joyfulchristian

This seems odd

In a New York Times story about Iraq, I found this curious paragraph:

This weekend could see a surge in terrorist or guerrilla attacks, according to a spokeswoman for the American military, who spoke on condition of anonymity.(Emphasis added.)

Huh?

An anonymous spokeswoman? How does that work.

Spokeswoman is defined as: A woman who speaks on behalf of another or others. In other words someone who is a "spokeswoman" (or for that matter spokesman, spokesperson, or totally rad spokesdud) is supposed to be conveying the views of someone else.

In some rare instances I can see the value of a public spokesperson speaking on behalf of an unidentified principle, but I can think of no legitimate reason for a spokeswoman of an identified principle (the military) who is acting in that capacity to hide her identity.

The only reason I can think of for an official spokesperson to act anonymously is to allow them to express their own views in a manner that borrows from the credibility of the principle while at the same refusing responsibility for what is being said. The odd thing is that I don't see anything in what she said that would require that type of obfuscation.

Maybe I'm just too cynical.

Improving intelligence

I don't agree with all of Fred Kaplan's analysis of the problems in the area of military intelligence, but it's hard to argue with his conclusion:

Even high-ranking administration officials are realizing that their policies—both for the occupation of Iraq and for the war on terrorism—are floundering. Donald Rumsfeld's leaked memo, earlier this month, was a cri de coeur for fresh ideas. But nothing fresh can flow if they keep circling the wagons, shutting down Web sites, cutting off criticism, and disdaining analysis.

Too true.

Finally

Brendan Koerner has a column about the Earth Liberation Front.

The radical Earth Liberation Front has claimed responsibility for an Oct. 24 attack on a Wal-Mart construction site in Martinsville, Ind. The saboteurs vandalized over a dozen vehicles, resulting in $25,000 worth of damages—a tiny blip compared to the $100 million in damages the group says it has inflicted since the mid-1990s. What are the ELF's goals, exactly?

As the shadowy organization has noted several times in post-attack communiqués, its most immediate aim is "to remove the profit motive from the killing of the natural environment." For the past few months, for example, ELF operatives have been vandalizing SUVs at auto dealerships, particularly those specializing in gas-hungry Hummers. An anonymous ELF member explained these acts in an e-mail to the Los Angeles Times, stating that the goal was to increase insurance premiums to the point that dealers and car buyers alike would think twice about investing in an SUV. Similar logic has reportedly guided the group in its arson campaign against urban sprawl, as well as a failed September plot to set off incendiary devices at a Michigan-based Perrier bottling plant. "Water for life, not for profit!" declared the group's press release.

The gist of this is that ELF is using its campaign of terror to raise the cost of activities they don't like so high that no one will engage in them. What this means (at least one of the things this means) is that ELF is one of the few radical lefitsts organizations to display an actual working knowledge of the cost-benefit principle.

Now, if they'd just use that knowledge for good instead of evil.

The new look of war

Melanie Philips has a good point about what's happening in Iraq.

The west as a whole cannot even grasp that this is the new form of warfare but either trivialises and dismisses it as a 'remnant', or romanticises and sanitises it as 'resistance'. But it's neither. It's war. It's fought in and out of densely populated civilian areas, by an invisible enemy that targets the innocent. It is warfare shaped by the devastating asymmetry between those for whom human life means nothing and those for whom it means everything. In that contest, unless we change the way we think about war, the fascist death-dealers will triumph. We have to develop a whole new terminology, legal principles and rules of engagement to deal with this. But can we marry this with our own cherished beliefs? Is this where liberalism gets mugged by reality?

Just so you know

This site is about what I want to talk about. If you don't have comments germane to a post, I'd appreciate it if you'd e-mail them to me or keep them to yourself.

Irrelevant comments and anything I consider trolling will be deleted at my whim.

Okay, I'm upset

I was just reading one of my tax bulletins. In it I read about IRS Info. Letter 2003-155. (At the moment I can't seem to find this letter on the web. This letter contains a disturbing IRS ruling.

