New Hampshire law to limit voting by non-resident college students in the state

The New Neo Posted on by

Seems to me that New Hampshire would be well within its rights to require that students vote by absentee ballot in their states of origin rather than their temporary home of NH, unless they’ve established residency in New Hampshire. But NH state Democrats as well as other Democrats oppose it:

Senator Jeanne Shaheen, New Hampshire senator, also calls it a “voter suppression law” in the usual Orwellian fashion of the left.

A voting age of 18 (rather than 21, as in my youth) tends to favor Democrats in general. But allowing non-resident students to vote in a state such as New Hampshire, with such a tiny resident population and a not-insignificant number of university students, means the non-resident student vote might matter even more in the outcome.

Here are the issues involved in this “voter suppression” law (emphasis mine):

Under current law, New Hampshire is the only state that doesn’t require residency.

How do you like that? Shaheen and Harris and the rest somehow fail to mention that little tidbit.

More:

[Opponents] say the law, which takes effect July 1, burdens their right to vote by requiring new voters to shift their home state driver’s licenses and registrations to New Hampshire.

“Under this law, I have to pay to change my California license to be a New Hampshire one,” one of the students, Maggie Flaherty, said in a statement. “If I vote and don’t change my license within 60 days, I could even be charged with a misdemeanor offense with up to one year in jail.”

Cry me a river, Maggie.

More:

Republican Gov. Chris Sununu initially expressed concerns about the constitutionality of the law, which was passed by the then-Republican controlled Legislature last year. He requested an advisory opinion from the state Supreme Court. The court said eliminating the distinction between “residency” and “domicile” for voting purposes would be constitutional, siding with Republicans who argued out-of-state college students who vote in New Hampshire should be subject to the same requirements as everyone else.

Sununu, who signed the bill into law in July, had said it “restores equality and fairness to our elections.” Democrats argued it amounts to a poll tax and would deter students from voting. In its ruling, the court said that even if removing the distinction between residency and domicile creates a burden on them, the state has a compelling reason for making the change…

Deputy Secretary of State David Scanlan had spoken in favor of the bill last year. He emphasized that neighboring states require those who vote in their states to become residents, subject to motor vehicle and other laws.

There it is again, that pesky little detail.

[NOTE: Just to take an example, blue as blue can be Massachusetts has this requirement for student voters:

Registering to vote in Massachusetts makes you a resident for the purposes of your driver’s license and vehicle registration. If you drive your vehicle in Massachusetts, you have 30 days from when you register to vote to register your vehicle and get a Massachusetts driver’s license. For more information, contact the Massachusetts Department of Motor Vehicles.

And Cory Booker, senator from New Jersey, has this to say:

But the NJ law seems similar to the NH law:

Voting in New Jersey may be considered a declaration of residency, potentially making you subject to other laws that govern state residents.

That would mean registering your car, it seems to me.]

Dershowitz: I get it right because I’m objective

The New Neo Posted on by

Indeed he does and indeed he is.

One would think objectivity would be a requirement for success as a legal analyst, but anyone who thinks that would be very wrong because “success” isn’t defined as getting it right and certainly not as being objective, but as drawing interest and ratings from audiences. And the best way to do that seems to be to offer what partisans want to hear, wrapped in a thin patina of legalese.

Dershowitz doesn’t operate that way, but he’s in a very small group; I’d say the others in it are Andrew C. McCarthy and Johnathan Turley (at least those are the ones I think of off the top of my head). Dershowitz is an old-fashioned liberal Democrat, McCarthy a moderate Republican, and Turley a libertarian.

Dershowitz is right about this, too (although since I haven’t seen “every single one” of his predictions, I can’t swear to that detail):

I think I’ve always tried to be objective. I am neutral and nonpartisan when it comes to analyzing the law, and every single one of the predictions I have made over the last two years has come true…

I don’t allow wishful thinking to substitute for careful legal analysis. And what happened as a result of that is, for example, CNN, which used to have me on all the time, on Anderson Cooper, on Cuomo, on Lemon, as a centrist analyst, decided no, no, it is okay to have extreme Trump supporters to use them as kind of stick figure exhibits, and then everybody else will do the narrative of CNN. What they didn’t want was a centrist liberal who went against their narrative.

