• Raping Mrs. Hawke-Petit and her 11-year-old daughter Michaela.
• Strangling Jennifer Hawke-Petit.
• Setting the family home on fire, thereby killing Michaela and her 17-year-old sister, Hayley.

Dr. Petit, who had been beaten and bound in the basement, managed to escape. He had hopped up the stairs and made his way to a neighbor, who called the police. Twice alerted, the cops were conspicuous by their absence.

The crimes were premeditated. The two career criminals had stalked the Petit women. They “messaged” one another in anticipation of an orgy of violence. At one stage during the six-hour ordeal, Hayes popped out to purchase four gallons of gasoline. He also escorted Jennifer Hawke-Petit to the bank to withdraw cash. She had the wherewithal to alert a teller. Right away, the bank manager rang the police to report that a crime was underway at a home on Sorghum Mill Drive.

Hostage to procedure and self-preservation, police concerns were allayed by the late Mrs. Hawke-Petit’s optimistic assessment of the situation. She told the bank teller that her assailants were “being nice,” and that they likely wanted money, nothing more.

Last year, Hayes was sentenced to death. Komisarjevsky’s turn has arrived. In court today, Capt. Robert Vignola hearkened to Mrs. Hawke-Petit words to explain “why police decided not to enter the home.” “The police had no reason to believe anyone was in immediate danger,” seconded CNN stupidly.

Media and law enforcement are in the habit of describing a deadly home invasion as “a robbery gone wrong.” Consequently, homeowners have been culturally conditioned to consider the uninvited house guest as one would a modern-day Jean Valjean. Like Victor Hugo’s protagonist in Les Misérables, the “thief” is likely looking only to take a loaf of bread and leave—that is unless he openly announces his intentions to harm his reluctant hosts.

One extremely conservative writer even bristled when a news reporter broke protocol and applied the “home invasion” appellation to the offense of breaking and entering:

Confronted with a criminal breaking and entering, there’s precious little the occupant can do to divine the intentions of the invader. It should be assumed that anyone violating another man’s inner sanctum will willingly violate the occupant. The law should give latitude to the invaded, not the invader—it ought to regard all burglaries as potential home invasions, and forgive the resident who finds himself using deadly force to defend hearth and home. The Castle Doctrine used to proceed from just such a premise. But exceptions to the doctrine are fast becoming the rule.

If you believe in the sanctity of life you should fight for the sanctity of private property. It is a man’s right—even obligation—to defend his life and the lives of the loved ones living under his roof. Arguably, a right that is not vigorously defended is as good as a right forfeited.

Life is too precious to skirt an indelicate matter: Komisarjevsky and his accomplice entered the Petit home through an unlocked rear door. In correspondence with author Brian McDonald, child killer and rapist Komisarjevsky revealingly wrote the following:

“Hayley is a fighter; she tried time and time again to free herself. … Mr. Petit … ran away when he thought his life was threatened, and ran away to leave his wife and children to madmen… Had Mr. Petit fought back [at] the very beginning, I would have been forced to retreat. … You’re the first line of defense for your family, not law enforcement.’”

From inside his home in Cape Town, South Africa, a man close to this writer watched as two men waltzed into the back yard on a Sunday afternoon, as the family relaxed by the pool. The man saw his wife flee as in slow motion. He rushed to the safe, and retrieved the gun. He aimed at the invaders and roared, “Get the hell out of my home.” They obeyed. Since then, this man has strapped a piece to his ankle.

Petit family members or friends are particularly well-placed to take up the cause of self-defense and Second-Amendment rights.

In the course of the agonizing debates over the soon-to-be-merged Senate and House healthcare Bills, Republicans cried out for partisanship, griped about procedure, and said next to nothing about principles, an accusation that cannot be directed at the Democrats.

“Health care in America ought to be a right, not a privilege,” thundered Senator Christopher J. Dodd. The Democrat from Connecticut was expressing sentiments that are par for the course in Democrat discourse.

Nancy Pelosi’s core beliefs vis-à-vis conscripting individuals into buying (or providing) a commodity at the pains of punishment came across loud and quirky. When the House passed its hulking health-care legislation, the Speaker was asked where in the Constitution is the warrant for individual health mandates. Pelosi’s response was for posterity. “Are you serious?” she shot back.

