Category Archives: Constitution

Alexander Acosta Did Not Need To Fall On His Sword

Constitution, Justice, Law, Sex, The West

The lynch mob against Alex Acosta, Trump’s former labor secretary, is just that: a lynch mob. Jeffrey Epstein is the slimy sleazebag here, not Mr. Acosta.

I don’t usually agree with broadcaster Michael Medved, who leans heavily left. However, today, Mr. Medved did a bang-up job defending the rules of evidence. Or, what Joe Biden once denounced as Western jurisprudence.

The girls involved with Epstein did not wish to testify. And who can blame them?

And while “[t]he evidence in the original case appears overwhelming—in an interview with the Miami Herald the lead detective recounted phone records, flight logs and instructions for delivering flowers to one of Mr Epstein’s young fixations, alongside her high-school report card”—Epstein’s “original defense team included Alan Dershowitz and Kenn Starr, two lawyers skilled in defending the indefensible.” (The Economist.)

Epstein hired the best lawyers who were unmatched by the prosecution and the limits of the law.

“… his star-studded lawyers,” reports the Daily Beast, “threatened to go to trial in a case prosecutors feared was unwinnable, in part because Epstein’s team dredged up dirt on the victims, including social media posts indicating drug use.”

Dershowitz (who has defended President Trump with his usual legal élan), “told The Daily Beast that his accuser, Virginia Roberts, “has committed perjury and will continue to commit perjury in federal court.”

“I am asking the FBI to come to this trial because perjury will be committed in front of a federal judge and in a federal courtroom,” Dershowitz added. “And I will prove it is she who is committing perjury.”

Even the Economist concedes that it was not at all “obvious that the top federal prosecutor who negotiated the deal, Alexander Acosta, had better options available.”

“… [T]he difficulties of securing convictions in cases of rape or sexual abuse are well known.”

Alex Acosta, whose address to the public I found credible, had to ultimately defer to police and prosecutors in Palm Beach, Florida.

America Was Never Meant To Be A Raw, Ripe Democracy

Conservatism, Constitution, Democracy, Federalism, Founding Fathers, Natural Law

In the context of last week’s column against democracy, it’s important to remember that, “the reason the American democracy has been more successful than others is precisely because “the fathers of the American Republic devised an instrument of government unparalleled as a conservative power for ordered liberty.” (“The Conservative Mind” by Russell Kirk.)

Everything in the American Constitution was wisely designed to constrain raw democracy. A “great part of that accomplishment results from the wise conservatism of the Federal Constitution,” which avoids “the peril of a single assembly,” recognizes “the rights of several* states and the necessity for limiting the power of positive legislation.”

However, warned Kirk, the father of American conservatism, “[I]f there is a weak point anywhere in this “artificial reservoir,” “the mighty force which it controls will burst through it and spread destruction far and near.”

(“The Conservative Mind” by Russell Kirk, p. 335)

And so it has.

* The meaning of “several” in this sentence is “individual,” I believe. 

** Image is of the guillotine, French democracy in action

NEW COLUMN: Bernie’s Degeneracy: That’s Democracy For Ya

Conservatism, Constitution, Democracy, Democrats, Egalitarianism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Morality, Political Philosophy

NEW COLUMN, “Bernie’s Degeneracy: That’s Democracy For Ya,” is now on WND.COM and the Unz Review.

An excerpt:

BERNIE SANDERS, the senator from Vermont, said he thinks “everyone should have the right to vote—even the Boston Marathon bomber … even for terrible people, because once you start chipping away and you say, ‘Well, that guy committed a terrible crime, not going to let him vote,’ you’re running down a slippery slope.”

Bernie is right about a “slippery slope.” But the befuddled Bernie is worried about the wrong slope.

Denying the vote to some and conferring it on others is not a “slippery slope.” It’s exercising good judgment.

Insisting that the vote in America belongs to everyone, irrespective: now that’s a slippery slope, down which the slide is well underway.