Soldiers serving in a designated combat zone are eligible for a income tax exclusion for their combat pay. This exclusion also applies to those who are being treated in a hospital for injuries received in a combat zone. However, in Letter 2003-155 the IRS has apparently ruled that soldiers who received injuries in a combat zone which require only outpatient treatment do not qualify for the exclusion.

Personally, I think this is a travesty. It is pretty likely that soldiers could receive fairly bad injuries that nevertheless are treated on an outpatient basis. (Especially if the decision to treat them as outpatients was due to the hospital being overloaded.) I can think of no reason that severely injured soldiers should be denied the combat pay exclusion simply because their doctor decided they should be treated as an outpatient.

Grrrrr!

Good News

Mark Butterworth is back! He's started out with an essay on truth. I haven't had a chance to do more than glance at it so far, but it looks interesting. Pay him a visit.

Lame excueses

The Elder points out a very lame football excuse.

Blindspot

Timothy Noah has a column speculating on the reasons for the relative silence of the Clinton foreign policy team regarding Iraq. He lists several of them and then speculates about why they haven't been more critical. Completely absent in this analysis is the possibility that any of the Clinton team might actually agree with Bush. Failing that, he ignores the possibility that they don't think he's that wrong.

Update: I should clarify: I'm not actually offering an opinion about the motives of anyone involved. I just think that it's interesting to see what options Noah leaves out completely.

Not again!

I don't check Happy Fun Pundit much since they stopped updating very often. Consequently, I missed this story about the newest Democratic candidate. Something seems very familiar about the guy. I wonder why.

Another Reuters moment

Jonah Goldberg has a suggestion to really confuse Reuterville.

A liberal finds a conspiracy theory about the President

... that even he can't buy.

Stewart Kirkpatrick at the Scottsman starts out his story this way:

There's something that keeps me awake at night - and not in a good way.

I'm haunted by the question of why Tony Blair followed an unelected, ultraconservative knuckle-dragger into a mad crusade into the Middle East. What drove such an astute reader of the public and international mood to go to war with Iraq when it was such a patently bad idea?

We now know Saddam Hussein had about as many vanilla-flavoured pink flying saucers as he did weapons of mass destruction. The war has singularly to failed to bring stability to Iraq.

So why did we do it?

Well thanks to globalismnews.com, I now have the answer: the whole Iraq war was an occult sacrifice.

You see, after racking my brains for conventional answers to my question, I have begun to look to alternative sources of information. Petty conspiracy theories (such as the US only invading Iraq because there was oil there) are too tedious to interest me - I'm only interested in an explanation that once and for all lets me know exactly what's going on: the Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory.

Despite the fact that he confesses that he was looking for a conspiracy theory that would help him understand the war, he has trouble accepting the idea that the entire war was part of George Bush's evil plan to bring the anti-Christ into the world by means of a huge blood sacrifice. (He also can't seem to come to grips with the idea that JFK was killed in a dark Mason ritual.)

I'm rather disappointed in Mr. Kirkpatrick. He can't be a really good liberal if there's a conspiracy theory about Bush he won't buy.

There might be hope for him yet.

I'm jealous

John Derbyshire has fulfilled a goal of many conservative thinkers: he's been banned from a college campus.

We need more judges like this

... and so, I assume, do the Australians.

Killers likely to die in jail

That would be a change.

Snowtown murderers John Justin Bunting and Robert Joe Wagner are likely to die in jail after being sentenced yesterday by a judge who condemned them as cowards in the business of killing for pleasure.

Denounced by Justice Brian Martin as beyond rehabilitation and lacking contrition, 37-year-old Bunting - convicted of 11 gruesome murders, some preceded by torture - and 31-year-old Wagner - convicted of 10 - will serve mandatory life sentences without parole on each count.

Justice Martin, who said dreadful crimes required dreadful punishment, refused to set a non-parole period and warned future judges not to relent. "I make it plain I cannot envisage anything that would justify fixing a non-parole period," he said after hearing statements from some of the families of the victims of the men, two of a gang of four who became Australia's worst serial killers.

"If I had the power to make an order for them never to be released, I would unhesitatingly make that order."

It's a good thing too. What these guys did is absolutely gruesome. They claim to have been hunting down and punishing pedophiles, but I think the judge was right when he said they just enjoyed what they were doing.

