Dangerous Criminal Update
You might remember the story of Richard Paey, the Florida man who was given 25 years for “drug trafficking” because he broke the law to obtain extra pain medication. The Florida Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal against the sentence because there is no point of law on which to overturn it. This means that absent an unlikely appeal to the US Supreme Court, Paey will do his time unless granted clemency by the Governor. Let’s hope sanity will prevail.
The Paranoid Style
I was stunned to read this excerpt from the essay “The Paranoid Style” by Richard Hofstader today. I don’t think I’ve read a better summary of the current mindset of the authoritarian right with regard to the War on Terror – but this was written in 1964.
The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse. (“Time is running out,” said [John Birch Society founder Robert] Welch in 1951. “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack”).
As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish.
Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated — if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthenshis awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.
The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman — sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced.
Hat tip: Glenn Greenwald.
War On Drugs Success Story
Another dangerous criminal off the streets!
Florida’s drug trafficking laws were stretched beyond their logical limit when they were applied to Richard Paey, a Pasco County man now serving a 25-year mandatory minimum sentence. Paey suffers from debilitating and chronic pain, and he may have violated the law in order to obtain more pain medication. But Paey was convicted of a crime designed to put away drug kingpins and sentenced accordingly.
[...]
Due to a catastrophic auto accident and botched back surgery, Paey, who uses a wheelchair, lives with unremitting back pain. He came to the attention of law enforcement when he filled prescriptions for 700 oxycodone pills and large quantities of other pain relief medications within 36 days. While Paey said his doctor okayed his treatment, there was evidence that suggested Paey tampered with the prescriptions.
But there is no evidence Paey intended to do anything with the medicine other than relieve his own pain. Yet the state charged him under a draconian drug trafficking law.
[Dissenting Justice] Seals laid out the absurdity of this result: “I suggest that it is unusual, illogical, and unjust that Mr. Paey could conceivably go to prison for a longer stretch for peacefully but unlawfully purchasing 100 oxycodone pills from a pharmacist than had he robbed the pharmacist at knife point, stolen 50 oxycodone pills which he intended to sell to children waiting outside, and then stabbed the pharmacist.”
Aside from the obvious injustice, imagine the waste of resources involved in bringing this case to trial in the first place.
There’s another point here besides the absurdity of the drug war, and that is the tendency of agents of the state to use laws for purposes other than those for which they were originally enacted, if the law has not been framed narrowly enough. You might also remember the case of the North Carolina prosecutors who tried to prosecute a suspected meth-lab owner under anti-terrorism laws.
Good news from the US
At the time of writing, the Democrats have definitely won the house and look likely to win the Senate as well. Divided government is probably pretty good news for libertarians. Bush is unlikely to take as kindly to Democratic pork as he did to Republican pork.
Also, Rick "The pursuit of happiness is harming America" Santorum has been unceremoniously dumped from office.
There’s also this from Ramesh Ponnuru, certainly no libertarian:
If Sodrel loses in Indiana, as looks likely, it may be because a libertarian candidate took votes from him. The same thing happened to keep Slade Gorton from winning re-election to the Senate and to keep Jon Ensign from beating Harry Reid. So far, losing because of libertarians hasn’t caused Republicans to move toward the libertarians ideologically. But maybe things will change this time.
There you have it
The Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
Republican bigshot Rick Santorum:
Rick Santorum: I do believe [the left] are anti responsibility, I mean their entire agenda is, I should be able to do whatever I want as long as no-one gets hurt… I should be able to take drugs and do whatever I want to do… as long as… as long as… I should be able to ah, you know, particularly in the area of sexual freedom and personal issues, this is the mantra of the left, which is, I have a right to do what I want to do. And that is not the kind of freedom that our founders envisioned, it is not the kind of freedom that makes up a society that is devoted, as the subtitle of the book says, to the common good.
Interviewer: But isn’t the notion of working for the common good, if, er, liberal we’re talking about, people should spend more time working for the common good, wouldn’t they be accused of being kind of a little pink, a little socialistic?
Rick Santorum: No, not at all! … [We have] an entire culture that focuses on immediate gratification and the pursuit of happiness and personal pleasure. And it is harming America.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Republican Party – the home of freedom-loving Americans!
Janeane Nostradamus
Via Ex Tempore, I recently came across this quote from actress Janeane Garofolo, while she was being interviewed on Fox by Tony Snow in February 2003, prior to the invasion of Iraq:
SNOW: Do you think [Saddam Hussein] is eager to obtain weapons of mass destruction?
GAROFALO: Yes, I think lots of people are eager to obtain weapons of mass destruction. But there’s no evidence that he has weapons of mass destruction. There’s been no evidence of him testing nuclear weapons. We have people that are in our face with nuclear weapons. We’ve got Iran and North Korea. We’ve got a problem with Pakistan… There’s a whole lot of people that are going nuclear. And I think that Saddam Hussein is actually, with the evidence, the least able to use nuclear weapons and the least obvious offender in that area at the moment… But I also resent Rick — you know, Senator Santorum’s assertions that this won’t be particularly costly or lengthy. This is going to be economically devastating for us. And also, the assertion that inaction breeds terrorist strikes, that is ridiculous. Action in Iraq will make us decidedly less safe.
Eerily prescient, you’d have to say. Certainly better than the CIA managed to do. Congress should give serious thought to replacing the whole apparatus of U.S. intelligence with Janeane.
Of course, given that she’s previously on record saying things like…
When Communist U.S.S.R. was a superpower, the world was better off.
… it may just be a case of a blind squirrel eventually finding an acorn.
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