Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Civil Liberties 101

What Worries Civil Liberties Freaks: Surveillance on a terror 'suspect' (ho, ho!) picks up a meeting between the scumbag-in-question and an MP

What Doesn't Worry Civil Liberties Freaks: Agents of the state kidnap a newborn child without any legal authority whatsoever.

See ? I don't know why anyone thinks these people are a bunch of liberal kooks.

Mind you, I am just shocked to find that a surveillance operation aimed at dangerous subversives ended up taping a Labour MP. Seriously though, you have to question the strategy here: if they wanted to catch him making pro-terrorist statements they should have just listened to his speeches.

Needless to say, even the folks responsible for all manner of weird and wonderful interpretations of human rights laws can't find any actual law that have been broken. The nearest the left can get is a weenie convention from the Sixties that only mentions phone tapping and commits the government not to do it, unless they really need to, in which case they'll inform Parliament, sometime.

Call it a hunch, but I'd guess an MP hanging out with the mad bomber is what these guys had in mind when they made the language used so flexible - and that's before you consider the likely response if conservatives started citing conventions from forty years ago. We'd be accused of wanting to chain homosexuals to the kitchen sink and force women back into the closet. Or something.

I guessing we're not allowed to ask what it means when a supposed moderate pals around with jihadis, and I'll guess we're definitely not allowed to wonder what it means that Mr Moderate has no qualms about revealing this to the public. Say what you like about MPs, but they're masters of reading public opinion. I guess his constituents must be equally moderate, right ?

Meanwhile, even as liberals revel in ostentatious angst over the fact the security services treats MPs like ordinary people (socialism's not as straightforward as you'd think), the case of the Nottinghamshire baby napping disappears down the memory hole.

Let's check the scorecard here: agents of the state tapping what the victim assures us was just a conversation with an old pal: scandal! Agents of the state abducting a child: business as usual.

If nothing else, in so far as the left has reconciled themselves to the idea of an unrepresentative and unaccountable group of fanatics, protected from public scrutiny, using the power of the state to destroy families, could they at least stop warning darkly about the 'thin end of the wedge' and the like - we're pretty much up to the middle of the wedge by now. Ditto, they can drop the portentous references to Pastor Niemoller as well. For the average citizen, if they do come for you, they're more likely to be social workers than anyone in the security services.

No comments: