When the facts change, I change my mind - what do you do, sir?
— John Maynard Keynes
When the facts change, I change my mind - what do you do, sir?
— John Maynard Keynes
smarties — Sunday, 1 April 2007
by Donald W. Taylor II
Andrew Sullivan has an as usual highly heated, although rightly so, post on the Republicans abandonment of Western liberty ("Cheney vs Churchill," The Daily Dish, 1 April 2007; following on "After Habeas Corpus," The Daily Dish, 31 March 2007):
And the Republican party has lost not only its own soul; it is busy mortgaging the soul of America and the West as a whole. On this, there can be no compromise. Until a leading Republican commits to the full restoration of habeas corpus for American citizens, whether the executive considers them an "enemy combatant" or not, no one who loves freedom can support the GOP. In fact, any lover of freedom should consider it a duty to defeat them.
People on the right argue that the clampdown on freedom that might follow a major terrorist attack justify the lesser infringements of the Bush administration. The answer here is simple. First, a swap of the funding levels for, say, a missile defense system ($10 billion) and the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program ($1 billion) would do far more to prevent a catastrophic terrorist attack than the nullification of Article III, Section II, as well as Amendments V and VI of the Constitution ever will. Second, it would be easier to take this argument seriously if it weren't very people advancing it who would comprise the mob demanding authoritarian measures after an attack. In essence what these people are saying is accept our offer least we demand more in the future. One is tempted to irony and the invocation of Munich here, but it would be lost on this pack of fascists.
American history is so littered with world historic errors — slavery, the Gilded Age, persecution of labor, Jim Crow, McCarthyism, the Vietnam war — that one might think that we would have developed an eye for such mistakes by this point, and yet here we go down that path again.
I guess it bears repeating that what we learn from history is that people don't learn from history (I wish I could attribute it but Google shows it attributed to G.F.W. Hegel, George Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill and Warren Buffett, among others).
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Donald W. Taylor II Washington, D.C. United States of America taylordw@goodleaf.net |