Wait. A. Minute.
How can we have real liberty if we lack safety?
How is a man free to “pursue happiness” — another key phrase to our country’s Founders, if his house may be burned or his family killed?

Safety is a necessary condition to liberty. Not a sufficient condition, of course, but necessary. And we cannot have safety without our criminal code, which means “tough on crime” and docket management. Granted, there must always be a balance between safety and liberty, but they are not always at odds. Without safety, there can be no liberty. Without safety, any liberty we might have is an empty notion of what might have been.

There are a number of issues one might take with this.  For that reason, I decided to blog my response, rather than leave what would only be an overlong comment.

It’s difficult to know where to start with this.  Mark Bennett makes a good start in his own responsive comment. As Mark impliedly notes, there is no metaphysical or logical connection between being free and being safe. Sometimes, as Mark states, we deliberately move beyond a place of safety in pursuit of freedom.

What is not so clearly stated is that no absolute level of safety can ever be achieved.  Even in the most “locked down” of cultures, someone may burn your house, or kill you and your family.  You could even assign a police officer to every home — don’t worry, we’re getting there — and still not be completely safe.  Assuming the officer could protect you from your son, daughter, mother, or father, who’s to protect you from the officer?

The more that the rules or laws of a particular country attempt to lock things down “in the interest of safety,” the less freedom exists.  And, frankly, the pursuit of “safety” in the United States has reached the level of insanity.  Petty officials such as the Presiding Judge of the Fresno County Superior Court routinely ignore the constitutional requirements of the Fourth Amendment because it’s apparently reasonable to expect that anyone entering the courthouse might be armed and dangerous.  We’ve forgotten that the Constitution required probable cause particularized to the individual being searched, not a belief that it was reasonable to think some person entering a courthouse might have a weapon.

It was against the very idea of indiscriminate searches on baseless suspicion — fishing expeditions, you might call them — that our Founders rebelled.  It was this very sort of attempt at making sure all the rules are followed by everyone all the time — and overbroad rules like the “search all persons entering the courthouse” rules we’re increasingly running into now — through the application of arbitrary and indiscriminate searches that our Founders revolted.  Yes, revolted.  As in, “they started a revolution and overthrew the government.”

In spite of a Constitution which requires particularized reasons to subject a citizen to a search, we are routinely subjected to searches while moving from one area to another.  Try to fly without being searched.  Try to enter any government building without being searched.

The government gets away with this for two reasons.

First, on the whole, we are sheep.  We’re not actually citizens, we’re submitizens.  When some new procedure or directive comes down from “on high” requiring us to empty our pockets, strip off our clothing, or otherwise submit to interference in our personal lives from the government, the majority of us don’t even ask why.  We just do it.  Those of us who don’t, suffer the full wrath of the government because the majority of us are submitizens.  Why should the government fear acting as if there were no Constitution, when it knows the submitizens will let them get away with it?

Second, if someone actually does resist and takes the issue to court, the court (which, incidentally, is still the government) simply redefines the term “search.”  Somehow, someway, going through people’s things and making them empty their pockets is not a search.

This is okay, “Y” tells us.  Y?  Because we must have safety before we can have freedom.

But since we can never be safe, I guess what “Y” means is that we can never be free.

“What we have done in Iraq is what bin Laden could not have hoped for in his wildest dreams: We invaded an oil-rich Muslim nation in the heart of the Middle East, the very type of imperial adventure bin Laden has long predicted was the U.S.’s long-term goal in the region. We deposed the secular socialist Saddam, whom bin Laden has long despised, ignited Sunni and Shi’a fundamentalist fervor in Iraq, and have now provoked a defensive jihad that has galvanized jihad- minded Muslims around the world. It’s hard to imagine a set of policies better designed to sabotage the war on terror.” This conclusion was reiterated last Thursday by the National Intelligence Council, the CIA director’s think tank, which released a report saying that Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of professionalized terrorists.