No, Democrats are not in the habit of hiding how they feel about the US Constitution. As much as he dislikes the philosophical foundations of the republic, the president seems to know ─ and prattle ─ about them more so than do the Republicans. Here’s Senator Barack Obama talking about the document Republicans discount and Democrats deem dated:

… as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution … generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court-focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that. I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. You know, the institution just isn’t structured that way.

The president recognizes ─ and rejects ─ “the Constitution as a charter of negative liberties.” Because of the obstacles the Constitution poses to “redistributive justice,” community organizing à la Obama aims at achieving extra-constitutional change.

“That’s the way the founders designed it, because they saw what governments do when they are allowed to do stuff for you,” responded Glenn Beck, who regularly storms the ramparts of the progressive Demopublican regime.

Not quite. The Constitution is not a culmination of the wisdom of the ages, but an instantiation of the natural law. By the dictates of immutably just law, arrived at through reason (or revelation), negative liberties are the only authentic rights to which man can lay claim. LIFE, LIBERTY, AND PROPERTY: These are the sole rights of man. Congress doesn’t grant them; they exist irrespective of government.

One’s life, liberty and the products of one’s labor were not intended to be up for grabs by grubby, greedy majorities. The position that the law is always just because it was arrived at through majority vote is a species of legal positivism. Contra classical natural law theory, legal positivism equates justice with the law of the state. However, from the fact that most Americans want others to fund or subsidize their healthcare, it does not follow that they have such a right.

A need is not a right.

Rights always give rise to binding obligations. In the case of natural rights, the duty is merely a mitts-off duty. My right to life means you must not murder me. My right to liberty means you dare not enslave me. My right to property means you ought to refrain from taking what’s mine. And you have no right to stop me from taking the necessary acquisitive action for my survival, so long as I, in turn, heed the same restrictions.

If in exercising a “right” one transgresses against another’s life, liberty and property ─ then the exercised right is no right, but a violation thereof. Because my right to acquire property doesn’t diminish your right to do the same, the right of private property is a negative right. Negative rights are real or natural liberties because they don’t conscript me in the fulfillment of your needs and desires, and vise versa.

The reason the Constitution is by-and-large a charter of negative liberties, as the president put it, is because state-manufactured rights violate the individual’s real rights. Unless undertaken voluntarily, positive liberties are rejected outright in natural law. Now, many would argue that making some supply others with work, water, clothes, food, education and medical care will increase overall liberty in society. THAT WON’T WASH. Liberty is not an aggregate social project. Every individual has rights. And rights give rise to obligations between all men, including those who are in power. That men band in a collective called “government” doesn’t give them license to violate rights.

To their credit, Democrats speak candidly of their disdain for natural rights and the foundations of the republic; Republicans speak of them not at all.

About certain moral (and legal) matters, patriotic, freedom-loving Americans agree instinctively. For example:

When brave, border patrolmen Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean shot an illegal alien drug dealer in the derriere, they were defending their state, country and countrymen.

For hastening the descent into hell of two career criminals, who had broken into the country before breaking and entering at the home adjacent to his, Joe Horn ─ another fine Texan ─ is the best of neighbors. Another acid test is the case of Frank Ricci, a firefighter from New Haven, Connecticut. Ricci was denied a promotion because he bested all the blacks in the department on a test 77 other candidates took. City officials didn’t like the results, so they voided the test, and put the promotion on hold until a less sensitive test could be developed – one that better screened-out proficiency and ability.

The individual with a healthy moral compass will agree that Ricci was wronged. What is licit or illicit in the natural law is inescapably obvious in the other vignettes as well. But not to libertarian deviationists (by which I mean deviants, as opposed to dissenters).

Because many libertarians do not recognize state-enforced borders, they were silent about the injustice to border agents Ramos and Compean. Some libertarians even went so far as to celebrate the invasion of the Southwest. And in particular, these deviants toasted the spirit of the Reconquista ad campaign, launched by Swedish vodka maker “Absolut.”

