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.
SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS
Free State Project
The Libertarian Enterprise
LNeilSmith.Com
Rational Review Bookstore
Liberty Artworx
WHY AREN'T YOU A SPONSOR?
It isn't too early
by L. Neil Smith
Reading Matt Drudge's web page early this morning, I was delighted (and relieved) to discover that the acclaimed popular support for Silverfoot Junior's planned "preemptive" invasion of Iraq has begun to slip.
On the same page came more news: S.J.'s popularity has fallen to less than that of New York City's favorite goon, Rudy Mussol -- er, Giuliani. I don't know what other pundits may be attributing these facts to (yech, I think I just called myself a pundit), but I believe the explanation's simple: more and more people are discovering the truth.
"The truth about what?" I pretend to hear you ask.
Well, the truth about a lot of things.
The truth, for example, that the George Bush II administration was probably aware for some months in advance -- and fairly specifically -- what was going to happen on September 11, and let it happen for precisely the same reasons that Roosevelt II let Pearl Harbor happen. For starters, everybody knows that the only great presidents are war presidents. And too, an economic collapse is occurring on W's watch that may rival the one that made FDR desperate to have Japan attack us.
There's also speculation, expressed in more and more corners of the country, that, like Franklin, George arranged for the attack to happen. I can't attest to it, myself. All I know is what I read on the Internet.
And how about the truth that the only reason W bombed Afghanistan (whence none of the September 11 hijackers came, most of them being Saudis) was to pave the way for an oil pipeline through central Asia that he and his fellow petrocrats have lusted after for more than a decade?
Of course, there's the hideously embarrassing and increasingly evident truth that the gang calling itself the Republican Party and the gang calling itself the Democratic Party are simply branches of the same grasping, voracious, cannibalistic, and insatiable pack of thieves and murderers I call the Boot On Your Neck Party. They always have been. The Bushies have now rammed through many of the violations of your constitutional rights that Waco Willie wasn't able to succeed with. Next time around, his gang will do the same favor for Bush's gang.
Unless there isn't any next time around. Unless we can stop them all by refusing to vote for a single lousy incumbent. But, then, I digress.
Anyway, with all of that going on, and the future more in flux than any establishment "thinker" knows, I realized this morning that it isn't too early to start planning for what I think we'll call the Nuremburg II Tribunals someday. There is, after all, a small town in Pennsylvania called Nuremburg, just waiting for it. And this time, to the charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity (Silverfoot Junior and his cronies are so guilty that it oozes through their $1000 suits, drips off, and lingers in a track behind them like that of a common garden mollusc) we'll add something that's about two centuries overdue.
Crimes against the Constitution.
Whenever pundits (there the slippery rascals are again) commence to wondering aloud why the Bill of Rights has been gradually reduced, over twenty-odd decades, to the legal status of a square of toilet paper, it almost never occurs to them that it's simply because no mechanism was ever provided for its enforcement. The covenant without the sword, as Thomas Hobbes might have said if he'd ever met Lenny Bruce, is a crock of -- well, at least I think that's what he'd have said. A real libertarian administration would become that enforcement mechanism.
Naturally, the punishment -- someday I'll write about the trial; just now I'm in a cranky mood and want to chase to the cut, if you see what I mean -- should suit the crime, a matter of poetry as much as justice.
For instance, as you may be aware from watching movies on the topic (especially movies with a torrid, if larval, Angelina Jolie), miscreant individuals convicted of the cybercrime of "hacking" aren't allowed to have anything to do with computers. Since it appears to me (and to many others) that everything the Bushes do is for the sake of petroleum, we'll let them try to live without it for a couple or three decades.
Deprived of his pension and other benefits, Silverfoot Junior will be compelled to farm his land using a steam-driven tractor fueled with a sun-dried form of the same bucolic substance that has powered every presidential administration since George Washington got inaugurated.
Whaddya wanna bet that cold fusion would become "a sustainable and viable new technology" overnight, instead of the crackpot hoax that Bush and his soon-to-be-indicted co-conspirators presently want us to believe it is, when it threatens to gore every establisment ox there is?
Hell, he may even give hemp a chance.
Or maybe we could go Gilbert and Sullivan one better and let the punishment fit the criminal. Vice President and Warmonger-in-Chief Dick Cheney, having suffered the same heart-malf, more or less, that kicked the slats out of yours truly nine years ago, could be retired to Breckenridge (elevation 9,600 feet), forbidden to exercise, and compelled to consume all of the high-fat, high-carbohydrate food he can. The same judges who pass sentence should hand him a big box of cigars.
John Ashcroft we could just put in the same cell as Janet Reno, I suppose. Very few human beings would not consider that hell on Earth. But perhaps we should give him a male roomate, about seven feet tall, maybe 350 pounds, with many years' personal experience with penal, er, relationships.
Then Ashcroft might come (geez, there just isn't any way to do this without connotations) to understand, to the very seat of his being (sorry about that), exactly what he's doing to the Bill of Rights.
