THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

THE FEDERAL JUDICIARY: THE PROBLEM IS NOT THEIR PERSONNEL BUT THEIR POWER | 2000-11-04

The big argument for Bush is that he will appoint conservative Supreme Court justices. This is the kind of wishful thinking that makes conservatism lose every long-term battle.

As long as we play the game for more slightly more conservative Supreme Court justices, we will lose. The real problem, the problem we cannot avoid forever, is that our elected representatives let the courts rule America. As long as you base your politics on getting more justices on your side, you avoid the real fight. But just counting justices allows you to be respectable to liberals.

Anyone who demands that the power of the courts themselves be restricted is declared a radical. He loses the all-important "respectable" title that liberals give out.

For this reason, all of our legislative bodies give the courts the right to do anything they want to do. They do not dare take on the expansion of judicial power itself.

Congress has just forced every state in the Union to adopt a lower blood alcohol level for drunk drivers. This violates the most obvious of state's rights. It also takes attention away from the real problem.

Drunken drivers kill people, not because of a .02% difference in blood alcohol level, but because drunken drivers keep getting their drivers' licenses back. The killers have a record and the courts won't take their licenses away.

But the legislatures are not about to take on the judges. Judges are killing people, but that is no reason for congressmen to get so fanatical as to challenge them. So congressmen and legislators concentrate on blood percentages, because the courts are willing to leave that issue to them.

Exactly the same mentality rules when it comes to gun control. We all know that it is repeat criminals being put back on the street that causes crimes of violence. But the courts let them go, and no matter how loud public protest gets, the congress will only take token measures to rein in the courts' power. So it passes gun control laws.

Gun control laws don't work, but they are aimed at non-criminals, people the courts don't mind government pushing around.

We could lock up the repeat felons for life, but the courts won't let us. The courts make it too expensive. You can keep prisoners at a low cost, as the famous hard-nosed sheriff in North Carolina has shown us.

But the courts won't let us be hard on a poor, innocent repeat felon. It is the courts that make prisons too expensive for the public to afford. It is the courts that order repeat felons released because prisons are too crowded, and because that is hard on prisoners.

And what is the response of conservatives to this murderous court tyranny?

"Maybe Bush will appoint another conservative or two to our masters on the Federal Bench."

Now, if even the most dedicated conservative agrees to play the court game for respectability, what are the odds that poor, wimpy little BUSH is going to stand up and appoint people who will take on this same establishment?

I know that having a memory is not fashionable, but let me remind you that when the Democrats didn't want any conservatives, Bush, Senior appointed the most liberal man on the court, Justice Souter.

Gore's election would have at least one upside. Maybe he would put so many liberals on the court that conservatives will have to give up nose counting and go after the real problem.

KANE | 2006-05-05

Kanefronsf, you missed one of the best Scifi books of all time, the Pournelle-Niven "Inferno."

The Vestibule of Hell is for those who made no decisions IN LIFE, not for those who saw a moral crisis and decided to remain neutral.

I read all three of dante's book. I believe those who preserve neutrality are stuck at the gates of hell but not inside hell. They are in limbo.

Satan is at the bottom and it's freezing cold.

Comment by kane

WHOSE OBJECTIVITY? | 2010-01-18

When someone demands objectivity, always ask, "WHOSE objectivity?" When they are questioned on such matter as their fanaticism for Obama or their unanimous screams against Goldwater they will shrug and say objectivity is not possible in the real world. Then they start declaring that all objective science is agreed on global warning and especially race.

All tyranny is based on objectivity. Ayn Rand said that Freedom is based philosophy of Objectivism. Her followers are as rigid and as mirthless as any Puritan. Cotton Mather, Karl Marx, CS Lewis, Ayn Rand, all of them see spontaneous joy as evil, as an enemy of the grim Objectivity they are trying to promote.

In his Surprised by Joy, Lewis hurried to point out that his Joy was not a happy emotion.

I have written repeatedly that the person who calls everybody a liar in invariably a liar himself, that those who shout Mercy loudest uses it as an excuse for unlimited torture, that the person who scream HATE is always motivated by hatred himself, and that an experienced cop will look twice at anyone who is trying to look TOO innocent.

Mercy is the opposite of mercy, all capitalized virtues are their historical opposites.

Objectivity is the antithesis of freedom in history. And Freedom is the opposite of freedom because Freedom is objective. That is why it is capitalized. Actual freedom exists precisely to the extent that Objective Judgment stops limiting it.

Wordism says Freedom is a matter of WHO limits it. One is Truly Free only if he is obeying he law or the Lord or Marx or Mommy Professor.

And that, brothers and sisters, is ALL that the word freedom means.

Because of what freedom really is, a free person must always regard EVERY form of judgment as an imposition. Tyranny has absolutely nothing to do with the Words which lead to limiting it. BY its very name, society must limit freedom. But one must never look upon one excuse, one form of Wordism, as better than another.

I once called cop in Britain because a loudmouth was sitting on his roof next to my hotel. When the cop showed he ran. The cop told me he couldn't do anything anyway, because in Britain a man's home was his castle. I asked him what about he Englishman n his hotel room trying to sleep. One cannot throw rocks from his castle so why can he throw noise?

