To the Editor:
Re “A Conflict Without End” (editorial, May 17), about a House bill that would place the country in a state of permanent war, and not just against Al Qaeda and the Taliban but also any “associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States”:
Representative Buck McKeon’s dangerous effort to ride roughshod over constitutional constraints would not be politically plausible but for the Obama administration’s shortsightedness in allowing support for the Bill of Rights to be marginalized as namby-pamby liberalism.
The Bush administration’s lawlessness was un-American deviance. Instead of defining it as a transgression never to be repeated, the Obama administration normalized it to the point where discussions of torture and indefinite detention on the government’s say-so generate no more moral concern than discussions of the appropriate rate of estate taxes.
History will record the triangulation of this administration as a more permanent weakening of the rule of law than any of the radical follies of its opponents.
ERIC M. FREEDMAN
Hempstead, N.Y., May 17, 2011
The writer is a professor of constitutional law at Hofstra University.
Note from KBJ: Day in and day out, we hear progressives complaining about Barack Obama. They wail; they whine; they grumble; they gnash their teeth. Why did they vote for him? Did they not know enough about him? If they didn't know enough about him, why did they not know enough about him? Did journalists not do their job? Was he given a pass by a compliant and partisan press? Could it be that in their eagerness to elect a black man (actually, half black), progressives gave Obama a pass? How is that not racism? Racism is employing a double standard, one for whites and one for nonwhites. If blacks are not held to the same standards as whites, in every realm of life, then they are being degraded. I, for one, would resent it.
Note 2 from KBJ: Does it seem to anyone besides me that the good professor doesn't want "discussions of torture and indefinite detention"? An academic is supposed to welcome discussion, debate, and dissent from orthodoxy. This man evidently prefers to close certain issues to discussion. He is acting like a partisan rather than a scholar. If the arguments in favor of torture and indefinite detention are so weak, then a smart man like him should be able to expose their weaknesses in a way that even the uneducated can grasp. If the arguments are not so weak, then where does he get off trying to stifle them? I honestly don't understand this progressive compulsion to stifle debate. It bespeaks lack of confidence in the rationality of one's views.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 