Hillary Clinton: Immoral or Amoral?

During her recent Congressional testimony about the notorious Benghazi Affair Hillary Clinton uttered the now infamous rhetorical question “What difference, at this point, does it make?” Note my emphasis on the word “it.” In the context the question was asked and answered Clinton’s “it” referred at least to the murder of four Americans, and probably the State Department’s antecedent failure to provide adequate security and the White House’s subsequent stonewalling cover-up. 


In other words—according to the former First Lady, United States Senator, presidential aspirant, Secretary of State, and putative 2016 democratic party presidential candidate—it made no difference that the government of which she was then a high-ranking member exposed Americans to high-risk danger, left them defenseless in a hotbed of terrorists, made no effort to rescue them, literally watched them being murdered—and then tried to cover up apparatchik  malfeasance by lying through their teeth to the people of the United States.

“What difference?” indeed.

But beyond what has become obvious about Clinton’s and her colleagues’ betrayal of the deceased Americans and the rest of the government’s malfeasance, the Benghazi Affair reveals something even more sinister.

Over the years, some of Hillary Clinton’s questionable conduct has not involved issues of morality.  She has been a poseur, playing the role of victimized, yet forgiving, wife during the Lewinsky scandal. She has been a hypocrite, castigating George W. Bush for warrantless surveillance but using purloined tapes to her own political advantage. She has been a paranoid, complaining to the world about the alleged “right wing conspiracy.” She has been a conniver, ousting career White House travel office employees in favor of her cronies. She has been a dilettante, presuming to make over America’s health care system.  

While this conduct, and much more like it, has been unseemly and at odds with the dignified and trustworthy image that had been projected by modern-era First Ladies from Bess Truman to Laura Bush, none of Hillary Clinton’s conduct raised serious moral questions.

On the other hand, Clinton has done many other things that have raised serious questions of immorality (immoral defined as “not in conformity with accepted principles of right and wrong behavior; contrary to the moral code of the community” [Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language (13^th ed.)]; in other words knowing, but disregarding, those principles).

She authored a brief reeking with fraud while a staff lawyer for the Watergate Committee. She was a beneficiary of illegal commodities transactions that turned her a large profit.  She fraudulently stung lenders in the Whitewater land scheme. She bought votes and campaign contributions with criminal pardons issued by her husband. She lied about Chinese contributions to her political campaigns. She participated in slandering and intimidating women whom her husband sexually and otherwise abused, and was complicit in covering up his salacious conduct. She blithely desecrated the presidency by selling the Lincoln Bedroom to donors and celebrities. She stole furniture and furnishings from the White House. And much more—including her recent complicity in the murder of four Americans in Benghazi and the attempted cover-up of the entire sordid affair. All immoral conduct.

There’s more, but to elucidate all of it would be to gild the lily. Hillary Clinton’s immoral conduct—rationalize by her adherence to the “Rules for Radicals” promulgated by her mentor Saul Alinsky—has been detailed on the public record for decades, especially since her abortive campaign for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2007. 

At that time, I raised the question of whether Clinton’s decades-old questionable character traits and corner-cutting conduct demonstrated that she was merely immoral or, worse: Whether she was amoral—and whether there’s any important difference between the two concepts.

The answer is that there is a difference, a profound one, and with Hillary Clinton’s eye on a 2016 presidential nomination it’s crucially important for the future of the United States of America that the voters of this country understand it.

I begin with the concept of “morality” itself, one which Americans instinctively understand.  Rooted in fundamental notions of “right” and “wrong,” most Americans know (or knew!) that it’s right to pay our bills and protect our loved ones; that it is wrong to defraud creditors and abuse children. It’s immoral to buy votes, lie to investigators, release terrorists for a political quid pro quo, attack the defenseless, steal from the White House—all conduct that Hillary Clinton was a party to—as well as to engage in countless other actions which, by anyone’s definition, must be characterized as immoral.  That this prospective candidate for the presidency of the United States has acted immorally time and time again is clear beyond any legitimate disagreement.

But what about amorality?—defined as “being neither moral nor immoral; specifically: lying outside the sphere to which moral judgments apply; lacking moral sensibility . . . .”  (Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (10^th ed.); emphasis in original.)

