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- If one ever needed a reminder about how national-security paranoia has warped this country, look no further than the McCain/Lieberman-sponsored "Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010." This cowardly proposal that they would have Congress preserve in parchment codifies the view, promoted by John Yoo and others, that the president can, at any time, declare anyone, even a U.S. citizen, a "high-value detainee" and thus hold him in military custody without criminal charges. Now there's a real example of presidential tyranny, so much more potent than "Obama's gonna make me buy health insurance."
- So now we have evidence that liberals choose the sort of careers you'd expect liberals to choose, and conservatives choose the sort of careers you'd expect conservatives to choose. So what? The key word here is "choose," because it should be obvious that self-selection is at play here, not ideological warfare. Conservatives have the tendency to infuse institutions with implacable ideological drive, and thus are always suspect and totally corrupt. When Victor Davis Hanson, in his ongoing video series glorifying American war, says that military history is being snuffed out of the academy in favor of "gender studies," and observes that a "commercial enterprise" like Borders has shelves of books on military history, he is calling for a reordering of what is taught in universities. He's not interested in freedom of choice -- he just wants to dictate the official curriculum, like some petty Hobbesian sovereign.
- What's baffling about libertarians who are incapable of realizing that sprawl is the product of municipal regulations is that they ought to be, in theory, in favor of community planning. After all, if they really want to live in the absence of a state, or go Galt and build their own cities under the sea, then eventually somebody is going to have to plan out where people live. I understand that there's this fantasy of a group of rational, self-interested, and heavily armed settlers who will simply establish Randtopia via private contracts and market mechanisms, but this just seems like another example of a political philosophy that is in denial about the feasibility of founding a society on the basis of anarchy.
- I should probably just avoid parsing the incoherent slander of Michele Bachmann, but when she says she doesn't "mean any disrespect" when she accuses "the media" of treason, what does she mean? A compliment? Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I think there should be consequences for charging someone with a crime so serious it is specifically mentioned in the Constitution. What's disrespectful here is Bachmann's unmoored political attacks in the service of tireless self-promotion.
- Remainders: Our private health-insurance system is America's crown jewel; apparently Fox News has provided the greatest interview of Obama in the past year; Dennis Kucinich surprises again; Michael Wolff takes a look at the recent history of The Washington Post; it would be no small thing if the White House ended the War on Drugs; Fred Barnes is a national treasure; and yes, we should begin immediately to disassociate McCarthyism from its Irish-bashing roots.
--Mori Dinauer
