NIMBY Pimby/Namby Pamby

In case you didn't know, NIMBY is the acronym for Not In My Back Yard. Generally, the term is used pejoratively because it applies to a hypocritical opposition to the construction of an institution or the scheduling of an event despite that plan's overwhelmingly positive projected effects on the community at large.

For instance, the Kennedys have opposed wind farm construction in the sightline of their tony waterfront Cape Cod estates despite being champions of alternative, non-nuclear, ozone layer-sparing energy projects elsewhere.  Cash-strapped cities have rejected lucrative contracts for street-racing motorsports events because of the noise that such speed festivals might create downtown one weekend each year.

Prisons and mental institutions, even when placed in remote or even unseen locations, are generally opposed because of the risk posed by escaped inmates.  However, such institutions are often the only source of real jobs in rural and agricultural communities.

If the incarceration of captured enemy War on Terror combatants at our offshore Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba has served no other purpose it has kept doomsday plotters and rank-and-file al Qaida terrorist detainees far from our backyards. 

By the same token, if the Obama administration's plan to close Gitmo creates no other problems (God willing) it will certainly have Americans of every political persuasion crying NIMBY! should the alternative location for those Islamo-fascists happen to be in or near their own communities. 

When it comes to any topic related to military action in Iraq and Afghanistan you can rest assured that Democrat Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania will have a contrarian opinion.  In an interview with Fox News last Wednesday Murtha weighed-in on the Gitmo closing.

"[The suspected terrorists] would be no more dangerous in my district than in Guantanamo," the controversial congressman stated. "[There is] no reason not to put 'em in prisons in the United States and handle them the way they would handle any other prisoners," he concluded.

A decade ago there was a long drawn-out NIMBY argument that divided my own community.  It was over the construction of an electric power plant that would utilize natural gas fuel from a nearby national pipeline, water for internal cooling sourced from the nearby Hudson River and materials transportation via a major railroad freight line located at the proposed plant's back door. 

Among other paranoid reasons, the plant protestors -- many of them professional imports from far-left demonstration sites around the nation -- decried the spoiling of the scenic views from so-called landmark sites (somewhat famous artists' homes) on the other side of the river. 

I wrote numerous editorial pieces and open letters to editors and stood, nearly alone, as a media proponent of the project.  Today the plant, which generates enough power for a million-and-a-half homes while generating revenue for a long-depressed rural economy in the form of jobs and taxes, stands just as greenly, silently and nearly invisibly as its constructors had promised from the outset.

So having a decidedly anti-NIMBY background I'm ready to one-up John Murtha and offer my own property as the new home of the Guantanamo detainees.  I'll keep them out of your backyard on one condition; a condition that, in the spirit of the new administration, is very Clintonian.  Don't ask...don't tell.

Or perhaps you might agree that world opinion and the detainees themselves are better left at Gitmo where they receive better treatment than they deserve

-- the best treatment that US taxpayers' money can buy.

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