Do all the right wing insults now apply to Bob Gates?

By Lee Russ

Friday, March 23, 2007 at 05:02 PM

For a long time now, the right wing noise machine has tried to vilify everybody who ever objected to the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, and saved a special venom for anyone who wanted to close that place.

Well, now it turns out that Bob Gates, the new Secretary of Defense, wanted to close Gitmo, as did Condi Rice, but they lost out to the advocacy of Gonzales and Cheney.

So the question is: does that make Gates guilty of all those sins the right has heaped on Gitmo critics?

For example, Rumsfeld said that closing Gitmo would amount to pretending there is no problem with a terrorist threat to U.S. interests. If that's true, it must mean that Gates sees no terrorist threat, which would be mighty strange for a guy just made Secretary of Defense by George Bush.

Or another example from a right winger's blog, where in June of '05 the blogger offered up these "truths" to those who wanted Gitmo closed (emphasis added):

1. If we close Gitmo, Al Qaeda and friends will consider it a victory and promote it as such.

2. If you think for one nanosecond that closing Gitmo will score the US any brownie points with the world in general and the Middle East specifically, you are smoking crack. The world hates America because it is successful and it forces those countries to look introspectively to themselves and ask why they aren't as successful. Closing Gitmo will not make that process any less painful for them.

Gates is a crack smoker? Better alert the media. And please tell George Bush pronto, the last thing that man needs in another scandal in his administration.

But, in reality, all these examples really prove, for the umpteenth time, is that the rantings of the right as they try to demonize and marginalize all critics, have as much substance as a hologrm of a cloud of cotton candy whipping through a hurricane.

Not that it matters. As I was putting this piece together I came across a Reuter's news release that "Guantanamo likely to remain open rest of Bush term."

Why? Remember those hearings that they didn't want to give to the detainees? Well now they claim that conducting the hearings on the 60 to 80 of the 300+ detainees that they plan to try will simply take more time than Bush has left in office.