Posted on 08/29/2011 1:56:16 PM PDT by Da Bilge Troll
Lord of the Rings aficionados know that the evil lord Sauron paid little attention to the danger posed by two hobbits slowly struggling across the mountains and deserts of Mordor until he suddenly realized that the ring on which all his power depended was about to be hurled into the pits of Mount Doom. All at once the enemy plan became clear; what looked like stupidity was revealed as genius, and Sauron understood everything just when it was too late to act.
Jeffrey Toobin’s gripping, must-read profile of Clarence and Virginia Thomas in the New Yorker gives readers new insight into what Sauron must have felt: Toobin argues that the only Black man in public life that liberals could safely mock and despise may be on the point of bringing the Blue Empire down.
In fact, Toobin suggests, Clarence Thomas may be the Frodo Baggins of the right; his lonely and obscure struggle has led him to the point from which he may be able to overthrow the entire edifice of the modern progressive state.
Writes Toobin:
In several of the most important areas of constitutional law, Thomas has emerged as an intellectual leader of the Supreme Court. Since the arrival of Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., in 2005, and Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., in 2006, the Court has moved to the right when it comes to the free-speech rights of corporations, the rights of gun owners, and, potentially, the powers of the federal government; in each of these areas, the majority has followed where Thomas has been leading for a decade or more. Rarely has a Supreme Court Justice enjoyed such broad or significant vindication.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.the-american-interest.com ...
I found this article while browsing blogs and was mightly impressed! It really gets scary when you realize how little our up-coming generations actually know about "democracy" and about our Constitutionally-protected individual liberties. Add to that the growing infatuation with the "nanny state" mentality and you have a real recipe for disaster.
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From The Wall Street Journal's on-line "Opinion Journal"
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/rbartley/?id=110003537
THINKING IT OVER
Two Kinds of Liberty
Democracy alone doesn't guarantee freedom.
BY THOMAS F. WOODLOCK
Monday, May 26, 2003 12:01 a.m.
(Editor's note: This column appeared in The Wall Street Journal, May 11, 1945.)
The other day this writer pointed out that it was necessary for our people to make a fundamental distinction in its relation to liberty. Now he will attempt to make clear its nature and importance. He has for a long time been fumbling clumsily with its formulation. Fortunately, he finds in Hamilton Vreeland's book, recently discussed in this column (The Twilight of Individuality), a statement in brief and lucid terms and will borrow it wholesale.
Frequently in recent years this writer has referred to what he has called our seeming obsession with democratic forms and our apparent confidence that they furnished a guarantee of individual liberty and has insisted that they could be made instruments of despotic tyranny--which is perfectly true, but poorly stated. Also he has viewed the confusion in our public mind as one of "form" and "substance"--which is also in a sense true, but also imperfectly expressed. The merit in Mr. Vreeland's statement of the distinction is that it is placed exactly where it belongs and that is in the concept of "liberty."
There are two kinds of liberty. One is political, and is the right of the citizen to participate in government as a voter and--if he can get the necessary votes--as an official. The other kind of liberty is individual, i.e., personal, and this depends upon a limitation of government authority over his action. Its essence is the possession by him of certain "rights" against government which government is bound to respect. It is the confusion of the two kinds that is apparently rife in our public opinion, and especially in what we call "Liberal" or "Progressive" circles.
The Greek "democracy" stopped at political liberty. The citizen (only a part of the population were "citizens") could vote and run for office, but the "government" (the State) was absolute; there were no limitations upon its powers. So too with the Roman state when the Senate and the Consuls ruled. We know what happened to both. The notion of individual liberty came into the world with Christianity and our "democracy" was built upon it and built in the most explicit and formal way. Its essence is the limitation of State power over the citizen and the possession by the citizen of "rights" which may not be violated by the State.
There is, thus, the most fundamental difference between the two concepts of "democracy" and of government itself; yet there is fundamental similarity in their "forms." Both rest upon citizen suffrage as the base of all authority, and both express the public will under majority rule. Our "form" recognizes the ultimate omnipotence of that will for under our Constitution itself there is no limitation on its powers of amendment. If the "people" so willed it, it could in strict legal form sweep away legislature and judiciary and establish an absolute monarchy.
Thus, at the last, personal liberty depends not upon outward forms but upon the general conscience of the people itself, its concept of the person, his nature and his relation with his fellows. For the Greek and the Roman, the State was the "end" and the citizens the "means"; for the Founders of our civil order, the person was the "end" and the State the "means"; the State exists for the person and not the person for the sake of the State.
Now the plain fact is that there has long been going on amongst us a change in the conscience of certain groups of opinion and especially in "Liberal," "progressive," "left-wing" circles in the direction of emphasizing the importance of "society" as against that of the person. The "Instrumentalist" philosophy has gone practically the whole distance in this direction, and its logic implies absolutism of the "democratic" state. All the left-wing drift is in the same direction, that is of sinking the person in the State. It is a drift toward the old Greek and Roman concept of "liberty"--political liberty--and away from the American concept of individual liberty that is afoot on the "Left," a drift of which public opinion is as yet largely unconscious because the "democratic" form structure is not so far in question, and has sustained no important visible changes.
