As for due process, the greatest danger to liberty would be to allow more such attacks that would inspire an even greater public backlash against Muslims or free speech or worse. The anti-antiterror types on the left and GOP Senators who agree that the U.S. isn’t part of the battlefield are making the U.S. more vulnerable

The greatest danger to liberty is to allow civil liberties? The greatest threat to Muslims is to not single them out for racial profiling? These kinds of Orwellian logic are Fascism 101.

“Enemy Combatants in Boston”, WSJ

For example: how is the War on Poverty going?  We spent a trillion dollars on that, back when a trillion dollars was a lot of money for Uncle Sam.  Actually, we’re spending almost a trillion dollars per year on means-tested federal and state welfare programs these days.  Our reward for this is more poverty – poverty levels higher than they were in the late Sixties.  Under the current definition, one in six Americans live in poverty… but even the definition of poverty is the subject of much debate, because it doesn’t include the enormous value of those War on Poverty welfare programs, which can leave an “impoverished” family with more disposable income than “middle class” families enjoy.

Does this constitute success or failure for large-scale government welfare programs?  If the objective of the War on Poverty was to reduce poverty, it must be judged one of the most astonishing failures in American history.  Poverty won in a rout.  On the other hand, if the objective was to make poverty more comfortable, by raising the standard of living for poor Americans, the war could be viewed as an impressive success.  Most of the world’s poor live in conditions of awful deprivation; America’s poor wrestle with chronic obesity.

Food-stamp recipients eat better than the middle class? Didn’t this government-by-anecdote approach ride into the sunset with Reagan?

“Government Without Objective,” Red State

“This week, we have reason for great doubts in our culture’s ability to assimilate those who come here into good Americans, and our government’s ability to examine potential citizens and weed out those who would seek to harm us.”

“The Boston Bombers and the Collapse of Assimilation,” Jim Geraghty, National Review.

“It does not affect your daily life very much if your neighbor marries a box turtle. But that does not mean it is right…Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife.” (John Cornyn, July 2004)

Lock up your female box turtles!

So does America’s Welfare System create Jihadists in a vacuum? No. But it certainly could engender the type of hatred and contempt for worthless humanity that makes it possible for a dehumanized and brutal egoist to be brainwashed into blowing up 8 Year-Old boys without the slightest lilt of remorse or regret. America’s Welfare system dehumanizes man. Dehumanized men are more likely to commit crime. The Russians certainly told us this was coming. After seven decades under Communist tyranny; they certainly were the ones who would know.

“Does the US Welfare System Benefit Jihadists?,” Red State

The logic here seems to be that taking food stamps “robs” you of your humanity and tips you toward becoming a terrorist.

When a communist assassinated President Kennedy, somehow the American Right got the blame. Lyndon Johnson translated that myth into a campaign of slander against Barry Goldwater, casting him as a crypto-Nazi emissary of “hate.” After the Oklahoma City bombing, President Clinton saw fit to insinuate that Rush Limbaugh and his imitators were partly to blame….Occupy Wall Street was an idealistic expression of democratic protest, but the tea partiers are brownshirts in khakis…Barack Obama was friendly with a convicted domestic terrorist.

But to even bring these things up, never mind invest them with significance, is considered outrageous guilt by association. And you know what? Maybe it is.

But if that is outrageous, what do you call the paranoid style of liberal politics that has confused normalcy with fascism for more than half a century?

“The Right’s Undeserved Stigma,” Jonah Goldberg, National Review

This is a tricky double move. It’s not paranoid to accuse Obama of masterminding a socialist takeover of America because the GOP occupies the high ground on “normalcy.” Paranoia is the new normal in Tea Party America.

the West has imported vast numbers of people who hate our guts and would love to slit our throats. Political correctness has replaced self-preservation. The Boston Marathon killer who set a bomb down right next to an eight-year-old child is only the latest in an ongoing series of such people.

Today, virtually every group has its own “leaders” promoting its separate identity and different way of life, backed up by zealots for multiculturalism and bilingualism in the general population. The magic word “diversity” is repeated endlessly and insistently to banish concerns about the balkanization of America — and to banish examples provided by the tragic history of the Balkans.

We are importing many foreigners who stay foreign, if not hostile. Blithely turning them into citizens by fiat, rather than because they have committed to the American way of life, is an irreversible decision that could easily turn out to be a dangerous gamble with the future of the whole society. What happened in Boston shows just one of those dangers.

“Immigration Gambles,” Thomas Sowell, The National Review

The Boston bombings prove that diversity, multiculturalism, bilingualism and tolerance are destroying the American way of life.

The problem created by the welfare state is thus not best understood as…the illusion of an impossible independence—an individualism so radical it renders all human relationships, including our relationships to the weakest and most needy of those around us, into non-binding optional arrangements, ignoring the realities of human life that make it necessary to guard human beings in their most vulnerable moments through an array of unchosen—or at the very least non-optional—obligations, especially in the family. The Left’s statist radical individualism that masquerades as a kind of communitarian collectivism pretends to offer a way for people to act together, but in practice it offers an escape from all mutual dependence and from the neediness of people who are not well positioned to pretend to be utterly autonomous.

“More Than Dependency,” National Review

Statism and radical individualism at the same time sounds like an oxymoron, but Republicans always seem able to square the circle by making something—in this case, communitarianism and welfare—into its opposite—in this case, radical individualism and social breakdown. A moral imperative is turned inside out and twisted into seeming like into an immoral disavowal of social obligation and community.

In just a short time, they would be entitled to the same massive array of government programs as everyone else, including expensive retirement income and health programs that are already severely underfunded. The average unlawful immigrant has a 10th grade education, and low-skill immigrants on average take more in government benefits than they pay in taxes at every stage of their lives.

America’s families are already burdened with taxes to support a bloated welfare and overburdened entitlement system that is badly in need of reform. This situation would get far worse under amnesty.

“American Families Cannot Afford the Cost of Amnesty,” Heritage Foundation

Immigrant bashing personified.