Theleftprofessesignoranceaboutconservative,libertarianconcerns

The left professes ignorance about conservative, libertarian concerns over police militarization

posted at 3:21 pm on August 14, 2014 by Noah Rothman

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The left is out in force making sure that everyone knows they don’t really listen to conservative or libertarian arguments, but are happy enough to summarize them inaccurately.

“I don’t see anybody from the libertarian or Republican movement who talk about small government and overstepping American citizens’ rights coming either on camera or social media to talk about this situation,” CNN contributor L.Z. Granderson said on Thursday.

“You want to appeal to minority voters, this is how you do it. You don’t just come to the aid of white people being under siege by the government,” he artlessly added.

Granderson is not alone.

The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman asserted on Wednesday that “there has been a near-total silence from prominent libertarians” on the situation unfolding in Ferguson. That supposed “silence” could have been construed by Waldman as prudence, seeing as the details of what happened are murky and the response to the shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown has been violent and emotionally charged.

These voices on the left do not seem to have much regard for the axiom that it is best to hold one’s tongue unless certain that which is said would improve the silence. Nevertheless, the assertion that GOP and libertarian voices have been conspicuously silent on this or past episodes of excessive force by an increasingly militarized police is just flat wrong.

Among right-of-center elected officials, several have spoken out:

“Reporters should never be detained — a free press is too important — simply for doing their jobs,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) wrote on his Facebook on Thursday. “Civil liberties must be protected, but violence is not the answer.”

Together, we should all mourn the loss of life in Ferguson, Missouri and work to keep our communities safe and free. Police officers risk their lives every day to keep us safe, and any time a young man loses his life in a confrontation with law enforcement, it is tragic.

The famously libertarian congressman Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) expressed great dismay over the situation unfolding in Missouri:

Images & reports out of #Ferguson are frightening. Is this a war zone or a US city? Gov't escalates tensions w/military equipment & tactics.

— Justin Amash (@repjustinamash) August 14, 2014

Many were confused by Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-KY) apparent silence on the situation in Ferguson. It turned out that he was penning a definitive article for Time in which he insisted that the police must be demilitarized.

“There is a systemic problem with today’s law enforcement,” Paul wrote.

Washington has incentivized the militarization of local police precincts by using federal dollars to help municipal governments build what are essentially small armies—where police departments compete to acquire military gear that goes far beyond what most of Americans think of as law enforcement.

But while conservative elected representatives must maintain some caution while commenting on the violence in Ferguson, the right-of-center commentariat enjoys a bit more freedom of expression and they have been making use of it.

It is shocking to learn today that so many on the left appear utterly unaware of the vigorous debate conservatives have been engaging in over the increasing militarization and heavy-handedness of the police. The conservative columnist S.E. Cupp has compiled a fairly comprehensive list of voices on the right who have sounded the alarm over police forces exceeding their authority.

“Historians looking back at this period in America’s development will consider it to be profoundly odd that at the exact moment when violent crime hit a 50-year low, the nation’s police departments began to gear up as if the country were expecting invasion — and, on occasion, to behave as if one were underway,” The National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke wrote in June.

“If cops continue to take a warlike us-versus-them approach to policing the population, they just might bring the left and right together,” Fox host John Stossel noted that same month. “Government is reckless, whether it is intruding into our lives with byzantine regulations that destroy a fledgling business or with a flash-bang grenade like the one that critically wounded a child in a recent SWAT raid in Janesville, Georgia.”

“So you combine the cops overstepping the Constitution and their bounds …. some of them just starting to go dark inside, and the militarization of our police force and you have a very bad combination,” Glenn Beck observed in February. “How does that end?”

Washington Post commentator Radley Balko’s best-selling book, The Rise of the Warrior Cop, might be the definitive work on the subject of police militarization. Balko would hardly describe himself as left-leaning.

In Cupp’s amalgamation of links to right-of-center commentators expressing concern about the militarization of police, she could only link to Reason magazine’s tag “militarization of police.” Therein, nearly 30 full pages of articles on the subject go all the way back to 2006.

What the left may object to is the fact there is a robust debate on the right over this issue, and that conservatives and libertarians do not share a single monolithic opinion. On the right, there is no hive mind. There are a range of opinions on this matter, as there are on a variety of controversial political and social issues. On the left, however, there is no debate. The police in Ferguson are presumed both guilty and racist, and the only deliberation is over whether the officers accused of using undue force should have their names disclosed so as to satisfy the mob.

That is not healthy. That is not reflective of a sound party. What the left is demanding is Borg-like conformity from its members, and a general condemnation of those who do not display what is subjectively determined to be the appropriate level of enthusiasm while agreeing with them.

The fact that some center-left commentators believe there is total silence on the right when it comes to issues relating to excessive police force and semi-military posture is a shocking admission of ignorance. It is a display of obliviousness to claim that all on the right who are concerned about the erosion of Americans’ constitutional liberties have been inconsistent on the issue of police militarization.