A person who is amoral does not accept any moral standard by which her conduct is to be judged by others.  She simply does not care about the concept of morality, about right or wrong, in what she thinks, says, or does.  Morality does not apply to such a person. “What difference, at this point, does it make?” could well be such person’s mantra.

 Thus, the questions arise: Does all of Hillary Clinton’s dubious conduct over the course of decades reflect a simple, garden-variety immorality—knowing but eschewing the right, and deliberately doing the wrong? Or does Alinsky’s acolyte—the leading candidate of the Democrat Party for the presidency of the United States—at root care nothing for morality and deem it to have no application to her? Is Hillary Clinton amoral?

Her record (let alone her character) leaves no doubt about the answer.  Yet Clinton and her supporters ask: “What difference, at this point, does [morality] make?” 

To ask the question is to answer it.

In praise of torture

Several years ago I wrote that “recently we witnessed Chechen rebels taking over a Moscow theater, capturing hundreds of hostages, and threatening to kill them if the intruders’ demands were not met. Let’s assume the same thing happens in the United States, but with al-Qaeda terrorists. Assume further that we capture one of the terrorists who knows the plans of his comrades, but he won’t talk. Should we use torture to force this crucial information out of him?”

Well, Boston has just experienced an analogous situation. Brother 1 (the elder) and Brother 2 (the younger) detonate two IEDs (improvised explosive devices) at the Boston Marathon killing at least three innocent bystanders and maiming scores of others. Brother 1 is killed in a shootout with police. Brother 2 survives. Not initially having been “Mirandized” (“You have the right to remain silent,” etc.) he is to be politely questioned by crack FBI interrogators who cannot lay a finger on him (are you listening Senators McCain and Graham, and your weak-kneed cohort?).

Let’s say, hypothetically, that Brother 2 tells them that there are other bombs stashed in Boston, ticking away, and set to explode in public places beginning Thursday morning. Perhaps Fenway Park, maybe in a subway, at a race track or Prudential Center Mall. Why not all of them? Or elsewhere. Anywhere.

But there’s a problem. Brother 2 won’t provide any details. He just lies in his hospital bed muttering the mantra of “tick tock, tick tock.”

Frustrated—and plenty scared, after all Brother 2 has proved his bombing creds once already, to devastating effect—the interrogators would like to torture the information out of the terrorist.

"Torture"—commonly defined as "the inflicting of severe pain to force information or confession"—comes principally in two varieties: physical (e.g., the "third degree") and psychological (e.g., sleep deprivation). The literature on torture is voluminous, most commentators concluding that torture is odious and unacceptable at all times and under all circumstances, especially in a democracy.

But is it? Should it be?

Some of the commentators, in their analysis and discussion of the phenomenon of torture, admit being deeply troubled by how a democracy deals with the question of torture generally, let alone in the extreme example of the so-called "ticking time bomb" situation such as the one I posit here.

Until recently the question was hypothetical. Sadly, in the United States of America it no longer is.

There are variations on the ticking time bomb situation, but the essence is in this plausible, even worse, scenario: A known terrorist in FBI custody, whose information is credible, won’t disclose where in Washington, DC, he has secreted a "weapon of mass destruction" – a nuclear bomb – set to detonate in twenty-four hours. The Bureau is certain that the terrorist will never voluntarily reveal the bomb’s location. Within a day our nation’s capital could be wiped from the face of the earth, our government decimated, surrounding areas irredeemably contaminated, and the United States laid defenseless to unimaginable predation by our enemies.

What to do?

Accepting these facts for the sake of argument, we have only two choices. Do nothing, and suffer the unimaginable consequences, or torture the information out of the terrorist.
There are those among us—nihilists come to mind–who would probably stand by idly and endure an atomic holocaust. But most people, realists, would doubtless opt for torture, albeit reluctantly.

They would be correct. They would be entitled to be free of even a scintilla of moral guilt, because torture – of whatever kind, and no matter how brutal – in defense of legitimate self-preservation is not only not immoral, it is a moral imperative.

Unknown to most Americans, one case in two different courts in the United States—a state appellate court in Florida, and a federal Court of Appeals—have, albeit implicitly, endorsed such a use of physical force, and thus of torture, if necessary to save lives.

