It's the Chinese New Year, and there's a new administration in Washington, but there's nothing new about how the Right's responding to the Obama administration's policies. For all the talk of bipartisanship -- meaning Barack Obama should be bipartisan -- the ridiculous right are back at their old tricks, and sad to say, the media are too.

After only three days, the Right’s madmen were railing. The reversal of the global gag rule on health providers, would, they say, unleash an African infanticide, the closing of Guantanamo would release terrorists to stalk our school yards. Former presidential candidate and abortion criminalizer, Gary Bauer even figured out how to fit the GITMO decision and the gag rule into the same sentence.

He said, “It is both sad and infuriating that in the same week, President Obama extended new rights to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and began to release men whom we know have murdered Americans, he is preparing to sentence innocent children to death through abortion."

Bauer has built his career on crude manipulation of an under-informed public. But it's sad to see the Associated Press headline writers going the same way.

Over an article about the president's decision to close the Guantanamo Bay Detention camp, the Associated Press, on Sunday, January 25, ran the headline:

“Issue of terrorists' rights to test Obama's pledge.”

How different is that from Bauer speak: detainees’ rights are terrorists’ rights? 

It's an old Bush chrony meme. Back in June of last year, the ideologues at the Heritage Foundation were pushing the idea that "terrorist detainees" had more rights than Americans.

Now there it is in the AP headlines -- which thanks to media mergers and the layoffs of journalists across the country, ran in scores of papers across the land including the Star Tribune and International Herald Tribune.

Writing in Salon, Glen Greenwald points out that that sort of thinking is, "What Bush followers have used for years to justify their extremist torture, surveillance and detention policies and to demonize anyone who opposed these policies as being “soft on terrorism” or even “pro-terrorist.”

As anyone who's been following the facts, hundreds of those detained at Guantanamo have been charged with no crime at all, and hundreds more have been released before trial. Of the more than 550 initial detainees held at Guantanamo there are only 245 remaining.

But more important, and this is what the Republicans do not want you to know, many alleged high-level terrorists have already been tried in our normal federal courts where innocent until proven guilty endures.

After receiving a beating from the right for being too soft on Obama these past few months, the media are likely to bend over backwards to be rough on the new administration now. But that's no reason to pick up and run with right wing talking points. If that "terrorists' rights" headline appeared in a paper where you live, why don't you write a letter to the editor?