That is just about the last thing they want.

They had a choice of a Harvard law professor for 50 years who’s been getting it right, who’s a centrist liberal and who has credibility, or Michael Avenatti. And they picked Michael Avenatti. In fact one night I got a call from CNN saying ‘We have to cancel you. We have Avenatti! He is coming on tonight.’ He became their go-to guy and every one of his predictions turned out to be false…

Remember when Avenetti was the darling of the left and cable news?

[NOTE: My finger is itching to index posts about Alan Dershowitz under the category “political changers.” But so far, no go.]

Democrats and NeverTrumpers can’t wholly abandon the collusion narrative, it’s too useful

The New Neo Posted on by

“Useful?” you might ask. “What do you mean, useful? It makes them look crazy and desperate.”

I don’t think they’re crazy, and I think they only look that way to the right and maybe to some moderates/independents but far from all. And think about it; to deny collusion would be to say “we were wrong for over two years.” That’s hard, very very hard. Hard, embarrassing, and humiliating. Best to double down on the Big Lie. It’s worked in the past.

As for desperate—well yes, what else do they have? Obstruction (particularly unproven obstruction, based on unchallenged testimony, devoid of any underlying crime) is relatively weak tea compared to “COLLUSION!” “TREASON!” “PUTIN PUPPET!”

Glenn Reynolds points out:

Ralph Peters, on CNN, referred to President Trump as “slavishly subordinate” to Vladimir Putin. But that’s crazy. Trump has sanctioned Russia for its actions in Ukraine, Syria, and Iran, under his command the United States military killed hundreds of Russian mercenaries in Syria, has been sending weapons to Ukraine to resist Russian invasion, and most importantly has promoted U.S. oil production, crushing Russia’s main source of money and influence.

What Peters said is incorrect and illogical. It’s a conclusion not only unsupported by facts, it’s actually contradicted by facts, as Reynolds points out. But “crazy”? I don’t think so. It’s a tactic that makes sense at this point, especially since I’d bet that most of CNN’s listeners are unaware of the facts that contradict what Peters said.

Peters is counting on the likelihood that typical CNN viewers—the audience he’s addressing—will nod sagely at what he says. And I think he’s correct to think that.

The real question (as so often is the case) is about those in the middle. How many people who were on the fence about Trump before will now be rejecting the collusion narrative and not taking up the obstruction narrative? For that matter, how many people were on the fence about Trump before?

And where will the Democrat-controlled House go from here? Will they take the whole episode to impeachment, or will they just use the Mueller report’s Part II (the obstruction-can’t-be-ruled-out part) to smear Trump in preparation for 2020? I think they’ll decide on the latter. A trial in the Senate might expose the fact that they’ve got nothing of any substance. Better the trial by public opinion in the CNN courtroom.

And an actual crime was not really the point, it was merely the pretext. The point was to get an investigation going, cast a wide net, dig up all the dirt you can, and cast it in the worst light possible. Somewhere along the line, put the squeeze on subordinates to implicate Trump and hope they’ll tell the narrative you want told (who cases whether it’s true of not). If that doesn’t work, release the report when the Democrats control the impeachment process, and let them take it from there.

[ADDENDUM: Commenter “TommyJay” has pointed out that “collusion” isn’t actually a crime. My reply is that an actual crime was not necessarily the point, it was merely the pretext. The point was to get an investigation going, cast a wide net, dig up all the dirt you can, and cast it in the worst light possible. Somewhere along the line, put the squeeze on subordinates to implicate Trump and hope they’ll tell the narrative you want told (who cares whether it’s true or not). If that doesn’t work, release the report when the Democrats control the impeachment process, and let them take it from there.]