That's got to be dealt with

Fox News is reporting that one of Saddam's generals may be helping Ansar al-Islam plan its attacks:

WASHINGTON — A senior member of Saddam Hussein (search)'s ousted government is believed to be helping coordinate attacks on American forces with members of an Al Qaeda-linked terrorist group, a senior defense official said Wednesday.

Two captured members of Ansar al-Islam (search) have said Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri is helping to coordinate their attacks, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

That information is the first solid evidence of links between remnants of Saddam's regime and the non-Iraqi fighters responsible for at least some of the attacks on U.S. forces and their Iraqi allies, the official said.

Of course this isn't surprising, but it's still important information.

Confessions of an Isolationist Wannabe

... Volume II.

John Hawkins says he still finds isolationism to be very tempting. I do to. Practical? Well, no. Tempting? Oh yes.

Ahem

By now you've probably heard about House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi accusing law enforcement officers of terrorism. Scott Ott shows us how the story would read if her charges were true.

Dean needs to get his house in order

J P Carter has a post about Dean casting stones. Go read it and decided what you ought to do about it.

Wellfare ninnies

Robert Clayton has some interesting things to say about what the wellfare state does to its supporters.

Food for thought

Steven Vincent has an article about Iraqis who resent America because we freed them.

BAGHDAD, IRAQ — These days, the more I experience the situation in postwar Iraq, the more I think of France. After all, both countries were freed from despotic madmen largely through the efforts of the United States. And just as France has become the oversensitive, vainglorious, self-aggrandizing nation we know and . . . well, know — Iraq, too, is showing increasing signs of resentment toward its liberator. In Iraq's case, however, the symptoms are more serious, threatening to bring social division, political volatility, and a kind of sullen passivity.

To offer one example: At a small social gathering in Baghdad recently, a woman expressed great excitement over the freedom in her life occasioned by the fall of Saddam. In the same breath, however, she added, "but I hate the occupation of my country so much I fantasize about shooting a U.S. soldier." When I suggested a link between U.S. soldiers and Saddam's demise, she replied, "I know that — and you can't imagine how it humiliates me."

Keep reading. He's spotted an important problem. I hope someone's working on ways to deal with it.

Yeah, I know

... that I haven't posted today. I've been covered up at work and then had to go to a CPE class. I'm beat too beat to post. See you tomorrow.

Of all the nerve!

Okay, so let's run through the facts.

-Woman goes into coma. -She comes out of the coma, but is diagnosed as being in a persisitent vegitative state. - Her doctors are ordered to pay a malpractice settlement. - Husband gets new girlfriend and starts having kids. - Husband starts trying to have wife's feeding tube removed so she'll die. - Husband accuses wife's parents of trying to keep her alive because they're bitter about money.

I didn't see him on TV and the quotes are pretty disjointed, but it sounds like he's accusing her parents of only wanting to keep their daughter alive to get back at him.

And then there was this little gem:

He also answered criticism that he has abandoned his wife for a longtime girlfriend with whom he has one child and another on the way. Schiavo said his girlfriend is supportive of his care for Terri Schiavo.

"I'm fortunate to have two women in my life that I love very much," he said. "My girlfriend right now has done more for Terri than her own mother did. She shopped for her. She washed her clothes."

Pardon me while I gag.

How taxi cabs ruined the world

Donald Sensing has a fascinating thought experiment. What if Germany had one the Battle of the Marne and, therefore, WWI. He makes a plausible argument that the world would have turned out very differently, and perhaps, actually better in a political sense. (Though not as good from a technological standpoint.)

I don't have enough historical training to evaluate his conclusions, but it seems plausible.

Spell Check!

Susanna has been reviewing resumes in an attempt to find her replacement. The experience has been somewhat frustrating. To say the least.

Good catch

Dean Esmay alerts us to another zionist plot.

Good plan

Moe Freedman attended the Democratic debate. Based on his experience, he's got an idea on how to beat them.

The real reason for the EU

... enriching bureaucrats.

