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My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.

2005-12-27

Another Offering From Today's Dailies

Though, sadly, this one much less, shall we say, lucid.

Ed Quillen is, near as I can tell, the resident curmudgeon on staff at the Denver Post. His political leanings go from liberatarian to hard liberal, with little in between.

Take today's offering. He starts out in pretty safe ground:

Congress is supposed to be a deliberative body where laws emerge after discussion, hearings and debate. . . .

The USA Patriot Act is 345 pages long. It's difficult to believe that any member of Congress had time to read it and digest it in a month, and indeed, some said they hadn't even seen it, much less read it. . . .

The USA Patriot Act is 345 pages long. It's difficult to believe that any member of Congress had time to read it and digest it in a month, and indeed, some said they hadn't even seen it, much less read it.

Of course, that'll never happen, but it actually does have the ring of rationality to it. Fairly normal liberatarian/conservative sort of thinking.

And then the pendulum swings WILDLY over to the hard liberal:

let's get real here. What difference do laws make to President Bush?

He claims the authority to arrest anyone, anywhere in the world, as an enemy combatant, and to hold that person without filing criminal charges. He has our government running secret prisons in Europe, a power I haven't found in Article II of the Constitution, which enumerates the authority of the president. His administration claims the power to tap communications without a warrant. He fought to reserve the authority to torture people in U.S. custody. His appointees defend a process of turning prisoners over to other countries for, shall we say, more enthusiastic interrogations.

Laws, treaties, our Constitution - Bush has always been able to find someone who will tell us that he's really acting within the bounds of his office.

Well, never mind a point-by-point refutation: all of these assertions have been soundly smacked down by more gifted smackers-down than I. The point is that the curmudgeonly "voice of reason" is so far detached from reasonability that he doesn't even recognize the need for a smooth segue from normal to deranged.

This is why David Harsanyi is must-reading for subscribers to the Post. Someone needs to be tethered to reality. (By the way, if you haven't read his column on a successful blogger--and, thus, the possibilities for the new media--you should)
Posted by: Michael / 12/27/2005 05:08:00 PM

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