Sri Lanka massacre: the victims who must not be named, the likely perpetrators who must not be named

The New Neo Posted on by

Any specific news that actually exists regarding the perpetrators of the deadly Easter Day bombings in Sri Lanka points here:

The government has blamed a little-known local jihadist group, National Thowheed Jamath, although no-one has yet admitted carrying out the bombings…

Late on Sunday, Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said security services had been “aware of information” of possible attacks but that the information had not been acted upon.

A local Islamist group known as National Thowheed Jamath is believed to be behind the attack, said cabinet spokeman Rajitha Senaratne…

Sri Lankan authorities were warned about a bomb threat from National Thowheed Jamath a full two weeks before the attacks, cabinet spokesman Rajitha Senaratne said at a press conference.

He said that the warnings were not passed on to the Prime Minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, or his cabinet. Mr Wickremesinghe acknowledged that security services had been “aware of information” but had not acted on the information.

Defence Secretary Hemasiri Fernando told the BBC that the intelligence “never indicated it was going to be an attack of this magnitude”.

“They were talking about isolated, one or two incidents. Not like this,” he said.

He said “all important departments of the police” were informed about the warning, but acknowledged that no action was taken.

Mr Senaratne said that authorities believed the bombers had international support. “We do not believe these attacks were carried out by a group of people who were confined to this country,” he said, adding: “There was an international network without which these attacks could not have succeeded.”

That’s what we know so far. It’s not definitive, of course, and subsequent reports may change something, but everything—the history of attacks such as this, the logic of attacks such as this, and the specific background of this particular attack—points to the likelihood of a radical Islamicist group as perpetrators.

But press coverage of two facts about the bombings—the religious group identity of many victims (Christian) and probable radical religious group identity of perpetrators (radical Islamicist)—is strangely muted, filled with hemmings and hawings and delays and omissions, as well as insertions of distracting irrelevancies. It is at least somewhat understandable if the probable Islamicist perpetrator angle isn’t played up much—after all, the actual perpetrators are still unknown. But the church victims are not unknown: they were Christians worshiping on Easter Day, the holiest day of the Christian calendar.

And yet much of the media has been reluctant to use the obvious and appropriate word “Christians,” substituting the rather odd circumlocution “Easter worshippers.” As Sarah Hoyt points out at PJ Media:

Baldilocks might be absolutely right when she thinks they’re avoiding pronouncing the word “Christian” because there’s power in the word “Christ.”

On the other hand, for those of a less mystical disposition, it’s easier to believe they’re trying to avoid saying the word “Christian” for the same reason they’re not naming the religion of the attackers — because their idea of citizens are mushrooms who are kept in the dark and fed… er… the end product of digestion.

The title of that Hoyt post is “Shhh… Someone Did Something to ‘Easter Worshippers’ in Sri Lanka.” It’s hard to avoid the idea that the MSM has taken Ilhan Omar’s now-famous formulation about 9/11, “some people did something,” as a good guide to media coverage of all Islamicist terrorism.

Several commenters also called my attention to this column by Mark Steyn entitled “Taqiyya for Easter,” in which Steyn writes:

…[T]hroughout Sunday the UK, Aussie, Danish and the rest of the world’s media saw their job as thorough obfuscation of the truth. I heard about yesterday’s attack from the BBC, which had extensive rolling coverage with correspondents on the ground – and yet seemed mainly to be trying to tell us as little as possible. A lady think-tanker from Chatham House was keen to focus on the brutality with which the Sri Lankan government had ended the Tamil insurgency a decade ago: a fascinating topic no doubt, but utterly irrelevant to the mound of Christian corpses in Colombo that morning. In the entire hour, hers was the only mention of Islam – when she cautioned that it would be grossly irresponsible and “Islam-phobic” even to bring up the subject.

…As one of our Oz Steyn Club members, Kate Smyth, put it, the media have advanced from dhimmitude to full-blown taqiyya.