Jean Leon kidnapped one Louis Gachelin, who was held at gunpoint by Leon’s accomplice. A ransom was arranged, a trap was sprung, and Leon was arrested.

Fearing that the accomplice would kill Gachelin if Leon didn’t return promptly with the ransom money, the police demanded to know where the victim was being held. Leon wouldn’t talk.

According to the Third District Court of Appeal of the State of Florida, when Leon "refused, he was set upon by several of the officers. They threatened and physically abused him by twisting his arm behind his back and choking him [and, allegedly, threatened to kill him] until he revealed where . . . [Gachelin] was being held. The officers went to the designated apartment, rescued . . . [Gachelin] and arrested . . . [the accomplice]."

While this was happening, Leon was taken "downtown," questioned by a different team of detectives, and informed of his Miranda rights. He signed a waiver and confessed to the kidnapping. But before Leon’s trial, he sought to exclude his police station confession, arguing that it was the tainted product of the cops’ literal arm twisting, choking, and threats. (No self-incrimination issue arose from Leon having revealed the victim’s location because that information was not sought to be used against him at his trial).

The trial judge denied Leon’s motion to suppress his confession on the ground that the force and threats used on him at the time of arrest were not the reason for his confession. In other words, the conceded coercion at the time of Leon’s arrest had dissipated by the time of his confession, which the trial judge ruled had been given voluntarily.

Leon appealed. The Florida appeals court affirmed, reaching the same conclusion as the trial judge: Whatever had happened at Leon’s arrest, the coercion had dissipated by the time he’d confessed. Thus, it was proper to use Leon’s confession against him at trial.

That ruling should have been the end of Leon’s first appeal because the only question in the case was the admissibility of Leon’s confession. Yet the appeal court’s opinion went further than the facts of the case required. In language lawyers call dicta—judicial reflections in no way necessary for a decision—the appellate judge added, gratuitously, that "the force and threats asserted upon Leon in the parking lot were understandably motivated by the immediate necessity to find the victim and save his life."

Consider the implications. Even though the motive for using force, and the police’s use of it, were irrelevant to the decision, the appellate court’s 2-1 majority saw fit to give its express approval of physical and psychological coercion in this situation, so long as the product of that coercion (the confession) was not used against defendant Leon at his trial.
Lest anyone think that the dicta in this decision was an aberration, we need look only at the unanimous three-judge decision in Leon’s further appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.

The facts were not in dispute. Once again, the only issue on appeal was whether the physical and psychological coercion at the time of arrest tainted the confession, or whether the coercion had, by then, sufficiently dissipated to make Leon’s confession voluntary.

First, the federal appeals court dealt with self-incrimination. As to Leon’s arrest statement concerning where his accomplice was holding Gachelin, there was no issue since the prosecution, properly, had never tried to introduce that statement at the trial. Next, whatever coercion had been used, it did not taint Leon’s later confession because, according to the court, "the totality of the circumstances . . . clearly confirms . . . that the second statement was voluntary." Therefore, that statement was both voluntary and admissible.

The federal appeal court’s ruling concerning the voluntariness of Leon’s confession completely disposed of the case. But, as with the earlier appeal, this court took the unnecessary step of including dicta to the effect that the use of coercion at Leon’s arrest was "motivated by the immediate necessity of finding the victim and saving his life," and that "[t]his was a group of concerned officers acting in a reasonable manner to obtain information they needed in order to protect another individual from bodily harm or death."

Since the appellate courts, both state and federal, went out of their way to express their approval of coercion in a life-threatening situation, their dicta is noteworthy because it signals their acceptance of coercion in principle – a legitimization, as it were.

 If, without objection from a state and a federal appeals court (indeed, with their apparent approval), the Florida police could employ a relatively benign form of coercion to save the life of a kidnap victim, it follows that the same rationale would support actual torture (physical and/or psychological) in a ticking time bomb situation.