MEPs called for the head of Pedro Solbes, the economics commissioner, after a final audit report leaked yesterday said missing records and the total breakdown of financial control at Eurostat, the statistics agency, made it impossible to know how much taxpayers' money had vanished or what it was used for.

Investigators identified the loss of £3 million in "a vast enterprise of looting" by senior officials in Luxembourg, mostly through inflated contracts with outside firms.

After sampling 400 out of contracts worth £320 million from 1999 to 2002, internal auditors found endemic abuse. "Indications of potential conflict of interest and/or insider trading were identified in 29 per cent of cases," they said.

Eurostat kept no central register of its contracts and records were missing "or destroyed" in 54 per cent of cases. "Not even copies of bank statements have been kept," the report said.

The few documents that have come to light from the slush funds, known as "financial reserves", show payments of £7,500 to the "Casino equestrian society" and £1,700 to the "Beaufort equestrian club" but auditors are certain that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Widening the net beyond Eurostat, the inquiry found systemic abuses in almost half of the commission's departments.

Nice.

Comic relief

Yeah, we're not the only ones with hypocritical politicians.

Sheesh.

Not all the rumors are bad

I hope Juan, or whatever he's calling himself now, is right about this story.

Wave of the future?

El Al has started mounting anit-missle decoy systems on their airliners.

JERUSALEM (AP) - Israel's national airline, El Al, has installed an anti-missile system on some of its aircraft, Israel TV reported Monday, just days after an alleged plot to fire missiles at a plane in Toronto.

[...]

A system called Flight Guard, developed by Israel Aircraft Industries, has been installed on a few planes at a cost of $983,000 Cdn for each aircraft, the TV report said. It did not say exactly how many planes had the system.

The initial project was paid for by the Israeli government, but future costs will fall on the airlines themselves, which would mean higher ticket costs, the report said. The system, if it succeeds, will be installed on other Israeli aircraft.

International airlines have expressed interest in the Israeli system, but say they will not purchase it until the device is registered with international airline authorities, the TV report said.

Israel Aircraft Industries recently displayed the Flight Guard system, which responds automatically to an approaching heat-seeking missile, firing flares that divert the missile away from the aircraft. It has been used on Israeli military aircraft for a decade.

As usual, El Al leads the way in airline security. Of course, there's a reason for that.

Oh my!

Indymedia has posted a fraudulent Reuters story claiming that Charles Johnson was arrested for several sexual offenses. (Link via Steve den Beste.)

Obviously, these people have sense of what "beyond the pale" means. If they don't figure out a way to fix this real quick, Charles is going to end up owning Indymedia. (Not that he'd want to.)

Well said

Alex Singleton reminds us what is required for a truly progressive society.

Beware handshake fearers with cell phones

That's the message of Mark Steyn's latest column. I'm not sure it's possible to excerpt any of this and have it still work so you're just going to have to read the whole thing.

Hmm

I think I'd rather be called and "Autobot".

Grrrrrrrrrrrrr!

I was in the middle of fisking some stupid comments by Nancy Pelosi this morning when my computer crashed and I lost it all. I really don't want to try to recreate it. I do, however, want to comment on one thing she said.

Pelosi said the Wal-Mart raids showed the need to legalize undocumented workers in parts of the economy other than just the agricultural sector.

So, if this story is accurate, Pelosi's position is that the fact that a lot of people were arrested for breaking the law is proof that the law needs to be changed. That's just batty.

Now don't get me wrong, the fact that lots of people are breaking the law is not totally irrelevant, but it is hardly proof, in and of itself, that the law needs to be changed. Implying otherwise is evidence of an unserious mind.

Michael Moore Hates America

That's the title of a new documentary coming out next year. If you haven't seen the trailer, you should check it out.

What if

Lori explains the differences between liberals, conservatives, and Texans. The word "bang" is featured prominently.

This is cute

A Canadian author using the pseudonym "Slinger" published this interesting column in the Toronto Star:

In 1983, anti-Americanism was a fact of daily life for Americans living in Grenada. To remedy the situation, the U.S. decided attitude-change was in order, and invaded the place.

So when the vice-chair of the Canadian branch of Democrats Abroad, an affiliate of the U.S. Democratic Party, begins a piece on the Opinion page of this newspaper with the words ``Anti-Americanism is a fact of daily life for Americans living in Toronto,'' I pay very close attention.

