Joe Scarborough, Mika Brezinski, Camille Paglia, et al. are making sanctimonious, specious and hyperbolic arguments against Ted Cruz's anti-terrorism policy prescription

In response to the Brussels terrorism attacks, Senator Ted Cruz made the following anti-terrorism policy recommendation:

(CNN) Ted Cruz on Tuesday called for law enforcement to step up their policing of Muslim neighborhoods in the U.S. in the wake of terrorist attacks in Brussels, comparing it to police boosting their presence in areas with known gang activity. 

"If you have a neighborhood where there's a high level of gang activity, the way to prevent it is you increase the law enforcement presence there and you target the gang members to get them off the streets," the Texas senator told CNN's Anderson Cooper. "I'm talking about any area where there is a higher incidence of radical Islamic terrorism."...

The sanctimonious, specious, and hyperbolic arguments against Cruz's escalation have been quick to follow from the likes of Joe Scarborough, Mika Brezinski (video starting at 5:50 time mark), Camille Paglia and many others.

In a classic tu quoque moment, New York City's police commissioner, William J. Bratton, head of an organization that has been criticized by the ACLU for its Muslim Surveillance Program, criticized the senator's recommendation.  Can you say chutzpah?

Much of the criticism comes across as virtue signaling to an informed citizen.

The FBI's own historical record is replete with targeted enforcement actions against:

• Italian Organized Crime
• African Criminal Enterprises
• Asian Criminal Enterprises
• Balkan Criminal Enterprises
• Eurasian Criminal Enterprises
• Middle Eastern Criminal Enterprises

Cruz's recommendation is a reasoned extension of the targeted efforts against the criminal dynamic identified as Islamic Radicalization by the FBI.  

So when someone hyperbolically asserts rhetorical questions like:

...What exactly are the telltale signs of creeping radicalization that roving patrol cars would be able to spot—an uptick in Bedouin garb and the waving of scimitars in the street, as in a Rudolph Valentino movie? And how would American police “secure” any neighborhood without violating basic constitutional rights?...

 à la Camille Paglia, the response is that we can walk a path that protects constitutional rights at the same time we chew up the terrorism that seeks to destroy our way of life.  

In fact, the FBI is already tracking 900 'homegrown' ISIS cases in all 50 States and these are the areas Senator Cruz is recommending "you increase the law enforcement presence" against.

Calling 'Bullshit!' on Congressman Mike Rogers

On Sunday's ABC News This Week House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Rogers (R) made the following justification for the NSA hosting the nation's phone records (transcript, emphasis added):

...What this is, and the reason this happened is after 9/11, we realized there was a big hole in our ability to fully identify all of the players in that terrorist plot. And one of it was by the fact that these business records, the phone billing information, is destroyed by these companies. They can't, expense-wise, it's really difficult for them to hold them. So this is what happened. The court said, put all of that information in a box and hold that information, and when you want to access that information, you have to use this very specific court-ordered approval process, which means it has to be a foreign person believed to be on a foreign land. So some notion that they can see a name that even comes out of that -- by the way, this is important -- no name comes out of that search. So even if they get a number, it doesn't have a name on it. This then allows them to do further investigation.

The "expense-wise" argument is Bullshit!   Congress mandates that business hold records all the time (think tax records).  If it was really a matter of cost, Congress could have appropriated funds for the phone companies to warehouse the phone records and yet make them immediately available via a secure data link (à la NexisLexis-style business-to-business access) once the FISA court had authorized it's access in a case with probable cause.   This would be a solution that captures both the spirit and letter of the Fourth Amendment.

Update: Congressman Rogers is interviewed on Fox News Special Report (video).  He addresses the data "lock box" but not the technical justification for warehousing all the data at the NSA; as opposed to leaving it in place at the phone companies.  See post: NSA Phone Data "Lock Box" and the "Reasonable" test of Smith v. Maryland