by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
Real Clear Politics<\/em><\/p>\n A<\/span>\u00a0common liberal complaint against the Bush administration is its supposed trampling of civil liberties. The Patriot Act, wiretaps, and Guantanamo supposedly have undermined our freedoms \u2014 or so we are warned\u00a0ad nauseam<\/i>\u00a0by liberal watchdogs.<\/p>\n True, we have not received any detailed analysis or cost\/benefit ratios of how many deadly terrorist plots have been circumvented by these new controversial measures. The administration\u2019s past defense of tough interrogations abroad of suspected terrorists sounded to many a lot like an endorsement of torture-light. In any case, as the danger of another 9\/11 fades after almost six years, the public seems to be backing off from such anti-terrorism measures \u2014 at least until another such mass murder takes place on our shores.<\/p>\n But at least the Patriot Act passed both houses of Congress with wide public support. In contrast, there are a variety of other assaults on personal freedoms, due process, and the sanctity of the law that leftwing moralists not only ignore, but often seem to endorse \u2014 as if the liberal ends should justify illiberal means.<\/p>\n First, take illegal immigration. Not only have we neglected to enforce federal immigration statutes, but also local communities, due to pressures from Hispanic lobbyists and tacit approval from employers, have passed local codes barring arrests of suspected illegal aliens.<\/p>\n Tens of thousands of regional and local government officials, along with law enforcements, have taken the law into their own hands by simply deciding not to enforce it.<\/p>\n Both employers and aliens \u2014 the former for profit, the latter with the expectation of ethnic solidarity and support \u2014 have simply flaunted the law with impunity. We don\u2019t talk about massive fraud in our Social Security system due to false names and numbers used by illegal aliens, but only in pragmatic terms of whether such flagrant disregard ultimately puts more into the system than it takes out.<\/p>\n The result is one of the most grievous examples of civil disobedience in our nation\u2019s history \u2014 with 12 million\u00a0de facto<\/i>\u00a0exempt from the law. In fact, we haven\u2019t seen state and local government defy federal laws in such blatant fashion since the Jim Crow days when the states of the Old Confederacy were openly insurrectionist.<\/p>\n Second, every bit as dangerous as wiretaps are prosecutors who manipulate the law, either for personal, ideological or political reasons. And here too reappears a pattern in which perceived political liberalism seems to trump adherence to the spirit of the law.<\/p>\n In the so-called Duke rape case, now disbarred District Attorney Michael Nifong withheld evidence in his holy crusade to convict three innocent Duke Lacrosse players \u2014 in hopes of appeasing the lynch mob of local black activists and self-righteous university professors. But even before evidence was adduced \u2014 all exculpatory to the defendants \u2014 liberal forces had tried and convicted the falsely accused in the media in furtherance of their own leftwing race, class, and gender agendas.<\/p>\n In the case of Valerie Plame, a special prosecutor was selected to find out who outed supposedly covert status at the CIA. The common liberal allegation was that administration lackies had stooped to hound a CIA employee for the anti-war politicking of her husband Joe Wilson.<\/p>\n But very early on in Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald\u2019s investigation, two inconvenient truths emerged. Ms. Plame was not a covert agent as envisioned by the original mandate of the special prosecutor. And second, the culprit who disseminated knowledge of her employment in with the CIA was almost immediately revealed \u2014 former State Department official Richard Armitage.<\/p>\n But no matter. Armitage was out of office and had voiced misgivings about the Iraq war. Thus his early conviction would have earned little public attention, but might instead have ended the investigation before it could snowball in the daily press.<\/p>\n So Fitzgerald barreled ahead anyway on a new mission to satisfy the partisan lust for high-value scalps \u2014 hoping to find some top administration official guilty of something else in the growing labyrinth of competing testimonies.<\/p>\n Presto!\u00a0 Scooter Libby, Chief of the Vice President\u2019s staff was found to have offered contradictory evidence, and thus convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice. We tend to think of smooth Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald as far more professional than the buffoonish Nifong. Maybe. But as was true of Nifong in the Duke rape case, Fitzgerald knew of information that might be fatal to his case \u2014 that early on Richard Armitage confessed to the leak \u2014 and yet neither apprised the public nor shut down his investigation.<\/p>\n Prosecutors pick and choose what charges to bring. When they either act unprofessionally or beyond their mandates, they have enormous, unchecked powers to undermine the very legal system that employs them.<\/p>\n Third, everyone has their own particular complaint about the modern Supreme Court\u2019s propensity to legislate new rather than interpret existing laws. But two years ago this June, they dismantled much of the constitutional protections of the right to hold private property.<\/p>\n In the Susette Kelo case, the Court gave state and local officials unchecked rights of eminent domain to expropriate her house. The property was not condemned for a necessary bridge or public highway. Instead it was seized for \u201curban redevelopment\u201d \u2014 even when the property in question was not blighted, and the urban renewal project was of questionable viability.