To keep its Mexican market in high-spirits, the advertising agency TERAN\TBWA had thrown in California ─ depicting it as part of Mexico. In the “Absolut” ─ i.e., perfect ─ world of La Raza libertarians, Mexicans reclaim their conquered Alta California. Yes, the Mexican “Reconquista” is wreaking havoc on a part of the country that was built by Americans, not Mexicans. But who cares about flesh-and-blood human beings, when one can cleave to “Absolut” Abstractions.

You and I agree that Joe Horn chased down and blew away the worst of mankind. But does the libertarian anarchist’s vocabulary even accommodate the concept of evil? Perhaps. But more often than not, free will and individual agency get short shrift. For the sins of man, hard leftists blame society, and hard-core libertarians saddle the state. “The State made me do it” is how such social determinism can be summed-up.

Kookier libertarians dismiss Ricci ─ a dyslexic who came sixth among 77 test takers ─ as follows: By petitioning the courts, when they should go gentle into that good night, white men like Ricci are seeking equality of results much as blacks do through coercive civil rights laws. I know; this is too silly to sustain. And wicked too. Ricci was wronged for excelling. He is not petitioning for special favors; he’s petitioning against them. If anything, Ricci is asking only that the city accept inequality of outcomes; accept that not all are created equal ─ and that he, more so than his less-qualified colleagues, is most suited to fighting fires and dousing departmental flames.

The test Ricci took was both statistically valid and reliable. This means that it does what it’s supposed to do well. Whatever the cause of the differences yielded by such a standardized test, reason dictates that someone with a higher score has more of the thing the test measures than the man with the lower score. Because, overall, blacks and Hispanics score lower on various proficiency tests, these are often considered discriminatory. The New Haven test was therefore discarded because: 1) it screened out less able candidates, and 2) More of those candidates were black than white.

In Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws, Richard Epstein, a very good libertarian legal theorist, argued that “voluntary affirmative action is perfectly acceptable by private firms, but far more problematic when undertaken by government.” Contrary to the civil servant, the private person’s freedom of association ought to be sacrosanct. State institutions don’t have the prerogatives of private property.

“The city favored no one,” goes yet another flippant and foolish dismissal of Ricci by a libertarian. “It tossed out the test results for all races, not just for whites. So what’s the beef?” An analogy will illustrate the vacuity (and venality) of this argument.

Cut to Beijing, 2008. Swimmer Michael Phelps is powering himself to yet another pinnacle in the 400 meters individual medley. Hungary’s Laszlo Cseh comes second. Ryan Lochte is resplendent in third place. However, a problem arises. Once again “the test” favored Phelps. We know this from the outcome: Phelps won. Acting as socialist leveler, the International Olympic Committee strips all three winners of their medals.

By this specious species of “libertarian” illogic, nobody was harmed because no one got a medal.

So why is countering these fringe standpoints important? Simply because they may move into the most visible libertarian movement to date. Congressman Ron Paul has propelled libertarianism to political prominence. Many young people are being brought into freedom’s fold. The young are especially susceptible to the fantasies and follies of the old. Libertarians owe them the firmest foundation for freedom.

©By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaliy.com & Taki’s Magazine
June 6, 2009

Quaint, I know, but to the federal government were delegated only limited and enumerated powers (Article I, Section 8): 17 to be precise. Most everything it does these days is extra-constitutional.

Forced to accept piles of paper from the federales, for “federally mandated increases in spending on Medicaid and education,” some states have realized that the price is too steep. Not only would they have to obey the occupying force; but states could expect to splinter under the statist burden of a panoply of programs prescribed by the Healer-in-Chief, who would play them like hooked fish.

So, governors and state representatives are invoking that which ought to have been the law of the land: the ingenious Tenth Amendment. In short order, at least twenty eight states resolved to reclaim the people’s “unalienable rights,” by beating back the federal occupier and voiding unconstitutional federal laws.

Sights set on sovereignty, Montana’s Democratic Governor Brian Schweitzer has signed a bill rejecting any federal meddling with arms and ammunition that are made in Montana and stay in the Big Sky State.

They may not call it interposition and nullification, but legislators in the Texas and Utah state legislatures are planning to practice the doctrine Thomas Jefferson and James Madison perfected in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798.

Writes historian Thomas E. Woods, Jr.: “The Virginia Resolutions spoke of the states’ rights to ‘interpose’ between the federal government and the people of the states; the Kentucky Resolutions used the term nullification – the states, they said, could nullify federal laws that they believed to be unconstitutional.”

