Thursday, July 28, 2005

Another authoritarian conservative outs himself: Rick Santorum

I kept forgetting to bring home the notes I had jotted down while listening to the radio at work. Sen. Rick Santorum was on Sean Hannity's show this past Monday, and he clearly showed that he has the same warped idea of freedom as Rudy Giuliani. These are the ideals of liberty that he promoted:

"Freedom to do what you ought to do, not what you want to do."

"...for the common good..."

"...a 'we' kind of freedom, not a 'me' kind of freedom."

As the old question goes, "And just who decides?" The very problem is that government eventually usurps the decision-making of what people "ought" to do, what the "common good" is.

I'm very disappointed -- though not surprised -- to see that Santorum is just another authoritarian conservative. This fits in with his fellow conservative Rudy Giuliani, who I'll quote once again:
We only see the oppressive side of authority. Maybe it comes out of our history and our background. What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do and how you do it.
The parade of authoritarians continued on Tuesday, when Hannity's guest that day (I forget his name) promoted the use of profiling. "Someone has to be searched," he declared. Is that so? The only reason a politician demands that "someone" be searched is strictly for the sake of creating the illusion of safety. The guest also boasted, "Profiling works in every instance." That's news to me: profiling would never have caught Richard Reid, Jose Padilla and John Walker Lindh.

1 Comments:

Blogger TKC said...

It seems Victor Davis Hanson might be joining the authoritarian club too, however, it might be that I've only misread his intent.

Here is how.
http://pubcrawler.blogspot.com/2005/07/1st-amendment-question.html

Friday, July 29, 2005 5:03:00 PM  

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