Once that threshold is crossed—once the principle is accepted that torture legitimately can be employed to save lives—all that remains is the application of that principle to concrete cases. While that application could be difficult—requiring some showing of probable cause, judicial oversight, and the like—the need to create such important procedural safeguards does not negate the argument that, in this country, where killers are routinely put to death for the commission of a single murder, it is neither immoral nor illegal in principle to employ non-lethal torture—waterboarding, for example—in the name of saving thousands of innocent American lives. 

Indeed, failure to do so is immoral.

Hanoi Jane lies again

In our book “Aid and Comfort”: Jane Fonda in North Vietnam Erika Holzer and I proved that her wartime trip to, and radio broadcasts from, North Vietnam was provable constitutional and statutory treason of which she could have been convicted by a jury.

Then came her autobiography, in which she defended her trip and claimed that over the years since she had apologized.

In response, for Front Page Magazine Erika and I wrote a lengthy deconstruction of everything she said in her book about her junket to Communist Vietnam. Entitled “Guilty as Charged.”

On April 3, 2013 Newsmax reported that Fonda says that “I made one [!!] unforgivable mistake when I was in North Vietnam, and I will go to my grave with this.” She claims that she has “apologized repeatedly, both privately and repeatedly.”

(Although this is a PC blog, I can’t restrain myself from saying “Bull Shit”).

As to her treason, see “Aid and Comfort”: Jane Fonda in North Vietnam. As to the purported repeated apologies, see “Guilty as Charged.”

Women in ground combat

The late military historian Lt. Col. Roy E. Appleman wrote extensively about the Korean War. His book Disaster in Korea: The Chinese Confront MacArthur describes in heart-wrenching detail the United States Army's 2d Infantry Division's withdrawal south from a place called Kunu-ri. Here is one vignette, quoting an American Lt. Colonel who was at that moment under intense Chinese small arms and mortar fire:

"For the next 500 yards the road was temporarily impassable because of the numerous burning vehicles and the pile-up of dead men, coupled with the rush of the wounded from the ditches, struggling to get aboard anything that rolled. When we checked to make a turnout, away from a blazing wreck, either there would be bodies in our way, or we would be almost borne down by wounded men who literally threw themselves upon us. At one point, I got out of the quarter-ton [jeep] to remove a body from the road. Then I saw the man was still living. He was a wounded ROK [Republic of Korea] soldier. I squeezed him into our trailer. But as I put him aboard, other wounded men piled on the trailer in such numbers that the jeep couldn't pull ahead. It was necessary to beat them off. We got underway. Then I heard a scream behind me and stopped. The press of bodies had pushed a wounded Turk between the jeep and the trailer and we were about to tear him apart. Again I had to get out and wrestle off a dozen wounded who were trying to board us. There wasn't any space for even one of them and I couldn't give up my place because I had to keep my battalion moving." (My emphasis.)

Every war has uncountable stories like this: Large caliber machine guns too heavy to redeploy; hand-to-hand combat; bayonet charges; wounded who need to be carried to safety. 

And those stories give rise to questions so obvious that I won't waste your time raising them here. Except to ask a rhetorical one: How many of the radical feminists, and their female supporters, are going to volunteer for ground combat -- or are they going to sit comfortably on the sidelines cheering on their sisters who may well die in the name of an absurd notion of "equality," and take male warriors down with them?

The Real Meaning of "You didn't build that."

Obama spoke those four words last week in the context of a wider statement that can only be spun, but not misunderstood.

Those now infamous words amounted to his explicit confession of the ethical principle at the core of Obama’s belief system: collectivism.

As good a definition of collectivism one can find is Ayn Rand’s: “Collectivism means the subjugation of the individual to a group -- whether to a race, class or state does not matter.  Collectivism holds that man must be chained to collective action and collective thought for the sake of what is called ‘the common good’.”

OK, if “you didn’t build that,” someone else did -- and Obama told us who it was: other people, whether configured as “the government,” or “society.”  Anyone other than you.  The collective.

This means that if you didn’t build "that" and the collective did . . .  well, you have no inalienable right to “that.”

According to the President of the United States -- the freest, most capitalist, private property protective nation ever to exist --  individuals create nothing by themselves, it’s the collective that’s responsible, and so that’s where ownership of the "that" properly should be vested.

What's the "that"?

Private property.  Your private property.

