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Bear life

With characteristic pithiness, Atrios observes,

Between Horny Bear Scooter and Strip Search Sammy I’m really starting to wonder what the hell is up with your modern Republican party.

But that snippet seemed a little too pithy, so I followed the links to Amanda’s house, and she led me to Shakespeare’s Sister, where I read all kinds of things about Scooter Libby’s 1996 novel, The Apprentice, via this “Talk of the Town” item by Lauren Collins in the latest New Yorker.

All of which is prelude to saying that I was just a-skimmin’ the Internets one fall evening when I came across this passage, penned by Scooter Libby himself:

At age ten the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a stick when it seemed to lose interest.

And I thought, well, now, between Alito’s approval of a clearly unwarranted strip-search of a ten-year-old girl, and Scooter’s little fantasy of ten-year-old girls being raped by bears, yes, there really does seem to be something quite odd going on here.

Now, I know there is no indication whether, in Libby’s novel, the girls are strip-searched before they are raped by bears, and of course I know there’s no paper trail as to whether Alito would approve of such a search.  And I know, from reading the comments at Shakes’s Sis’s place, that there are some readers out there who’ll say, “get a grip already, you liberals!  Scooter Libby wasn’t proposing legislation that would require ten-year-old girls to be raped by bears!  He was merely fantasizing about ten-year-old girls being raped by bears!  Yeesh!  Whatta bunch of literal-minded types you liberals are!  No appreciation whatsoever for the right-wing literary avant-garde!”

But still, the evidence does seem to be piling up, like unto a heap of naked, abject bodies, that there’s something very rotten, very foul living in the heart of the darkness of the right-wing imagination.  James Dobson and his extraordinary lifelong fetish for beating small children with belts and spoons, even when the children are as young as eighteen months.  Rick Santorum and his fears about men having sex with dogs (for John Cornyn, it was box turtles).  Alberto Gonzales and David Addington (Scooter’s replacement!) and the whole prisoner-torture crew.  Rush Limbaugh and his hand-rubbing glee over the Abu Ghraib photographs, likening them to Madonna kissing Britney on MTV.  And, of course, the Abu Ghraib - Guatanamo phenomenon itself, with its PUC-fucking, its serial rapes of women and young boys, its lethal, days-long beatings of kids who just happened to drive by at the wrong time.

Folks, I know it’s a little hard to believe that the party in power is the party of torture, child-beating, and strip searches of innocent prepubescent girls.  You know, next to this stuff, a little abuse of parliamentary procedure here, a crooked Supreme Court decision there, and couple of well-coordinated smear campaigns against critics of the Iraq War look like plain vanilla evil. 

So I asked a couple of scientists and philosophers what they make of all this, and they said, “Michael, we don’t believe in ‘repression’ or the ‘unconscious’ or weirdo psychoanalytic things like that.  Remember, Freud’s work was never empirically verified; strictly speaking, it’s not a science at all.  You literary critics really should stop making up these extravagant ‘explanations’ of human behavior and listen to the neurobiologists.  After all, Alan Sokal proved that none of you know what you’re talking about.”

Well, since they were no help, I turned back to Shakespeare’s Sister, who writes,

What kind of mind comes up with this shit, dreams up scenarios where children are raped by animals to train them in prostitution? Oh, right. A conservative one. One that has toiled under a lifetime of repression, and spent its time dreaming up legislation designed to control the sexual freedom of women and gays. It isn’t enough that men like Scooter Libby must repress their own sexualities; they have to oppress anyone who doesn’t succumb to exhortations to do the same.

They like to say that the sexual liberation of women and gays has some alleged detrimental affect on society, but I don’t see it. What I do see is a collection of perverts whose own sickness pours out of them given the slightest opportunity, and whose fervent belief yet that they are the moral ones encourages them to create a whole other generation of screwed-up people, as they legislate the promotion of abstinence, repression, in sex ed classes.

To which I have to add, remember the good old days, when Newt Gingrich, accomplished womanizer and sick-wife-abandoner, was telling us that Democratic policies were to blame when Susan Smith left her two kids to drown in a car?

