PrintApril 16, 2009
Where We Must Make a Stand
There was a time when the Left reflexively sided with criminal defendants. Rapists like Huey Newton, terrorists like the Weathermen, and bank robbers like Angela Davis were "political prisoners." The System was used to crush dissent. The Left deemed police and prosecutors as the enemy. The rest of us saw prosecutors as our allies.
The lust for power which is Leftism, however, has no fixed principles. It is a relentless insinuation into every aspect of life, a constant perversion of every institution of society, a toxin which keeps poisoning public life. Whole institutions have been swallowed in the maw of Leftism. The American Bar Association, for example, was once an honorable organization which eschewed political positions. More and more today the ABA resembles a sock puppet of Leftism. The League of Women Voters has become simply another nodding head in the gaggle of Leftist organizations. The very few groups which have held their ground, like the Boy Scouts, are selected for special treatment by the ACLU and other priests of orthodoxy.
When everything is political (and to the Left everything is political), then there are no neutral territories that are viewed as simply part of civil life. Sports commentary today is spiced with political correctness. Fashion magazines require obligatory fawning spreads on Michelle Obama, while giving short shrift to more glamorous Republican women like Sarah Palin. We simply accept the double standard of public life. Many of us can only barely recall when politically correct thinking did not infect every part of entertainment, education, and amusement.
The destruction of real entertainment leaves a gaping hole in our lives. When there is literally no cable channel which is presented without an agenda, when innocuous areas of life like children's cartoons and food programs are invariably presented with pre-selected heroes and causes, then we cannot truly recreate ourselves. The ubiquitous "Green" this and "Green" that shows just how close we are to Orwell's dystopia.
Still, we can survive what we can understand. School children often shrug off the re-education camps called public schools because the heavy hand of indoctrination, as Soviet children could have told us, simply bores kids. Conservatives in other areas of life have become the genuine revolutionaries, with all the thrill and liberty that comes from truly rejecting a sick society. Religious faith, though under assault, survives quite nicely as millions abandoned the established churches and moved, instead, to living churches.
True oppression comes when the Left uses the blunt power of the state to crush opponents. Radical Leftists like the Nazis and equally radical Leftists like the Soviets did not just rely upon endless propaganda. They used the criminal justice system to make political resistance itself criminal. That is the spectacle we see today in the criminal justice system.
Ted Stevens was not a likeable guy. He was hardly a hero to conservatives. But he held a Republican Senate seat which might well have been crucial in Democrat dreams of a filibuster proof Senate. So in a year in which he was seeking re-election and in a tight Senate race, Stevens was indicted, tried, and convicted. Only now -- after the Left captured Stevens' senate seat -- we learn that exculpatory evidence was deliberately kept from the judge and jury. This was not simply a miscarriage of justice. It smacks of the brazen abuse of prosecutorial power to gain political power.
This is just the same sort of politically motivated prosecutorial misconduct that Elliott Spitzer engaged in when he was New York's Attorney General. Tom Delay was savaged because he was a powerful Republican leader in the House of Representatives. Scooter Libby was ensnared by agenda-driven justice. When almost everything in life is theoretically criminal, politically motivated indictment and trial can produce outrages and true oppression.
Moreover, criminal courts are vehicles well suited to official demonization. Abused by power mongers, criminal trials can become lynch mobs, become Moscow "show trials," become Hitler's "People's Court." Ted Stevens deserved to lose his Senate seat because the corrupt prosecutors of the Senator portrayed him as a criminal. The Duke Lacrosse Team members were guilty because men were guilty and because young white men were particularly guilty. Scooter Libby helped Vice President Cheney and Tom Delay advanced Republican policies, so he was guilty too.
In the final analysis, the essential products of good government are national security and a sound system of justice. No system of justice can survive political correctness. The use of prosecution to remove political enemies strikes at the vitals of ordered liberty and functioning democracy. If there is a last stand against Leftism, it must be in the criminal courts, where the rights of the accused -- even the unpopular accused -- against malicious prosecution by political overlords must never be tolerated.
Bruce Walker is the author of two books: Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie, and his recently published book, The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity.
