I watched about 43 seconds of the GOP debate last night, and I must say that I picked an ideal moment to tune in. The moderator had just asked Romney a question about what he (Romney) would do to ensure the safety and security of the American people against further terrorist attacks.
Mitt’s answer started off well, talking about safety, about how he’d be willing to arrest people in mosques and things like that, so for a while I was actually pretty happy. Then he said “but you have to remember that we have these things called civil liberties”; and I started to get happy, because for a brief, shining second I thought he was going to say that civil liberties were important.
I was wrong. He finished that sentence with (I don’t remember the exact quote) “the ultimate civil liberty is your right to not be killed, and it’s the President’s job to protect that”.
My wife and I discussed the ramifications of that statement, and come to the (shocking) conclusion that Romney had just said, on national TV, that he was perfectly willing to trample on whichever parts of the Constitution he felt interfered with “his job” of “protecting us”.
Personally, I’d rather not have Mitt Romney providing for my protection. I mean, Massachusetts during his reign time in office wasn’t exactly the safest state in the country.
In other news, it is about damn time that Fred D. Thompson declared his official candidacy for El Presidente. I honestly do feel like Fred is the best bet of the actual viable candidates running for office; it would be nice to not look at the ballot in November and say “which is the lesser of two evils” when casting my vote.