[Peace-discuss] Contempt for the populace

[C. G. Estabrook]

If there’s one thing defenders of civil liberties know, it’s surely that
assaults on constitutional freedoms are bipartisan. Just as constitutional
darkness didn’t suddenly fall with the arrival in the Oval Office of George Bush
Jr., darkness will not dissipate with his departure and the entry of President
Barack Obama.

There’s no more eager and self-righteous hand reaching out to the Bill of Rights
to drop it in the shredder than that of a liberal intent on legislating freedom.
As illustration, simply take “freedom from hate,” expressed in the great liberal
drive to criminalize expressions of hate and to impose fierce punitive
enhancements if the criminal had been imprudent enough to perpetrate verbal
breaches of sexual or ethnic etiquette while bludgeoning his victim to death.

For years, I have reminded my left and liberal friends of a juror’s
constitutional right to set the law aside and issue a verdict consonant with the
dictates of conscience. Each time, I sadly rediscover that most liberals
mistrust juries and have no interest in an institution, which is the ultimate
bedrock protector of liberty. This steady push to erode the role of the jury has
continued steadily through every administration.

We are  thankfully near the exit door from the Bush years, after enduring
appalling assaults on freedom, built on the sound foundation of kindred assaults
in Clinton time - perhaps most memorably expressed in the screams of parents and
children fried by U.S. government forces in the Branch Davidian compound in
Waco, and in Bill Clinton’s flouting of all constitutional “war powers”
inhibitions on his executive decision to wage war and order his commanders to
rain bombs on the civilian population of the former Yugoslavia...

--Alexander Cockburn, CounterPunch (print ed.) 15:20 (Nov. 16-30, 2008) pp. 1ff.