President Obama spent the weeks leading up to the Paris and San Bernardino terror attacks talking about how ISIS was contained and shaming those who think the government won’t do a good job screening the thousands of Syrian refugees he insists on America taking in. When reality suddenly eviscerated his credibility on these issues, the White House went casting about for a distraction and found one.
In a speech so terrible that it left Politico wondering if Oval Office addresses should become a thing of the past, Obama proceeded to demagogue Republicans for not passing legislation preventing people on the “no-fly list” from buying guns. This proposal is a nonstarter and utterly unserious. For all of the mystique surrounding the list, it’s little more than an assortment of people the government deems suspicious for any number of reasons. (It’s also a misnomer—people on the list fly all the time but are subject to heightened scrutiny when they do.) Senator Ted Kennedy ended up on the list once, as did The Scrapbook’s colleague Stephen F. Hayes (Steve had flown on a one-way ticket to Istanbul, to board a cruise ship that ended up in Athens).
The size of the list—and criteria for ending up on it—can vary from day to day. In 2011, 10,000 people were on the list. In 2013, that number was 47,000. While the no-fly list can be defended as a practical approach to a complex problem where we have little margin for error, it’s impossible to argue that it isn’t capricious. Further, there’s almost no process for those who end up on the list to get their names removed. The idea that anyone is going to be denied a clearly enumerated constitutional right based on some computer algorithm or the suspicion of federal bureaucrats is brazenly illegal.
The White House has disingenuously and deliberately muddied the waters by putting out alarming stats, noting that 2,000 people on the terror watch list—wholly different from the no-fly list—have been able to buy guns. At the end of 2013, 1.1 million people were on the terror watch list.
It’s also worth noting that a huge percentage of the people on these lists are Muslim. The media had a collective meltdown when Donald Trump urged an immigration moratorium on Muslims—even though he’s an attention-seeking blowhard who’s never held office. But when the leader of the free world suggests denying the constitutional rights of a large portion of the Muslim population, it’s somehow deemed a reasonable—even praiseworthy—proposal.
Indeed, the media did everything in their power to ensure Obama’s demagoguery was taken seriously. On December 4, the New York Times editorial page attacked Republicans for standing up for due process:
It’s a curious editorial, considering that just a year ago another New York Times editorial attacked the “shadowy, self-contradictory world of American terror watch lists, which operate under a veil of secrecy so thick that it is virtually impossible to pierce it when mistakes are made. A 2007 audit found that more than half of the 71,000 names then on the no-fly list were wrongly included.”
This hypocrisy might be amusing, if people weren’t dying. We need workable national security solutions, and all we have is a leader who would rather sacrifice the Bill of Rights than own up to his own failures.
