Trivial Pursuit
The Saint Paul City Council passed an anti-Patriot Act resolution yesterday.
My commentary about my moonbat councilman Jay Benanav (DFL - the Merriam Park People's Collective) is well-worn enough to skip here.
This is about Councilman Dave Thune (DFL - West End). I'd always known Dave Thune to be relatively reasonable for a DFLer.
In the future, I'll probably know it again - and, just to be clear, I say that with an implied smile. Dave's a guitar player and a fellow expat North Dakotan (we are taking over). His predilection for DFL politics only slightly tarnishes the fact that he's an otherwise good guy...
He made a posting this morning on E-Democracy's "Saint Paul Discussion" forum regarding the council's action. I'll chalk this post up to a winter vacation from reason. Perhaps Thune is sitting on a beach in Cozumel right now, taking a big hit off the Deanbong and washing it down with a long belt of Kucinich and soda.
My response - in classical "fisking" format - is pretty much the one I posted to the forum, with a few better things I thought up in the shower.
Councilman Thune wrote:
"Has the Federal government obtained copies of St. Paul residents' reading
history from the St. Paul public library?"
As a member of the St. Paul Library Board of Directors I asked this question today. The Director of the library could not answer "yes" or even say "no" because to do so would place her in violation of federal law!
As well it should. But that's hardly a funtion of the Patriot Act.
Now if you trust that the government ONLY asks these questions of suspected terrorists who take out books on building weapons of mass destruction, then you are too young to remember J. Edgar Hoover and the Nixon/LBJ/Vietnam years. The federal government did in fact spy on U.S. citizens, keep files on peace protesters and wiretap Martin Luther King Jr.
There are many possible responses to this paragraph:
- I was probably 12 during the Church Commission hearings, so yeah, I do remember them. To some extent, their restrictions were a reasonable response to the excesses of Hoover, Nixon, and (do try to be fair) FDR, Truman and Kennedy. To another extent, they overreached, putting up statutory blocks between agencies that could have been better handled by stronger oversight. As knee jerk reactions go, it was like most - some good, some bad.
- However, Dave, everyone on this list is old enough to know about the RICO Act, or the Crime Bill of 1994. Both of those sets of laws impose burdens on civil liberties far beyond anything in the Patriot Act - in fact, most of the most noxious parts of the Patriot Act are the parts where the government wants the same power against suspected terrorists that they already have against suspected drug traffickers and racketeers. And yet there is almost no hue and cry from the "League of Cities". Why? The "War on Drugs", unlike Iraq, is based on a huge set of lies. The "War on Drugs" has killed more Americans than Vietnam, two orders of magnitude more than have died in Iraq, and has devastated the cores of most American cities in ways that we'd never tolerate the military doing to a foreign country. Why are the *same measures* so tolerable against drug dealers (who deal in a purely consensual commodity) and "racketeers" (a term whose definition is a lot more flexible than "terrorist", depending on the US attorney involved), but not against those who want to - bulletin! - kill us all?
The measures are no less noxious, because in most instances they are *the same*. So where are the Dave Thunes and Jay Benanavs and Leagues of Cities? Where is the outrage? Where *were* all those ardent libertarians in 1994? Where *were* they when RICO grew into a one-size-fits all legal sledgehammer?
The answer, I guess, is "waiting for a Republican administration".
The resolution we passed today at the city council is the same one endorsed by the National League of Cities and hundreds of other cities and towns
across the country.
And given the political agenda of the "National League of Cities", its motivations are the same, too.
I happen to believe we cannot trust the government.
Indeed we can't. At ANY level.
ALL levels of government lie about *everything*, *all the time*.
In fact, ask yourself this question: "How can you tell when *any* government official is lying?" Answer: "His/her lips are moving!".
Seems overly general, doesn't it?
What you really mean to say, Dave, is "The City Council, being DFL, is playing its part in the 2004 election campaign", isn't it?
How can we trust an administration which lied about the need for war in
Iraq,
They didn't.
sent our children, parents and siblings to fight, die and be wounded
even as we killed Iraqi civilians just as dead as did Saddam
It's been shown that fewer Iraqi civilians died during the period of the war than Hussein himself would have murdered in an equivalent time. It's for sure it's not happening anymore.
Ah, but they're just Arabs. Who cares about them, right?
So if I were to stand up and say as an elected official that the government is spying on my constuents, will I be arrested?
Quick, Dave - name the officials at ANY level of government in the US that have been arrested for any such thing?
Show us the camps full of dissenters on the Idaho plains. Show us the disappeared critics. Show us the shut-down newspapers? (these last two happen all the time in this country, actually - on our college campuses. Dissent from liberal orthodoxy is punished, dissident newspapers are shut down - is the SPCC going to pass a resolution about THIS repression, which has caused more damage to liberty than the Patriot Act ever will)?
Michael Moore and Cher are not lying in a mass grave in Wyoming next to two hundred WTO protesters - they are both earning way more than either of them deserve for their meager talent. Two of the biggest, most accusatory, inflammatory moonbats in American politics today - Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton - are running for president. That's how we oppress dissent in this country. The Minneapolis City Council - which preceded the SPCC in lunacy by quite some time - didn't disappear in the middle of the night.
And they never will!
Don't get me wrong; there are parts of the Patriot Act that DO overreach. I keep asking liberal friends of mine to name them; none can.
St. Paul has stood up in defense of the Bill of Rights.
No. Saint Paul stood up and said "George Bush is a ickypoopyface.". No more.
Don't trivialize this action.
How better to say "It is trivial"?
The SPCC should stick to debating noise easements.
Posted by Mitch at
January 22, 2004 08:12 AM