The lights are going out on the most basic of journalistic instincts: Who, what, when, where, why. All are subordinate to the Narrative – or Official Lie.

Those lights went out quite some time ago, actually.

Gwen Verdon: the greatest show dancer of them all

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s a new TV series out entitled “Fosse/Verdon,” that follows the lives and times of Broadway choreographer/director/dancer Bob Fosse and Broadway dancer (and choreographic collaborator) Gwen Verdon, who were husband and wife and had a tumultuous relationship. It’s not as though Fosse’s infidelities were previously much of a secret, either; he mined the same material (his life) in his own 1979 film “All That Jazz.”

Ah, but that was forty years ago, and a new generation (or two) has come up since then, who might be interested in this legendary pair. From what I’ve seen of the few very short clips from the show (episodes of which I’ll probably start watching, because I’m very curious), the cast does a valiant job of impersonating highly idiosyncratic and essentially unique personalities. It helps if you don’t remember the originals, particularly Verdon, who was one of my favorite and perhaps my very favorite dancer-singer-actress of all time.

Watching a short promo video for the show (embedding it doesn’t work, so you’ll have to click on the link), I see that Michelle Williams tries really hard as Verdon and probably does as well as any person possibly could do. But no one, no one, can be Verdon, whose way of movement was unique. Every corpuscle and cell of Verdon’s body danced, particularly her upper body, every muscle moving in a way that seemed simultaneously sinuous, sexy, happy, enormously entertaining, and tongue-in-cheek at the same time. I’ve never seen anything like it. She may have been the most charming person who ever lived, at least on stage.

Unfortunately there aren’t too many clips of her dancing. This one is of her famous “Whatever Lola Wants” number in the film “Damn Yankees,” but unfortunately the clip is distorted and she looks somewhat thinner than in real life. In real life she was slender but perfect; here she borders on skinny, which Verdon never was. It perfectly showcases her combination of sex and self-mockery (and Tab Hunter is not supposed to be gay in this scene, by the way; he’s supposed to be resistant because he’s actually married and wants to remain faithful to his wife)

Here’s a clip of Verdon I’d never seen before. It demonstrates her absolutely extraordinary versatility. Here she does an English vaudeville turn, singing a tongue-twister song effortlessly (complete with British accent) while dancing in a comic vaudeville style, acting too, and then increasing the already-fast speed in the last minute, all the while clad in a baggy suit that doesn’t show her famous body but doesn’t stop her from being her fabulously attractive self. Enjoy!

I bet they don’t try to recreate that number in Fosse/Verdon. If they do and manage to do it at all well, my hat is off (to coin a Fosse-appropriate metaphor) to them.

ADDENDUM:

I have to add this clip. It was Gwen dancing with Debbie Allen on the TV show “Fame.” This episode was apparently filmed in 1982, so since Verdon was born in 1925, she would have been 57 years old in this clip. As far as I’m concerned, she dances rings around the much younger (32) Allen in terms of style and fluidity:

The Mueller report’s second half: special counsels and political documents

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the many problems with the Mueller report is that it is not evenhanded, nor is it meant to be. I found the following description in a comment at National Review and it’s quite apt:

Mueller’s report is essentially a prosecutor’s charging document that does not charge anyone with a crime, yet it tells a biased story in its interpretation of what happened and what people said.

It’s biased not just because the people who worked on it may have had (and probably did have) an anti-Trump agenda. It’s inherently biased because of its very nature as a document prepared by the special counsel, which is essentially the same (with some minor differences) as a special prosecutor. His report is not necessarily made public, and yet Trump allowed it to be. Why is it not automatically supposed to be made public (not just Mueller’s report, but all such reports)? One reason is that it presents evidence, insinuations, and conclusions that wouldn’t hold up in court, and it therefore can (and will) be used to smear innocent people and create a false impression of guilt where none exists.