Of course, that's a gross over-simplification of the invasion of Grenada, but it was still funny.

Read the rest, I think you'll be entertained.

Shaking up the Pentagon

Richard Halloran suggests some sweeping changes to the Defense Department:

HONOLULU -- In a leaked memo that caused a stir in Washington and throughout the far-flung American military forces last week, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asked: "Is the DoD [Department of Defense] changing fast enough to meet the new 21st Century security environment?"

From this perch in the Pacific, the answer is a resounding "no." Here are a couple of suggestions for bold moves the Pentagon might make to speed things along, including a revision of the commands in the Asia-Pacific region:

* Streamline the Defense Department by abolishing the three anachronistic departments of the army, navy and air force. This would eliminate about half of the senior positions in the Pentagon's bloated bureaucracy and make the secretary of defense the master of his own house.

* Provide for integrated military plans and operations by abolishing the anomalous Joint Chiefs of Staff -- a quarrelsome organization led by a chairman who acts like a corporate executive making widgets -- and replace it with a military staff led by a warrior in command of the operational forces.

What follows is a more detailed analysis of how he believes the Pentagon should be realligned. It's a good read.

Strangely, I found this in the Japan times.

Um ... Yeah

This is what passes for a peace protest.

Sheesh

When I first turned on the Mississippi State v Kentucky game, Kentucky was down 17-0. Now they're ahead 42-17. Good grief.

I'm bored

Not much to do today, so I've been reading IMAO arhives. Now that's an entertaining way to pass time.

Something is deeply wrong with this picture

Is the Air Force discriminating? Against the Army? Evangelical Outpost has some thoughts about a story that has serious implications for the safety and morale of our troops.

Go read.

For what?

I was just flipping by the ANSWER protest on C-Span. The crowd was being led in a rousing chant of, "Impeach Bush!"

I'm sure that this is neither the first nor the last time I'll hear such nonsense. What I haven't heard is someone accuse him of a specific crime. Yeah, I know that they claim that he took us to war under false pretenses, but even if it were true, it wouln't be an impeachable offense. He would have had to have broken a specific law.

Now if he'd lied under oath ...

The Broncos are in trouble

This is from the Denver post:

There's no truth to the rumor the Broncos are going to sign 43-year-old John Elway as their new quarterback.

Then again, considering the current state of the Broncos' quarterback corps, maybe that's not such a farfetched idea.

Yeah, starting QB Jake Plummer has a broken foot. Beurlein, his backup, has a broken finger in his throwing hand. Now, things are getting worse:

The latest blow arrived Friday when Danny Kanell - the former third-stringer who was elevated to emergency starter this week - missed practice with a bad case of the flu. Kanell is officially listed as probable, but coach Mike Shanahan said he's not sure if Kanell will play Sunday against Baltimore.

"This morning he was vomiting; he's got the flu right now," Shanahan said after Friday's practice. "He's a little bit dehydrated. We gave him some IVs, and hopefully he'll be all right by game time. We'll find out. We'll wait and see. I really don't know. He's got a touch of the flu. We'll see how he is in a couple of days."

They've resigned Jarious Jackson and he may end up being the starter. If they're lucky:

But Jackson isn't feeling well, either.

"I'm coming down with a cold myself," he said with a scratchy voice. "Man, my voice is already deep, I sound like an elephant. I'm definitely taking medicine and trying to dry it up before Sunday."

This doesn't look good.

Typical

Apparently, the Henan province of China is suffering a massive Aids crisis. In totally unsurprising fashion, the government has been trying to pretend nothing was wrong and punishing anyone who said differently. Here's a pretty good story on the problem. (Remarkably well done when you consider it's the Guardian.)

"The headman told us that he doesn't want us to get the reputation as an 'Aids village' but it is a fact that almost everyone here has the disease," said Chang. Other villagers said their claims for the benefits due to HIV sufferers have been turned down.