I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things.  The only way you get change is to vote Republican.

Well, that was in 1994.  Since then, y’all have voted Republican.  And my, how things have changed.

I’m beginning to think that Hunter S. Thompson checked out last year only partly out of political despair—and mostly because he had the entirely plausible feeling that not even he could plumb the depths of America’s right-wing imagination any longer.

Posted by on 11/02 at 03:24 PM

  1. I think you’re reading these things too literally. I think the innocent girl on bear sex is just a metphor ... for something probably more deeply disturbing. The dude’s name is Scooter after all.

    Posted by  on  11/02  at  04:48 PM

  2. Folks, I know it’s a little hard to believe that the party in power is the party of torture, child-beating, and strip searches of innocent prepubescent girls. 

    Yeah, it’s just inconceivable, innit.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  11/02  at  04:48 PM

  3. Boy, Cheney sure likes to surround himself with people who have unusual sexual tastes, doesn’t he? First, Lynne and now Scooter.

    Posted by  on  11/02  at  04:56 PM

  4. I’m just sayin’, Chris, they didn’t run on this in ‘04.  They told us that if we voted for Kerry we’d be devoured by wolves.  They didn’t say that if we voted for them our daughters would be strip-searched by Supreme Court justices and then raped by bears.

    Figuratively, that is.

    Posted by Michael  on  11/02  at  04:58 PM

  5. I hate to get all conspiratorial but :

    http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2004/11/dick-cheneys-other-big-secret.html

    Dick Cheney had an apparent addiction to the “thrill of the sport.” He appeared obsessed with playing A Most Dangerous Game as a means of traumatizing mind control victims, as well as to satisfy his own perverse sexual kinks. My introduction to the game occurred upon arrival at the hunting lodge near Greybull, Wyoming, and it physically and psychologically devastated me. I was sufficiently traumatized for Cheney’s programming, as I stood naked in his hunting lodge office after being hunted down and caught. Cheney was talking as he paced around me, “I could stuff you and mount you like a jackalope and call you a two legged dear. Or I could stuff you with this (he unzipped his pants to reveal his oversized penis) right down your throat, and then mount you. Which do you prefer?”

    a two legged deer

    Weird, huh?

    Posted by Weird, huh?  on  11/02  at  04:58 PM

  6. I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things.  The only way you get change is to vote Republican.

    Yeah, I remember him saying that. What I don’t remember is much talking from Gingrich about the revelations at trial that she had been sexually abused by her step-father, who just happened to be a bigwig in the local Republican Party and Christian Coalition.

    Posted by apostropher  on  11/02  at  04:59 PM

  7. The wolves are looking pretty good at this point.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  11/02  at  04:59 PM

  8. Wendy, I have to say that at this point Lynne’s sexual fantasies are looking clean as a whistle.  A little woman-identified-woman love on the prairie (in Sisters), a Vice President dying while having sex with his mistress (in The Body Politic) . . . I mean, c’mon, that’s the kind of America we can rally around!

    And apostopher, thanks for dropping the other shoe on Smith’s stepfather.  One can only speculate on what kind of novel he would write.

    Posted by Michael  on  11/02  at  05:04 PM

  9. "And apostopher, thanks for dropping the other shoe on Smith’s stepfather.  One can only speculate on what kind of novel he would write.”

    Perhaps Smith’s stepfather would never have strayed so far from the straight-and-narrow and become a sexual predator if he had released and resolved his sexual tensions with the act of writing. I therefore ask: what if our GOP author-like friends had NOT taken up the pen? We should be thankful.

    Posted by  on  11/02  at  05:29 PM

  10. What the hell kind of mind have they got?

    The crying on the inside kind, I guess.

    It is amazing the sort of depravity one can sink into if one truly believes oneself only to be capable of virtue.

    Posted by  on  11/02  at  06:00 PM

  11. “Hunter S. Thompson checked out last year… mostly because he had the entirely plausible feeling that not even he could plumb the depths of America’s right-wing imagination any longer.”

