a happy day for America.

"Sad the incident happened." Can you imagine a government official opportunistically using a terrorist attack (like the Christmas Day attempted bombing) to shore up his or her case against civilian deaths in Afghanistan? And here's Jed Babbin making a JOKE about the Texas suicide bombing and fellow tax protester Grover Norquist at CPAC:

"I'm really happy to see Grover today. He was getting a little testy in the past couple of weeks. And I was just really, really glad that it was not him identified as flying that airplane into the IRS building."

Look, I can concede that there are close cases here when we try to apply the terrorist label. Nidal Hasan attacked what could be perceived as a military target at Fort Hood, although no one could ever claim he or anyone else was under a direct threat from unarmed troops that hadn't yet deployed to a battle zone. Scott Roeder's murder of George Tiller unquestionably had a political context, but his target was specifically Tiller, not just abortion policy in general. (For the record, they're both terrorists as well.) But for the love of Pete, Joseph Stack flew a plane into a building because he didn't like government policy, and he killed an innocent man in the process, and yet we have members of the press and the government unwilling or unable to treat his crime like the textbook definition of terrorism that it is. As long as that's because either his looks, his name, or his politics reminds us too much of ourselves, then we are truly lost.

It's worth pointing out that we could be having the same exact discussion about the word "torture". To most defenders, acts like waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, beatings, etc. are unquestionably torture when Someone Else does it to us. Of course John McCain was tortured, that's the perfect word to use. But when Americans do the exact same things, use the exact same tactics, to detainees in the war on terror, it couldn't possibly be torture - even when the victims turn out to be completely innocent - because we're the Good Guys, and our hearts are always in the right place even when we cross the line once in a while. Again, little wonder we can't seem to help ourselves.

Hat tip to Greenwald on this, with another great post.