Tempers snapped in June, after four villagers died of Aids in less than a week and two residents were detained by police on their way to petition the provincial government for help. The arrests sparked China's most violent Aids-related confrontation. Almost 100 villagers overturned an official's car and marched on the village headman's office to protest against their lack of health care. The authorities' response was swift and bloody: two days after the demonstration, 600 baton-wielding police stormed the village, battering down doors, smashing windows and beating residents, including HIV-sufferers, children and Chang's 56-year-old mother, who says she still feels pain in the arm they broke.

If they spent half as much engergy treating victims as they do beating them up, they might not have so big a problem.

Read the whole thing.

Moral laziness

The Scottsman has declared George Galloway its "Villain of the Week", but not for the reasons you might think:

First a word in defence of the MP for Glasgow Kelvin. George Galloway was absolutely right to oppose the war in Iraq. We were taken into that conflict on the basis of false information. There were about as many weapons of mass destruction in that country as there are in your average kitten.

Of course, let's just ignore the fact that it has now been established that whether Saddam actually had such weapons, he was clearly still pursuing them. Let's also ignore the fact that, so far, only a small fraction of suspected weapons sites have been searched.

He's not this week's villain because he was wrong about Iraq - it took great courage to speak out for peace during the collective jingoism of the pre-war period. Nor is it because he was kicked out of the Labour Party this week, which was entirely unsurprising given its not entirely enthusiastic approach to internal debate.

I don't have much knowledge of the internal workings of said party, but their casting off of Calloway is one of the few things that makes me think they may not be completely beyond hope.

Here's the part I really wanted to talk about:

No, George Galloway is this week's villain because he made it too easy for his opponents to discredit him.

There's the TV footage of him praising Saddam Hussein for his indefatigability, which the Iraqi dictator tended to express by having people shot.

There were his calls during the war for British troops to disobey orders.

And there was his call for Arabs to fight British soldiers.

He would have had much more credibility and been a much stronger advocate for finding out the truth about the Iraq war if he had kept his mouth shut at crucial moments.

The Scottsman is upset because Calloway heaped praise on a dictator, incited rebellion, and gave comfort to the enemy. All of these are evil acts, especially when committed by an MP. But he's not being taken to task for doing evil things. He's being berated because his evil acts got in the way of his message.

Is that really how far we've fallen? A member of the British Parliament engages in overt acts against his country during time of war and the only outrage a major paper can muster is based on the fact that his treasonous acts hurt his credibility?

This is pathetic.

Kudos

I saw this story and thought it was worth mentioning:

The drama unfolded in fading daylight and in calm conditions at around 5.30 pm when the French-built Socata TBM 700 single-engine turbo-prop, which was en route to Dundee from Biggin Hill, near London, suddenly veered towards the river seconds before it was due to touch down.

Although exact details are sketchy, the privately-owned plane appeared to have belly flopped smoothly into the water before tilting to one side, as there was little apparent damage other than the propeller being badly twisted.

The four occupants were able to open the side door of the plane and scramble into the fast-rising tide, which airport staff estimated would have been about eight-feet deep at the point it hit the water.

The airport’s emergency hovercraft was immediately launched and the crew were able to pull the shocked foursome from the water within 10 minutes of the accident.

If you read further, you'll see that all the emergency personell seem to have worked together very smoothly. Not only did they have tha passengers on their way to the hospital within 10 minutes from the time they hit the water, but the plane appears to have been secured and the entire incident over in about 30 minutes. I realize that this was by no means a major rescue effort, but still I felt the need to point out what appears to be a job very well done.

Caution. Rant ahead.

Okay, I'm upset and I'm going to share. The following rant is based on a couple of comments I've seen over the last couple of days.

The first was a comment posted on Susanna Cornett's site. Susanna posted a link to a Fox News story about Justice Scalia. Among other things, the story gives us this Scalia quote:

The ruling, Scalia said, "held to be a constitutional right what had been a criminal offense at the time of the founding and for nearly 200 years thereafter."

Johno, one of Susanna's readers posted this comment:

Well, I think it's a leetle disingenuous for Scalia to argue that gay sex is unconstitutional on the grounds that laws against it were on the books at the time of the founding of the nation. Laws against aiding freed slaves were also on the books, and I'm pretty sure their waning has gone unlamented.