    That may have been the case, but it’s difficult not to view HST’s hasty exit, stage left, as driven by resignation and despair instead of by Beat heroics: had he really been serious about giving the final Gonzo “Phuck off and Die” to Republican Fratboy Swine, Inc. he might have been a decent ‘head and had the tape rolling and the web-link hooked up. And there may have been a bit of “Cherchez La Femme” as well to his demise. Others, even some freaks, have suggested more sinister motives--nonetheless, the Bush regime would seem to be one of the instrumental factors.

    Posted by Mister Toad  on  11/02  at  06:04 PM

  12. a Vice President dying while having sex with his mistress (in The Body Politic) . . . I mean, c’mon, that’s the kind of America we can rally around!

    Especially if it’s this vice president! “Go, Dick, go!” Oh, uh, hmmm ...

    Anyway, I agree that Lynne’s “Little Lesbian House on the Prairie” fantasies are pretty tame, especially by my standards (I live in NYC, so at this point there’s not too much that shocks me). It’s just that these guys hold themselves up to be the Great Right Hope. It’s the hypocrisy that gets me ... but then, you already knew that.

    Posted by  on  11/02  at  06:06 PM

  13. I spent some time last night trying to come up with a gruesome torture method for use as a plot device in a short story I am attempting to write that has nothing to do with any of the topics of this blog. But it brings me to two points:

    1. I would very much hate for someone to say that I “fantasized” about the scene I ultimately concocted, even if it is true in one sense. Let’s hope I never arouse the ire of the internets! Or, for the rest of you, perhaps it’s better to hope that I am never published.

    2. I am now pretty sure that Libby can out-gross me. Dammit, I will never be a success!

    Posted by Bellman  on  11/02  at  06:16 PM

  14. michael, you teach english lit, so help me out here.  in re the gingrich quote, what’s with him saying “the society”, instead of just “society”?  i’ve noticed his culture warrior ilk also do this with “culture”. it’s always “the culture” which is sick.

    Posted by  on  11/02  at  06:18 PM

  15. I know I’m not the only one to notice this, and maybe it’s just that I’ve been reading a lot of undergraduate paper drafts so I’m particularly sensitive to such things, but in the selection from Libby’s novel, why is the madam ten years old?

    You’d figure that Ivy League-educated conservative Masters of the Universe could at least write grammatical sentences.

    Posted by  on  11/02  at  06:33 PM

  16. That did occur to me, Ben.  Call it the “poor usage” theory of social decay:  you let conservatives get away with a dangling modifier here (as with Libby) and a comma splice there (as with Harriet Miers), and before you know it, they’re maiming and torturing detainees.

    Looks like old Jacques Barzun was right after all.

    Posted by Michael  on  11/02  at  06:43 PM

  17. The sick bastards are calling us sick bastards. Even I, ignorant of most psychology, recognizes that as projection. Their minds are in the ones in the gutter.

    Posted by  on  11/02  at  09:34 PM

  18. I once had to work a “swingers” Halloween party in conservative/libertarian Orange County, CA. Let’s just say that San Francisco’s Exotic Erotic Halloween Ball had nutin’ on that shit. And, to this day, I wonder how the OC “swingers” snuck those some of those costumes outa Disneyland.

    Posted by Roxanne  on  11/02  at  09:42 PM

  19. I wonder how the OC “swingers” snuck those some of those costumes outa Disneyland.

    Great, Rox.  Now you’ve got me fantasizing about Man-on-Goofy sex.

    And Ex Con, there is no such thing as projection.  Like “repression,” it is not a scientific concept.  Also, liberals are racists who would suppress free speech if given half a chance.

    Posted by Michael  on  11/02  at  09:59 PM

  20. At this particular event, there was a topless Minnie Mouse humping a topless Snow White. Goofy was a watcher.

    Posted by Roxanne  on  11/02  at  10:07 PM

  21. (Minnie and Goofy were there together, but theirs was just a Plutonic thing.)

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  11/02  at  10:27 PM

  22. I knew I would learn something useful at michaelberube.com one of these days, and, after reading and re-reading old Pogo strips for the last twenty years, I finally get the joke.  “Churchy Lafemme”!  Hee hee.