<\/p>\n City officials were delighted. Their stock and trade have been to confiscate properties, sell them in sweet heart deals to wealthy insider developers \u2014 and paper over the entire shanigan with utopian rhetoric about helping the underclass.<\/p>\n Fourth, most recently Democrats have discussed reinstating some sort of \u201cfairness\u201d doctrine aimed at regulating talk radio. They are furious that the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Bill Bennet, Michael Savage, and a host of other conservatives dominate the AM airwaves \u2014 while Air America, Jerry Brown, Jim Hightower, Mario Cuomo, and other liberals have failed utterly to carve out a comparable audience in the marketplace of ideas and entertainment.<\/p>\n Once again, liberal civil libertarians are not so liberal about free speech when it is a matter of the public not buying into their own progressive agendas. We should remember that the public is free to choose \u2014 and advertisers respond accordingly \u2014 about what they wish to hear. Apparently, whiny sermons by nasal-droning elites about the illiberal nature of the yokel middle class is exactly what most on their way to work do not wish to endure.<\/p>\n Of course, conservatives likewise lament the imbalance of left-leaning public radio and television, the major networks such as NBC and CBS, the predominantly liberal print media, universities, the entertainment industry, and foundations. But the difference is that for the most part they are not calling for the government to mandate \u201cfairness\u201d by empowering federal bureaucrats to curb the liberal biases of these institutions.<\/p>\n It is stereotypically easy to identify authoritarians who seek restrict civil liberties during war in the name of \u201cnational security.\u201d But it is much harder to take on crusading special interest groups, district attorneys, court justices, and liberal Senators who ignore, twist, or subvert our constitutional freedoms under the liberal clarion call of helping minorities, stopping the war, or championing the underclass.<\/p>\n If we are to lose our civil liberties, it won\u2019t be all of sudden due to Patriot-Act zealots in sunglasses and flattops, but rather insidiously and incrementally by egalitarian professors, moral crusaders, muckraking journalists, and government utopians all unhappy that constitutional justice is too little and too late for their ever impatient desire to ensure heaven on earth.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u00a92007 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson Real Clear Politics A\u00a0common liberal complaint against the Bush administration is its supposed trampling of civil liberties. The Patriot Act, wiretaps, and Guantanamo supposedly have undermined our freedoms \u2014 or so we are warned\u00a0ad nauseam\u00a0by liberal watchdogs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[756],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-VS","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":5301,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/debating-the-patriot-act\/","url_meta":{"origin":3588,"position":0},"title":"Debating the Patriot Act","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 11, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers The following was presented in October in Modesto, California as part of the American Heritage Series sponsored by the\u00a0Modesto Bee. The 9\/11 terrorist attacks shocked the nation in many ways. In addition to the horrific scale of the destruction and loss of life, the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12379,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-left-is-what-it-once-loathed\/","url_meta":{"origin":3588,"position":1},"title":"The Left Is What It Once Loathed","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 19, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness Compare the current progressive view about civil liberties against the old liberal positions of the past. Surveillance and spying on U.S. citizens? Remember liberal Senator Frank Church of Idaho and his 1975 post-Watergate select Senate investigative committee? It found the CIA, FBI, and NSA\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4294,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-biteback-effect\/","url_meta":{"origin":3588,"position":2},"title":"The Biteback Effect","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 19, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Do we even have a word to descrive the new criticism? by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Sometimes even the English language is without the right word to describe a commonplace occurrence. We don't, for example, have a term quite like the German\u00a0schadenfreude: \"Taking malicious delight in someone else's\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "August 2005"","block_context":{"text":"August 2005","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2005\/august-2005\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3093,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/tough-times-for-radical-islam\/","url_meta":{"origin":3588,"position":3},"title":"Tough Times for Radical Islam","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 16, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Osama bin Laden is dead. The Middle East is in chaos. And radical Islam is floundering For a time after 9\/11, bin Laden was riding high. 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