GAAH! It Drives Me Crazy When Journalists And Pundits Float The Bad Guys' Boat!

Ascribing good intentions to bad actors is delusional and just perpetuates the problem

FOR YEARS I'VE BEEN BOTHERED BY THE TENDENCY OF PUNDITS AND JOURNALISTS to reflexively characterize even overtly law-defying acts of government officials as being nonetheless well-intentioned. I imagine this mealy-mouthing is done for fear of losing readers who would find straight talk off-putting, but when the official bad behavior is systemic and sustained, this disinclination to call it by its true name is a purely harmful practice.

Playing along with the pretense of good intentions for bad behavior simply perpetuates many readers' increasingly-dangerous delusions about the character of those in power. It also supports eventual "get-out-of-jail-free" cards for villains who should be being universally denounced, and whose futures should instead serve as cautions to others who might be tempted to similarly offend.

Worse, those "see-no-evil" courtesies lend a completely undeserved legitimacy to the adolescent notion that 'intentions' are relevant in public policy-- a notion under the fog of which all manner of evils have been successfully fastened upon Americans for decades now. If "I was just trying to keep us safe" is an adequate, accountability-proof excuse for violating the Constitution, who can be surprised that there's a whole lot of violating going on?

THE MOST (AND MOST OBNOXIOUS) OF THESE puerile, perp-serving exculpatory expressions are found in mainstream media stories in which the offending officials' own descriptions of their evil acts are presented without challenge or clarification. This allows the 'all-seeing-eye' offense to be presented as a Constitution-respecting search solely directed at uncovering terrorist threats, salted with claims of successes to make it all sound effective as well as legitimate (even though "effective" has nothing whatever to do with "legitimate"-- there's nothing in the law that says, "...but we don't really mean "no" if doing otherwise works well...").

But even the friends of liberty and the law fall into the honey-trap of ascribing good intentions, either to stay at what they imagine to be their readers comfort-level, just out of reflexive bonhomie, or because doing so is easier than doing otherwise. Unfortunately, while less palpably obnoxious (because you know that if pressed, these folks would come out on the right side of the question), these passes are even more harmful, in that they leave casual observers of the political stage with the impression that thoughtful, objective commentators actually have reason to believe that the felons being discussed are genuinely the people's good and faithful servants (from which comes "They must know something [about the situation or the law] that I don't, and so I should close my ears to all this talk about illegality and give them my support!").

For instance, even Andrew Napolitano, a great voice for the rule of law and against the systemic lawlessness of the denizens of Mordor-on-the-Potomac, nonetheless grants a presumption of good intentions  (and thus offers support) for the crimes of the administration, the NSA and the cooperating private businesspeople. In his July 10 article 'Above The Law', Judge Napolitano-- even while leading up to a righteous denunciation of the NSA total surveillance programs as an effort to keep us servile to Obama and a violation of the Fourth Amendment-- describes the perpetrators' goal in engaging in these crimes as wanting to "keep us safe from terrorism".

John Stossel has not only given a "good-intentions" pass to the bad actors, he nearly hands out the Kool-Aid himself. Explaining why he doesn't get worked up about surveillance-state crimes in a June 12 article titled, 'Why Libertarians Have Better Tthings To Worry About Than The NSA', the normally measured and genteel but relentlessly BS-puncturing Stossel acknowledges that, "[T]he snooping may be unnecessary. Government's claim that it prevents terror is weak... [The snooping is] invasive, probably illegal and maybe useless." But then, perhaps in an ill-considered effort to sound even-handed, he goes on to throw out the "but it's all done with the best of intentions" card: "Terrorists do want to murder us. If the NSA is halfway competent, Big Data should help detect plots"

PEOPLE, PEOPLE, PEOPLE! The goal of these crimes is not to keep us safe from terrorists!

The goal of these programs is to collect a searchable record of everything YOU have done over the last decade and more, in case it should become beneficial to the perps to act against you in some way. There IS no "terrorist threat" of any meaningful dimension, and never has been, and if there were, this "total awareness" outrage wouldn't even slow it down.

If there were an actual terrorism campaign against the American people as asserted by the military- security- surveillance-state interests, we would have suffered a multitude of actual, completed terrorism events over the last 12 years. After all, terrorism is cheap, easy and unstoppable.

Think about it. All it takes to commit a pretty effective act of terrorism is to buy a $500 junk car and park it on a passenger-rail train track, for instance. Or cheaper and easier still, just dose a few random bottles of Tylenol with poison, or even simply claim that this has been done-- those of us who are old enough will remember how much panic a little no-cost effort like that can cause.

If actual terrorists had designs of the sort the grossly expensive and outrageously abusive TSA purportedly exists to thwart, they would be throwing satchel charges into the security queues in airports now, where travelers are routinely bunched up in large numbers and hindered from fleeing. The bad guys could in many cases walk away (we are told this doesn't matter to them anyway, of course) and they would now be spared even the expense of buying a plane ticket.

