TheAgitator.com
Jingo Trap
Sunday, August 31st, 2003The Washington Post points out that if we actually had the constitutional amendment prohibiting flag desecration that our president and his party support, he could have been arrested for violating it.
6 Responses to “Jingo Trap”
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivs 2.5 License.
I’m a little confused about why the WaPo sees the need to print this editorial NOW… this happened a couple of months ago. Or at least, if they’re going to editorialize on old news, they would be well advised to do some better research. If they had, they’d discover that according to another obscure American law, what The President did was perfectly legal, regardless of any ammendment to the Constitution.
From the same obscure law.
“…and any such alteration or additional rule shall be set forth in a proclamation ”
I think he’d still be indictable.
You’d be surprised at the power and significance that a simple semicolon has when it comes to the law. I’m not saying that I agree or disagree, but that could be interpreted any number of ways even though common sense would dictate that it’s pretty straightforward.
My point was only that the WaPo editorial was engaging in faulty logic and presenting half of the story in order to lambaste the President for his seeming hypocrisy on a non-issue. While I will agree that Bush deserves a good wet-noodle-flogging on any number of issues, this is a waste of column-inches that accomplishes nothing.
I’m certainly not one to blindly defend Bush, anyone here can probably attest to that. However, I do feel a duty to speak out when I think the guy’s getting a bad rap. Sure, one could easily find fault with his every misstep, but I think that in the end it discredits the legitimate complaints.
Brian:
One could also read this not as criticism of the President but as a cautionary tale for those wanting to inflict yet more “constitutional pollution” upon us. The fact that the statute is so expansive merely illustrates the fact that this proposed admendment will have some serious unforeseen consequences.
Of course, trust WashPost to muddy the waters by getting in a few unneccessary and irrelevant snarky comments about the guy, just for kicks.
“The fact that the statute is so expansive merely illustrates the fact that this proposed admendment will have some serious unforeseen consequences”
And it shows that “flag desecrators” aren’t limited to weirdy beardy commie pinko sexual deviant hippies. (As I suspect people like Tom Delay conceives of them.)
I agree. Not all of them have beards.