Politics: June 2005 Archives

Many misguided people, particularly those who have spent too much time in university classrooms, think that economic rights are for the rich and powerful. The opposite is true: in the absence of a legal system that safeguards private property, the rich can always protect their interests by hiring muscle and buying influence. (That's how organized crime was born.)

Jews and Christians agree that private property is divinely sanctioned, which is why God explicitly forbade theft in the Seventh Commandment. But the right to property is a natural right, and thus accessible to anyone with a functioning intellect. Ancient civilizations, East and West, prohibited thievery and often prescribed death as a punishment. Indeed, besides preserving the lives of its members, a mark of a functioning society is the ability to keep one man's hands off another man's goods.

The United States was founded on the ideal of private property. Our forefathers were so incensed with practice of housing British soldiers in private homes that they outlawed it in the Bill of Rights. They affirmed this fundamental right by only allowing a citizen's property to be taken under two circumstances: if he was convicted of a crime, or if the public good demanded it.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court, without asking the people's permission, has authorized multi-billion-dollar corporations to steal people's houses, as long as the corporation can pay more taxes to the city government. You'd roll your eyes if a screenwriter came up with a plot that involved a major drug company commissioning a city council to destroy people's homes in order to build an office park, but that's pretty much what's going to happen in New London, Conn. Here are some of the little people whose homes are going to be demolished:

Petitioner Wilhelmina Dery, for example, lives in a house on Walbach Street that has been in her family for over 100 years. She was born in the house in 1918; her husband, petitioner Charles Dery, moved into the house when they married in 1946. Their son lives next door with his family in the house he received as a wedding gift, and joins his parents in this suit....

Big corporations are essential to modern life, as they are the best instruments for doing big things like creating new medicines, building airplanes, or running communications networks. But they're also made up of sinful human beings who can commit evils, and they should be restrained by the law appropriately.

This ruling represents a failure of justice at all levels of government. Theft is theft, whether it is performed by a burglar in the dead of night, or by a city council's decree, duly ratified by our unelected judicial tyrants.

Amnesty International, like Greenpeace, is an organization I would join if it wasn't run by ideologues. Human rights should unite everyone of good will, but Amnesty has always been harder on Western or pro-Western governments than on the truly repressive regimes.

Now they have veered into Bush-hating territory. Two weeks ago, they caused a minor fracas by referring to the terrorist detainee camp in Guantanamo as a "gulag," then admitted they had no idea whether that was true. (Hint: unless it's a slave-labor camp, it's not a gulag.)

Dr. William F. Schulz (no relation to John or Steve), the director of Amnesty International USA (isn't that name an oxymoron?) said, "We have documented that the use of torture and ill treatment is widespread and that the US government is a leading purveyor and practitioner of this odious human rights violation."

At best, Dr. Schulz is misrepresenting and exaggerating Amnesty's findings. Even the few details they provide are questionable:

The Bush Administration cited Egypt for beating victims with fists, whips and metal rods. And yet US Major Michael Smith testified at an administrative review hearing last year that an autopsy of a captured Iraqi general revealed he had suffered five broken ribs that were "consistent with blunt force trauma, that is, either punching, kicking or striking with an object or being thrown into an object."

Five broken ribs might be painful, but that couldn't have been the cause of death. And who broke those ribs? Dr. Schulz implies that it was U.S. troops. Yet for all he knows, it was the general's fellow inmates.

Don't take my word for it — read the report yourself, or at least some of it. The country findings are long on summary, short on detail. The moral equivalence would be laughable if it weren't so sickening:

US-led forces in Iraq committed gross human rights violations, including unlawful killings and arbitrary detention, and evidence emerged of torture and ill-treatment. Thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed during armed clashes between US-led forces and Iraqi security forces on the one side, and Iraqi armed groups on the other [emphasis added].

On the one side, you have thugs and murders who bomb mosques, churches, marketplaces, civilian vehicles; who kidnap and behead the innocent in the name of God; who desperately want to beat the rest of Iraqi society into submission so they can administer their "human rights violations" (and you can bet Amnesty won't be invited to observe.) On the other, you have thousands of Iraqis and Americans trying to stop these human beasts and build a more just society. But to Amnesty, it's just two sides fighting.

