Patriot Goes Up Against Treason Lobbyist

Patriot Peter Brimelow, founder of VDARE.COM, debated Treason Lobbyist Jacob Hornberger on immigration.

I await footage of the debate, but I expect “Bumper Hornberger” was intellectually disemboweled.

He ought to be used to it, although the bitch-slap he received from Robert Bidinotto occurred some time ago, so “Bumper” may need a reminder. See “Shame on Bumper Hornberger,” reproduced hereunder.

I have no wish to revisit the manner in which he (and his ever-righteous ifeminist handmaiden, or hyena, rather) swarmed me. I’ll say only this: Hornberger and his backers seldom fail to bend over backwards to avoid imputing evil intent to bad elements or evil characters (as Bidinotto elaborates hereunder). Yet me Bumper and his gang accused of malicious intent in the absence of any. In other words, they implied I was a liar; impugning my person rather than my positions.

Again, notwithstanding the intellectual differences we hold on the issues; what makes these people–who’re forever posing as paragons of justice–so despicable is that they convicted me of malicious intent when there was none.

In the universe of these twisted individuals, some are more equal than others.

In any event, in “Shame on Bumper Hornberger,” Robert Bidinotto explains why “Bumper Hornberger” is a lousy exegete, not fit to defend truth. This is why I am quite confident Peter Brimelow, a class act, will have tossed and gored Hornberger “real good.”

The BIDINOTTO BLOG
Shame on Bumper Hornberger
posted 08/26/03

Bumper who?

Okay, apologies. This impromptu post refers to a matter more arcane than you’ll normally find here, and I beg your patience for a brief setup.

A feisty columnist for WorldNetDaily.com, Ilana Mercer, recently took on some fellow libertarians for their one-sided view of Middle East politics: the view that Israel is the root of all evil, and that the poor, downtrodden Palestinians are merely responding defensively and justly against the Zionist oppressor.

Ilana (she’s a friend, so I’ll call her that) has a perfectly good point. There’s a curious moral asymmetry among some self-styled lovers of Liberty and Justice, who rage against Israel for targeting the likes of Hamas terrorists in self-defense, yet who simultaneously exude boundless sympathy toward those who encourage their kids to strap on explosives and blow themselves up, along with scores of innocent noncombatants in buses, restaurants, and nightclubs. For most Americans, this is an easy moral call; but then again, most Americans aren’t libertarian anarchists.

Anyway, it so happens that one of Ilana’s targets was a writer and editor, Sheldon Richman. Not one to mince words, she wrote: “I understand that libertarians like Sheldon Richman (and the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review) believe, mistakenly, that all ‘the land’ belongs to the Arabs.”

Mr. Richman, who is of Jewish descent, took great offense. He claimed that with this sentence Ilana had implied that he, too, was among those who denied the reality of the Holocaust. One notes, though, that in her sentence, Ilana had fastidiously segregated Mr. Richman from the Holocaust Deniers by means of a parenthetical barricade. I don’t think that any fair reading of the sentence (that is, a reading by someone not personally involved in the counterpunching) would construe it to mean that Mr. Richman was similar to the I. H. R. in denying the Holocaust–only in their shared beliefs about Arab claims to Israeli land.

Now Ilana Mercer is perfectly capable of defending herself, and she has. But a bit of piling on against her has begun, with one Jacob “Bumper” Hornberger–head of something called the Future of Freedom Foundation–now hyperventilating against the lady and her online publisher, WorldNetDaily.

Mr. Hornberger believes that Mr. Richman was grievously wounded by Ilana’s parenthetical bludgeon, and has publicly damned WorldNetDaily (“Shame on WorldNetDaily” is his screed’s title) for daring to defend their columnist, rather than muzzling or disowning her. Along the way, he accuses Ilana of a “false and despicable insinuation” and of a “smear”; and he further claims that she “knowingly, deliberately, and intentionally chose not to pursue the truth…”

I would have stayed out of this particular little spat except for two things.

