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From Under The Rubble
March 12, 2014
The Leviathan Goes Rogue
by Christopher Manion
fitzgerald griffin foundation
FRONT ROYAL, VA — On the Sunday morning shows last week, Secretary of State John Kerry denounced Russia's "invasion" of Ukraine as a "brazen act of aggression."
Whatever that says about the Ukraine, Kerry's highly-charged prose could equally describe the federal government's manifest invasions of privacy here at home, its "brazen acts of aggression" against personal liberty, and its avalanche of serial violations of our own Constitution.
Unfortunately, Republicans appear to be more worried about Putin and Crimea than they are about criminal politicians on the home front.
Unfortunately, Republicans appear to be more worried about Putin and Crimea than they are about criminal politicians on the home front.
In fact, House leaders are often among the most fervent defenders of Big Brother's invasion of liberty and privacy right here at home.
Of course, it's always for our own good.
We've come a long way from this primordial pronouncement of the conservative conscience a half-century ago:
The turn will come out when we entrust the conduct of our affairs to men who understand that their first duty as public officials is to divest themselves of the power they have been given. It will come when Americans, in hundreds of communities throughout the nation, decide to put the man in office who is pledged to enforce the Constitution and restore the Republic. (Barry Goldwater from The Conscience of a Conservative, 1960)
Today, If the GOP has a guiding principle at all — that is, a policy that is consistently borne out in action — it is government power.
Of course, that power in Republican hands would be wielded more responsibly, we are told, and more "conservatively." But few Republican office-holders have the temerity actually to amputate the cancerous, caustic limbs from the lumbering Leviathan that threatens to flatten us all.
Every day new instances arise. Lois Lerner refuses to testify, but will Holder the Hack ever prosecute her?
Should that wonder ever come to pass, Obama has already declared her innocent.
When Scooter Libby was convicted, Bush dithered.
Obama won't.
Between his vacations and Michelle's million-dollar shopping jaunts, he'd pardon Lerner in a heartbeat.
Good soldier Lerner knows this. If she were granted immunity, however, and she talked – honestly – her future could be very … dark.
It's the Chicago way.
Better she clam up and ride it out. The Conniving Capo will take care of the rest.
A Thousand Points of Pain
Language is symbolic, but when the symbol is purged of its reality, it becomes an ideological straitjacket.
The Soviet Union had a "constitution." North Korea is a "Democratic Republic."
And, closer to home, the contemptible and contemptuous Holder runs the "Justice" Department.
Holder is not alone. Obama calls a referendum in Crimea "illegal … under the [Ukrainian] constitution," yet he and his apparatchiks violate our Constitution every day.
...few Republican office-holders have the temerity actually to amputate the cancerous, caustic limbs from the lumbering Leviathan that threatens to flatten us all.
Running roughshod over the states, Holder unilaterally enshrines gay rights as the law of the land, even as his department joins the rest of the administration in its frontal attack on the Catholic Church.
But the Church is not alone. Down to the administration's most nefarious bottom-rungers, Obama's good soldiers carry out their campaign to inflict a Thousand Points of Pain on all of their critics — whom they consider the enemy, of course, since, for the Hard Left, politics is war.
Countless federal agencies are vying to outdo Lerner in harassment.
Even the Fish and Wildlife Service couldn't resist: it went after Gibson Guitars (full disclosure: I own a Gibson Dove, just like Elvis) for using illegally imported wood. (Gibson's offense: owner Henry Juszkiewicz has criticized Obama's "bullying and harassing" administration).
Gibson is fighting back, but that just means there will be great music in FEMA's Gulag.
Paranoia always accompanies persecution. Homeland Security buys a billion rounds of lethal ammunition and we're expected to believe it's for target practice (well, let's hope their triggermen really can't shoot straight).
The NSA is bad enough, but now even the CIA has gotten into the act.
Desperately trying to hide documents pertaining to their allegedly tortuous interrogation methods, the CIA is accused of spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Welcome to Darkness at Noon. Rubashov, call your office!
Meanwhile, no doubt suspecting that the media aren't sufficiently supine already, Obama's FCC threatens to send his Thought Police to monitor media newsrooms.
As Winston Smith learned at the Ministry of Truth, the threat of Room 101 is enough.
(Note to homebound bloggers: with this, "Get the government out of our bedrooms" takes on a whole new meaning.)
Obama calls a referendum in Crimea "illegal … under the [Ukrainian] constitution," yet he and his apparatchiks violate our Constitution every day.
Jonathan Turley — a supporter of Obama's policies but also a law professor who respects the Constitution — testifies that our country is at a constitutional tipping point.
Yes, our Congress could soon become as pointless as North Korea's "Supreme People's Assembly."
Speaker Boehner responds by daintily postponing a House vote on amnesty — the number one priority of Chuck Schumer and Eric Cantor — until after the GOP primaries that could replace Cantor and other RINOs with Tea Party stalwarts.
Obama laughs, more administration officials lie, plunder, and pillage, and Congress acts as Obama's doormats.
How do you spell "impeachment"?
The Gulag Goes Local
The brutal mindset of the apparat filters down to the local level.
Small towns and counties nationwide suit up SWAT teams that feature armored tanks.
The Defense Department urges veterans returning with PTSD from war zones to apply for positions with local law enforcement.
Austin, Texas Police Chief Art Acevedo tells a jaywalking girl complaining about police brutality that she's lucky his officers didn't rape her.
So much for my old "Support Your Local Police" bumper sticker.
The intimidation is blatant and brazen: "I will feel your groin, twice across and twice down," TSA supervisor Christopher Anderson told me at Dulles Airport last week (I have skin cancer, so I had to opt out of the porn scanner).
Everyone else just had to take off their shoes and raise their hands – it reminded me of the Sundance Kid, yelling to Butch Cassidy, "they're up against the wall already!"
But it's not funny: the entire enterprise is designed not only to humiliate, but to habituate and to intimidate and to remind us who's in charge.
I told Mr. Anderson that if he did that to me anywhere else, he'd be in jail for life.
"No I wouldn't," he said, "We have the power to do it anywhere."
I'm not kidding.
Neither is he.
Well, Solzhenitsyn occasionally found humor in the Gulag, and so do I.
I flew back to Dulles a few days later. As my return flight boarded in San Francisco, the gate agent announced that the TSA would conduct a "random inspection" of passengers (the only one I observed in that end of the terminal, with a dozen gates, during my three-hour layover).
Two TSA agents stood at a table by the gate, chatting.
Passenger groups one, two, and three boarded the plane without incident.
I was at the end of group four.
As I approached the gate, the two TSA agents moved smartly to flank the walkway, one on each side. The big one on my right looked straight at me, sternly.
I looked straight back.
As I passed, he cracked a smile.
"Have a nice flight," he said.
How nice of Mr. Anderson to send his Welcome Wagon.
"We have the power to do it anywhere."
Truly comforting.
[Memo to Mr. Anderson: please give me back my gloves. It was five degrees when we returned to Dulles after midnight, and I had to clean the ice off my windshield wearing socks on my hands. Thank you.]
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From Under the Rubble is copyright © 2014 by Christopher Manion. All rights reserved.
Christopher Manion is Director of the Campaign for Humanae Vitae™, a project of the Bellarmine Forum. He served as a staff director on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for many years. He has taught in the departments of politics, religion, and international relations at Boston University, the Catholic University of America, and Christendom College. This column is sponsored by the Bellarmine Forum.
See a complete biographical sketch.
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