Lady Liberty Keeps Getting Her Ass Pinched

As creepy as I find Grand Inquisitor Ashcroft, I think it is more what I believe he wants to do, more so than anything he has done; although he has done a few things that really ought to be questioned. Can we really trust the fate of the nation to a presumptively heterosexual man who is so afraid of a bare breast, he would spend $8,000 to cover the Spirit of Justice Majesty of Law statues’ naughty bits? Instead of maybe…moving the podium…or growing up a little bit? I would think someone would have pointed out the brutally hilarious irony inherent in that symbolic little gesture; which of course assumes that the Attorney General even has a sense of irony. Not a bet I’d take.

And speaking breasts that make the Attorney General quake in his sensible shoes, can anybody tell me there is a reason to fine CBS over the Janet Jackson Superbowl thing? It was tamer than the commercials that ran in between stretches of violence by committee. For that matter it was tamer than the neo-burlesque performance leading up to it. And her tit was what tipped the scales from entertainment to obscenity? That’s like watching two crackheads get high and screw on your lawn, then getting offended when one of them tries to bum a smoke.

While this is all old news, it is useful in providing some context for where the Justice Department has its priorities, doesn’t it.

“Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” - H. L. Mencken

That’s really what scares me, and just about everybody else who’s skeptical of Ashcroft’s motives. He just has the grim, unsmiling certainty and gravity of a fanatic. It kind of makes you nostalgic for Janet Reno.

But as creepy as all of that is, what is happing to our more civilized cousins on other side of the Pond in Britannia, gives makes Ashcroft positively cuddly. Or at least not apathetically homicidal.

The Brits, in their zeal to solve society’s problems with government bumbling a.k.a socialism, are busily instituting programs that don’t even bother with giving people the chance to be the biggest and best screw ups they can, before they are subjected to the whims of elected officials and the insidiously vile bureaucracy that politicians and their good intentions deposit like a bag of flaming dog poop on the front porch. It’s the kind of dilemma you can’t win. Do you let it destroy everything you care about, or do you step in, knowing that you’ll have to spend a good chunk of the night scraping bureaucrat off your shoes.

Now I can follow the logic path that leads to developing vaccines against drug addiction. It makes sense. But administering that to someone based on the theory that they may be at risk, rather than after they’ve developed the problem is almost as dangerous as it is stupid.

Dangerous because, you’re screwing some fairly fundamental brain chemistry on the possibility that someone may choose to do it on their own later. It also neatly dodges most of the outrage that would come with forcibly injecting people with drugs for their own good, by targeting the only segment of the population that doesn’t have any right to object, and whose possible – not inevitable - victimization can be used to justify damn near anything, in the name of saving the children.

And it’s stupid, because, the problem is addiction and abuse, not coke or heroin or ciggies. The only reason more designer drugs don’t cross over is that there are already substances that can pretty much do anything out there, in wide use. The other reason, that these can be administered after the problem develops, make forcing it on people dumber than Anna Nicole Smith on whippets. Is it back asswards to apply this solution after a problem develops? Only if your idea of liberty is being able to choose what color cup you have to pee into.

But if you eliminate something like cocaine, do you really think that some ambitious chemist isn’t going to try and take a piece of that multi-billion dollar market? If you’re under the impression you’ve seen it all, lemme tell ya, there are chem lab geeks out there with nothing but time, money and free chemicals to play with. Drugs aren’t the problem. People are the problem, and unless you can fix them, well, you aren’t going to fix anything.

The other program those jolly fine chumps are looking at involves throwing more money and government attention at the children of convicted felons, “targeting” and “tracking” them. Well thank God the presumption of innocent until proven guilty is being preserved. And we're certainly glad that guilt by association hasn't taken root over there. They aren’t even making a pretense of going after some arbitrarily defined “at risk youth.”

No, why bother when you can just saddle them with government policy based on what these kids might do, because of who their parents are. Maybe it means they'll arrest the remaining Kennedys next time they visit.

The really, truly, capital “D” Dangerous consequences of these types of programs is that they indoctrinate a generation into the cult of bureaucracy, government supervision, and the atrophy of liberty by lack of use.

The last thing anybody wants is a government we trust. And that's not sarcasm. If we trust our government without reservation, and start handing over our liberties based on conjecture, even reasonably plausible conjecture, we're abdicating the responsiblity we have to occasionally take them by the scruff of the neck and rug their faces in that horrible pile they left on the Persian carpet.