Real terrorists would be poisoning or polluting water supplies-- or claiming to have done so. They would be cutting power lines. Heck, they'd just be planting random little bombs here and there.

There are hundreds of real terrorism opportunities, and they can't be prevented. "Total awareness" isn't being conducted in order to do what anyone with the sense of a monkey knows is impossible.

THE ONLY RELATIONSHIP THE NSA SURVEILLANCE CRIMES MAY HAVE EVER HAD TO TERRORISM is in the possibility that they began as programs hoping to unearth or facilitate the manufacture of "terrorist-threat" evidence. This would have been for the purpose of justifying the crimes of invading Iraq and Afghanistan and killing hundreds of thousands of folks who had never done anything to harm us killed and ruining the lives of millions more with something a lot more acceptable than the real reasons.

"Protecting us from terrorism" is a whole lot likelier to be reflexively forgiven, and to minimize the dangers of future prosecution, than is the far likelier real reasons for these crimes: thwarting Saddam Hussein's plan to drop the dollar as the exclusive currency for oil sales and thus threatening the dollar's status as the world reserve currency; gaining control of the territory needed for the installation of an energy pipeline across  Afghanistan; setting up the board for the sequential destruction or regime-change of all Middle-Eastern states not already our puppets; and creating pretexts for funneling vast amounts of American wealth into the hands of armament and other "security state" business interests.

Thus the extreme "information-gathering" programs: Surveill enough folks long enough and it becomes possible to construct entrapment "security theater" events of the sort that make up nearly the whole of all alleged "terrorist plots" supposedly prevented by the state, just as waterboarding hapless prisoners at Gitmo enough times might get someone to desperately "confess" to something. Either method can be used to make it appear that there really was a good reason for handing over all this money and power, and doing all those terrible things to our liberties and rule of law, and terrible things to all those folks living elsewhere.

THOMAS PAINE WAS ONE OF THE BRIGHTEST LIGHTS of the astonishingly bright constellation of minds and spirits miraculously appearing together in the second half of the eighteenth century in America, and he explained to us long ago what's really going on here: "Taxes are not raised to carry on wars; wars are raised to carry on taxes."

Paine's wisdom was echoed and amplified by James Madison: "Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. . . . No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."

THESE are the reasons for the NSA outrage and all the rest of these serial crimes being committed by those in control of the state-- Republican or Democrat. These crimes have nothing to do with providing you and me with security. They are all about securing wealth and power into the hands of the connected few.

I call upon all others writing about these matters to speak sensibly and speak plainly. No one committing these crimes is so stupid as to be doing so because of a sincere belief that this kind of "egg-breaking" benefits the American people and will produce a legitimating omelet. The rest of us must stop speaking as though this is so.

“There is no safety for honest men except by believing all possible evil of evil men.”

-Edmund Burke

"The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names."

-Chinese proverb

I ALSO CALL UPON ALL THOSE WRITING ABOUT THESE MATTERS to grow up to the fact that the brilliant founders like Paine and Madison provided a defense against these well-anticipated threats to American liberty. These architects of our minarchist Constitutional structure (either directly, in Madison's case or by influence, as in Paine's) equipped each individual American with the means to regulate the resources available to the state upon which these much-and-rightly-feared threats depend.

These means arise from the fact that although widely misunderstood today (with the unfortunate consequence of causing many who would not were they clear on this point to scorn the Constitution), the tax authority granted under the US Constitution leaves the fed-state virtually incapable of commandeering resources from American individuals without their express, fully optional choice and cooperation. (The only plenary tax authority granted to the fed-state is to impose taxes on the several states. That alternative is designed to impose its own strict limits on the amounts that can be claimed, and to invoke inescapable political accountability to deter abuse.  It has only been used on a handful of occasions in our entire history, and then with considerable care.)

AS HARD AS THE STATISTS HAVE STRIVEN TO HIDE THEM from American consciousness, the Founders' tax-structure provisions for restraining a state gone bad remain fully in place, and remain the uncompromised law of the land. However, as such things always do, these means for restraining the state require that people understand them, and are encouraged to use them (and this requires that some folks overcome their mule-headedly-stubborn, ever-more shameful preference for the myth that our ancestors were complete morons over an admission that they themselves have been mistaken about the true nature of the income tax).

Every one of you pundits and journalists (and everyone else, for that matter) who fail to spread this critically-important understanding, and fail to encourage its use, are, in that way also, just serving the interests of the enemies of liberty and the law. Please stop serving the enemies of the people, and get on the right side before it is too late.

"Free government is founded in jealousy, not confidence. It is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind those we are obliged to trust with power.... In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."

-Thomas Jefferson

For a few words on the practice of bad state actors of menacing the population with hobgoblins as a means of engineering their theft of power and wealth, see 'The Shield'.

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