Remember the Ken Starr report that was used as the basis for Bill Clinton’s impeachment? That was under a slightly different governing statute:

Barr is currently operating within the confines of the special-counsel regulations, which were written as a reaction to the independent-counsel rules. Those rules expired in 1998 at the end of the Whitewater investigation. Unlike Mueller, Ken Starr, the independent counsel at the time, was obligated to send his final report to Congress rather than the attorney general. Congress then made the report public, which prompted a backlash among those who were angry that Starr had aired details of President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky—an episode that went well outside of Starr’s original mandate to probe a land deal in Arkansas. “We believe that information obtained during a criminal investigation should, in most all cases, be made public only if there is an indictment and prosecution, not in lengthy and detailed reports filed after a decision has been made not to prosecute,” Janet Reno, Clinton’s attorney general, told Congress at the time. “The final report provides a forum for unfairly airing a target’s dirty laundry.”

Whereas the old rules required that the independent counsel tell Congress about “substantial and credible information that an impeachable offense may have been committed,” the new rules are much more narrow: The special counsel’s office, in its report, need only explain to the attorney general its prosecution or declination decisions. In other words, Mueller’s “solemn obligation is not to produce a public report,” Starr wrote for The Atlantic earlier this month. “He cannot seek an indictment. And he must remain quiet.”

The Democrats, meanwhile, argued that the Republican-controlled 115th Congress set a precedent for asking for and receiving highly sensitive and classified material related to the probe into Russia’s interference in the U.S. election, which Mueller then took over— and they’re demanding the same degree of transparency now.

The positions keep changing depending on who is the target.

I have long been against the entire idea of a special counsel or special prosecutor. I understand the impulse that went into the creation of the role, but the potential for harm is IMHO greater than the potential for good. I’m with Alan Dershowitz on this; he has repeatedly criticized such laws in general as both unnecessary and invitations to political machinations and manipulation.

Here’s Dershowitz on the Mueller report [emphasis mine]:

Barr takes the view — a view that I have argued for many months — that the act requirement of a crime (actus reus) cannot be satisfied by a constitutionally authorized action of the president, such as firing FBI Director James Comey. Mueller takes the view that a constitutionally authorized act can be turned into a crime if it is improperly motivated.

Mueller’s view is extreme and dangerous to civil liberties because it creates pure thought crimes. According to Mueller, the corrupt motive is the crime because surely the constitutionally authorized act cannot be criminal. The implications of this view for all Americans are frightening. They are especially frightening if applied to a president. Do we really want prosecutors or members of Congress to probe the motivations of presidents when they take constitutionally authorized actions?

Presidents, like the rest of us, have multiple motivations in virtually everything they do. Some are altruistic, others self-serving. Some are patriotic, some are partisan. A president may be motivated by revenge, friendship, family loyalty or countless other factors. We should judge presidents by what they do, not by why they do it.

In any event, neither Mueller nor Barr could find sufficient evidence of criminal motive to conclude that President Trump committed a crime. That was the right decision, even if Mueller made it for the wrong reason…

The Democratic leadership has already said that it makes little sense to try to impeach the president. Instead, they will try to hinder him by 1,000 cuts — subpoenas, hearings and other partisan maneuvers. They will use the critical contents of the Mueller report to further their partisan aims. That is one good reason, among many, why prosecutors should not issue public reports containing negative information about subjects of their investigations.

Another good reason is that prosecutorial reports are, by their nature, one-sided. Prosecutors do not look for exculpatory evidence, as Mueller has admitted in this report. That is why it is important to wait for the Trump legal team’s rebuttal to the Mueller report before coming to a final conclusion.

More here from Dershowitz.

And I wonder whether the final paragraph of this article by former prosecutor George Parry will come true:

Now that we have a sentient adult running the Justice Department, the true facts about the state sponsored coup are about to be unearthed. And, when that happens, Team Mueller’s shameful report will become an insignificant albeit sleazy footnote to the exposure and massive cleansing of the deep state that is about to occur.