It is not in forms that this change has occurred but in the use to which the forms have been put and the validation by the judicial "form" of that use that is the point. The "police power" in the most important arm of the State and the Constitution does not give the Federal government this power nor was it intended that it should. Yet we have seen in he last decade, as Mr. Vreeland has pointed out, a series of judicial interpretations of the Constitution's (so-called) interstate commerce clause which have placed in the government's hands police powers of a sweeping character, the dimensions of which are still quite unsuspected by the general public. Moreover, the logic supporting these interpretations has implications still less suspected, much less generally understood, implications of further extensions of this power to a point where there would remain for the citizen but little of the "rights" that our Government was founded to protect.
It is high time that our people generally should recognize what is happening for what it is and ask themselves whether it is what they want. Their first job should be to get clearly into their heads the distinction between political liberty and personal liberty and how the same "democratic" structure can be made to produce either.
Mr. Woodlock, born in Ireland in 1866, was editor of The Wall Street Journal, 1902-05, and "Thinking It Over" columnist from 1930 until his death in 1945.
How about it? Are you scared yet?
Thanks.
May God make it so. Amen.
My point is that abortion can not be made legal by either a Federal or State legislature, because of the fundamental principle of our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Either the Constitution is the Supreme Law or Marx is—there can be no compromise.
We have an ‘inalienable right to life’. You can never take away “inalienable rights” nor can you give them away, even if you wanted to. That is the definition of “inalienable”.
That life begins is determined by science—not some random woman. Our laws are based on Right Reason according to Nature—not by some arbitrary person, even if they are a “judge” or lawyer.
Our standard of law comes from the Creator. We use His standard of Right and Wrong—not Barney Frank’s standard. When our Congress makes up laws which don’t agree with Natural Law Theory and science and denies Biology—it is unconstitutional because it is not considered “Just Law” which is defined in Natural Law Theory—the philosophy of ALL the Founding Fathers and which was used to form our Supreme Law of our Land.
Arbitrary law was what Hitler, Stalin, and Barney Frank uses. It doesn’t work in a land where all is equal under the law.
Babies and Fathers have no say in abortion “rights” and the father has as much genetic material in the life as the woman. And the baby has a fundamental Right to Life. If we decide we can kill that life-—then there is no longer equal law.
AND amen.
Sheesh, having your Constitutional creds dissed by The Won, that's a bad day. That's like Rosie O'Donnell calling you fat or Jeanine Garofolo calling you a skank.
Why? Who says the FDA is entitled to that kind of control over even non-narcotic drugs? I mean, I realize they EXERCISE such power, I have never been convinced they have the authority to do so.
I agree, drugs are evil. But not all evils are within the Constitutional mandate of the fedgov to prevent. In fact, MOST evils don't fall into that category. Treason, attacks by foreign nation-states, illegals streaming across the border, that's about it as far as the list of evils that they're supposed to deal with, and as you can see, they can't even seem to handle those.
Well, is the guy a super-villain or is he going to undo centuries of incorrect decisions which force us to pretend our liberal overlords know what they're doing and are entitled to share our oxygen just like humans? Make up your mind, man!
Which would allow liberal decisions always to win the day because intellectually dishonest agenda-driven liberals put no such constraints upon themselves. Or to look at it another way, if Scalia really feels that way, he should have no trouble reversing decision that themselves lacked deference to precedent.
Only liberals or the uneducated cite the general welfare clause to support their arguments.
Yes. Did you see the latest Harry Potter movie? Where Voldermort's secret was placing [portions] of his soul into objects so that he couldn't be destroyed; it's the same idea.
{Also, when Sauron forged his ring he tied it to all the other [powerful] magic rings (that he had taught the other races to make, btw) to make those rings subservient to his... that was the origin of the ringwraith.}
Really? I don't see any Constitutional authorization for the FDA.
Furthermore, there is solid precedent against your model of how things should work (but then again, precedent is all too often ignored when it is against what one is a proponent of). Consider this; the Federal government needed a Constitutional amendment {the 18th} to regulate a substance (namely alcohol); furthermore, the 18th was repealed in whole by the 21st... so any claim that the government did/does have the authority to regulate drugs (like marijuana, or opiates, etc) based on prohibition is legally null and void.
I think we would have more luck in presenting our case against Roe v. Wade as a improper Judicial decision which violated the 5th Amendment (no deprivation of life w/o due process of law) and the 10th Amendment (Fed barred from things not specifically stated in the Constitution).
Sounds interesting. Do you have a transcript?
>The right to life is unalienable. That’s why suicide has always been illegal in this country.
>Self-murder is still murder.
Only if they succeed.
If suicide is utterly repugnant, why then is Samson (who committed such) listed [as one of the faithful] in Hebrews chapter 11?
Ah. But Kaegan is. And the "wise latina".
Yeah. Otherwise it is attempted murder.
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