First, I don’t much like it when men gang up on a lady–especially a lady whom I know to be honorable.

Second, it so happens that I’ve had a bit of first-hand experience with Mr. Hornberger concerning the matters that he says so concern him: false and despicable insinuations, smears, and deliberate misrepresentations of the truth.

This seems an opportune moment to revisit that episode.

The July 1990 issue of his Freedom Daily column, “The Forgotten Importance of Civil Liberties,” found Mr. Hornberger striking his favorite pose–that of a self-righteous moralizer–this time to attack me for what he described as “a tremendous intellectual assault on civil liberties.” My offense, he proclaimed to his readership (such as it is), was my three-part series, “Crime and Consequences,” which appeared during 1989 in The Freeman magazine.

While I am gratified that, to Mr. Hornberger, my series was both “tremendous” and “intellectual,” I certainly didn’t recognize any of my views in his characterization of them. According to him, here is what I said:

“Concerned with ever-increasing crime rates in America, Mr. Bidinotto argued that the solution, at least in part, turned on the curtailment of the safeguards enunciated in the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Mr. Bidinotto suggested that if Americans just loosened some of the strictures in the Bill of Rights which enabled so many criminals to go free, the crime problem could be significantly alleviated. Not spared from Mr. Bidinotto’s attack were civil liberties lawyers as well as such rights as trial by jury, right to bail, right to counsel, protection from unreasonable searches and seizures, and protection from self-incrimination.”

Now had I written any of those things, I would have been first in line to condemn myself, sparing Mr. Hornberger the strain of further moral posturing. But the reader will first note a curious fact: nowhere in his bill of indictment does one find a single word in quotation marks. [A technique “Bumper” and his ifeminist friend further perfected on me.]

That isn’t surprising, since not a single claim is true.

What Mr. Hornberger declared to be attacks on the Bill of Rights were nothing more than my unapologetic assault on the Warren Court’s infamous misinterpretations and manipulations of the Bill of Rights: their shameless departures from a “strict constructionist” approach to constitutional interpretation, and their wholesale invention of a category of criminal “rights” never envisioned, intended, nor codified by the Framers.

For example, I criticized Supreme Court decisions such as Miranda v. Arizona (1966) and Mapp v. Ohio (1961) for manufacturing evidentiary “exclusionary rules” that one finds nowhere in the Constitution or Bill of Rights. Yet Mr. Hornberger equated my criticism of this constitutional vandalism with criticism of the Constitution itself. Perhaps this is understandable. Mr. Hornberger is an attorney, and having gone through a modern law school, he may no longer be capable of grasping subtle distinctions–such as the difference between James Madison and Earl Warren.

To take another example, what exactly did I say that he declared to be an “attack” on the “right to bail”? Only this: “Career criminals–and anyone with a history of escapes or failures to show in court–should never get bail consideration.” That is hardly a radical assault on a “right”: in fact, it’s the essence of the 1984 federal Bail Reform Act, which grants judges the authority to deny bail to defendants who pose a danger to individuals or the community. My position is totally consistent with the wording of the Eighth Amendment, which says that “Excessive bail shall not be required”–leaving it to judges to determine whether defendants are trustworthy to appear in court, whether bail ought to be granted, and in what amount. I said nothing inconsistent with this established principle, leaving me to wonder if Mr. Hornberger believes that the Constitution guarantees bail to every defendant, no matter what his character or trustworthiness.

I could go on, but the interested reader can decide the matter for himself. The three-part series is available online: Part I, Part II, and Part III. [Links defunct.]

Afterwards, the reader may also decide for himself if the accusations Mr. Hornberger slings at Ilana Mercer more appropriately describe the accusations he made against me: “false and despicable insinuation” and “smear” by someone who “knowingly, deliberately, and intentionally chose not to pursue the truth…”

If Mr. Richman needs a defender concerned with the truth, it should be someone other than Bumper Hornberger.