Friday, May 7, 2010

Will someone send Beck a constitution-for-dummies already? thanks

Lots of conservative blogs quote Beck. His show video clips are posted like they are gospel. Beck said this. Beck said that. Cool. Great. Neat-o-keen.
Umm... pssssst, in case you forgot: Mr. Beck gets paid a looooot of money to entertain you...
(hello, before FOX his prior employer was CNN? nope, nope, no liberal bias there at allllll...)
WAKE UP AND SMELL THE DISINFORMATION people!
While you are admiring his whiz bang TV show and top notch chalk board skills, please start paying attention to what Beck DOES NOT talk about, OK? (yep, what the constitution actually says and means about POTUS eligibility is a big f**g deal)
Recent example: Miranda Rights are not in the constitution. Daniel Greenfield has a good column about this at his site Sultan Knish. If you haven't read any of Daniel's analysis, I recommend it. He is good. From the Constitution and the Times Square Car Bomber :
"Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square Car Bombing suspect, has been caught and will predictably enough be routed through all the formal legalities reserved for Islamic terrorists trying to kill Americans. He will get a criminal trial, a lawyer and a jail sentence after which he, like so many of his compatriots will be released to try and kill again. And quite possibly sooner than anyone might think.

Meanwhile on FOX, Glenn Beck protested the idea of denying a Miranda Warning to Shahzad because he is a US citizen and "you don't shred the constitution." Obviously Beck isn't very familiar with the Constitution, because at no point in time does it mandate a Miranda warning, or compel civil trials for armed insurgents. Instead Beck has confused the Miranda Warning, one of the Warren court's judicial innovations with the Constitution. This is a mistake commonly made by liberals and those who have not educated themselves regarding what the Constitution actually says.
The Warren court pursued its radical agenda of judicial activism by creating an entire spectrum of "rights" based on spurious readings of the Constitution. Warren's technique was simple enough. He would take the actual Constitution and reinterpret the text to suit his political agenda. The actual ruling was not anything that the Framers had ever intended, and had nothing to do with the actual purpose the text was meant to serve. It was just a convenient hook to hang his ruling on.
Take Cruel and Unusual Punishment, which had been meant to ban all sorts of hideous executions and tortures that had been practiced in Europe. The Warren court used it to ban the denaturalization of a army deserter and to rule that imprisoning heroin addicts is illegal, because their addiction is a sickness, not a crime. This had nothing to do with the Eight Amendment of the United States Constitution which was meant to ban certain painful physical punishments, not to control whether junkies could be taken off the street or defectors could be deprived of citizenship. Instead it was used by the court to ban the death penalty for rape, to ban the death penalty for 17 year old murderers, and temporarily the idea of the death penalty itself.
The Miranda Warning that Beck insists is in the Constitution is based on a similarly spurious reading which made the leap to arguing that questioning a suspect without informing him of his rights, such as the aforementioned Ernesto Arturo Miranda, a serial rapist, was the equivalent of denying him those rights. The court's argument in Miranda was that being taken into custody is so intimidating that it is essentially a form of compulsory self-incrimination.
For Beck to argue that a failure to Mirandize "shreds the Constitution" would mean that he seriously believes that the Constitution had been shredded all along until 1966 when Earl Warren fixed it by adding the requirement of a Miranda Warning. This is a belief widely held on the liberal side of the aisle, but I don't think Beck believes that. He is simply following the widely held liberal indoctrination which treats the rulings made through Judicial Activism as equivalent to the actual text of the Constitution." ... Read the rest here
Someone... Anyone... [of course this person has to be someone Beck-the-know-it-all will actually LISTEN to], please send Beck a flippin' copy of the United States constitution and perhaps a team of constitutional experts to advise him.
You may need to clear it with the Saudi investor-part-owners of Fox though... so good luck with that.

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