Obama’s naked collectivist attack on individual enterprise -- "You didn't build 'that'" -- was, at bottom, an attack on the nature, source, and ownership of private property.

Someone, please explain that to Mitt Romney, as well as every Republican candidate running for election today.

John Roberts and a Vietnamese Village

No one need read the entrails of a goat to understand the decision five Supreme Court justices rendered last Thursday regarding the constitutionality of the so-called Obamacare individual mandate.

With the dust settling on that decision—the mandate is constitutional not under the Commerce Clause, but as a newly-invented “tax” within Congress’s power to impose—focus is shifting to Chief Justice John Roberts’s vote that gave the four Court liberals and President Obama the constitutional victory.

Serious people are asking why Roberts wrote so patently an indefensible opinion, distorting reality to find a tax when there is no tax.

There are some who believe that Roberts’s whole-cloth tax rationale masked the Chief Justice’s clever Machiavellian plan to prevent the Commerce Clause’s further engorgement, tilt the election toward Mitt Romney, and otherwise in some not apparent manner do damage to the Court’s enemies.

Other commentators, preeminently Charles Krauthammer, argue that Roberts—who literally sat still when Obama insulted the Court and some of its members in person in front of Congress, the American people, and the world—is still hearing echoes of Bush v. Gore.  They believe, with some justification, that the Chief Justice feared his Court would again be held in disrepute if a 5-4 conservative bloc ruled Obamacare unconstitutional.  Indeed, in the last few weeks Obama himself, some members of his administration, a few Congressmen and Senator Patrick Leahy unconscionably told the Supreme Court it better not hold the mandate, let alone the rest of Obamacare, unconstitutional.

If this is why Roberts—otherwise a card-carrying judicial conservative, and staunch supporter of judicial restraint—caved in and ruled Obamacare constitutional, he made a serious miscalculation.  His tortured majority opinion has not only sullied his own reputation.  It has confirmed the view of many that the Supreme Court is just another pragmatic political institution—to be distrusted, even scorned.

One is reminded of the perhaps apocryphal Vietnam War comment, attributed to an unnamed American officer, to the effect that “to save the village, it had to be destroyed.”

Progress report

I was just informed that The American Constitution and Ayn Rand's "Inner Contradiction" is now number 6 of 100 on Amazon's list of "Hot New Releases in Constitutional Law."  (Note the company I'm keeping:
 http://www.amazon.com/gp/new-releases/books/227137/ref=zg_bsnr_nav_b_2_10777.)

I mention this now because it provides me with an appropriate time to answer a question I've been asked in the past several weeks: "What am I [note the pronoun] doing to promote The American Constitution and Ayn Rand's "Inner Contradiction"?

In a word, Nothing.

If this seems an odd attitude, here's why.
  
The American Constitution and Ayn Rand's "Inner Contradiction" is the product of years practicing, teaching, researching, writing, cogitating, analyzing and synthesizing American constitutional law.  And spending decades applying to that subject Ayn Rand's political philosophy.  To the best of my knowledge no one else has done this in the same way I have. 

Just as Erika Holzer's and my "Aid and Comfort": Jane Fonda in North Vietnam, and my first and second editions of The Supreme Court Opinions of Clarence Thomas, are unique books, so too is The American Constitution and Ayn Rand's "Inner Contradiction."


I've eschewed my regular publisher in favor of getting this book out to the public before the November election, in the hope that it could have an impact on some voters.

I have seen that it is for sale on virtually every digital format in existence (for peanuts), and now there are print copies available (for peanuts, plus).

That's all I'm going to do.

(I'm taking a minute to think of a polite way to say the following.)

OK.  I've done enough.  The horses have been led to water, but I consider it unseemly for me to try to make them drink.

If members of the public consider my work valuable in the fight for freedom in America, it's up to them to use the ammunition I've provided.  Indeed, that's the least they can do.  They can spread the word . . . or not.

One easy way for like minded people to do that is by reviewing the book on Amazon.  Another is simply to tell as many people about it as possible. 

I have put up.  Now it's time for others to do the same, or . . . .

Hanoi Jane as the First Lady

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/lambert/120427.

You'll need to paste this into your browser.

