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Quote of the Day: Due Process and Fairness
Left-wing zealots have often been prepared to ride roughshod over due process and basic considerations of fairness when they think they can get away with it. For them the ends always seem to justify the means. That is precisely how their predecessors came to create the gulag. – Margaret Thatcher
It appears we are seeing this play out in this week’s news, but it has been a problem for years. Certainly since the Department of Education changed standards on sexual assault accusations on campus.
We do not have to offer our adversaries due process or basic considerations of fairness. It might be easier to win that way. But as Margaret Thatcher observes that path leads to the Gulag. As for those who call up the Gulag, thinking they want it? They often find themselves imprisoned within it.
Published in Law
I am not convinced that leftists think the Gulag is a bad thing. Especially not for them, as they know how to do things right, and if it takes cracking a few heads in order to get this society molded to their ideal, it is worth it. Remember the talk of making Obama a dictator?
I agree they do not. Let me add something to the original post to explain why even those who want the Gulag should fear it.
And Trump’s Education Secretary can change it back. Probably waiting for the 2018 or 2020 election.
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The Department of Education should have been eliminated long ago. Do so now, please.
I call Godwin on that quote. (That is sarcasm, btw.)
Nowadays it is hard to tell. Things have gone beyond parody.
The people who seek to create totalitarian utopias always seem to assume that “their kind” will always be in charge, such that they will always get to decide who goes in the gulag.
I would have thought that the election of President Trump and Vice President Pence combined with their certainty that he was an authoritarian would have illuminated for them the possibility that the tables could be turned, and that they could end up in the gulag.
But apparently that lesson is not being learned. It appears they have supreme confidence that there will be enough of “their kind” around to protect them (see today’s post by @mim526 on Democrats in Congress demanding that members of the Executive Branch ignore the directives of the President (i.e., the head of the Executive Branch)).
During the Junior Bush administration it seemed many conservatives didn’t care that the vast new police powers established under the Patriot Acts could ever be used against them. Because, of course, we weren’t worried about Bush coming after us. Even I, a long-time Never-Busher, didn’t worry about him coming after me.
And at at the state level, Michigan Governor John Engler presided over a huge transfer of school authority from the localities to the state, as if Democrats would never gain control of the education department.
Robespierre. Trotsky. Ever-evolving intersectionality.
Well, what lesson should be learned, when the only people dragged out of bed or perp walked are men who dared support Donald Trump? He is exactly correct in saying this week that he has no Attorney General. Jeff Sessions was captured by the agency before he even took the oath of office.
When the Democrats lost the House and Senate in 1994 over the HillaryCare disaster, the lesson the left took from that wasn’t “Don’t push to nationalize health care, or the voters will get mad“. It was “The next time we control the White House and both houses of Congress, do health care as fast as possible“….
…which is what they did in 2009-10. But this time, when Obama was sworn in, people on the left were angry that he didn’t have Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld immediately brought up on war crimes charges, and that the power of the government wasn’t used to harass and/or shut down Fox News, conservative talk radio and conservative web sites. That didn’t happen, but as with more government control of health care between 1995 and 2009, it doesn’t mean there aren’t people out there still seething that it didn’t happen, and vowing not to make the same mistake twice, the next time they hold the presidency, the House and the Senate at the same time.
Exactly.
In George Weigel’s recent book”Lessons In Hope” about his efforts to understand JP II in order to write his biography” he paraphrased JP II on the struggle between communism and the Church, “ This was not something adjudicable. There was no fifty-yard line of coexistence between two utterly opposed views of the human person, human community, and human destiny. Someone was going to win, and somebody had to lose.”
While I am reluctant to put conservatives on the same side as JPII, indeed, Weigel’s and JPII’s whole point is that it was not a left right, liberal conservative struggle, it was basically good and evil, the individual against totalitarians. In the case of Democrats and their media supporters, or the media and their Democratic supporters, which ever deserves front billing, it is evil and all the rest of us. There is no working with these people, no compromise, no accommodation. It is not “adjudicable.” We must learn this in the same way the Vatican reluctantly learned from JPII (and has since forgotten) who they were dealing with. JP got it right and the whole edifice disintegrated right in front of us. Clarity and truth are at the core of both struggles.
Yeah, wow, well put. I always think when Francis criticizes “conservative” Catholics, he’s really criticizing Catholics. It’s the CINO leftists whose religion is progressivism he’s siding with.
But, since you’ve outlined the good/evil conflict so clearly, expect equivocation in 3..2..1.
Already did. One of DeVos’first actions was to withdraw the “Dear colleague” letter that moved the standard of guilt imposed by the Obama administration.
Great. The next step is to monitor the results and be sure it’s followed. If not, use the precedent of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, because Leftist hate to follow proper authority.
Why shouldn’t they believe that there will be plenty of their kind? They have increasing levels of electoral support, media support and academic support.
And it’s just a coincidence that the US now has the largest proportion and amount of foreign-born citizens ever. Folks from countries and cultures without Anglo-American traditions like rule of law and due process. Recent immigrants don’t overwhelmingly favor Democrats, do they? And the Democrats, after over 200 years of existence, have become a quasi-socialist party just by accident, right?
You don’t favor reducing all immigration into the US, do you?