Home / General / Jeff Sessions, Civil Libertarian, and Other Delusions

Jeff Sessions, Civil Libertarian, and Other Delusions

/
/
/
3045 Views

Isaac Chotinier interviewed Donald Trump fanboy Alan Dershowitz, and the results are amazing:

The president has been, in an unprecedented way, attacking the Justice Department, the FBI, law enforcement officials—

Sounds like me. I have been doing this for 53 years. The only thing that has changed is that now conservatives have become civil libertarians, and liberals have become strong supporters of law enforcement, the Justice Department, and the FBI. I have been consistently a critic of law enforcement and the FBI for 53 years.

Professor, we both know why conservatives are criticizing the FBI right now, and it’s not because they have become critical of law enforcement, and we both know liberals are not defending everything that has gone on with the law enforcement community.

Yes, they are.

Right. Trump and his allies are attacking the Mueller investigation out of concern with such violations as…a search executed with a valid warrant obtained with much more rigorous standards than than a typical search warrant?

To state the obvious:

How President Trump feels about due process appears to depend on whether he or his associates are the ones being investigated.

Monday, after the news broke that federal investigators had raided the office, hotel room, and home of Trump’s longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen, the president called it  “an attack on our country, in a true sense,” and “an attack on what we all stand for.”

It was a curious reversal for a politician who, from the start of his campaign, has ridiculed due process protections as mere “political correctness,” but one that has become so common over the first two years of his presidency that it now goes practically unremarked. As a candidate in 2016, Trump declared that “an attack on law enforcement is an attack on all Americans.” But no chief executive has attacked law enforcement more frequently than Trump.

Much of the president’s rhetoric assumes that the arms of the state are infallible, and that its targets are assumed guilty. Trump has encouraged police to abuse or “rough up” criminal suspects; he has complained that Chicago’s police force, facing accusations of racial discrimination and brutality, was being too “politically correct” to stop a rise in homicides; he called for the execution of the Central Park Five and insisted they were guilty even after they were exonerated; and supported the death penalty for drug dealing. He called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States; he has called for killing the families of suspected terrorists; he insisted that Muslims accused of terrorism should be tortured.

This “if you think the Mueller investigation should be allowed to proceed it’s because you uncritically worship law enforcement in general and the illegal wiretapping of civil rights leaders in particular” routine is incredibly tiresome (and, needless to say, doubly so from leftier-than-thous whose reaction to the selective, prejudicial statements from the FBI Director that threw the 2016 election was ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.)

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Linkedin
This div height required for enabling the sticky sidebar
Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views :