BYRON HARVEY

Does it you?

Before I quit this blogging thing—or a la Brett Favre, say I’m going to quit, and then not quit, but maybe quit, decide to continue but then really quit, except if and when I keep on blogging—one of the things that I’ve been meaning to write about is two particularly galling examples of liberal disingenuity (or abject ignorance; I’m not qualified to determine if deceit or sheer ignorance is in play here).  Here are the two examples that have frosted me in recent months (and there are variations on these themes):

Example 1: “It’s all well and good for these Tea Party types to protest big government, but I don’t see any of them lining up to return their Social Security or Medicare!”

To the simpleton minds who produce this rubbage, this is supposed to quell all arguments, brand the Tea Partiers as phonies and hypocrites, etc.

Example 2: “Tea Partiers who believe in the Constitution, who want things to be like they used to be, are apparently ignorant of the fact that blacks were discriminated against, etc., in the ‘old days'”.

Now, the first response to this tripe, to paraphrase something the great George Will wrote a few years back, is that those who have neither the inclination nor the ability to understand adult arguments shouldn’t attempt to; they might get hurt.  That’s a general caveat that applies to all such silliness on the part of liberals.  But there’s more.

To deal with the first one, which I’ve seen written several times, the responses are not even hard:

• Where do I line up to get out of the Ponzi Security system, and to receive a rebate of all the money I put in, along with even half the interest I’d have earned had I had the freedom to invest it myself?  Show me where to go, and I’ll do it!
• Do liberals not even understand basic human nature enough to realize that we always attempt to act in our own best interests, that no one will voluntarily give up something due them (even if they believe—as do many of us—that current systems need revamping, and badly)?
• Do they not understand that one can advocate for the changing of a system while at the same time attempting to navigate the current situation to the best of one’s ability?

So no, there is nothing at all contradictory—nothing—about saying that government is broken (and it is) while at the same time attempting to do all that is legally possible to navigate well the current system until such time as it can be changed.

To answer the second red herring, liberals often either don’t understand or, just as likely, intentionally obfuscate the meaning of terms like “judicial restraint”, “Constitutionalism”, etc.  Here’s the truth: a Supreme Court justice can vote 100 times in a row to overturn a previous ruling, and not be a “judicial activist” in the slightest, just as I can be a faithful Constitutionalist and advocate for any number of new amendments to the Constitution (or the repeal of some old ones).  It’s categorically not about going back to some supposed Nirvana of the past (which never existed), complete with old prejudices and the like; rather, it’s about treating the Constitution with respect, amending it according to the rules (or not at all), letting the rule of law be the rule of law, etc.  It’s about attempting (as best we can) to understand what the framers of the Constitution meant when they wrote what they did, and then applying that to today; it’s not about bending meaning and arriving at tortured conclusions that the framers would have never imagined and then putting it down to some tripe about the Constitution being a “living document” (actually, I think it was Robert Bork who correctly said, “I believe in a ‘living Constitution’; I just don’t believe in a mutating one.”).  And so what we Tea Partiers want is not some return to some “Golden Age”, but merely a respect for the Constitution, the rule of law, and the like, rather than the judicial activism that we see that ignores the written law and replaces it with the rule of what Thomas Sowell called “The Anointed”.

OK, that’s enough about that…