“Liberalism: Where everything that isn’t mandatory is banned”
— Unknown
One of liberalism’s most noxious traits is its tendency – indeed, its almost inevitable need – to support and enforce “liberal” (big and small “L”) policies with authoritarian means.
This tendency is expressed through means both moderately civil and benign (the European mania for larding every step of the production and distribution process with Value Added Taxes, or VATs, which make enterpreneurship so very horribly difficult and so terribly inpinge the profit motive where they’re applied) to big and ugly (Nancy Pelosi’s plan to build concentration camps for people who don’t buy healthcare, Obama’s fistful of czars and his executive pay boards and the enforcement arm behind the “Stimulus”).
There is history for this, of course; it was during America’s most unfettteredly-“liberal” era, from the thirties through the early seventies, that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, and the CIA, carried out abuses against American civilians that would have made Bush-era liberals lose bladder control, if their masters told them to think about it they thought about it all that hard. Under Roosevelt, Truman, the relatively liberal Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnsion, domestic surveillance was common; the FBI and CIA kept dossiers on American citizens.
“War on communism?” Sure.
But even after the so-called “McCarthy” era – and remember, while the left to this day jumps up and down and invokes “Joe McCarthy” with the same thoughtful consideration of monkeys flinging poo (as if a Senator from Wisconsin controlled all the levers of the federal government), there was plenty of bipartisan, transpartisan and non-partisan support for the so-called “witchhunts” in the post-New-Deal executive branches of the day.
And after the “Red Scare?” When Jimmy Carter’s version of “hope and change” was stymied by the “lynch and terrorize” counterpolicy of Ayatollah Khomeini, he not only launched a rescue mission that’d make Jack Bauer blanche at the unreality of it all; he also founded the “Joint Special Operations Command” (JSOC), the organization that controls the Army’s “Delta” and the Navy’s SEAL “DevGru”, which reports directly to the Secretary of Defense and the President as opposed to the regular military command, which undertakes all the serious “black bag” dirty work with only the highest level of oversight. The left and media, naturally, only paid attention to it during the Bush Administration – and seems not to have any actual evidence of actual abuses during that time – but it was a creature of the Carter years.
And it should go without saying that after eight years of lefty whinging about nonexistent or overblown excesses in the Bush administration, it’s the Obama Administration and its allies that are actually seriously discussing censoring and gutting freedom of speech. Because Hope and Change must be unanimous!
At any rate, the main point is this: behind the “carrot” of hopey-changey big-L Liberalism – the programs, the entitlements, the goodies under the government tree every morning – there is a big, ugly, authoritarian stick. They go together like horse and carriage.
So after putting up with eight years of lefty whinging about the Bush Administration’s alleged, largely nonexistent abuses of the Constitution, and a year of watching the Obama administration undergird its “hope and change” with enemies lists, with official paranoia aimed at American citizens, I’ll make this prediction:
If Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is sprung from his public show trial by fair means (unlikely) or foul (also unlikely, but then so is every jailbreak that has ever happened), it’ll be the Obama Administration that authorizes covert hit teams to prowl the globe killing people beyond the pale of any law, oversight or accountability.
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