The Extremism at the Heart of the Republicans.

The reaction from some on the right to the Supreme Court decision that Habeas Corpus applies to the men held at Guantanamo Bay has been as hysterical as expected, but Andy McCarthy has gone even further:

A Courtroom, er, Battlefield We Can Win On [Andy McCarthy]

An old government friend emails with a practical response to the Supreme Court:

Let's free all Gitmo detainees...on a vast, deserted, open and contested Afghan battlefield. C-130 gunship circling overhead for security. Give them all a two minute running head start.

It says a lot about how deranged the American right have become that they now advocate killing people when they have utterly failed to find these people guilty of any crime.

They are now enraged that Bush should even be required to produce any evidence at all against men that he has held in custody for over six years.

Glenn Greenwald has a good piece up today contrasting the reaction of British conservatives like David Davis - resigning in protest over the state's encroachment of civil liberties - and the fact that the American right are on the other side of the conservative fence, demanding ever more state powers to arrest and detain and spy on the populace with utterly no oversight from the courts.

There really is no power that American conservatives would deny their government and, apparently, they want this power handed over without any oversight of any kind.

Let's remember, the Supreme Court did not demand that Bush and Co. release the prisoners on Guantanamo Bay, it merely asked that their guilt be proven before a court of law.

Why do so many conservatives on the American right find such a thing so scandalous? How far removed have they become from their own values during the Bush administration that the concept of "innocent until proven guilty" has become almost a swear word to them?

The neo-cons were always an extremist element within the Republican party and for the last seven years these extremists have come to represent the Republican mainstream. It is only when one looks at how offensive they regard what most people consider as legal norms that the scale of their utter extremism becomes so glaringly apparent.

The notion that people have the right to a trial before being detained is something that has been accepted as a norm in western society since 1215, and yet Andy McCarthy now jokes about gunning people down rather than affording them that basic right. He sees that as a "practical response" to the Supreme Courts decision.

These people are fanatical extremists, there really is no other way to describe them.

Click title for Greenwald's post.

Tags: Andy McCarthy, Guantanamo Bay, US Supreme Court, Bush, Cheney, neo-cons