    Posted by Mark Gilbert  on  11/02  at  11:38 PM

  23. Forget Freud.  There is actually some real research on conservative psychopathology, this being a recent addition to the gorwing literature.

    Here is a gorwing colleciton of documented cases of sexually deviant leaders of the Religious Right and elected GOP officials.

    Some other bloggers also, more or less regularly, collect such cases.

    Here is some more on this connection and here are some more links concerned with conservative (sexual) psychopathology.

    Enjoy!

    Posted by coturnix  on  11/03  at  01:58 AM

  24. Sorry for gross misspellings - it is 1am here....

    Posted by coturnix  on  11/03  at  01:59 AM

  25. Poor Freud, always associated with sex! He wrote a lot about power and its perversions too; his essay on Shakespeare’s “Richard III” one could swear was written with Bushco in mind. Not to mention that he considered that the moral sense derived from humans being the most fragile and dependent of all animals at birth, therefore giving the adult on whom he/she depends for care an absolute power over him/her; I figure this is why these guys are so obsessed with kids and animals – it’s the power, not the sex. Not, of course, that Freud is relevant and all, just sayin’.

    Posted by  on  11/03  at  08:16 AM

  26. I can’t think of anything snarky to say.  The citations from Scooter’s “novel” sadden and infuriate me.

    Posted by  on  11/03  at  09:42 AM

  27. And via Crooks and Liars, I read that Santorum talked about having a conversation with Imus’ wife where Santorum--apparently with some seriousness--thought she wanted a “threesome” with him.

    Imus gently (!) said that she was talking about a phone conference.  One can feel the “What is this weird guy’s problem” oozing from Imus’ response.

    Between the Libby, Cheney, and O’Reilly novels, the Santorum weirdness (who can forget man-on-dog sex and the bring-home-the-dead-baby stories?), and Ann Coulter dressing like she’s going to play a role in “Boogie Nights”, these people who call themselves “conservative” are projecting their desires as much as their fears in the worst way.

    I noticed this years ago when living in Orange County how some many culturally out of control people I met were Republicans. At first, I thought it was a contradiction, but then I realized it was horribly consistent.  These people identified with the ideological selfishness and more importantly, knew where the power center was located and wanted access.

    “Republicans Gone Wild” indeed.

    Posted by Mitchell Freedman  on  11/03  at  11:50 AM

  28. AH I got ya: Scooter Libby’s cheap Mishima meets Penthouse Forum scribblings as case study. Certainly if some poor tweaker in Fresno was on trial for, well, tweakin,’ they would allow that as evidence of his unwholesome, deviant nature, if not intent of a possible sex crime; the court-appointed psychologist would make use of it in a psych. evaluation.  Libby would not only be sentenced to prison but put in with, as the perps say, J-CATS--and administered some ‘Zine or Mellaril. He’s not Leavenworth but Atascadero material.

    Posted by Mister Toad  on  11/03  at  11:57 AM

  29. Your analysis is missing the important symbolism in Scooter’s fiction: it is a BEAR.  As in Russia.  As in Commies.  Otherwise known as Democrats.  So what this is really about is what happens when you let the Democrats loose on the nation.  At least I think that’s what Scooter would say.

    Posted by maggie may  on  11/03  at  01:09 PM

  30. Thank you, maggie may!  I was up late last night just churning over F*cker Carlson’s suggestion way up there in comment 1, trying to think of things for which bear-on-girl sex could be a metaphor.  Was it a parable of how a weak stock market could harm our children?  A warning about the dangers of preserving too much wildlife in our nation’s parks?  I so completely forgot to worry about Communists!

    You’ve helped me immeasurably in the writing of my next book on Republicans and “framing,” tentatively titled Don’t Think About a Bear.

    Posted by Michael  on  11/03  at  01:39 PM

  31. OR

    There’s a bear in the woods ...

