The Rubber Hose Right…

quite naturally evolves into the Assassination Right. This zeal for Salvation through Leviathan by Any Means Necessary is why, in the middle of all the fulmination about Obama as the Hitler/Stalin/Atheist/Muslim monster who is just about to murder 25 million Americans with his Bill Ayers Kommando secret death squads, nobody on the Talk Radio Right has uttered a peep about his actual (and incredibly dangerous) usurpation of power by which he has granted himself the authority (in the name of Keeping Us Safe from Terror, of course) to murder anybody in the world (including American citizens) without evidence, arrest or trial simply because he declares them to be, on his say-so alone, an “enemy combatant”.

Our End to Evil enthusiasts on the Right love this sort of stuff (as Goldberg’s and, especially, Whiton’s columns illustrate). And so, we find again this weird sotto voce cooperation between the “Left” and “Right” to concentrate despotic power in the hands of the State while the rhetoric on both sides continues to be about “freedom” and “defending American values”. I’m skeptical that the Founders would be enthused about the President assuming the power to murder whoever he pleases, including citizens, simply by declaring the proposed victim an “enemy combatant” and expecting that claim to be accepted without trial or evidence beyond a White House press release. Still less would they be comfy with the assumption of such power being predicated on the theory that the President will relinquish such power as soon as “terror” goes away. And the notion that this is about defending “freedom” or “American values” is laughable.

Our political classes appear to be devolving into those who want to brightly and breezily waste other people’s money without respect for the rule of law, and those who want to brightly and breezily waste other people’s lives without respect for the rule of law. Both of them promise us the Great Rosy Dawn, whether at home or abroad, if we will just grant them the power to behave lawlessly with respect to either the fifth or the seventh commandment. We are not approaching, but have already arrived at, the place where the President can order your death if he likes and, should anybody ask questions, simply reply (as Caiaphas more or less did to Pilate), “If he were not guilty, we would not have wanted him dead.”

A deeply conservative friend remarks:

It’s not conservatism at all. It’s The Right. The Right is what you get when Catholicism is removed from conservatism.

I wish I were a Senator. I’d censor the names out of all the Wikileaks pages and then enter them into the Congressional Record, like Gravel did with the Pentagon Papers. (That’s the only reason you can read the Pentagon Papers today — they’d still be classified otherwise).

Still, perhaps Goldberg and Whiton are on to something. Certainly, from some perspectives, National Review and Fox News are engaged in “political war” against the people of the United States. More people would die from lack of healthcare over the next 10 years than from any foreseeable terrorist attack. Maybe the CIA wet team that hits Assange could swing by NR and Fox on the way home? Goldberg and Whiton would be the last to complain.