7/3 vs. 9/10

The recent Supreme Court ruling regarding premier Bush's authority over enemy combatants elicited a flurry of absurdly hyperbolic hand-wringing from Mr. Bush's supporters. The Supreme Court found that...hold your breath...the president of the United States does not have the authority to arrest and detain human beings indefinitely without notifying their families, allowing them to see a lawyer, or even charging them with a crime.

Mr. Bush's sycophants, which is to say the handmaidens of tyranny, have taken this ruling, which simply reaffirms that Bush isn't Stalin, and implied that it amounts to a get out of jail free card for Osama bin Laden, a ridiculous assertion that would only be marginally less ridiculous if these blowhards actually managed to catch Osama bin Laden in the first place.

It is paramount to keep in mind how limited this ruling was; the Court, that same liberal horde who gave George W. Bush the presidency by turning a blind eye to every good and reasonable impulse and precedent in our nation's history, simply found that the president is not an emperor. He is not Josip Disaronavich Djugashvili, a.k.a. Josef Stalin, a.k.a. Joe Steel, whose whispered word was legality enough to deprive folks of their freedom and often their lives.

Nobody's letting any detainees go free because of this ruling, nobody's shutting down our illegal prisons, nobody's charging the President with kidnapping. The Supreme Court simply said that, after several years, detainees should at least be charged with a crime. That's all. And that, it seems, is too much for Bush's minions.

Their favorite rhetorical device is to imply that such soft-headedness is indicative of a "September 10th, 2001 mindset". You know, like the mindset that President Bush and all the President's men still had when they woke up on September 11th, 2001? The common rejoinder from the targets of this slander is that their adversaries are evincing a "July 3rd, 1776 mindset."

This is a clever rhetorical ploy, although it would be more aptly called a 1786 mindset, since the issue at hand here is whether our constitution has any actual meaning anymore, and that hallowed document was written not in 1776, but in 1787. That footnote aside, what was the mindset that led to the framing of the constitution?

Mr. Bush's position is that the constitution is applicable only until following it could theoretically make Americans less safe. This is the moral equivalent of saying that marital monogamy is sacrosanct unless and until one is confronted with a blend of alcohol and lust and opportunity which makes it clear that the prior constrictions have been rendered "quaint" by such unique and unforeseeable circumstance.

The 1786 mindset was that some precepts, some rights, and some restrictions on the power of government were worth added dangers. Our founding fathers were so principled in this matter that they brought the full punitive wrath of the British Empire upon their heads to defend what to them were inalienable rights. They knowingly put themselves and their nation at risk for that principle.

How far have we fallen? Where the founders accepted danger as the price to pay for their freedoms, our "leaders" now cite danger as the altar upon which our freedoms must be sacrificed in the name of protecting them. It is as if, in the hypothetical above, a man commits adultery with the stated rationale being that he had to do so to protect the virtue of his marriage.

Our founders were confronted with this choice: if they insisted on the freedoms which they felt were God's gift to us, they would be confronted with violent opposition from the most powerful empire the world had ever known. They soberly accepted this danger, which is far out of proportion from anything al-Qaeda could muster.

Our current leaders are confronted with this choice: if they respect the constitution, it is theoretically possible that a terrorist attack will occur that would not occur in a police state. They have made their choice clear, and in doing so have exposed to us all a hollow and decrepit shaft where their spines once were, if they ever had them.

If democracy and limited governmental authority cannot survive the treachery of 19 young Arab men, how was it that it once withstood the full wrath of the British Empire? And, if the Manhattan massacre leads to a place where Premier Bush presumes to disappear people he personally deems evil, where will the next attack take us?

If the liberation and reconstruction of Iraq lends any precedence, surely Halliburton could build gulags for undesirables at the rate of 400 cents on the dollar.