If Mitt Romney Were President Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Would Already Be On His Way to Guantanamo

     Nancy Pelosi,once said in answer to an interviewer's question  We have a Democratic President-Thank God. Never more should we feel this than now. We've already got the calls for all the leading chicken hawks of the Republican party calling for the suspect to be held as an "enemy combatant."

    "Sens. Lindsey Graham and John McCain are calling for the surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings to be tried as an enemy combatant, rather than as an ordinary criminal."

    “Under the Law of War we can hold this suspect as a potential enemy combatant not entitled to Miranda warnings or the appointment of counsel,” the Republicans said in a statement released Friday night. “Our goal at this critical juncture should be to gather intelligence and protect our nation from further attacks. We remain under threat from radical Islam and we hope the Obama Administration will seriously consider the enemy combatant option.”

    "Now that the suspect is in custody, the last thing we should want is for him to remain silent,” they said. “It is absolutely vital the suspect be questioned for intelligence gathering purposes. We need to know about any possible future attacks which could take additional American lives. The least of our worries is a criminal trial which will likely be held years from now.”

     Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/04/lindsey-graham-enemy-combatant-90365.html#ixzz2R0kPMoqh

     So here we are 12 years later and the same old George W. Bush arguments. Even on it's own terms-putting aside the civil liberty issues; a concern that the chicken hawks see as totally remote-it's very dubious. How much information do you get via torture which is what this call amounts to. There's been disappointment for many liberals that the President hasn't been able to shut Guantanamo down. However, at least let's not further add to it. 

     I think we learn even less from "enemy combatants." Despite the disdain that Republicans have for normal law enforcement I think we've already seen what it can do where this entire case has been solved in a matter of a few days-amazing testimony to the level of our communications in the Internet age. 

    The country has handled this tragedy very well. 

     http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/04/in-boston-marathon-bombings-we-learn.html

     Still, would it be fair to say it would not have been handled quite so well if Mitt Romney were President. I know, I'm playing a very tricky counterfactual game. How can we really know beyond making speculations that we may think sound plausible?

      I often used to think about how much better we would have been as a country had Al Gore won; of course, even here I have to re-litigate another issue: I still think that election may well have been stolen. However how do we know this?  Can we be certain? Well I think had Al Gore won we'd at a minimum not gone into Iraq though maybe Afghanistan. 

     We wouldn't have done the regressive Bush tax cuts. Any tax cuts we would have had would have been much more progressive. We would also have been much more environmentally conscious.

     Parenthetically, Al Gore really is a visionary. 

     http://www.amazon.com/The-Future-Drivers-Global-Change/dp/0812992946/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1366468250&sr=8-1&keywords=al+gore

    You can take all this too far. It's always possible for any number of reasons that things wouldn't have been as different as you imagine. I do think the things I mentioned above would have been different with President Gore but nevertheless, we still probably would have had a financial crisis  But if Romney were President today would he be rebuffing McCain and Graham?