Step 1. Open an account on electronic social networking platforms like Youtube and Facebook.

Step 2. Wear a Che Guevara t-shirt.

Step 3. Support a Presidential candidate whose campaign has a Youtube and Facebook account and whose staff and supporters display Che Guevara flags and posters alongside the candidate’s signs.

Behold, the most shockingly faulty logic to ever enter a human mind:

How do you spell blowback?

Maybe this technically isn’t blowback. More like creating terrorists. I suppose now the argument for indefite [sic] detentions will be something along the lines of:

We can’t release the prisoners because, if they weren’t actually terrorists before we locked them in our gulag and tortured them for information, they almost certainly will become terrorists if we let them go.

Future generations will study Jeff’s words with an equal mix of befuddled amusement and disgust.

They will wonder how anyone could possibly come to posit the theory that an otherwise disinterested young Middle Eastern man decided to blow himself up in Iraq as retribution for a brief stay in an American military prison, nearly three years after being released to his home country, after having said this during his hearing:

“I don’t blame the Americans for what they did by bringing us over here and detaining us over here. If I were in their place I would go out and look for terrorism all over the world like they did but I have a feeling it is going to be a just decision by the Americans. That is my feeling. I would do the same thing if I were in their shoes. I would capture the bad people, the terrorists and bring them over here and detain them.”

They will wonder how Jeff instinctively rushed to the defense of a soldier who went AWOL from the Kuwaiti military in order to join forces with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and later became a suicide bomber in Iraq, over the testimony of his own country’s defense agencies, who correctly deemed the suspect a “continued threat to the United States and its Allies.”

They will wonder how Jeff came to take the final piece of evidence of the man’s terrorist proclivity as proof of his innocence.

And then they will question why such thinking had become so commonplace among liberal Democrats at the turn of the century, and why so few were willing to call them on it.

The CA adds a few new details to the Mahmoud Maawad account:

Mahmoud Maawad, who was convicted in a Memphis federal court in 2006 for fraud and deported to Egypt, ordered DVDs on pilot training, Memphis airport layouts and how to pass himself off as a pilot.

When authorities raided Maawad’s University of Memphis-area apartment they found a prayer rug, a desk, a computer and a model of a tanker truck — and a pilot’s uniform.

Maawad had used the computer to download information on ways to thwart airport security and to research terrorist Web sites.

“Was he the real deal?” [FBI special agent Eric] Jackson asked. “In my experience, I think he was.”

I’ll bet you $5 he’s already back in the United States.

VV points to a post at The Nation that is critical of Fred Thompson’s plan to strengthen and expand the U.S. military:

What is unfortunate is that Republicans lack a candidate with the wisdom of a actual military commander like, say, Dwight Eisenhower.

Then, instead of proposing exponential expansions of the Pentagon budget, they would be saying, as Republican Eisenhower did: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”

Actually, what’s unfortunate is that the passage quoted above is one of those that the Left likes to swap back and forth, stripped from context, and without ever linking back to an original source (do a quick Google search if you don’t believe me).

The quote is from an Eisenhower speech known as the Chance for Peace Address, which was delivered in 1953 and was intended to send a message to the Soviet Union, which was gearing up for a cold war with the United States.

It’s clear the author hasn’t given much thought to the way history played out following this speech, or what role Ronald Reagan and his strong defense policies might have played along the way.

It’s also clear the author hasn’t considered the position held by any of those populations aided by such guns, warships and rockets, specifically those across Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

Eisenhower did not deliver this speech in the middle of World War II, when those munitions were being used to liberate France, rescue millions of Jews and defeat the armies of fascism on two fronts.

Nor would it have been delivered today, as these same forces are being used to liberate 50 million people and to wage war against Al Qaida and allied terrorist groups on two major fronts in the Middle East.

Unless, of course, it was intended for countries such as Iran, North Korea and China, just as the original encouraged the Soviet Union to stop their aggressive military buildup.

And, finally, it’s clear the author hasn’t familiarized himself with the entire speech, which also includes this warning to the Soviets, that their aggression had:

…instilled in the free nations - and let none doubt this - the unshakable conviction that, as long as there persists a threat to freedom, they must, at any cost, remain armed, strong, and ready for the risk of war.

Hmm, that sounds like Fred Thompson’s plan, doesn’t it?

Of course, we couldn’t have expected much more from the post’s author, John Nichols, who was last heard offering Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton as the future PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.

Hi, my name is Samir Khan. I’m 21, and I cheer on the jihad from my parents’ basement in North Carolina. Watch my cool video. (And, no, I haven’t signed the letter.)

See also: this post.