Jeffrey Toobin and guiding perceptions: guilt by emotion

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s not the Onion. Not the Babylon Bee.

It’s just Jeffrey Toobin, Harvard Law graduate and legal analyst for CNN, giving us the benefit of his Deep Thoughts from a Deep Mind:

Hey, I’ve got an idea, Jeff. Let’s investigate you for something you didn’t do—like, for example, treason—and then leak lies about it like a sieve, lies that implicate you in massive guilt and threaten your family, your job, and everything you hold dear. And then let’s have people report on every single thing you do and say after that and analyze your emotions. Of course, you won’t be the least bit frustrated, I’m certain.

Oh, and by the way, if Trump had not been frustrated and angry, Toobin would have found that to have been evidence of guilt, too.

In this post so far, I’ve treated Toobin’s tweet as though for laughs. But really, although it has humorous aspects, it’s not funny. And the state of mind that leads someone like Toobin to write something like that for public consumption—and then to continue to be a supposedly expert and respected legal analyst for liberal media—is worth looking at.

Is Toobin stupid? No. He knows what he says is legally absurd. It’s a cliche to say that Trump makes people on the left lose their minds, but it’s not literally true. Toobin’s not out of touch with reality, and he actually does have enough understanding of the law that he knows what he says is garbage, in the legal sense.

But he’s not speaking legally there, he’s speaking quasi-legally, or rather pretend-legally. It goes like this: he’s a legal expert, has good legal credentials, and he’s talking about guilt. That’s a legal term, right? However, he’s using it in the vernacular sense, the emotional sense, speaking almost as a psychologist or a novelist to explain human behavior and its meaning, and cloaking himself in the mantle of “legal expert” to make it sound to the gullible and willing as though he knows what he’s talking about when what he is actually saying is an absurdity.

Most democrats have been waiting for the Mueller report for years, and they didn’t get what they wanted out of it, nor what they’d been led to expect. They might feel pretty shaken, actually. Toobin is providing some guidance for a way to think, a way out of the Mueller maze and to the endpoint of still believing Trump to be guilty. To people who might desperately want to preserve this belief, he offers a possible way to do it. Whether or not Toobin is successful in that endeavor or not, that’s what he’s trying to do for them, and perhaps even for himself.

Is he successful? Hard to say. Many of the responses to that tweet of his are pretty brutal (and pretty funny), but that’s mostly from people who seem to be on the right anyway. Those on the left might buy what he says, just as similar arguments were used (and accepted) against Brett Kavanaugh, whose reaction to Ford’s lies about him were labeled as being too emotional, too heated, and therefore supposedly indications of guilt rather than innocence.

It was preposterous when applied to Kavanaugh. His emotional reaction was exactly what you would imagine from an innocent man. But that didn’t stop a lot of people on the left from believing the argument then, and still believing it today.

Just so with Trump. Toobin is suggesting a version of that same argument. One of the main problems with it, though, is that it falls into the category of phenomena people can observe for themselves in their ordinary lives. How do innocent people act when falsely accused? How would I act if falsely accused of heinous crimes? Most people are well aware that the normal reaction would be outrage. And yet a lot of Democrats were able to override this common sense conclusion during the Kavanaugh hearings, and my guess is that quite a few will manage to do so again in order to continue to implicate Trump.

In a logical world, the Mueller report would change a lot of minds in favor of Trump. But the world isn’t so very logical is it? I haven’t seen any polls yet that try to measure the effect of the report and all the commentary following it. But I know that the frantic and almost dizzying spinning of the MSM has a purpose, and might very well hit the mark for a lot of people who are searching for a way to maintain their hatred of Trump.

ADDENDUM:

Also, by the way, there’s this:

On Passover and liberty

The New Neo Posted on by

[The following is a slightly edited repeat of a previous post.]

Tonight is the beginning of the Jewish holiday Passover.

