Conservative

By Russ Wung

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Nothing fails to capture the news like a thwarted terrorist attack. During the past seven years, Western security services and militaries have saved countless lives by uncovering such schemes and capturing their perpetrators.

Obama’s challenge will be to keep Americans aware that terrorism remains a threat to our national security. Every foiled terrorist plot should remind us that the threat remains very real. Countering them by any means necessary should remain a top priority.

The fact that no major terrorist attacks have occurred in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001 is one of the most obvious and yet one of the most ignored achievements of the Bush presidency. Today, Americans’ sense of security at home has been so thoroughly restored that the phrases “national security” and “war on terrorism” seem more often used in hackneyed sarcasm rather than for serious discourse on the subject.

We have, in most senses, ceased to worry about the threat of terrorism. As the attack on the twin towers and the Pentagon recedes from our ever-shrinking attention spans, so has the perceived need to enact measures to prevent another incident. Nothing epitomizes this more than the sanctimonious hand-wringing over the welfare and privacy of captured terrorists and terrorist suspects.

Criticism of interrogation and surveillance tactics employed during the Bush administration is rarely tempered by understanding of the very real need for information in this new form of warfare. There’s a world of difference between roughing up a suspect to extract a forced confession and doing the same to find out where the proverbial bomb is.

More than once, the left has glibly complained of erosion of our civil liberties, at worst using hyperbolic references to Big Brother, telescreens and 1984. Yet after eight years of the Bush administration, persons accused of common crimes generally continue to receive the due process rights accorded to them by the Constitution, and the freedoms of speech, assembly, press and religion remain quite intact. The very volume of the public venom directed at Bush suggests that he did not use executive power to suppress criticism from the public.

Given the prevalence of surveillance tactics in Western European democracies such as France, the Netherlands and the U.K., only the truly radical would argue that a wiretap of a suspected terrorist is a wiretap of us all. The bottom line is that investigative surveillance poses no threat to civil liberties in an advanced pluralistic democracy, and that the only losers from stricter anti-terrorism laws have been enemy combatants.

With so few visible threats to our domestic safety, we have returned to the complacency of the 1990s. We now indulge in the dangerous luxury of self-flagellation over the very means that have kept us from further harm.

First indications from the new administration are not reassuring. During his confirmation hearings, Attorney-General nominee Eric Holder appeared more worried about protecting suspected terrorists and closing Guantánamo Bay than he was about protecting us from its inmates and their comrades at large.

On the other hand, Holder is no softie: he’s expressed a clear willingness to continue Bush and Clinton’s harassment of online gamblers. This is progress: accord harmless terrorists every superfluous privilege as if it were a right while still giving those dangerous horserace bookies and poker players a run for their money.

Reach columnist Russ Wung at opinion@dailyuw.com.

Liberal

By Chris Jordan

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There are several different types of people in America who are affected by the issue of energy every day.

First of all, there are the soldiers. Many of them are off bravely fighting in Iraq partly because the United States needs to guarantee a secure source of oil. You may not agree, but I invite you to ask yourself, “If Iraq produced broccoli instead of oil, would we be there today?”

Next there are the unemployed. Almost 2 million jobs were lost in the last third of 2008, and these people need work to keep paying the bills. Perhaps some new careers in green energy are in order?

Don’t forget the environmentalists. Concerned about the gases that are spewed into the atmosphere each day, they ride mass transit, walk or ride their bikes whenever possible.

Fourth, there are the young people and children. Their futures are shaped by the long-term effects of climate change they will, one day, be forced to deal with.

Then there are the drivers. Last summer’s gasoline-cost explosion burned a giant hole in their wallets. Needless to say, they aren’t looking forward to $4-per-gallon gas returning any time soon.

Lastly, there is everybody else: people who depend on a strong American economy to keep their businesses running, to keep their salaries paid at work and to fund the government they rely on for basic services. The new alternative energy companies springing up across the country directly benefit them.

Now that I think about it, who isn’t affected by the energy issue?

It’s precisely for this reason that the most challenging and important issue facing the new Obama administration is energy.

The roadblocks that could prevent Obama from making any real progress on energy issues are enormous, however. Incredibly powerful and wealthy interests are quite comfortable bathing daily in their endless oceans of profit and cash. Together the oil companies spent more than $126 million in 2008 on lobbying efforts and campaign contributions to solicit favor with lawmakers. They are perfectly satisfied with the way business has been going lately.

Obama is also faced with the fact that the government is digging itself into a hole of debt; an endless black pit of owed money that will take decades to pay off. Cries for fiscal restraint will be loud and may prevent the new president from achieving his energy objectives; the piggy bank is, simply, empty.

Despite the challenges, energy simultaneously offers America enormous opportunity to push on into the future.

America is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases on the planet. A coherent national strategy, as opposed to the current nonexistent one, could go a long way toward slowing, and eventually lowering, U.S. emissions.

With this opportunity to save the planet from impending doom comes another opportunity to revitalize the economy and spur the creation of a whole new green energy industry. A massive investment in public works projects to build a smart energy grid could hold the key to snapping our economy out of its current state by creating immediate jobs and building a bridge to the future for a green-energy-based economy.

As Hillary Clinton so aptly stated during the campaign, when it comes to energy, the president’s philosophy should not be, “Drill, baby, drill!” but rather, “Jobs, baby, jobs!”

Finally, the energy issue gives us an opportunity to make America safer. Instead of sending oil money to unfriendly nations, we could be producing our own clean energy here and sending the money to Michigan, Texas and even Washington state.

Instead of having a foreign policy that consumes time and effort with military operations in oil-rich states like Iraq, we can focus on repairing our alliances with the broccoli-producing states of Europe. Only through restoring America’s image as a world leader can we become safer, and only through ending our obsession with oil does this appear to be possible.

Reach columnist Chris Jordan at opinion@dailyuw.com.

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