That’s your own administration’s CIA. NIC chairman Robert Hutchings said Iraq is, quote, “a magnet for international terrorist activity.” Peter Bergen, quoted by Barbara Boxer at Condoleeza Rice’s confirmation hearings (January 2005).

Thanks to Chepooka for this quote, but ever more astounding information is available here.

Meanwhile, I’ve been enjoying the look on Condi’s face during the confirmation hearings. Bush has his smirk, but it can’t touch Condi’s sneer. She knows this is just so much bullshit she has to endure before she gets what she wants.

She knows Americans don’t give a flying f*ck.

UPDATE: Even more of the Boxer-Rice dialog is available at “What Is Today”.

In high school, he did the radio news for WBLJ AM in Dalton, Joooooh-ja. He became a real dog — at the University of Georgia where he majored in Journalism, minored in history and worked again with radio news for WGAU AM / WNGC FM in Athens. After regurgitating (or is that “graduating”?) from college he worked as a news reporter and weekend sports anchor at WCHS-TV (CBS) in Charleston, West Virginia and later as a reporter and back-up anchor for WKRG-TV (then CBS) in Mobile, ‘Bama (that’s “ALAbama” to you westerners).

A 30-minute documentary he produced, wrote, edited, and narrated won the Outstanding Documentary award for the Southeastern United States from the United Press International Broadcasters Association, and the Outstanding Documentary award for Alabama from the Associated Press Broadcasters Association. In 1984, he received the Award for Outstanding Journalistic Achievement from the Press Club of Mobile.

Of his experience, he says,

Keep in mind, this was Radio and TV. Writing for
broadcast is very different from other kinds of writing. In television, especially, I never considered myself a journalist. Even though I covered “heavy” (serious) stories such as politicians and trials, I considered myself more of an entertainer than anything else.

His first column may be entertaining to some, but I’d call it “hard-hitting, provocative and sure to raise eyebrows.” Or, as Rather & Brokaw might say, “Two thumbs up.”

Look forward to it later today right here at Unspun™.

All I can say is “please, read it.”

Afterwards, first…pretend you knew the person to whom she was reaching out…

…and then pretend you were her.

“I don’t think [the public] understand[s] the level of violence we deal with every day — the stress,” said Dave Darchuk, with the California Correctional Peace Officers Association.

It doesn’t take a brainiac to realize that this is irrelevant. But that appears to be the accepted approach of the government agents or officials whenever they get caught doing something they shouldn’t: hit specific citizens with pepper spray, the general public with a smoke-screen. (After all, it’s a tactic which has worked well for the Bush Administration. As one example, Paul O’Neill received the equivalent of a pepperball attack for revealing that the Bush Administration was planning a war on Iraq from the first day of his Presidency. Richard Clarke has received the equivalent of a pepperball attack after recent revelations he made about the Bush Administration’s focus on Iraq while ignoring real terroristic threats. The public gets a smoke-screen in the form of half-hearted “cooperation” with the President’s own 9/11 commission — “Condi” Rice is finally allowed to testify only after Bush feels heat from the public trying to cut through the smoke to deal with the fire. And if we believe Clarke about the requirements of that job, she will work hard to put a positive spin on things — or at least avoid the negative aspects — while testifying. But this is all grist for another blog entry, another day.)

Stress is a factor of everyday life: Road rage on crowded freeways, paying increasing amounts of one’s paycheck for gasoline to get to a job where fewer workers are picking up the slack for those who are laid off and whose work can’t be sent to offshore workers, dealing with long lines at the Walmart which “creates jobs” by displacing thousands of small businesses across the country and coming home to neighborhoods where “hot prowl” burglars, barking dogs and neighbors who broadcast their musical tastes via boom-boxes and tricked-out car stereos do violence to the nerves which find scant recovery in a short night’s sleep punctuated by lone motorcyclists trying to outrun themselves, high-pitched engines cutting through one’s dreams. Few people in the United States know life without stress.

Somehow, the majority of us resist the urge to beat helpless teenagers who are already lying face-down in submission to our pent-up frustrations.

