Yesterday, to my horror, I watched as Bill O’Reilly argued what is increasingly the standard populist postition that the government needs to get involved in policing “self-destructive” behavior, if only to save “the taxpayer” down the road from the (largely illusory) set of epidemics professional nannystatists, disguised as concerned scientists, are always warning against. O’Reilly cited such behavior as over-eating (leading to obesity) and drug use (leading to addiction)—though to be fair, he was careful to point out that he wasn’t so concerned with curbing personal freedoms per se as he was with having to pay for the longterm effects of not having curbed them in some way, a distinction with a (minor) difference.

- 25 August 2005

Me, I’m willing to make the following offer: I will accept as valid the chickenhawk argument from any person who agrees to support a Constitutional Amendment making military service a prerequisite for all who presume to shape foreign policy, up to and including the President, members of both the House and Senate, and all Federal Court justices. Either that, or from those who push to pass a Constitutional Amendment disbanding the military, which makes the question moot.

Short of that, I’d ask you to save your anti-democratic impulses for, say, campus speech codes or social engineering programs driven by the idea of proportionality—and allow the grownups to make the difficult choices that arise in the course of protecting the interests of our nation. Please.

- 22 August 2005