If you really want to break the law, get into politics
Y’know, Clinton’s impeachment hearings weren’t ever really about his Monica-given BJ’s: It was about him lying about it and covering it up.
So I don’t understand why the American zeitgeist is so astonishingly indifferent to the wholesale sidestepping of our civil and legal rights that the current administration has been engaged in — from Jose Padilla to the warrantless wiretaps on Americans abroad… and those are just the injustices we know about.
After all, we’re dealing here with people whom the State says it suspects, but has not yet proven, are “drug dealers.” With those people (and, of course, with “suspected terrorists”), anything goes, even before a trial and without any due process of any kind. All of this can be done strictly on the Government’s say-so, even if the Constitutional “niceties” which exist to prohibit such behavior haven’t been complied with. “It may be wrong,” spits out Jonah, but we should do it anyway, because these people deserve it.
Isn’t it exactly this depraved thinking which lies at the heart of almost every current controversy we have? The whole point of the Bill of Rights — really, its principal function — is to prevent the Government from punishing those whom the Government claims (but has not yet proven in a court of law) are bad people deserving of punishment. That’s why there is a sequence mandated by the Constitution before rights can be abridged and punishment inflicted — first, charge someone with a crime, then give them the right to defend themselves along with other protections of due process, and then convict them. Only then are they considered criminals whose rights can be abridged.
Glenn Greenwald has a nice essay called “A Nation of Jonah Goldbergs” that is, IMHO, on the mark.
(Counterpoint: My friend Doug has a different point of view.)