    Posted by Roxanne  on  11/03  at  02:23 PM

  32. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell which is more frightening or hypocritical: A Mussolini and his mistress Clara, or the blood-lusting partisans who kill and rape them after they fall

    Posted by Jacques  on  11/03  at  02:30 PM

  33. "There’s a bear in the woods.  For some people the bear is easy to see. Others don’t see it at all. Some people say the bear is tame. Others say it’s vicious and dangerous. Since no one can really be sure who’s right, isn’t it smart to keep it aroused with a stick?”

    Posted by  on  11/03  at  02:40 PM

  34. Alito’s approval of a clearly unwarranted strip-search of a ten-year-old girl

    As much as it pains me to do so, I have to say that this statement mischaracterizes Alito’s position in his dissent.  At issue in the case was whether the police were entitle to qualified immunity in their violation of the girl and mother’s civil rights.  Alito basically said that the police were entitled to qualified immunity because they could have reasonably believed that the search warrant authorized them to search occupants of the house being searched. 

    Now it is certainly reasonable to criticize Alito’s legal reasoning, but I don’t think it is helpful to mischaracterize his position or to sensationalize the criticism by implying that Alito favors gratuitous strip searching of 10-year old girls.

    Posted by  on  11/03  at  03:15 PM

  35. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell which is more frightening or hypocritical: A Mussolini and his mistress Clara, or the blood-lusting partisans who kill and rape them after they fall

    After careful considering the question for about a nanosecond, Jacques, I’m gonna have to go with “Mussolini and Clara” on that one.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  11/03  at  03:18 PM

  36. "carefulLY,” of course. “D’”, as the kids say these days, “oh.”

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  11/03  at  03:18 PM

  37. Hey blah, fair enough.  But on Alito’s legal reasoning, don’t take my word on this.  Take a real live attorney’s word.  From Iocaste (an I draw your attention to the italicized passage, which I italicized for precisely this reason):

    The two judges in the majority—including, hilariously, the author of the opinion, Judge Michael Chertoff (i.e., Bush nominee, now famous for fucking up the Department of Homeland Security)—had no trouble concluding that the search was illegal. Though warrants often incorporate the full affidavit by reference, in this case, that did not occur. The warrant specified the things (and people) to be searched, and said nothing about searching anyone other than the targeted drug dealer. It might well be true, said the court, that drug dealers often stash contraband on relatives who live in the same house, and the cops might have had a good reason for searching the wife and daughter. It might well be true that the cops had intended the warrant to authorize a search of all occupants. But that’s not what the judge saw. The judge saw an application to search only one person, and a house—this is what was authorized, this is clear from the face of the warrant. Case closed.

    Not so for Judge Alito. Although the warrant specifically had a box for “things to be searched,” and occupants of the house were not included in the box, Judge Alito saw this as a mere “technicality.” The cops had testified that they hadn’t included a more full description in the box for “things to be searched” because there hadn’t been enough room. They testified that they had intended that the warrant cover everything included in the accompanying affidavit. Thus, said Judge Alito, we should give a more flexible interpretation of the warrant.

    Except that even if you accept the cops’ word on it, that’s really not the point. Cops don’t get to decide the scope of a warrant; that’s what judges do. Here, a judge was confronted with a warrant that specifically identified the things to be searched, and that’s what the judge authorized. If the cops wanted to search more stuff, and the space on the warrant wasn’t big enough, they could have incorporated the affidavit by reference (as most warrants do), or they could have attached a separate sheet of paper. Instead, the magistrate was confronted with a piece of paper that was quite specific about the things to be searched, and the wife and daughter were not included.

    And this is where we get to the critical part of Judge Alito’s analysis. He conceded that the critical issue is what the judge authorized, not what the cops intended. So Judge Alito made inferences about what the magistrate “must have” been thinking: “The magistrate must have understood that the officers, who had drafted the warrant, believed that the warrant, if signed, would give them authorization to carry out a search of the scope specified in the application, viz., a search of ‘all occupants.’ As a result, the magistrate surely would not have signed the warrant without modification if the magistrate had not wished to confer that authority.”

