Palin's Facebook tough talk falls flat

It would be difficult to sum up all the things that are wrong, silly, and ridiculous with former half-term governor Sarah Palin's terrorism policy paper/Facebook status update, so we'll just break it down, piece by piece.

We are at war with radical Islamic extremists and treating this threat as a law enforcement issue is dangerous for our nation's security. That's what happened in the 1990s and we saw the result on September 11, 2001.

Funny, I heard the exact same thing on The O'Reilly Factor last night from Dick Morris. Equally funny is how Sarah Palin found the one way to make herself even less credible on national security matters -- copping material from Dick Morris. Moving on:

It simply makes no sense to treat an al Qaeda-trained operative willing to die in the course of massacring hundreds of people as a common criminal.

What an odd thing to write, particularly when you consider that earlier today we learned that Zacarias Moussaoui -- the Al Qaeda-trained operative willing to die in the course of massacring thousands of people on 9-11 who was tried by the Bush administration as a common criminal -- had his conviction upheld in court after a federal appeals court denied his appeal. Slogging forward:

Reports indicate that Abdulmutallab stated there were many more like him in Yemen but that he stopped talking once he was read his Miranda rights.

I certainly haven't seen any "reports" to that effect. In fact, CNN reported today that they spoke to law enforcement officials and they "would not say whether [Abdulmutallab is] cooperating or if he was read his Miranda rights." Continuing:

Giving foreign-born, foreign-trained terrorists the right to remain silent does nothing to keep Americans safe from terrorist threats. It only gives our enemies access to courtrooms where they can publicly grandstand, and to defense attorneys who can manipulate the legal process to gain access to classified information.

You know, I've heard this one before too -- and it's already been debunked. Federal courts don't do televised trials, thus making a "public grandstand" pretty close to impossible. And lastly:

President Obama was right to change his policy and decide to send no more detainees to Yemen where they can be free to rejoin their war on America. Now he must back off his reckless plan to close Guantanamo, begin treating terrorists as wartime enemies not suspects alleged to have committed crimes, and recognize that the real nature of the terrorist threat requires a commander-in-chief, not a constitutional law professor.

Gotta love the false choice between tough ("commander-in-chief") and smart ("constitutional law professor").

I always suspected Palin had an ulterior motive for quitting as governor, and now I know what it is -- she wanted to spend more time absorbing warmed-over right-wing talking points and copying-and-pasting them onto Facebook as her very own. Mission accomplished.