As you'll see, I responded to him in the comment box, but I wanted to take a different angle here. Remember that the question at hand is whether or not anti-sodomy laws are unconstitutional. Webster's defines the word unconstitutional like this:

Not constitutional; not according to, or consistent with, the terms of a constitution of government; contrary to the constitution; as, an unconstitutional law, or act of an officer.

You see for a law to be unconstitutional, it must be shown to be inconsistent with the precepts laid out in the Constitution. Scalia's argument, as a strict constructionist, is that the Constitution cannot possibly prohibit laws which those who drafted and ratified the Constitution clearly didn't believe were prohibited.

Johno responds by drawing an analogy to laws prohibiting the assistance of escaped slaves. It's important to notice though that Johno's argument is not based on an eventual discovery by a later generation that the Constitution, as originally written, actually prohibited such laws. Instead, his argument is that, on the whole, those laws are now seen to have been bad law. ¹

I fully agree that the anti-assistance laws Johno mentioned were bad law; in fact, they were highly immoral. However, they were constitutional at the time the Constitution was ratified. They didn't become unconstitutional ² until the Constitution was changed by amendment. If the 13th Amendment had not been ratified, those laws would still be constitutional. In fact, so would slavery. Wrong? Yes. Unconstitutional? No.

Those laws would be constitutional because, before the 13th was ratified, nothing about those laws was inconsistent with the terms of the Constitution.

Let's try a thought experiment. Suppose Congress passed a law stating that all people over the age of 60 are to be executed. This would not be a punishment for any crime and there would be absolutely no exceptions. ³ Would such a law be unconstitutional? I'm sure that many people would immediately say, "Of course!" I'm not so sure though.

I intentionally chose an extreme example because it shocks the conscience. On its face, such a law would be immoral in the extreme.

But is it unconstitutional? That is a totally different question. In order to determine that we would have to isolate the specific provisions in the Constitution which such a law might violate and then compare each one to the law in question. If the law violates any of those provisions, then, and only then, is it unconstitutional.

So, what provisions might the kill-everyone-over-60 law violate? Off hand I can think of a couple. You might argue that such a law would violate some combination of the 5th and 8th Amendments. I'm not at all sure that would be the case, however. After all, those amendments are talking about punishments for crimes. The law in question has nothing to do with criminal law. It's a blanket kill everybody law so I doubt they would apply.

You also might argue that the law would violate the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment because it discriminates based on age. I'm not so sure about that either; after all, the law would apply to everyone equally. Eventually, it would get every single one of us. (For this example I'm ignoring how corruption might affect this law.) On its face, this law is not necessarily discriminatory.

Now let's be clear here: I'm not actually saying that this law would be constitutional. I haven't given an in depth look at this after all. What I am saying is that even the most horrifying of laws is not necessarily unconstitutional. These things require very meticulous analysis.

Unfortunately, all too many people have adopted a very simple formulation: This law is bad = This law is unconstitutional. (Shoot quite a lot of people use: I don't like this law = This law is unconstitutional.) Even more unfortunately, lots of judges have adopted this formulation. As a result, lots of people have just come to expect that if they believe a law to be evil, or even just bad policy, that the courts will strike the law down as a violation of the Constitution. When that happens, the role of policy maker is stripped from the legislative and executive branches and placed in the hands of the judiciary. (Which is one of the major arguments behind strict-constructionism in the first place.)

If I haven't been clear enough, let me summarize: Even if a law is the most evil piece of legislation ever imagined, that doesn't mean it's unconstitutional. Only laws which violate a specific term of the Constitution are unconstitutional.

So far we've been dealing with the false belief that if a law is immoral (or even just bad policy), then the bad law must be proscribed by the Constitution. (I call this the proscription fallacy.) Another fallacy is essentially the opposite of that blunder. This is the idea that if an act is immoral, then the Constitution must prescribe a law against it. (The prescription fallacy.)

For instance, in a post about the partial-birth abortion ban, Lee Warren said this:

The court will say that abortion is legal in America and therefore it would be unconstitutional to ban any form of it. I cringe when the concept of abortion is deemed constitutional. Murder can never be constitutional, regardless of what a legislative or judicial branch of government says.

