How can Republicans say they love America when they think it is a weakass wuss of a country?

For the last decade we've had to listen to Republicans call themselves patriots and us traitors because we believe in the Constitution and in the system of laws and justice that was built to found this country. Conservatives seem to have so little faith in the ability of the system that the Founding Fathers they so revere put together that they believe we have to resort to the worst human rights abuses of the worst tyrannical nations and groups in the world in order to survive.

It may very well be that it is not possible to survive without turning into a nation that tortures, that invades nations without provocation, that has to throw its values in the trash in order to live to see another day. I don't buy it for one minute, but people like Dick Cheney and Peter King and others who have been shitting their pants for the last nine years while the rest of us have gone about the business of living our lives do live it. I suppose they think that the millions of people who continue to live in New York within sight of Ground Zero, and the many more who commute to work there every day in skyscrapers are a bunch of wusses if they don't believe in torture and show trials and indefinite imprisonment without charges.

We're seeing just what kind of frightened, little men these people are by the vapors they're having about trying terrorism suspects in New York. First it was Dick Cheney calling the current President a traitor, now it's a group of Republican lawmakers demonstrating their utter lack of faith in the very nation they claim to love, respect, and revere:

Standing in front of the Supreme Court this morning, a group of Republican lawmakers railed against the court system run out of the building behind them. A sign affixed to the plexiglas podium each spoke at in turn spelled out the reason for their concern. "Protect our homeland," it read. "Keep terrorists out of America."

The justice system laid out in the Constitution, they said, is just too weak to protect American citizens from wiley terror suspects. From "activist judges" to courtroom sketch artists, the group reeled off a list of reasons the Obama administration decision to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to the U.S. for trial could quite possibly end in, as Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) suggested, a nuclear attack on the United States.

[snip]

King suggested that "activist" judges could be inclined to release terror suspects over some liberal legal principle or another. "A judge can rationalize most anything," he said. "If you're a living, breathing -- how should I say it? -- 'evolving' constitutionalist than you can write anything you want to justify your own rationale."

Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC) was troubled by what might happen when waterboarding and the American right to a fair trial met in a U.S. courtroom. She worried what might happen if terror suspects argued they'd been given "cruel and unusual" punishment at Gitmo.

"This is what scares me because they're in a U.S. court now and the rights are different," she said. "What will they say [about their detention] and what could happen and could they be out among the people again? It's very frightening."

How frightening? Mushroom cloud frightening, according to Franks. He said that a federal trial would give the suspects "a megaphone to speak to the planet," which he said "only hastens the danger" of, literally, a nuclear terrorist attack.

When a reporter pointed out that federal trials aren't televised, perhaps making the "megaphone" a little less likely, Republicans said there were other ways for terror suspects to peddle their propoganda from a U.S. courtroom -- for example, sketch artists.

What I would ask these lawmakers is this: If the justice system which is such an integral part of what we know as a free nation is "too weak" to handle these trials, then what exactly is it about America that they are trying to defend? Is it the right of the military to plunder other nations for the benefit of giant multinational corporations? Is it the right of banks to profit off of government cash while gouging borrowers? Is it the right of Republican lawmakers to enrich themselves with corporate cash while ignoring the needs of the people they represent? If we are not a nation of laws, then what are we? A nation of chickenshit faux-tough guys like Dick Cheney, with his five military deferments because he had "more important things to do" than fight a war he believed in? A nation of greedy scumbags? If we are not about justice, then what ARE we?