By Dennis Holt
Brooklyn Daily Eagle

BROOKLYN — I guess I am puzzled a lot these days, but I spent much of this past weekend more confused than usual.

The source was the uproar and language of the reaction to the government’s decision to try the top five terrorists of 9/11 in the very city they terrified.

Listening to those on the far right, you would have believed that we have surrendered to the terrorists and that these thugs will for sure go free. And others, less radical, are speaking up: former Governor Pataki appeared on CNN debating a congressman from Pennsylvania, and Pataki sounded very much like Rush Limbaugh.

(Seeing Pataki come “out of retirement� suggests to me that he might be willing to take on Senator Gillibrand next year, if she remains the Democratic nominee.)

Yes, a trial in Manhattan will cause some inconveniences, but not to the retail merchants in the general area, not to the taxi industry, not to owners of parking garages, not to the city’s Parking Department which will no doubt rake in a lot of parking fines, and not to the press.

The terrorists attacked New York City, not Pearl Harbor or an Army military base. It makes no difference that they are not American citizens; they attacked American citizens, they killed American citizens, they violated American law. It is an American court, populated by American citizens, where they ought to be tried.

Ever since that attack, this country has made a shambles of capturing, interrogating, and detaining the folks who brought so much horror to us. We fought the wrong war after almost wrapping up the right one, and now we are painfully having to contemplate critical decisions again about the right one — Afghanistan.

The far right doesn’t believe the trial should be held in New York “because we are at war.� Yes we are, but by holding on to our principles, we are at least no longer at war with ourselves.

A friend quizzed me on this issue and I finally had to admit, not so difficult to do actually, that the national Republicans will oppose, and with distemper, anything that President Obama proposes — anything.

For some reason, the national Republican leadership is hell-bent on probable self-destruction. The vehemency of its language and the immoderacy of its positions have become dangerous. They cost themselves a congressional seat in upstate New York and seem headed toward costing their party a U. S. Senate seat in Florida.

Florida’s moderate Republican governor could defeat any Democrat in Florida next year for the open Senate seat, but the crackheads in his party are threatening to nominate a far right-winger as an act of party purification.

More so than in this country, European political writers have begun to wonder why Obama continues to seem to reach out to those who don’t want to be touched or even be in the same room with him.

Writing in a recent issue of London Review of Books, political writer David Bromwich raised the issue: “That the central lesson about his domestic enemies has not yet been learned by Obama is the mystery of the first eight months of his presidency. He has acted as if he were the leader of no party; as if patience and benignity of temper could bring out the best in everyone.�

Bromwich has no illusions about the Republicans: “The Republican Party of 2009 is a powerful piece of contrary testimony. It has become the party of wars and jails with an issue still up their sleeve when wars wind down and the jails are full: a sworn hostility towards immigrants and ‘aliens.’

“The anti-immigrant bias is an underground stream of the party that makes it a bearer of racist sentiments no longer avowable in public.�

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