The videotape of the beating, the guards’ union claims, only shows half the story. What they don’t say is that it shows the only half of the story that matters: Three guards beating and pepper-spraying two un-armed kids who were clearly offering no resistance. Whatever else happened in the course of the guards’ day is irrelevant. If the level of violence they’ve dealt with in other situations — if the stress they’ve had to endure on a daily basis justifies purgation by pummeling the bodies of wards in a youth correctional facility — then we might just as well stop locking people up.

Because if what these guards did is not a crime, then what is?

They want the Federal government controlling Social Security like it’s some kind of federal program. – George W. Bush (while campaigning in 2000).

…but he’s doing his part to make sure it won’t exist much longer as any kind of program — federal or otherwise.

No real surprise there, since after he learned that it actually was “some kind of federal program,” he began arguing that it should be privatized.

No word yet on whether Halliburton will get the no-bid contract on Social Security privatization if Bush wins in 2004.

Tony Blair would be well advised to remember this hoary old saw: You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time but you can’t join an oil-crazed right-wing nutter’s lunatic crusade in the Middle East on the basis of ridding the world of a Blofeldesque stockpile of Doomsday devices and come up with nothing more threatening than the contents of Portobello beach without getting a long, hard, stiff kicking from the electorate. - News.scotsman.com, “Heroes and Villains: Brent East and Andrew Gilligan,” 19 September 2003.

Obviously, the Brits and Scots aren’t nearly as ignorant as Americans. Over there, they actually get pissed off and do something about it when their leaders try to shaft them.

The Bush administration supports Nike….[Solicitor General Theodore Olson] also said California’s law represents “government power transferred to private citizens….”

If there’s one thing Bush hates, it’s when private persons are allowed to have a say in how things work.

For now, just read this Bill Moyer’s speech about The Progressives. I wish there was a way to get everyone in America to read this.

And that we are. After all, so far, of all the countries of the world, we are the only country ever proven to have both a large stockpile of weapons of mass destruction and the willingness to use weapons of mass destruction. Not only have we used them in the past, but George Bush and others have stated that we “would not rule out” using them now if we felt we needed to do so.

No other country, so far as I’ve ever heard, has been proven to have launched an actual weapon of mass destruction against another. Some countries have used pretty potent weapons (the Germans using mustard gas, for example), but only ONE has used a weapon that could, and has, destroyed over 200,000 people—quite a number of them by basically being vaporized. And that country didn’t do it just once, either; they did it TWICE.

It should be noted that development of this weapon of mass destruction was done even though some scientists of the time—some full of hubris and probably half-jokingly (like Edward Teller), but others with less hubris, and also less certainty—wondered whether the bomb might ignite the atmosphere. Fermi pondered whether it would merely destroy New Mexico (when the first atomic bomb was tested) or destroy the world. (It must be noted that there were scientists who thought it theoretically impossible for this to happen; there were scientists, however, who thought it could. That there were scientists who were uncertain, but continued working on the projects anyway means there were scientists willing to risk the destruction of the entire planet.)

But my friend is right about one thing. There are other people out there like the Americans. They might be “potential” or even [using my friend's definition] “emerging” threats to the United States. And since they know, because both distant and recent events have shown them, that Americans are capable of anything in their rapacious desires to consume the earth’s resources, and those stupid people over there are living on top of our g-ddamned oil, no less! Well, they MIGHT…they just MIGHT, if they could get their hands on some weapons of mass destruction, try to use them against us.

If they should try to do this—but not before—we would be entirely within our rights, just as a man surprised in the street by a thug with a threat and a gun, to use all reasonable means to stop them (like disarming them, wounding them, or finding other non-lethal ways of stopping them). (But then we wouldn’t get access to all that lovely oil now, would we? And Bechtel and Halliburton and Cheney and Bush and friends wouldn’t be able to make a profit “rebuilding” what they had destroyed.)

And so now the desperate search goes on (without success so far) for the weapons of mass destruction.

But as I said before, the puppeteer has them.

And that would be us…us…U.S.