Whence cometh the fury of these people? I think it arises less from revulsion at interrogation techniques — who thinks that captured al Qaeda leaders should be treated politely and will then tell the whole truth? — than it does from a desire to see George W. Bush and Bush administration officials publicly humiliated and repudiated. Just as Madame Defarge relished watching the condemned walk from the tumbrel to the guillotine, our contemporary Defarges want to see the people they hate condemned and destroyed.
It doesn’t seem to matter to our Madame Defarges that it’s not clear that Bush officials violated any criminal law. One of the core principles of our law is that criminal statutes must be construed strictly against the government. If the government wants to deprive someone of his liberty for doing something, it should be very specific about what that something is. This distinguishes our system from authoritarian and totalitarian regimes that demand, like Alice’s Red Queen, “verdict first, trial later.”
It also doesn’t occur to the Madame Defarges of our times that revolutions like hers tend to devour their own.
A little bit of sunshine on a cloudy day.
Posts