    The magistrated “must have understood” this? When confronted with a paper filled out by the cops that specifies only the drug dealer and his house as the specific things to be searched? And it was the magistrate’s responsibility to both intuit that the cops intended something broader and to correct them if the magistrate wanted to narrow the scope of the search to the things specified in the warrant?

    I’m really not sure where Judge Alito gets his Vulcan mindmeld power, with absolutely no statement or testimony from the magistrate himself. To me, it’s not at all obvious that the magistrate “must have” known that the cops were planning to search everyone.

    Think of it this way: How implausible is it to think that if the warrant had specified “search house and all occupants,” the magistrate might have asked questions. How many occupants? Who are these people? A child? Seriously? Exactly what kind of search are you envisioning?

    So Alito gave legal cover to the strip search by way of a bizarro-world reading of the law that effectively guts the “warrant for probable cause” clause and the “unreasonable search and seizure” clause of the Fourth Amendment, which is to say, the whole damn thing.

    I think that’s bad.

    Posted by  on  11/03  at  03:42 PM

  38. Title: “Bear with me”, or “Goldilocks and the rape by three bears”.

    Posted by coturnix  on  11/03  at  03:46 PM

  39. "Sadly The Bear I’d Cross”

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  11/03  at  03:48 PM

  40. Michael:

    See, I don’t really disagree with the analysis you provided.  I think Alito was way off base and reached his conclusion by granting extreme and unwarranted deference to the police.  (As a quibble, the decision didn’t concern whether the search was illegal.  It was conceded that the search was illegal.  The sole question was whether the cops were entitled to qualified immunity.)

    But that type of analysis is not as fun as saying “Judge Scuzzalito wants to fondle your daughters!”

    Moreover, for purposes of the decision, it didn’t really make any difference whether the victim was a 10 year old girl who was made to drop her pants or a 42 year old man who was made to empty his pockets.  In either case, the same general rule would have to apply.

    Ultimately, I think attempts to sensationalize the decision could undermine serious efforts to opppose Alito.  Which would be a shame.

    Posted by  on  11/03  at  03:57 PM

  41. I’d go with “Exit, Raped by a Bear.”

    Posted by  on  11/03  at  04:17 PM

  42. It’s a bit unfair to cast the bear in the role of villain here, as he’s every bit as much the prisoner of the situation as are the girls. A happy ending wuld see the captors vanquished, the girls set on a healthy course with appropriate counseling, and the bear freed so that he might live happily ever after with his true love.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  11/03  at  04:23 PM

  43. “As a result, the magistrate surely would not have signed the warrant without modification if the magistrate had not wished to confer that authority.”

    And this isn’t legislating from the bench how, exactly?  Unless divination of motives doesn’t count as legislating, of course.

    Posted by Linkmeister  on  11/03  at  04:44 PM

  44. When I worked in DC a couple decades ago I remember being puzzled by the number of highly successful 50s-ish men of all political stripes—policy wonks, academics and so forth—who suddenly decided they had a novel in them.  Of course they didn’t: most wrote the most godawful woodenly-plotted tripe, like airport fiction but less competent.  I could never figure out how people who wrote well and carefully in other areas lost their minds when they turned to fiction.  I do think part of it is not pure repression-lifting so much as the deliberate can-you-top-this production of the lurid: the act of writing a novel seemed to require something like, well, like this unbelievable business with the bear.  None of these guys aspired to be Henry James, if you see what I mean.

    Posted by  on  11/03  at  04:47 PM

  45. Moreover, for purposes of the decision, it didn’t really make any difference whether the victim was a 10 year old girl who was made to drop her pants or a 42 year old man who was made to empty his pockets.  In either case, the same general rule would have to apply.

    True enough, as a principle.  But c’mon—Alito wasn’t the magistrate signing the warrant authorizing the search.  He was reviewing the case long after the search had taken place, and knew perfectly well that one of the plaintiffs was a ten-year-old girl.  The plausibility of the search, on which Alito was passing post hoc judgment, does depend on whether you think her strip search was reasonable enough to support an argument for qualified immunity.

