"To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing,
if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?"
-- Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, 1803

Sunday, August 19, 2007

Greetings Andrew Sullivan readers!

I have been a National Review subscriber for years.  It’s the magazine that really got me interested in conservatism.  But over the Bush years I’ve seen it slide from a champion of conservatism as an ideology to conservatism as supporting virtually all of the Bush agenda.  It’s gone downhill to a large degree, but it’s still great reading.  At any rate, in their August 7 edition’s This Week section, they mention Conrad Black.  Here’s Black’s Wikipedia overview. 

Conrad Moffat Black, Baron Black of Crossharbour, PC, OC, KCSG (born 25 August 1944, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada) is a former financier, newspaper magnate, and biographer.
Black is Canadian-born, but publicly renounced his Canadian citizenship in 2001 in order to accept his appointment as a life peer in the British House of Lords, an offer blocked by then Prime Minister of Canada Jean Chrétien. He is married to Barbara Amiel, a well-known, British-born journalist.

Patrician, blue blood to the core.  And a criminal.

Black was a defendant along with three others in United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, with Lord Black facing 13 counts related to criminal fraud. On 13 July 2007, the 12-member jury reached a guilty verdict on four charges, including mail fraud and obstruction of justice, but acquitted him of the other nine charges, including wire fraud and racketeering, after 12 days of deliberation. He faces a maximum penalty of 35 years in prison and a million-dollar fine when he is sentenced, scheduled for 30 November 2007, in Chicago.[1] His Canadian lawyer, Edward Greenspan, has stated that an appeal of Black’s convictions will be filed in due course.

Okay, so he’s a thief on a massive scale who stole millions of dollars and faces 35 years in prison.  Here’s National Review‘s paragraph, which is unfortunately subscriber firewalled.

Conrad Black, who is both a baron and a press baron, was convicted recently of four felonies in Chicago. His friends, who include the founder of National Review and several of its editors and writers, notably Mark Steyn and John O’Sullivan, can point out that Black was acquitted on nine of the original fourteen charges, that the amount he and his fellow defendants are alleged to have stolen has been reduced from more than $500 million to less than $6.1 million, and that he is appealing the guilty verdicts and might still leave court an innocent man. The odds are against this, for technical rather than substantive reasons, but odds are always less than certainties. And there is little doubt that the case against Black proved to be vastly more flimsy than either the prosecution or most media forecasts suggested. Black’s critics — who since the verdict seem to include half the world — say cynically that most of his remaining defenders are journalists who worked for him at one time or another. But so are some of the sadists who have been salivating all down his old publications’ pages over the prospects of Black’s being caged in some hard-time prison. We wish our friend well at the next legal stage.

Note the tone.  “Messy business, that.” This is a magazine that has spent the better part of the last four years largely rubber-stamping anything the government did to Jose Padilla, a defendant who had his charges significantly reduced, and whose case proved to be “vastly more flimsy than either the prosecution or most media forecasts suggested.”

The Conrad Black comments were from a week before the Padilla verdict.  I think I see how this works.  If you’re a patrician blueblood the legal system exists to exonerate you.  If, by some ghastly turn of events, you happen to end up convicted (Scooter Libby), there are systems in place which can be activated, no matter how inappropriate, to secure justice (Scooter Libby).  But if your last name happens to be all foreign-sounding and scary, even though you’re an American citizen, any violation of your rights under the Constitution is justifiable, any gross mistreatment is essential to national security, and anyone who dares ask questions or dissents is a left-wing traitor who hates America.

“We wish our friend well at the next legal stage.”

Update: The standard Bushbot defense for this is going to be that Jose Padilla was a terrorist, whereas Conrad Black was just a criminal.  That’s not the point.  We, as Americans, enjoy certain rights.  Unalienable Rights. There is no asterisk next to these rights in the Constitution.  Jose Padilla, an American citizen arrested on American soil, was not just denied his rights, he had them violated in an obscene and clearly illegal manner.  Conrad Black, who is not American but was arrested on American soil, was afforded those rights, as should anyone arrested for an offense in a civilized democracy.  (Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 people, was afforded all his constitutional rights, convicted, and eventually executed.) National Review seems to think that violating the Constitutional rights of one person is perfectly acceptable, whereas with the other, gee, isn’t it a shame that our good friend is going to prison for stealing millions of dollars.  Pity about that.

Utter, rank hypocrisy, the kind that unfortunately defines the GOP these days.