Amherst, MA: Nuttyville, USA

The Boston Globe has this doozy of a story:

The western Massachusetts university town of Amherst is mulling a resolution urging the Congress to release cleared Guantanamo Bay detainees into the United States and calling for the town to welcome those detainees into the community.

The town’s Select Board voted 2-1 Monday night to endorse a warrant article titled, “Resolution to Assist in the Safe Resettlement of Cleared Guantanamo Detainees.”

“The United States has a long history of being a place of refuge and asylum for persecuted people. There’s nothing new about this,” said Gerry Weiss, one of the two selectmen supporting the resolution. “This is the tradition of the United States.”

The resolution was submitted by Ruth Hooke, a Town Meeting member and a member of Pioneer Valley No More Guantanamos.

In briefing material supplied to the selectmen, the group said the resolution “asks our local community to look beyond the stereotype that all the men at Guantanamo are ‘terrorists,’ and instead to look at each man as a human being who deserves human rights and a presumption of innocence until proven guilty.”

Are these people nuts? Besides the obvious absurdity of calling war criminals “innocent until proven guilty” (should WWII soldiers have conducted quick field trials before shooting at the enemy?), do these Amherst schmucks think that terrorists are going to just “settle down” in their cozy little insane town and join the local Kiwanis club? Maybe throw a nice barbecue party on Memorial Day…

No. The first thing these terrorists are going to do (not that this bizarre proposal is ever even going to come close to fruition) is to get the hell out of the one town in the country filled with people even more insane than they are, which means that the rest of the country is going to be crawling with terrorists on the loose. At least the idiots of Amherst can take comfort in the fact that no one really cares enough about their ridiculous existence to incinerate their whole town, but as for the rest of us [saner] people living in cities that these terrorists are targeting… thankfully, we have more of a say (for now).

SIDE NOTE:
James Taranto of the WSJ introduces the Boston Globe story above with a great opening paragraph:

President Obama’s promise to empty the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has run into a little obstacle: It turns out the place is full of terrorists! Like everything else, this is not Obama’s fault. The terrorists are there because George W. Bush put them there, leaving poor Obama once again stuck cleaning up someone else’s mess.

As Taranto (and many others) point out time and again: poor Obama should just shut up already about whose mess this is and instead should start cleaning. He didn’t “inherit” the mess, as he loves to claim, as though it was never his idea to get stuck with it; he enthusiastically pursued the very office that comes with the entire mess (not to mention his knack for taking the mess to new heights).

Tags: Amherst MA, Guantanamo Bay, James Taranto

This entry was posted on Friday, October 23rd, 2009 and is filed under National Politics, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.