Monday, January 28, 2008

By the way ...


... is anyone else amused by the fact that the very people who have, for the last several years, been yawningly unconcerned about privacy, warrants, due process, security certificates, wiretapping, rules of evidence and presumption of innocence, and who made an absolute anthem out of "If you haven't done anything wrong, you should have nothing to hide," are now the same people who are terribly, terribly concerned about Ezra Levant's precious civil rights?

It's just an observation.

5 comments:

Ti-Guy said...

As the doyenne of all neocons, Gertrude Himmelfarb (William Kristol's mother) said, citing de la Rochefoucauld approvingly: "Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue." That is a fundamental motivation with conservatism; the difference between them and the neocons is that the neocons assert that hypocrisy is a virtue (whereas true conservatives consider it an embarrassing character flaw).

The dilemma with hypocrites is thus: When confronted with something that contradicts their expressed beliefs (the ones for which we have a documented record), they remain silent, and in this way, prevent anyone from concluding whether their beliefs are deeply held or whether their belief systems are coherent. Then, when it becomes impossible to deny the evidence with regard to some outrageous violation of civil liberties, they become "principled" and claim that the protection of all civil liberties is what they've always stood for. And you can't point to any inconsistency, since, when it was appropriate to stand on principle, they remained silent.

E in MD said...

The most obvious hypocrisy down here is all the Republicans who wanted to dismantle our rights and claim that if you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to fear, yet people like Cheney and Bush are fighting tooth and nail to prevent public documents such as the white house guest records from becoming public. Yet impeachment is still off the table because of San Francisco values.

thwap said...

They like to have their cake and eat it too. But I don't like our "anti-hate laws" neither.

http://enmasse.ca/forums/viewtopic.php?t=9955&start=0

Ti-Guy said...

I love our anti-hate laws. Round 'em up and gulag the haters on Axel-Heilberg. Yee haw!!

Just imagine how much better everything would be right now if everyone at FoxNews and The NRO had been interned? I believe some well-known conservative actually made a case for internment...

Frank Frink said...

Don't know about amused but I am totally unsurprised.