For some people it isn’t enough that Alan Keyes has virtually no chance of winning the Illinois Senate election. They also don’t want anybody to listen to his campaign. One of these folk has set up a Truth About Keyes blog, “to help collect all the crazy things that Alan Keyes says. And then help de-bunk them”. A little preemptive well poisoning by someone who professes to be “angry” that so awful a person was allowed to run for office.
I browsed through “Truth Girl’s” collecting and debunking this evening and have to say that hers is the sort of effort for which the adjective “lame” was invented. Her principal complaint is that Ambassador Keyes is an outspoken Christian whose “crazy” opinions include the ideas that Christianity played a large role in the founding of America and that easy access to contraception and abortion has undermined marriage. Well, okay. In the world of Fahrenheit 9/11, it takes a little more than standard issue social conservatism to fit my definition of “crazy”, but others apparently employ the term more loosely.
Perhaps the most interesting example of Keyes’ wild-eyed mania is “Keyes on Padilla and Civil Liberties”. Ah, ha!, you think. She’s nailed the right wing extremist shrieking for execution by executive fiat. Not precisely. Here is the shocking, anti-civil libertarian passage that she quotes from a Keyes essay entitled “The Dangers of Physical Safety”:
The case of “enemy combatant” and American citizen Jose Padilla is raising important issues beyond the challenge of frustrating the plots of terrorists. In a USA Today Gallup poll last week, 80 percent of Americans said they would give up some freedoms to gain security. This alarming sentiment, of course, has been the basis of the tyrant’s bargain with the people from the beginning of human society. America was founded in large measure precisely to end such blackmail.
That’s why we should pay close attention to how Jose Padilla is treated. He might very well be a terrorist, but he is certainly an American citizen. That means that he is entitled to a whole range of protections under law that we take for granted. These protections include the opportunity to defend oneself against government charges, and to have that defense conducted in a court of law, with a fair chance to state one’s case before an impartial and independent judge – independent, that is, of the executive power that is bringing the charge.
. . . Mr. Padilla, we are told, is an “enemy combatant” in the judgment of President Bush. This judgment may well be true – indeed, seems quite likely. But imagine the following sequence of events. A president or other high official determines that a citizen is an “enemy combatant.” Accordingly, that citizen is stripped of his rights, held incommunicado in the brig without legal counsel like the al-Qaida prisoners being held in Cuba, until the war ends. And, of course, the war on terror may never end, so he may stay there forever.
So that’s the sort of “crazy thing” that this liberal observer wants to “de-bunk”? Who would’ve guessed?
Comments