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Tags: conservative, ferguson, libertarian, militarized, police, Radley Balko, S.E. Cupp

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S.E.Cupp:It’samyththatconservatismis

S.E. Cupp: It’s a myth that conservatism is hostile to atheism

posted at 8:41 pm on July 30, 2014 by Allahpundit

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Well, sort of yes and sort of no. She’s right that most conservatives welcome atheist fellow travelers. I remember telling a friend before HA launched that I’d be writing for a righty website and him telling me that I should hide my nonbelief, but I didn’t and it’s never been a problem. The most static I catch for it is when I’ve written something extra RINO-y and a commenter grumbles that we shouldn’t expect any better from the godless. Even that’s rare; the smoking gun of RINOism that’s most often cited by my righty critics is support for gay marriage, not atheism. So yeah, certainly this is no bar to entry into the commentariat. In fact, more conservative atheists seem to be writing about their dual identities. See, e.g., Robert Tracinski in April at the Federalist making “an atheist’s case for religious liberty” or Charles Cooke back in February arguing that godlessness and conservatism aren’t incompatible after all.

I think Cupp’s right too that righty atheists on average respect religion more than their liberal counterparts do. That’s probably mainly a function of exposure: If you’re a conservative of whatever demographic and whatever educational level and you associate mostly with other conservatives, chances are you’re going to run into and end up being friends with some devoutly religious people. I’m not so sure that’s true on the left. If you’re a highly educated, reasonably well-to-do liberal — coincidentally, the same niche that most of the left’s commentariat comes from — devoutly religious friends may be hard to come by. (Call it epistemic closure.) Just as polls on gay marriage show support for SSM rising steeply among people who have at least one acquaintance who’s come out of the closet, I suspect that knowing religious people whom you respect inevitably softens your view on the value of religion.

But look: Certainly there’s some wariness about atheism within conservatism. Go look at one of those polls in which a variety of supposedly undesirable traits in a would-be president are listed and people are asked to name which ones would make you less likely to vote for him/her. Atheism is always at or near the top of the list. That’s not the fault of conservatism alone; plenty of religious Democrats look askance at atheists too, and if you doubt that, ask yourself how many Democrats in Congress have been willing to cop to nonbelief while in office. Offhand the only one I can think of is Pete Stark, who was later ousted in a primary. Barney Frank copped to being an atheist only after he retired, which is telling — it was safer for him politically to admit to being gay than to doubting God’s existence. If you polled Republicans and Democrats today and asked them whether they’d be positive, negative, or neutral about having a president who identifies as atheist, I guarantee that both sides would tilt negative and feel reasonably confident (considering that there are more liberal atheists than conservative ones) that conservatives would tilt more negative than liberals would. See Cooke’s piece linked above for an insight as to why. The most common complaint from religious people about atheists in my experience is that we lack a moral foundation; they can always resort to the Good Book for guidance, but what does the atheist resort to? “The Selfish Gene”? Logically, that concern will be more common among religious people than it will among the less religious, so go figure that conservatives, a more religious group, might show that concern more strongly. I wouldn’t call that “hostility” to atheism as much as, let’s say, skepticism of it, but it’s there. And yes, it’s there among plenty of Democrats too.

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Tags: agnostic, Atheism, conservatism, liberalism, S.E. Cupp

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S.E.Cupp:IfChristiewasdirectlyinvolvedin

S.E. Cupp: If Christie was directly involved in Bridgegate, he should resign

posted at 7:32 pm on January 8, 2014 by Allahpundit

Via the Daily Caller, are we at this point so soon? The story about his deputy’s e-mails broke this morning; he put out the requisite shock-and-disappointment statement a few hours ago; and now here’s a righty pundit already dropping the R-bomb on him, albeit conditionally. Half the Republicans I follow on Twitter are rolling their eyes that anyone in the media could be so exercised about petty hardball played by local politicians, especially when Bob Gates is busy accusing the president of the United States of sending men to die in a war he never believed in. Christie’s not in any imminent danger.

But look — at this point, given his emphatic denials that he had anything to do with the lane closings, what’s the alternative to resigning if a smoking gun emerges proving that he did? He’s not going to stand at the podium, cop to having lied baldfaced to the world about his role in punishing the public in order to retaliate against a political enemy, and then say, “Oh well, see you tomorrow.” His whole shtick is that he’s a straight talker who tells the truths that more polished politicians are too afraid to tell. He can’t admit to having lied to protect himself and then go back to business as usual. So what’s the alternative to resignation if he gets caught red-handed? Which, I guess, is another way of saying that the odds of him getting caught red-handed are verrry low or else his denials wouldn’t be so emphatic. If he was involved, the way this was done, I assume, is Christie telling a close aide to make it happen and then the aide telling Kelly to make it happen. That gives him plausible deniability. No paper trail, no muss, no fuss. At worst, if Kelly turns on him and claims that she’s confident the order came from Christie himself, he’ll dismiss it as fingerpointing by a bad employee who’s eager to rehabilitate her rep by telling the media what it wants to hear. He wouldn’t go all-in on denials if he had reason to believe he was exposed.

As for the rest of the clip, where Cupp teases out a scenario in which Christie resigns, becomes a martyr to his supporters for doing so(?), and then rebounds by running for president anyway, I don’t know what to tell you except that Tapper’s green room must include a mini-bar. Any pol who would abuse his power for such petty, egotistical reasons, lie about it repeatedly, and then actually step down in disgrace isn’t going to be considered for the most powerful job in the world. Especially when a big chunk of his own party’s base already disdains him.

Tags: 2016, bridge, bridgegate, christie, New Jersey, President, republican, resign, S.E. Cupp, tapper

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