Kind of funny

The City of Hardin, Montana has an empty jail.  Its construction loans are in default and the city is desperately trying to find a tenant.

 

The federal government has a full jail they want to shut down and, consequently 240 prisoners that need to be moved within a year.

 

The City of Hardin wants those prisoners.  Montana’s congressional delegation doesn’t want those prisoners.

 

Why?  ‘Cause they’re prisoners from Guantanamo Bay.

 

Apparently, the only reason why they are prisoners is because the prison was built at the naval facility and if you elect a young, charismatic President who promises to shut down the prison, the problem with terrorists and all those prisoners will just magically go away.

 

But what of the prisoners?  Eh, someone else’s problem.  And when someone else steps up and offers to solve that problem?  “Not on my watch”, says the good senator Max Baucus from Montana.  Nope, this problem will just solve itself.

 

This is when you can trot out the over used phrase “in these uncertain times” and shine it up as an economic issue where the addition of the prisoners will generate jobs and make things a little better for the town of 3400.  But it’s not even that complex.

 

The reality of the thing is that despite protests that these people who were picked up on battlefields and turned in as terrorist collaborators should be treated like prisoners within the normal criminal system of the United States of America, nobody really wants to treat them like normal criminals in the United States of America.  They don’t even want these guys locked up like pedophiles.  They want them exiled on a small communist island in the middle of the Caribbean, but they don’t want the lock up on the small communist island in the middle of the Caribbean. 

What they want, I suppose, is to just blink their eyes and make it all go away.  You know, if we act nice and listen then the terrorists will just love us to pieces.  You know, because WE’RE the problem, not their own malfunction.  All we have to do is play nice.  Maybe if we elect some democrats.  Maybe if we elect a black guy.  Maybe if we close Gitmo.  Maybe if we pull our forces out of Saudi Arabia (we did that, Al Queda still hates us).  Maybe if we just…  oh, I’ve got an idea!  Capture them and lock them up forever.  Or shoot them before they “love” us to pieces, and our loved ones have to go and identify one of the pieces so that we can get a proper burial.