President Obama's profiling edict may have lost even liberals

This is the headline article on January 16, 2014, in the N.Y. Times,  U.S. to Expand Rules Limiting Use of Profiling by Federal Agents.  I'll quote from the first paragraph,

The Justice Department will significantly expand its definition of racial profiling to prohibit federal agents from considering religion, national origin, gender and sexual orientation in their investigations, a government official said Wednesday.

I often comment on Times articles, frequently being the voice of dissent on some serious issues, specifically their biased reporting on social issues and the ACA.   They are not spurious comments, as on at least one occasion the public editor agreed and forwarded my observations to the person who approved a clear non-fact based OpEd.  Usually, when it is a partisan issue, the reader comments are highly in favor of the Democratic position, unless it is a clear political sell out, such as not prosecuting the malefactors who engineered the financial depredations that almost brought down the world's economy in 2008.

This was my comment on the current profiling article:

We have one group, Arab Muslims, who happen to have reason to resent our invasions, drone attacks and support of one country in a region that is often at war with them. They also believe that exercise of the first amendment freedom of speech, even invidious ridicule that is protected under the Constitution, is cause for murder.

This group represents some one percent of this country's population. While no one is suggesting random arrests, focusing surveillance on this group specifically is like mining in an area with known ore deposits.

If such religious profiling is eliminated, then our investigatory efforts will be diluted to about a tenth of effectiveness, or conversely would require ten fold to prevent the same amount of potential terrorist attacks.

Sometimes reality isn't pretty, but it's still reality.  

What is notable is that it received a high number of recommends, agreements with my sentiments, which were echoed in other comments with high reader approvals.  What I didn't have space for in my printed comment was to describe the contradiction- the President's moral obtuseness of self righteous abrogation of an investigatory tool for tracking potential terrorists; while defending drone based execution of targeted individuals, including innocent bystanders.  In this procedure, unlike the investigations that have now been denied tools for effectiveness, there is absolutely nothing remotely like "due process," no defense at all, simply the sum total of damning reports of nefarious purposes that condemns the individual, and innocents around the explosion, to death.

One value of looking at this ruling is that it is done under the rubric of fairness, opposing "discrimination"-- a word that when over-generalized negates the differentiation between when such a sorting process is rational and when it is used to perpetuate unjustified harm to a given group.  "Discrimination" so distorted, is always seen as invidious,  as an extension of another common term that is unfortunately not explored with the full appreciation of its violence to our language, to critical thinking, and in this case, vital pubic policy.  That term is "political correctness," or simply PC.  It is too often simply a joke, a punch line, something for late night comedians to garner a chuckle. 

In combating terrorist attacks, President Barack Obama continues to defend our vast investment in NSA procedures that tease out by phone-based "meta data" patterns that often mirror religious connections.  Perhaps such individuals will have accumulated guilt-by-connections with such groups, or too many calls to a vocal advocate of violence against America.  And by the decision of a single individual, without any legal defense or even opportunity to explain his/her action, a lethal attack may be authorized.

If this suspect person had been investigated, perhaps his group infiltrated by covert FBI agents based on criteria now disallowed, there may have been an indictment, then a trial, an appeal-- the entire array of what we promise all who live in this country, "due process."  Our President with a stroke of his pen, without any concurrence by our elected legislators, has weakened this process that begins with an investigation and ends with a trial;  while preserving his right to issue edicts of remote execution.

And yes, this is too much, even for liberals.  Actually, especially for liberals.