Nobody ever answers me.

And what about my right to go straighten the guy out myself. That I didn't bring up before a cop, but it is freedom any Anglo-Saxon would have recognized.

None of my freedoms mattered because the man in front of me had on a costume. He represented Objectivity.

The loudmouth's freedoms have to be weighed against mine. That is true and it is what people say. But my point here is that, as usual, they say it but they don't THINK about it.

My point is that the BALANCE is the point, not the JUSTIFICATION. In Rule WW2 I pointed out that the media or a respectable conservative cannot say that shooting someone down for trying to escape a Red country is not the same thing as a right-winger shooting someone down. If that were evil the entire Communist Empire would be evil., OBVIOUSLY evil from the word go.

But this cannot be because the left cannot be evil, just as Jews cannot hate and only whites can be racists.

No human being is objective or perfect in any other way. But the inability to be altogether good is no excuse for evil and the imperfection at being objective is not a license not to be. But Wordists use their Truth as an excuse, whether it is their version of Patriotism or Mommy Professor's Progressivism or the million different declaration of the Will of the Lord.

Wordism sees no such balance.

Wordism is insane.

WHERE ARE THOSE "MORE CONSERVATIVE" SOUTH CAROLINA REPUBLICANS WHEN IT COUNTS? | 2000-07-15

On March 18, 2000, in "Our Masters Are Upset That They No Longer Own the Gun Permit Business", I explained that the 25,000 concealed weapons permit holders in South Carolina are a potent new force in our politics. They are organized in Grassroots, South Carolina, which is doing a really spectacular job of lobbying. We have a link with them here on the SCLoS site, and we can learn from them.

Grassroots South Carolina has won some victories, but it lost the big one this year. As I pointed out on March 18, the old gun permits, which were given out on the basis of political favoritism, had no restrictions on them. But when new permits were made available that you have to EARN, petty politicians loaded them with restrictions. One of the biggest is that if you go to any place that serves drinks, you can't carry your weapon with you to or from that place.

Well-dressed people going in and out of expensive restaurants are the prime targets for muggers, and they need to carry more than others.

Other states do not have this restriction and they have had no more incidents of trouble with permit holders than we do.

Which means NONE. If one of the hundreds of thousands of people who have had permits for the last five years of this decade did do anything bad, you may be sure the media would trumpet it from coast to coast.

The simple fact of the matter remains that honest citizens with guns are never the problem.

Contrary to what gun control advocates tell you, a policeman is not a god. A major part of his function is to be an honest, law-abiding citizen who is armed to protect himself and his fellow citizens.

We don't need Clinton's fake fifty thousand new cops as much we need hundreds of thousands of new permit holders to make crime a desperate risk for muggers.

Surprisingly enough, there was almost no opposition in the South Carolina legislature to this reform of the concealed weapons law. Twenty-five thousand people, militant and almost every one a voter, is a formidable force. The reform was going through easily until three legislators stopped it.

Guess what party those three belonged to?

I am not surprised that it was three Republicans who stopped the gun law reform. Remember, it was Republican governor David Beasley who switched on us on the Confederate flag. When a hot button conservative issue comes up, it is usually Republicans who take "credit" for selling us out on it. If a Democrat takes the lead on a liberal policy, he will pay for it in the next election. But if a Republican takes the lead, as Beasley did, he thinks he can gain liberal support and not worry about conservatives. They'll vote for him anyway. So he thought it it would pay him to turn on us.

We taught Beasley reality by voting for the Democrat running against him. We came very near to scaring the Republicans away from taking the flag down. But they still think they can sell us out on the flag and on gun control. The question is, can they? A straight Republican ticket in 2000 is a resounding "Yes!"

When Nixon withdrew recognition from Taiwan, he had the full backing of the Democratic Party. If you sell out people on your own side, you are safe from having a problem with it in the general election. After all, your most solid supporter on such issues is the party you will face in the general elections. Right after World War II, Jacob Javits decided to run for Senate in New York as a liberal Republican because the Democrats couldn't use his earlier Communist affiliations against him. As long as he called himself a Republican, he could do anything against the United States he wanted to. Most Republicans will sell anybody or any principle out in the name of Republican party loyalty.

It was the Republican Richland county sheriff Sloan who was a main advocate for gun control in South Carolina until his own incompetence finally got rid of him. As always, he could afford it, because Republicans would vote for him slavishly, principle be damned.

This slavish Republicanism has an another effect no one seems to notice: it keeps Democrats liberal. Politicians go for the swing vote. As long as conservative voters will back Republicans regardless, conservatives have no effect whatever on Democratic elected officials. Democrats will only do conservative things if they stand a chance of getting conservative votes for it.

Some Democrats did support the flag, and many more would have had there been some potential votes in it for them. It was a few conservative Democrats who dared speak up against our caving in to the Supreme Court's gigantic anti-constitutional power grab on the anti-miscegenation laws (See July 1, 2000, "We Cannot Criticize the Federal Courts Any More").

No respectable Republican would dare do that.

Now Republicans take the lead in betraying us on the gun issue, right after selling us out in a "compromise" on the flag. And the more blindly we support South Carolina Republicans the more they will do this to us.

Once again, in real world politics, you get no more than you demand.