Stop Complaining!
How Liberals Paved the Way for the Ashcroft Civil Rights Assault

by John Loeffler, Steel on Steel
www.steelonsteel.com
(c) 2003 All Rights Reserved

December 2, 2003

This week's letter from the ACLU appeared in the business mail, alarmed at the assault Attorney General John Ashcroft is waging on civil rights and hinting that if I kick some money into the pot they could prosecute an effective defense to this clear and present danger. Sigh. Give 'em enough time and they'll eventually catch on, sort of.

Strange times do indeed make for strange bedfellows and while I have consistently attributed credit to liberals for clearly identifying the current civil rights crisis, my liberal friends just don't seem to understand that their policies of the last three decades carefully laid the groundwork for such a situation to arise.

Three decades ago liberalism went off the rails, embraced a philosophy of relative, constantly-changing values as it morphed into an eclectic party of self-contradicting special interests. And so it's always amusing when liberals talk about the "rule of law," because the core belief of most liberals is that no values (or laws) are absolute and no one should push their values on anyone else unless of course they're liberal values (a party of contradictions

Indeed, liberals have always preached the rule of law when in power but when forced to abide by laws they themselves find unpalatable, they consistently find some way to torture laws and the judiciary into getting around it or simply assume a glassy transcendent look and say, "oh but we have a higher moral purpose and are not obliged to obey immoral laws." Heaven forbid one of their conservative adversaries should ever say such a thing, such as Judge Roy Moore.

So in complaining about the civil rights abuses of the current administration, consider dear liberal that when you bludgeoned the Second Amendment to death by creating so many laws and regulations it is difficult to exercise the right to bear arms, you proved that a right enshrined in the Bill of Rights could be destroyed without actually repealing it. Thus you opened the door for other amendments to suffer a similar fate. So stop complaining about violations of freedom of speech, or habeas corpus, or speedy trial, or privacy, etc. You made it all possible to legislate them out of existence.

When you ignored the Tenth Amendment and systematically forged a bloated, sprawling, out-of-control government to manage virtually everything in our lives in the name of helping the little guy or the environment, you made it possible for that same government to snoop on everything we are, control everything we do and take everything we own to do it. So stop complaining when that government invades your life.

When you seated activist judges in the courts, who cavalierly ignored laws that existed and contrived laws where there were none just to forward liberal agendas, you made it possible for successive judges of other philosophical persuasions to do the same thing, while ignoring your rights and rationalizing their way around legal protections, especially those protecting you. So stop complaining about rights violations.

When you said it was acceptable for President Clinton to commit perjury, you simultaneously gave consent for President Bush to lie about the war in Iraq. So stop complaining if he did it.

When liberals taught school children that the Constitution was the product "of long-dead white slave owners," you laid the foundation for its unimportance and abolition in the minds of youth. So stop complaining when someone else doesn't want to honor your rights written down by those very same long-dead racist slave owners.

When you said the Constitution was a "living breathing document," you destroyed the foundation that it means what it says and enabled successive administrations to ignore it. So stop complaining when it doesn't live and breathe the way you want it to. You created that monster in the first place.

When you ignored the Fourth Amendment and created civil forfeiture laws in the name of the War on Drugs, which created a stream of free booty for government agencies while doing little to stop the drug flow, you made it possible for your property to be seized for any frivolous reason. So stop complaining when they take your possessions on being accused as an enemy of the state.

When you inverted the first amendment from freedom of religion to freedom from religion, you forgot that freedom of speech is part of the same amendment. So stop complaining when someone inverts your right to express yourself.

When you created so many laws, regulations, fines and penalties, you made it possible for all of us to be guilty when we have to be, for dissenters and whistleblowers to be harassed by an inhuman machine with endless resources to do so. So stop complaining when these laws and regulations backfire and devour you and they are chewing up liberals as well. Did you think this machine would only eat conservatives?

When President Clinton said it was wrong to criticize our government, by agreeing to this outrageous statement or failing to object, you lost the right to criticize our government's actions in Iraq or anywhere else for that matter. So stop complaining about what they're doing.

When President Clinton illegally used 800 FBI files to get "dirt" on his enemies, you gave consent for conservative presidents to do the same to you. So stop complaining when government invades your privacy.

When liberal-controlled colleges actively suppressed the free speech rights of conservatives and libertarians on college campuses in the name of tolerance and diversity, which was neither tolerant nor diverse from anything that didn't agree with it, you set the stage for people to ignore your free speech rights. So stop complaining when they tell you to shut up.

I have consistently argued to both liberals and conservatives that we must have a level playing field in civil rights and that the Constitution must be strictly constructed in this area. Otherwise everyone's rights are endangered because they can simply be defined away as the current political need requires.

Unfortunately this concept of a level field and strict constructionism is a particularly hard sell to liberals with a philosophically incoherent belief system, comprised of floating, non-absolute, frequently-contradicting values that can be morphed into getting what they want at any given moment to satisfy any political agenda.

Thus, my liberal friends, if you are upset by the current administration, you must realize you set the stage for the current problem by torturing and ignoring law until you got what you wanted. It was a monster you promised could be kept under control but you failed do it. So stop complaining if John Ashcroft and George Bush want to play with the monster for a while. When it's tired of playing with them, it will eat us all alive in the end anyway.

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John Loeffler is host of the weekly syndicated talk show Steel on Steel, which can be heard online at www.steelonsteel.com. Tape subscriptions to the show are available at (800) 829-5646. John also produces and co-hosts The Financial Sense Newshour with Jim Puplava at www.financialsense.com.