L. Neil Smith
L.Neil Smith is the libertarian movement's most prolific author, with more than twenty books to his credit. He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.
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"We Have a Nice Jail Cell for
Them"
by L. Neil Smith
It must be something they do to you in concentration camps.
I'd promised myself, around the end of 2000, that I'd back off on my favorite target -- the GOP -- for a while, not because they deserved it,but because Silverfoot Junior and his oily entourage could be trusted to demonstrate to everybody's satisfaction what I'd been saying for years: Republicans are no better friends to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights than their fellow criminals on the other side of the aisle.
Boy, was I ever right about that. However, circumstances following September 11, 2001 didn't allow me to keep that promise. The Bush Administration is the clearest and most present danger the America I care about has ever faced, and I've badly needed to write about that threat for the good of my circulatory system as well as that of the nation. The most I could have said about the Democratic Party in any case is that they're standing around with their thumbs lodged firmly where the sun don't shine, whimpering over trivia, while the Republic burns. Hardly surprising, since they never gave a rat's ass about it, anyway.
A recent development, however, allows me to keep my promise in a small way, because it included an intention to start leaning more on the left wing socialists than I had, theretofore. Which takes us back, believe it or not, to that remark I made earlier about concentration camps.
My friend and partner Aaron Zelman, founder and director of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, often ponders -- with the kind of punctuation that goes with scratching one's head in utter perplexity -- how his people could go through what so many of them did during the 1930s and 1940s, and still support governments that want to strip them of their means of self-defense, and demonstrate exactly the same social, political, and economic philosophies as that of Nazi Germany.
Another example: Senator John McCain is the son of an admiral, and regarded as a big war hero because he could have gotten out of being a prisoner of war in Vietnam, but refused. The man belongs heart and soul to a Republican machine in Arizona that, with the assistance of whorishly willing media, sends him back to Washington time and again regardless of what the people of that state really think about him. They call him the "Manchurian Candidate". Everything he advocates is socialistic. He has seldom voted in way that would have disappointed Karl Marx.
Yeah, it must be something they do to you ...
Which brings us to Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta, who recently said, with regard to the funding of certain kinds of airport security measures, "I hope that that would not dissuade people from flying ... but we will strip-search everyone, including pilots, before this is over and if they don't like it we have a nice jail cell for them."
I see, Norman, if people use their First Amendment rights to defend their Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights, you're going to jail them.
Now there are certain things you should know about Norman before you go and get that rope he so richly deserves to be strung up with. First, Norman is of Japanese descent, and when he was a schoolboy, he and his family were rounded up and sent to one of the concentration camps that the Roosevelt II Administration so thoughtfully provided for them. There was a war on, you see, and that justifies absolutely anything.
You think that should have taught little Norman something, don't you, about individual liberty and an overreaching government, right? But apparently it didn't. After Norman and his family got thoroughly concentrated, he finished high school, did a stretch in the military, and finally wound up in Congress for about 20 years, doing a little overreaching of his own. In all that time, his left wing socialist credentials were impeccable. He became nationally famous as the first Asian-American this and the first Asian-American that, and capped his career by getting a bill through Congress to pay Japanese-American concentration camp victims $25,000 for all of their World War II tribulations.
Apparently he thought that's what a soul goes for on the open market.
When Norman got wiped out of Congress, however, with a lot of other Democrats in the phony Republican Revolution of 1994, Lockheed-Martin, the creepiest of all defense contractors, was waiting for him with open arms, bestowing upon him the title, and, presumably, the salary, of a "top executive". From there, he was to become Secretary of Commerce -- "first Asian-American Cabinet appointee" -- for Bill Clinton.
Given Norman's left wing socialist background, the Lockheed-Martin thing seems a trifle anomalous, but there was something a great deal more X-Filish ahead. Somehow, with a change of regimes in 2001, Norman managed to hang onto a Cabinet post, becoming, in what claims to be a Republican administration, the first Asian-American Secretary of Transportation -- the commissar directly and gleefully responsible for denying the Second Amendment rights of airline passengers and airline personnel.
Here is a piece of work that would rather have thousands murdered by a handful of knife-wielding thugs, than see those thousands with guns in their hands. And if you don't like it, he has a nice jail cell waiting for you.
Understandably, the socialists who call themselves liberals love this guy. So do the refreshingly few and far between equivalents to the NAACP among Asian-Americans. The web is just full of worship for him. But Norman Mineta is a living insult and an embarrassment to both the Democratic and Republican parties (and believe me, that's dipping pretty low). He is an insult and embarrassment to every Japanese-American, every Asian-American, who knows what America is really all about.
The fact that Norman can go on saying the things he's said, and still isn't out on some street corner, selling pencils from a tin cup, tells us everything we already knew about this administration from having to listen to John Ashcroft. Let me be the first demand (yeah, I know exactly how much good it's gonna do) that he resign now or be fired.
Forget that rope you were going for. When we have a free country once again, Norman's headed directly for that jail cell he's so proud of.
