Parapoetica

Jonathan Adler is a law professor and Volokh conspiracist.

Jonathan Adler on torture, September 2006:

Assuming a good faith effort to operate within accepted legal norms, the clearer the rules about when one may engage in potentially tortuous behavior, such as the use of force, the less likely it is that such conduct will result in liability for the officer in question.

Jonathan Adler on, um, threatening secured creditors with bad publicity in press briefings unless they cede to unsecured creditors during White House-Chrysler bankruptcy negotiations, May 2009:

incendiary, and quite disturbing… more than Nixonesque thuggery…the sort of thing one expects to see in a Banana Republic. It is antithetical to the rule of law and undermines the trust necessary for liberal economic institutions to function.

Sometimes a man’s just got to take a stand.

You can only blog for so long without getting drawn into political matters, I suppose. So here I go.

Disclosure: I consider myself a liberal; I identify strongly with most liberal causes, although I certainly disagree on a good number of issues. I voted for Kerry, but only as the lesser of two evils; I would have really loved a Dean – McCain fight.

That said, I probably read more conservative blogs than liberal ones, because who wants to live in an echo chamber? And I’ve tried to live an objective life; too many people on both ends of the political spectrum get blinded by allegiances.

Yet, naturally, as a liberal, it’s the tunnel vision of the conservatives that gets my goat, so I’m more likely to rant about that than about the latest crazy thing that Sharpton or even Kos says.

Given that introduction: Hindrocket writes in Friday’s Powerline about the “partisan hatred” going on in the Schiavo case, and opines:

I don’t know how to account for it, unless one concludes that for some liberals, politics is about hate, period.

Well, the signs in the accompanying photo, which say things like “Jeb is like Terri – Brain Dead!”, are hardly the epitome of a dignified political debate, but frankly, I’m more concerned with the death threats made against not only Michael Schiavo, but the judge in the case, and even a Florida legislator who voted against Yet Another Special Law to, er, encourage the judiciary to reconsider.

Yet I don’t consider these threats to be the mark of a “conservative”. I consider them to be the mark of an idiot. In this case, an idiot who probably does vote Republican. But, first and foremost, an idiot, and one with a God complex. Or, in the case of the sign holder, an idiot with poor taste in metaphors and no gift for grammar. Key takeaway, though: Idiot. I wish Hindrocket could see that too.