Joe Lieberman’s Terrorist Expatriation Act is designed to strip the constitutional rights from any American who is accused of supporting terrorism, but the political sentiment he’s tapping into is simply, America first. Does Lieberman have no concern about where this might go?
How about this New Yorker who Max Blumenthal interviewed recently? Presumably she’s an American citizen, but it sounds like she puts Israel first:
As for where Lieberman is finding support, it isn’t coming from the White House but other Democrats have spoken favorably:
Several major Democratic officials spoke positively about the proposal, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Noting that the State Department already had the authority to rescind the citizenship of people who declare allegiance to a foreign state, she said the administration would take “a hard look” at extending those powers to cover terrorism suspects.
“United States citizenship is a privilege,” she said. “It is not a right. People who are serving foreign powers — or in this case, foreign terrorists — are clearly in violation, in my personal opinion, of that oath which they swore when they became citizens.”
Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she supported the “spirit” of the measure, although she urged caution and said that the details of the proposal, like what would trigger a loss of citizenship, still needed to be fleshed out.
Interesting comment from Clinton… Makes me wonder: how does she feel about Rahm Emanuel serving in the Israeli Defense Force? I know that doesn’t count as an infraction of the law because Israel is not a country hostile to the US, but there’s no avoiding the fact that serving in the Israeli military is serving a foreign power.
As for the “spirit” of the measure, I guess Pelosi will have to explain what she means, but Megan McArdle is not alone in finding this spirit hard to discern:
Can someone explain to me–hopefully using graphs, and small words–why Joe Lieberman is willing to share the precious blessing of American citizenship with Charles Manson, Gary Ridgeway, and David Berkowitz, but wants citizenship stripped from a guy who strapped some firecrackers to a bag of non-explosive fertilizer?
Indeed. And if even Glenn Beck and Chuck Schumer both doubt the wisdom of Lieberman’s bill, that might be a hint that this truly is an act of idiocy.
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We are slipping back into the mentality of Pearl Harbor where once again Americans hit at other Americans rather than at the incompetents whose job is to protect us but totally failed. So far the PREVENTIVE SIDE of the payroll is an expensive catastrophe and the LEGAL PROSECUTORIAL side is on the ball. Lieberman and his fellow Radical Zionists are motivated by their obsession that Muslims will eventually outnumber Jews in America, both as voters, as wealthy influence and as intellectual influence. That is why they will do anything to impose immigration restrictions violating the rights of other SEMITES, ironically thinking that they are so well entrenched that all they need do is yell “anti-Semite” and that will stop dead any finger pointing at their past dubious deeds. So far, the only group that BRAGS of multiple passports and infests high security US Gov agencies with their sense on dual loyalty are the neocons. Lieberman is playing with fire in a nation that paid heavily in blood for his advocacies in service of Radical Zionism. The notion that if it’s good for Israel is MUST be good for USA is a dangerous provocation that will soon unleash a blowback on innocent LOYAL Jewish-American victims. The filth that neocons imposed on America through the immoral presidency of GW Bush can still come back to bite them….indeed chew them to bits. Yet it isn’t fair that the mass majority of Jews who deem neocons to be mad men should be impacted upon by this pretended spokesman for American Jews. Lieberman no more speaks for American Jews than binLaden!
This issue would seem to be yet another symptom of the xenophobia disease that is chronic in the US.
There is a wide streak of it in Hillary Clinton, I think. I remember how Senator Clinton and her office kept insisting that the 9/11 terrorists entered the US thru Canada – and therefore the longest and oldest undefended border on the planet had to be “hardened” and new US military bases be built in some of the border states. Our ambassador to the US had to keep correcting that misperception. (Janet Napolitano of Homeland Security also subscribes to this 9/11 myth.)
Since it’s NAFTA that is the cause of most “illegal” immigration, why doesn’t Washington deal with that? It’s like terrorism: everybody knows what causes anti-West terrorism – namely Western foreign policy – but the US and its vassal states will spend bazillions of dollars and thousands of lives rather than just address the foreign policy issues.
Now the US wants to banish its own citizens. Will Washington search for homes for them the way they did for all those innocent Muslims held in Gitmo for all those years? Or maybe the military will just dump them in some Middle Eastern country and then assassinate them?
Is it any wonder the empire is slowly crashing?