But this is completely false. The only crime which the Constitution requires the government address is that of treason. There is no constitutional requirement that either the state or federal governments address any other crime. Even murder. Our governments prohibit such things as murder and rape, not because the Constitution requires it (although some state constitutions may), but because it's good policy. Society simply can't exist without them.

If one of our states repealed its law against murder the Constitution wouldn't have anything to say about it. ⁴ It would, no doubt, create a huge uproar. (You think the French call us cowboys now?) The governor would be denounced as a maniac. The legislature would be condemned. Shoot, given the recent change in the law, some of them might even be lynched. Eventually the entire state would probably descend into something resembling Mogadishu circa 1993. And not one bit of the ensuing chaos would create a constitutional requirement to outlaw murder.

In fact, the prescription fallacy may hold even more dangers to the Republic than the proscription fallacy. After all, if judges can simply mandate a new law anytime they believe its necessary, then we would be forced to rely on judicial restraint alone to maintain a representative form of government at all. If the Constitution prescribes laws against every type of activity deemed to be immoral, whether The People's representatives have seen fit to criminalize it or not, then representative government quickly descends to a farce. In fact, taken to its logical extreme, this type of thinking would create several semi-independent states ruled by the Courts of Appeals who would be able to "find" any law they wanted in the Constitution. And they couldn't be accused of legislating because, under the prescription fallacy, the law must have already been there because it was necessary.

Let's summarize again:

1. Just because a law is bad that doesn't mean that it's unconstitutional.
2. Just because a law is needed, that doesn't mean the Constitution requires it.

This whole thing was pounded out pretty quickly, so I might make some minor adjustments later. If I change anything other than grammar, I'll try to let you know.

¹ He doesn't specify whether he's concerned that those laws were immoral, unethical, bad policy, or simply impractical. All of those are true to one extent or another, but I suspect his point is that the law was immoral. For the rest of this post I'm going to assume that his point is that the law was immoral. Even if that wasn't Johno's point, I have heard people make similar points about other issues. Since my concern is people who conflate immorality with unconstitutionality, this assumption is necessary. If that wasn't what Johno was trying to say, I apologize.

²That is, assuming they actually are unconstitutional. The institution of slavery was made unconstitutional by the 13th Amendment, but I don't really see anything that makes laws preventing the assistance of escaped slaves unconstitutional per se. It's not really vital to either side at the moment, so let's assume that such laws violate the 13th Amendment.

³ Yes, this is loosely based on the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Half a Life."

⁴Someone might argue that since people were protected from murder in the other 49 states, the 14th Amendment requires a protection against murder in them all. I doubt this would fly, however; it's my understanding that the 14th, when applied to state laws, is generally seen as providing equal protection to all those within a given state, but does not require identical protection of resdidents in different states. Otherwise, as soon as one state passed a law granting a certain protection all the other states would be bound to change their laws to match.

Update: 1 AM, Oct. 25. I've made some corrections and clarifications. I don't really think any of my points were altered.

Update the second. Oct. 25 11:20 AM: Jonah Goldberg made much the same point, although with significantly fewer words, yesterday.

Update the third. Oct. 25 12:52 PM: Alan Cornett has a post on a semi-related issue.

Amend the Constitution?

Erin Montgomery raises the issue of whether immigrants should be allowed to run for President.

Personally, I don't have a problem with the idea of an immigrant President. In principle.

In practice I think we'd have to be very careful how such an amendment would be drafted. As is pointed out in Montgomery's piece, one of the reasons for prohibiting immigrant Presidents in the first place was the fear that a foreign power could manipulate the process and place a foreigner on the throne.

Even with a lenghty period of time as a citizen required, there still remains a danger that a foreign power could introduce deep cover agents whose mission was to get elected. (Yeah, I know this seems paranoid, but when we're talking about amending the Constitution paranoia is a great asset to keep in the arsenal.)

The impetus for the article was a proposed amendment introduced by Orrin Hatch that would allow those who have been citizens for 20 years to run for President. That's not nearly long enough for me. A 30 year rule would be the minimum I would even consider.