    I agree that’s not the same as saying that Judge Scuzzalito wants to fondle your daughters, or that (perish the thought!) he would authorize their rape by bears.  But insisting on the difference between “Judge Alito approved of a strip search of a ten-year-old girl that was clearly unwarranted” (which is what I said, and I did mean “unwarranted” literally) and “Judge Alito merely sought to give the police qualified immunity for conducting a strip search of a ten-year-old girl” seems to me a bit of a strain.  Maybe that’s just me.

    Posted by  on  11/03  at  04:51 PM

  46. How shocking. The cops violate the 4th Amendment with the blessing of the Black Robed Posse every fucking day. This type of appeal is merely a drop in the bucket--hundreds, if not thousands of these allegations of violation of the 4th are filed with State and Fed courts each year and probably less than 5% are heard. When it’s controversial--a young girl being frisked--it makes it through the judicial labyrinthe--when it’s a po’ mechanic or parolee from San Berdoo whose house is shaken down regularly, with or without a “warrant,” the Writ never makes it past the office staff.  Regardless of what is “checked off” on a search warrant, once the cowboys are in your house or apartment, anything will be used, or in fact “staged” in a nice heap of evidence, including things you never realized were illegal, like a playboy magazine or toggle swtich (possible terrorist!).

    This is the Paranoiacracy, and if you are not down with the neo-con or neo-liberal statist program you, especially you Drug Fiend, , are considered an Enemy of the State.

    Posted by Mister Toad  on  11/03  at  05:34 PM

  47. OK, Jason, m’man, I’m completely with you on this one, and have been ever since back in the day of U.S. v. Leon (1984), when the Supreme Court invented a “good faith” exception to the Fourth Amendment.  And if I recall correctly, Leon involved a drug dealer, so the Supremes decided that the Constitution should step aside just a bit.  Since then, James Madison’s rotation-in-grave velocity has only increased with each passing year.

    It’s worth going back and looking at Brennan’s blistering dissent on that one.  Mister, we could use a man like William Brennan again. . . .

    Posted by  on  11/03  at  06:18 PM

  48. James Madison’s rotation-in-grave velocity has only increased with each passing year.

    Not to wax Discovery-Channel like, but the Jefferson and Madison faction realized early on the dangers that the “standing court” of John MarshallStack and Hamilton posed to the Republic (and it is beyond bizarre how Res Publica--the party of Robespierre and the Spanish left--becomes the American Republican). Perhaps Madison was a bit more sympathetic to Hamilton’s aristocratic dreams--I need to re-peruse a few of the pertinent sections of the Federalist--but Jefferson, his mentor, fought for years against Marshall and Hamilton; and a big part of that was about the Federalist’s plans to erect a recapitulation of the Tory courts (and British finance models). It is fashionable now to bash Jefferson due to the Hemmings thing, but Jefferson was from the start quite convinced the Marshall/Hamilton model of a independent and immune judiciary was not a benign and civilizing force but rather a potential threat to the democracy (a democracy which had to be properly educated, TJ insisted), and in a sense a perpetuation of the ancien regime elitism which the revolutionists had overturned.  In someone like Lysander Spooner this detestation of the Toryish “standing court” reaches a much higher level: he denies that the Founders intended the Constitution to be valid for anything other than the original colonies and for few years: you get the sense Spooner viewed the Const. as more or less a type of “loom” for the yankee pirates and brigands who managed to overthrow the older colonial pirates and brigands.  (And I don’t think someone such as Hawthorne was far from that view either)

    At this point the Supreme Court has developed into an institution enforcing various types of fascist-lite social engineering: and they have themselves assumed governmental (executive) powers, as demonstrated when the Gang of 9 decided to overturn the votes of millions for medical cannibis and re-classify it as a controlled subtance. TJ’s nightmares of a baronial court have been, as the philosophy boys say, instantiated, tho that probably began with like Eisenhower and J. Edgar and the gang.

    Posted by Mister Toad  on  11/04  at  01:12 PM

  49. "I’d go with “Exit, Raped by a Bear.” “

    Is “Exit” a verb or a noun here?

    Posted by  on  11/04  at  01:39 PM

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