Herd Loyalty and Selective Memory

I’m not a Republican or a Democrat, I don’t go to Tea Parties (although I sympathize with their pro liberty philosophy); from where I sit, both parties can be very hypocritical, and those of us that are true believers in either can be very naive. 

It’s pretty hard not to notice that people ignore things about their party or candidate that they’d find unforgivable in someone on the other side.  We’re quick to condemn the other guy, but we’ll give our side a pass for doing the same exact thing (or worse).  I also notice that too many of us ignore history, especially when it doesn’t support our views.  

 When I hear people saying we have to “get back to the Constitution” I agree, but I know  that we always had to claw our way back to it, right from the very beginning.  Each President and every Congress has tried to expand government’s power, so it’s a never ending struggle.  Presidents Obama and Bush never really seemed to respect the Constitution, but that’s nothing new.

 Would you be in favor of a law that would allow the the President to deport any alien (legal or not) that spoke out against the United States Government?  Doesn’t the Constitution guarantee that our government will not infringe on our right of free speech?  That wasn’t only meant for American citizens, our rights are “inalienable”, every person in the world is born with those rights; some governments take them away, ours isn’t supposed to.  Would you be in favor of a law that would allow our government to deport any alien (legal or not) if we were at war with their home country?  You might be far removed from something like that now, but if you have either Italian, German or Japanese heritage, your parents or Grandparents might have been deported during World War Two for absolutely no reason, and without a hearing.  Only eleven years after our Constitution was ratified, President John Adams signed the “Aliens and Sedition Act” into law, effectively taking the “inalienable right” of free speech from immigrants, and giving government the right to deport just about any immigrant they wanted.  

 What would you think of a President that used his power to shut down unfriendly newspapers?  Could you imagine George Bush shutting down the New York Times and placing the entire staff under arrest and keeping them in a military prison, with no hope of trial?  Could you imagine President Obama doing the same to Fox News? What would you think of a President that ordered the military to imprison the owners, editors and writers of unfriendly newspapers without a trial?  President Lincoln did exactly that when he suspended habeas corpus.  “You will take possession by military force, of the printing establishments of the New York World and Journal of Commerce...and prohibit any further publication thereof...You are therefore commanded forthwith to arrest and imprison...the editors, proprietors and publishers of the aforementioned newspapers.” - Order of Abraham Lincoln to General John Dix, 1864.  During the Civil War, Lincoln shut down newspapers all over the country, and gave power to the Military to arrest people for exercising their “inalienable right” to free speech, and suspended freedom of the press.  During the Civil War, between 10,000 and 15,000 Americans were arrested and imprisoned without due process, for expressing their opinions.  

 If you’re a Liberal Democrat, chances are you were outraged at President Bush’s internment camp at Guantanamo Bay, but the Liberal icon, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt did much worse; in February of 1941, he signed Executive Order 9066 which ordered our military and police to round up Japanese Americans and put them into Concentration Camps.  The people “interned” (more than 100,000) weren’t captured on a battlefield, they weren’t accused of any crimes, they weren’t POWs or EPWs, they didn’t get a trial, they were mostly regular folks trying to get by like everyone else.  At the point of a gun, they lost their homes, businesses, freedoms and way of life to live behind barbed wire.  In spite of this, many young Japanese Americans enlisted in the US Army, while their families sat in prison.  

 One of the things that Conservatives strongly believe in is property rights, but historically, they’ve supported a military draft.  Aren’t we the property of ourselves?  How can people that don’t even have rights to their their own lives, own homes, stock portfolios or bank accounts?  During World War Two, Republicans in Congress tried twice (unsuccessfully) to pass a law that would draft Americans to work as civilians for the war effort.  After all, if you can draft a person to serve in the military and drive a tank, why couldn’t you draft someone to work on an assembly line and build a tank?  That’s not a bad question and it shows us a very dangerous, very slippery road.  To avoid conflicts with labor unions, the industries would have to pay the drafted workers at union rates, but they’d only find military wages in their pay envelopes.  The difference would go to (you guessed it) the federal government.  

If George W Bush had a “D” in back of his name instead of an “R”, I think most Republicans would have been outraged at his nationalization of our educational system with the absurd, obscene “No Child Left Behind” law.  Isn’t it a right of the states to govern themselves?  Aren’t Conservatives against big, Federal Government mandates?   Shouldn’t a Conservative be against federal bureaucrats micromanaging the education of our children?  I didn’t hear too many of ‘em complain when President Bush signed it into law.    

President Barrack Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder have come out over and over against water boarding, and in favor of civilian trials for foreign war criminals captured on battlefields, but they’re targeting at least one American citizen for assassination.  Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki is an American Citizen born right here in the USA, and is a target for our missile firing drones; just recently he barely escaped being turned into a grease spot on a highway in Yemen.  I guess the best way to avoid a costly, risky trial in Federal Court isn’t a military tribunal, it’s an assassination.  Can anyone explain how the assassination of an American citizen is morally acceptable (if they can do that to a citizen, what can’t they do?), but a Military Tribunal for a foreign born war criminal, captured outside of the United States isn’t?   The same justice system that put a Navy SEAL through a Court Martial for punching a recently captured foreign terrorist in the nose, is trying to vaporize an American citizen by using guided missiles and unmanned aircraft.  Where is the moral equivalency?  Will he be less dead, or will we be less guilty if he’s killed by a robot?  I’m no fan of al-Awlaki, I wouldn’t shed any tears for him if he found himself on the receiving end of a Hellfire Missile, but at the same time, it’s just another in a long line of inconsistent, hypocritical policies coming from Washington.  Take the high road until it causes a headache, then push a button and blow the high road up with a smart bomb.  

If President Bush had “solved” the healthcare problem by forcing each American to buy health insurance, I doubt many on the left would be hailing it as a huge accomplishment; in fact, many would have accused Bush of being in bed with the insurance companies.  At one time (before he signed the bill into law) President Obama even said that solving the problem by forcing the uninsured to buy their own insurance was like forcing the homeless to buy their own homes.

Well, there’s plenty of hypocrisy to go around, we have more than two-hundred years of it.  I think the best we can do is stay as independent as possible, try to step back and think objectively and hold these people accountable, especially when they’re on “our side”.  Drop the party loyalty, try not to let emotions cloud our reason and see each policy from as many angles as we can.  We also need to remember that the ends do not justify the means.  

By definition, law makers make laws, that seems to be their solution to every problem.  If there isn’t a “crisis”, they’ll create one, so they can come up with a solution.  The problem is, every time they introduce legislation, they chip away some of our freedom, and it’s not easy to get back.  What will our nation look like in the future?  Do we really need more reactionary legislation and knee jerk decision making?  When deciding on the rules, we need less emotion and more thinking; we need a return to reason.