Don't miss

Andrew McCarthy's essay at NRO last Thursday: Material Support to…“Business Professionals” -- The Bush administration has some explaining to do on Hamas.

[ . . . ]

The rationale for the Bush presidency, the bedrock basis for reelection, is that the President has been clear-eyed and unflinching on the central issue of the day: the threat posed by militant Islamic terrorism. Again and again, he has said it: Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. This was the firm foundation of the Bush Doctrine — no quarter for terrorists, no place, no how. And no exceptions for the Palestinian Authority.

We have structured our law around it. Numerous people have been prosecuted under beefed up laws that forbid providing any kind of material support to terrorist organizations. In case after case, those defendants plead the same thing — what we might now call the “McClellan Defense”: “Sure the government might say they’re a terrorist organization, and sure they might mass-murder civilians, but they do a lot of good, too. They run charities. They run social service organizations. They have a lot of good business people who talk about improving the quality of life. I was only contributing to this happy-face side of the house, not the bad terrorists.”

The defense gets laughed out of court, because most people are not fools. As a practical matter, people know dollars are fungible. If you give money to a terrorist organization — like the $350 million McClellan indicates we are thinking about giving to a Hamas-dominated PA — you don’t control it; the terrorists do, and they decide whether to channel it to healthcare or bomb-building.

More importantly, as a behavioral incentive, people understand and endorse what antiterror law seeks to achieve. If an organization practices the savagery of terrorism, if it seeks political accommodation by murdering its way to the bargaining table, it must forfeit any right to be heard or, bluntly, to exist. No matter how many hospitals and charities it runs. No matter how many nice men in nice suits it trots out to prattle about social justice. End of story.

That's not the end of McCarthy's story, though. He makes the point another way, and this part hits very close to home for me.

President Bush has always seen the likes of Hamas as Hamas — i.e., as thugs, not businessmen. It was because of this that he was preferable to Senator Kerry, who saw terrorism as a problem to be managed in conjunction with the international community and its nuanced view of the world’s Hamases as “political resistance movements” that, alas, occasionally strap explosives to adolescent suicide bombers — a somewhat less-than-nuanced way of killing lots of civilians.

Yes, that (and not "moral values") was a big part of the reason I and a lot of other lifelong Democratic voters I know pushed the lever for Bush last November. So I'd echo McCarthy's call for a retraction, correction or damn good explanation for McClellan's remarks ASAP. At least this is one subject we can agree on.