Dr. Schulz calls for "a truly independent investigation into the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison and other detention centers" and says not doing so "is tantamount to a whitewash, if not a cover-up, of these disgraceful crimes." Why isn't the Justice Department and the military judicial system equal to the task? Are they not independent? If not, who are the guilty men who are going free?

This irresponsible statement is an accusation against dozens of Bush Administration figures: "You're a criminal. Prove you aren't." Ironically, if a government presumed that a suspect was guilty and made him prove his innocence, they'd be violating the accused's human rights, and Amnesty would complain. Ye hypocrites!

"Looking Back" over at Town Hall

What will future generations think when they see the front pages of our leading newspapers repeatedly preoccupied with whether we are treating captured cut-throats nicely enough? What will they think when they see the Geneva Convention invoked to protect people who are excluded from protection by the Geneva Convention?

And here's a related story about how we can't patrol our borders without wondering if we're introducing non-indigenous plantlife into the desert! Give me a break!

Border Patrol Horses Get Special Feed

HoDean, always good for a quote:

"You know, the Republicans are not very friendly to different kinds of people. They're a pretty monolithic party. Pretty much, they all behave the same, and they all look the same… It's pretty much a white Christian party,'' the former Vermont Governor [Howard Dean] told a San Francisco roundtable in reaction to a question about the lack of outreach to minority communities by political parties....

The comments are another example of why the former Vermont governor, who remains popular with the party's grassroots, has been a lightning rod for criticism since being elected to head the Democratic National Committee last February. His comments last week that Republicans "never made an honest living in their lives," which he later clarified to say Republican "leaders," were disavowed by leading Democrats including Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson.

Pretty funny coming from a former governor of a 97% white state. One could say that, at least demographically, the Democrats are a "Christian" party, given that over 90% of Americans identify themselves as Christians, over twice the number that say they're Democrats.

Unless "Christian" is a code word for "Evangelical" or "fundamentalist," Dean probably means that the Republican party is the home for people who place their faith first in their lives. This nutty little man will drive off religiously serious voters, who tend to be morally conservative but are probably persuadable when it comes to, say, education or tax cuts.

And that's bad for the country. Both major political parties ought to be friendly toward religious voters — they used to be. 1984 was the first year that (to my knowledge) a pro-abortion Democrat ran for national office. Evangelicals used to split their votes between the parties, and Catholics used to vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.

Now, one major political party forces believing, orthodox Christians to betray or ignore their faith, if they vote for its candidates. You cannot be in favor of medical experiments on tiny human beings, gay marriage, easy divorce, condoms for schoolkids, abortion, and pornography, and reconcile that with Christianity. In the long run, you either cast your lot with the ways of the world, or the ways of God. It isn't that the GOP is the party of God and the Democrats aren't; that is far too simplistic. Rather, the Democratic platform contains elements that go against the plain meaning of Scripture and 2,000 years of Christian tradition. On top of that, a large number of Democrats hate — the word is not too strong — people of faith and disdain them with words normally reserved for people who commit mass murder or high treason.

Democrats will either abandon their quixotic quest to build their free-love, quasi-socialistic, pacifist utopia because the American people have rejected it, or they will convince Americans that the post-Christian society is the way to go. The only way they've been able to keep their party going is through racial demagoguery and promises to sustain middle-class welfare programs like Social Security and Medicare. Most Americans don't think that 13-year-old girls should have sex, much less get abortions without their parents' permission, and they don't think two men can make a marriage. If the party would drop its advocacy of those two issues alone, it would cause serious damage by stealing away weakly committed Republicans. But then a lot of hard-core Democrats would have to abandon deeply-held religious beliefs of their own, whether or not they label those beliefs as such.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Gerhard Schroeder were losing his grip as the Eurofederalist constitution melts down, but no, he's just having a bad photo-op. Since he's got an election coming up in a few months and is likely to lose, I guess you could call it a John Kerry moment.