Remora

Peter Beinert has always passed the litmus test for editing the New Republic, as far as Limited Inc was concerned. That is, he's oafish, smug, and prone to Democratic center thinking. The liberalism of the fundraiser, in short, with a foreign policy right of Bushypoo's. But his column about the Right's embrace of civil liberties is, we must admit, pretty on target. Here's a graf and a half:

"... since September 11, George W. Bush and John Ashcroft (who quickly forgot his record in the Senate) have proposed stunning infringements of basic American liberties. An administration that vowed to oppose racial profiling is interrogating thousands of Arab-Americans solely because they are of a certain gender, age, country of origin, and came to this country at a certain time. Thousands of others have been detained indefinitely--their names kept secret--mostly for minor immigration offenses that have nothing to do with terrorism. The administration claims that its proposed military tribunals will be fair because military courts already fairly try American soldiers--willfully ignoring the fact that those courts contain safeguards that the proposed tribunals almost certainly will not.

Liberals have been screaming about this for weeks now, and they should keep on screaming. But they don't matter to this administration. The people who do are on the right."

Compare this with simplistic Christopher Hitchens, who is carrying his Diogenes of the Left act to a comic extreme (he scatters his lamp light looking for uncrazy lefties, or critics of Clinton, or whatever stance he has decided is the most daringly heterodox since Mencken came out for Darwin, and he finds himself, to his great satisfaction, alone, surrounded only by decent right-wingers and members of the staff of Reason Magazine). Here's CH in the Nation:


"Near the bar I ran into Grover Norquist, one of the chief whips of the Reagan revolution. He's also the man who arranged to take the President to the Washington mosque, and he has been very active in opposing Attorney General Ashcroft's megalomaniacal plan to turn the United States into a national-security garrison. Norquist's question to me was, in effect, What happened to the liberals? In meetings in the House, the supposed "USA PATRIOT Act" had been somewhat declawed by conservatives like Bob Barr of Georgia, Darrell Issa (an Arab-American Republican from California) and Chris Cannon of Utah, ably assisted by Bobby Scott, a black Democrat from Virginia. Some of the most extreme proposals of the bill were either diluted or struck out or subjected to a four-year time limit related to the course of the war. But then the White House tried to resell the original bill to the Senate. "That's the Democrats, right?" said Norquist. "But we were assured there would be a fight up there. Instead all the liberals just rolled over."

An assessment with which CH agrees, in spite of the fact that the rest of the press was touting the odd Bob Barr-Barney Frank partnership. But Frank is getting in Hitchens' territory by palling around with a right-winger -- only a daring guy like our contemporary Orwell would even dare...

What isn't being said, and Limited Inc is trying to find a place that would pay to have it said, is that there's a multiplier effect going on: those "gun nuts" who have fastened to the Second Amendment like leeches are starting to appreciate the context of that particular amendment -- the bill of rights. Since we are rather gun nuttish here at Limited Inc ourselves, we view this as yet another reason to keep the american people armed and considered dangerous.