As it stands, there are almost no moral or ethical obligations attached to citizenship in our near-unfettered Democracy.

Multiculturalism means that you confer political privileges on many an individual whose illiberal practices run counter to, even undermine, the American political tradition.

Radical leaders across the U.S. quite seriously consider Illegal immigrants as candidates for the vote—and for every other financial benefit that comes from the work of American citizens.

The rights of all able-bodied idle individuals to an income derived from labor not their own: That, too, is a debate that has arisen in democracy, where the demos rules like a despot.

But then moral degeneracy is inherent in raw democracy. The best political thinkers, including America’s constitution-makers, warned a long time ago that mass, egalitarian society would thus degenerate.

What Bernie Sanders prescribes for the country—unconditional voting—is but an extension of “mass franchise,” which was feared by the greatest thinkers on Democracy. Prime Minister George Canning of Britain, for instance. …

… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN, “Bernie’s Degeneracy: That’s Democracy For Ya,” is now on WND.COM and the Unz Review.

 

NEW COLUMN: Mueller Inquisition: ‘Collusion’ Pushers Must Pay

Constitution, Democrats, Donald Trump, Justice, Law, Politics, Republicans, THE ELITES, The Establishment

NEW COLUMN IS “Mueller Inquisition: ‘Collusion’ Pushers Must Pay.” It’s now on WND, the Unz Review and Townhall.com.   http://tinyurl.com/y36fergx

Excerpt:

… In the course of defending his reputation against silly, but gravely serious, smears—that he was a “Russian asset,” in the words of former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe—the president forcefully and publicly berated the Mueller proceedings and his turncoat attorney, Michael Cohen (who, though a hostile witness, testified that there was no collusion).

To Mueller, that paragon of virtue, the dilemma revolved around whether to indict Trump for the fighting words he spoke in defense of his now-proven innocence. Free speech, some might call it. (Remember that quaint thing?)

For in the legal penumbra in which the U.S. Office of Special Counsel operates, aggressively professing your innocence can amount to obstructing “justice.”

Fight an unjust conviction with everything you’ve—and you risk being convicted of a crime.

This is the Kafkaesque, circular reasoning that animates the workings of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC): It can criminalize conduct—worse, it can criminalize speech—that is perfectly licit in natural law, such as verbally defending oneself against spurious accusations.

Or, as Attorney-General William Barr put it, “Mr. Trump could not have obstructed justice because HE DID NOT COLLUDE WITH RUSSIA.”

As a scrupulously honest broadcaster, Tucker Carlson recently confessed to “looking back in shame” for having originally supported Kenneth Starr’s independent counsel investigation of President Clinton. (Good libertarians have always opposed the very existence of the OSC. This writer certainly has.)

Another honest man, Democrat Mark Penn, former chief strategist to Hillary Clinton and a frequent guest of the Tucker Carlson show, had “spent a year working with President Clinton” to fend off Special Counsel Ken Starr’s extrajudicial onslaught. Penn had recently remarked candidly that the Starr investigation “was child’s play” compared to the infractions of the Mueller investigation.

Yet, few have been willing to concede that the Mueller inquisition was the Kenneth Starr Chamber by any other name.

The origin of the Star[r] Chamber sobriquet is in 15th-century England.

Meant to remedy injustice in the times of Henry VIII, the “Court of Star Chamber,” as it was known, was soon co-opted and corrupted, becoming “a symbol of oppression” during the times of Charles I.

For reasons obvious, the “Starr Chamber” designation stuck to the outfit run by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, in1998.

Likewise, there was, seemingly, no limit to the broad remit of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Other than some accused Russians, nobody stateside dared challenge—from the vantage point of first principles—this draconian medieval inquisition …

… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN IS “Mueller Inquisition: ‘Collusion’ Pushers Must Pay.” It’s now on WND, the Unz Review and Townhall.com.   http://tinyurl.com/y36fergx