In this video from NBC nightly news, my colleague Tim Lynch takes on Richard Posner, who seems determined to hand off any libertarian street cred he once had. (Can you say "security panic"?)
Money quote from Lynch?
If the president and his lawyers keep up with these arguments that the entire United States is like a battlefield, that raises profound questions about our legal institutions, because on the battlefield, people do not have constitutional rights.
Hackneyed zinger from Posner?
Democracy is not a synonym for weakness.
The talking head sets up the debate as pivoting on the question of whether the Executive has the legal authority to conduct warrantless eavesdropping. I assume that was one of the main questions your colleague was invited to comment on. Unfortunately, that question is never directly addressed in the edited segment. Instead the debate comes off as "should we eavesdrop or shouldn’t we?" In other words, the debate was framed exactly the way the administration appears to want it framed, and your boy got taken to cleaners by the editors of the segment. Well, at least he got the face time.
Posted by: anodyne | December 29, 2005 at 05:05 PM