In recent years whenever I’ve attended a Seder, I’ve been impressed by the fact that Passover is a religious holiday dedicated to an idea that’s not really primarily religious: freedom. Yes, it’s about a particular historical (or perhaps legendary) event: the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. But the Seder ceremony makes clear that, important though that specific event may be, freedom itself is also being celebrated.

Offhand, I can’t think of another religious holiday that takes the trouble to celebrate freedom. Nations certainly do: there’s our own Fourth of July, France’s Bastille Day, and various other independence days around the world. But these are secular holidays rather than religious ones.

For those who’ve never been to a Seder ceremony, I suggest attending one (and these days it’s easier, since they are usually a lot shorter and more varied than in the past). A Seder is an amazing experience, a sort of dramatic acting out complete with symbols and lots of audience participation. Part of its power is that events aren’t placed totally in the past tense and regarded as ancient and distant occurrences; rather, the participants are specifically instructed to act as though it is they themselves who were slaves in Egypt, and they themselves who were given the gift of freedom, saying:

“This year we are slaves; next year we will be free people…”

Passover acknowledges that freedom (and liberty, not exactly the same thing but related) is an exceedingly important human desire and need. That same idea is present in the Declaration of Independence (which, interestingly enough, also cites the Creator):

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

It is ironic, of course, that when that Declaration was written, slavery was allowed in the United States. That was rectified, but only after great struggle, which goes to show how wide the gap often is between rhetoric and reality, and how difficult freedom is to achieve. And it comes as no surprise, either, that the Passover story appealed to slaves in America when they heard about it; witness the lyrics of “Let My People Go.”

Yes, the path to freedom is far from easy, and there are always those who would like to take it away. Sometimes an election merely means “one person, one vote, one time,” if human and civil rights are not protected by a constitution that guarantees them, and by a populace dedicated to defending them at almost all costs. Wars of liberation only give an opportunity for liberty, they do not guarantee it, and what we’ve observed in recent decades has been the difficult and sometimes failed task of attempting to foster it in places with no such tradition, and with neighbors dedicated to its obliteration.

We’ve also seen threats to liberty in our own country, despite its long tradition of liberty and the importance Americans used to place on it.

Sometimes those who are against liberty are religious, like the mullahs. Sometimes they are secular, like the Communists. Sometimes they are cynical and power-mad; sometimes they are idealists who don’t realize that human beings were not made to conform to their rigid notions of the perfect world, and that attempts to force them to do so seem to inevitably end in horrific tyranny, and that this is no coincidence.

As one of my favorite authors Kundera wrote, in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

…human beings have always aspired to an idyll, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of har­mony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men, where the world and all its people are molded from a single stock and the fire lighting up the heavens is the fire burning in the hearts of men, where every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily caught and squashed between the fingers like an insect.”

Note the seamless progression from lyricism to violence: no matter if it begins in idealistic dreams of an idyll, the relinquishment of freedom to further that dream will end with humans being crushed like insects.

History has borne that out, I’m afraid. That’s one of the reasons the people of Eastern Europe have been more inclined to ally themselves recently with the US than those of Western Europe have—the former have only recently come out from under the Soviet yoke of being regarded as those small black and meaningless dots in the huge Communist “idyll.”

Dostoevsky did a great deal of thinking about freedom as well. In his cryptic and mysterious Grand Inquisitor, a lengthy chapter from The Brothers Karamazov, he imagined a Second Coming. But this is a Second Coming in which the Grand Inquisitor rejects what Dostoevsky sees as Jesus’s message of freedom:

Oh, never, never can [people] feed themselves without us [the Inquisitors and controllers]! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, “Make us your slaves, but feed us.” They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious. Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man?

Freedom vs. bread is a false dichotomy. Dostoevsky was writing before the Soviets came to power, but now we have learned that lack of freedom, and a “planned” economy, is certainly no guarantee of bread.

I think there’s another very basic need, one that perhaps can only really be appreciated when it is lost: liberty.

Happy Passover!