Rick Santorum: The great right altruist hope

 

Most people think that “altruism” means nothing more than being nice to people. Contributing to Haitian relief, or medical research.  Helping the poor, supporting the arts.

But the real meaning of “altruism” when used in an ethical/political context is significantly different.  Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language defines altruism as “the doctrine that the general welfare of society ¹ is the proper goal of an individual's action”² — the sacrificial antithesis of one acting in pursuit of his or her own interests.  Others, anyone, everyone—before me, or you.

Ayn Rand defined altruism in the ethical/political context more fully: “the ethical theory which regards man as a sacrificial animal, which holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value.”³  She elaborated:

Do not hide behind such superficialities as whether you should or should not give a dime to a beggar.  That is not the issue.  The issue is whether you do or do not have the right to exist without giving him that dime.  The issue is whether you must continue buying your life, dime by dime, from any beggar who might choose to approach you.  The issue is whether the need of others [“society”?] is the first mortgage on your life and the moral purpose of your existence. * * *⁴

Closely related to altruism is the concept of “collectivism.” 

Contrary to popular belief, collectivism has nothing to do with people who share common interests voluntarily coming together, as in a bowling league.  On the contrary, and antithetical to the principles of individual rights and limited government, “[c]ollectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group (to ‘society,’ to the tribe, the state, the nation), and that the group may sacrifice him at its own whim to its own interests.”⁵  “Collectivism means the subjugation of the individual to a group— whether to a race, class or state does not matter.  Collectivism holds that man must be chained to collective action and collective thought for the sake of what is called the ‘common good’.”⁶

Because altruism and collectivism are ethical, not political/legal, doctrines, the only way to implement them is by brute force, of which the government has a monopoly. 

Necessarily, altruism and collectivism have a political/legal corollary, statism: “the principle or policy of concentrating extensive economic, political, and related controls in the state at the cost of individual liberty”⁷ and of limited government. 

Altruism and collectivism are the antithesis of the individual rights principle of the Declaration of Independence, the limited government created by the Constitution of the United States of America, and the enumerated and unenumerated rights protected by the Bill of Rights.

Not to see Rick Santorum—now anointed by many of the anti-Romney Republican primary electorate as “The Great Right Hope”—for the unapologetic altruist-collectivist-statist he is would be a huge, dangerous mistake.

Either woefully ignorant about the nature and consequences of altruism-collectivism-statism, recklessly indifferent to these ethical/political doctrines, and/or seeking any port in a storm, in the last several days too many Americans have fallen for Santorum’s rousing paeans to individual rights and limited government.

Despite the vigor with which he claims to stand up for liberty, individual rights, limited government, and property and contract rights, and despite wrapping himself in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (how did he miss the Northwest Ordinance?), Rick Santorum is a cunning altruist-collectivist-statist of the worst kind. 

Don’t take my word for it.

On September 27, 2005, then-Senator Santorum gave a speech at “The First International Conservative Conference on Social Justice” entitled “The Conservative Future: Compassion.” 

That’s quite a mélange: “Conservative” (“in favor of preserving the status quo and traditional values and customs, and against abrupt change”⁸), “Social Justice” (often understood to mean “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs”⁹) and “Compassion” (“sympathy for the suffering of others, often including a desire to help.”¹⁰). 

The catchy title of his speech would have been more accurate had Santorum entitled it something like “The Future As Seen By This Compassionate Conservative: Sacrifice Of Some To The Needs Of Others, For The Common Good, Backed By Government Guns.”

Do I exaggerate?

Here’s Santorum in his own words (in Times New Roman), with my emphases, at the Conference:

“America’s conservative heritage never pursued a limitless freedom to do whatever one wants so long as no one is hurt. That kind of ‘freedom’ to be and do whatever we want, irrespective of the choice is a selfish freedom that cannot be sustained or afforded.  Someone always gets hurt when masses of individuals do what is only in their own self-interest.  That is the great lie of liberal freedom, or as I like to say, ‘No-Fault Freedom”—all the choice, none of the responsibility.

