Bill's Notes

Elect Obama, that is. This is the latest transcript of showing what a ... well, a nut he is. And that the press let him get away with this -- is disgraceful.

You know, if you look at the victories and failures of the civil-rights movement, and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples. So that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at a lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it, I’d be okay, but the Supreme Court never entered into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society.

And uh, to that extent, as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution — at least as it’s been interpreted, and Warren Court interpreted it in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties: [It] says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf.

And that hasn’t shifted, and one of the, I think, the tragedies of the civil-rights movement was because the civil-rights movement became so court-focused, uh, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change. And in some ways we still suffer from that ...

You know, I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. The institution just isn’t structured that way. [snip] You start getting into all sorts of separation of powers issues, you know, in terms of the court monitoring or engaging in a process that essentially is administrative and takes a lot of time. You know, the court is just not very good at it, and politically, it’s just very hard to legitimize opinions from the court in that regard.

So I think that, although you can craft theoretical justifications for it, legally, you know, I think any three of us sitting here could come up with a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts.” (Emphasis mine.)

Right, Obama. In the United States, the government is not mandated to do things on your behalf. That's a different form of government.

And when someone talks about economic justice, what they mean is taking your money away using the coercive power of the state and giving it to approved groups. This is banana-republic politics. Yes, we've already done some of this -- but Obama is talking in terms that are radically leftist, meaning massive wealth transfers.

I have two hopes: Somehow McCain pulls this out, and that Obama will moderate once he's president. Because if he starts these massive wealth transfers, he'll not only destroy this economy, he'll do what Peron did to Argentina -- take a wealthy, first-world country and turn it into a third-world mess: all while being applauded by the approved groups.

Democracy, as is often said, has an achilles heel: What do you do when people discover they can vote themselves payments from the national treasury? We're already been doing that for a long time, but not in such a degree that we've tanked our country. Yet. What Obama's talking about, if he actually does is, will tank our country.

Let's hope he doesn't mean it.