“We here today believe in something altogether different.  It is the liberty America’s Founders understood properly defined.  Freedom is liberty coupled with responsibility to something bigger or higher than self.  It is a self-less freedom.  It is sacrificial freedom.  It is the pursuit of our dreams with an eye toward the common good.  Freedom is the dual activity of lifting our eyes to the heavens while extending our hand to our neighbor.

“The only orthodox conservative philosophy that matches with this is compassionate conservatism.”

Indeed!  The above quotation is why every self-respecting free American should run as if from a plague from Santorum and other “compassionate conservatives” who, according to him, claim to understand the Founders’ intent and accomplishments better than they themselves.

In his speech, Santorum confessed that he and his compassionate conservative cohort scorn the individuality and personhood often called the “self.”  They do so because the individuals possessing those essential human traits are not selfless— meaning, that being selfish the latter don’t have the good grace to be complicit when they are, in Santorum’s own words, sacrificed for the common good.  No man or woman with stature and pride will willingly be complicit in their own destruction--let alone in the name of the "common good."

What does Santorum mean by “something bigger or higher than self”?  Probably mystical forces that drive him and other compassionate conservatives to make irrational and indefensible pronouncements about where rights come from, and how we are all our brothers’ keepers.

Have we not seen enough by now of what comes from sacrificing human beings for the “good” of others, rationalized by the mystical doctrines that give birth to altruism, collectivism and statism? 

Putting aside all of earlier recorded history, did not the Twentieth Century provide evidence enough of how much human suffering these doctrines produce?

Included in Isabel Paterson’ groundbreaking 1943 book entitled The God of the Machine is her essay The Humanitarian with the Guillotine.

I leave you with what Paterson’s title implies, as we hear more and more about Rick Santorum’s mystically-rooted belief that some of us, sometime, must be sacrificed by government to fulfill the needs of others.  But, all that killing and plunder, devastation and pain, is of course for the “common good.”

---

^[1] According to Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, Second College Edition, a “society” is nothing more than “a group of persons . . . .”  Meaning, other people.

^[2] Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, Second College Edition.

^[3] Ayn Rand, “Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World,” Philosophy: Who Needs It, 74.

^[4] Ibid.  Emphasis in original.

^[5] Ayn Rand, “Racism,” The Virtue of Selfishness, 175.

^[6] Ayn Rand, “The Only Path to Tomorrow,” Reader’s Digest, Jan. 1944, 8.

^[7] Dictionary.com.

[8] Encarta Dictionary. 

[9] See Wikipedia.

[10] Encarta Dictionary.

Mitt Romney's "Crime"

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is being pilloried for having been a venture capitalist.  His company used its own and investors' money (which was theirs to do with whatever they wanted) to purchase usually failing enterprises.  Their goal was to make them better and sell either parts or all of them for a profit.

Much has been said by pseudo conservatives like Santorum, Gingrich and Perry—and by the collectivists in the media, academia, not-for-profits and Democrat Party—that in risking their own money and trying to make a profit Romney and his colleagues somehow "took advantage"of the failing companies.

Worse than that anti-capitalist rant is the chorus' lament that in Romney’s investing, buying, fixing and selling, some people lost their jobs.

What everyone seems to be missing, however, is the insidious implication lurking in that lament: that those who lost their jobs were deprived of something to which they were entitled.  That the capital and labor of Romney and his colleagues was somehow to be used to benefit not themselves and their investors, but instead sacrificed for the benefit of the employees of the companies they had purchased.

Webster’s defines altruism as "the doctrine that the general welfare of society[other people] is the proper goal of an individual's action" — the antithesis of one acting in pursuit of his or her own interests.

The late Ayn Rand defined altruism this way: “the ethical theory which regards man as a sacrificial animal which holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value.”

That's what Mitt Romney is being accused of by his supposed friends and avowed enemies alike: not being an altruist. 

According to them, Mitt Romney’s "crime" was not sacrificing his own interests to those of other people. 

Not serving others at his expense.

To be moral—presumably like the mystic Santorum, the conniver Gingrich, the lightweight Perry, the confused Paul and the altruists/collectivists/statists of the Democrat Party—Romney was supposed to squander his time and lose his (and others') money so that the employees of failed and failing companies could keep their jobs.

That's not only not capitalism. 

It's ethical and economic cannibalism.