“Jefferson,” explains Woods, “considered states’ rights a much more important and effective safeguard of people’s liberties than the ‘checks and balances’ among the three branches of the federal government.”

And for good reason. Judicial review was intended to curb Congress and restrain the executive. But the unholy federal trinity — the judicial, legislative, and executive — has simply colluded in an alliance that has helped to abolish the Tenth Amendment.

But what happens if you are of the ossified opposition — a neoconservative, or the kind of Republican for whom the manner in which Abraham Lincoln sundered the federal structure was both constitutional and moral? Why, then, you’re in a bit of a pickle.

These days neoconservatives are celebrating signs of local self-government, not for love of liberty and an appreciation of states’ right, but because they mistake the awakening for a mere revolt against the ruling rat pack (Democrats). To his credit, Harvard graduate Ben Shapiro is a bright neoconservative, who’s well aware of the contradiction inherent in his sudden support for the states in their lunge for liberty:

The federal response to the slavery question was quick and right – President Abraham Lincoln’s Civil War restored for all time the founding promises of the Declaration of Independence. Despite the Civil War, however, the legacy of Jim Crow further eroded the moral authority of states’ rights. And the federal government, wielding the ethical imperative of racial equality, stepped in. States’ rights advocates were forever branded as bigoted Orval Faubus types, standing in the doorways of segregated schoolhouses.
Now states are surprised to find that their ability to resist federal directives has been all but extinguished. They are surprised that they are no longer able to set their own standards regarding social, economic or criminal policy. They are surprised that through a combination of moral blindness and drooling greed, they surrendered their role in the constitutional system.

Surrendered? Not quite. “Honest Abe” was victorious in the War Between the States because, to vanquish the South, he invalidated the Constitution and violated the compact and comity between the sovereign states. Lincoln created a reality on the ground by brute force, not by constitutional warrant. This savagery owed little to the Constitution.

Neoliberal Chris Matthews of MSNBC had a similar reaction when Governor Rick Perry made it plain he would be asserting Texas’ rights. “That’s the kind of talk we heard in 1861. That’s what killed 600,000 Americans,” hollered the “Hardball” host.

By this lame logic, secession or state sovereignty is proscribed because last it was invoked, a bully launched a war. Or, as Kirkpatrick Sale, director of the pro-secession Middlebury Institute, countered: “The victory by a superior military might is not the same thing as the creation of a superior constitutional right.”

Sovereignty, of course, can be resuscitated; and the lost Constitution restored.

The pathology caused by an overweening federal government is fueling the fever of freedom among the states and their people ─ it is the fever a healthy organism develops to fight-off an invading pathogen.

I can’t get worked up about the current torture tempest.

The two parties are exchanging fusillades over ten interrogation techniques deployed with fourteen “high value al-Qaida detainees,” three of whom endured the most controversial method of all, because they were purported to possess “credible intelligence of an imminent terrorist attack,” as well as “actionable intelligence” to “prevent, disrupt or delay an attack.”

These facts emerged pursuant to Obama’s declassification of Bush Justice Department memos. At the time the memos were penned, cabinet members and lawmakers were in-the-know, but chose to button up.

Perhaps my uneasiness stems from the knowledge that if my own life depended on it, I’d want interrogators to save me and mine by means fair or foul. Whatever it takes.

Also, sometimes you just have to trust the government─I know I can always rely on America’s deracinated elites to elevate the interests of the enemy above those of the people. In other words, I trust the government’s untrustworthiness. So can you. In their own clumsy way, our top dogs are looking out for terrorists. That’s why I won’t. After all, when it comes to breaching the public’s interests, the government’s track record is better than good.

Consider:

Instead of crushing the culprits in 9/11 (al-Qaida), our protectors chose to vanquish a guiltless people (Iraqis). They harnessed American grief and rage for the purpose of pursuing a Democratic Manifest Destiny in the Middle East.

Make our government choose between placating local Wahabbi lobbyists and the safety of the flying American public─and it will opt for the first.

In the toss-up between tossing out millions of migrants or plaguing Americans with more unemployment, depressed wages, stretched social services, environmental despoliation, the misery of multiculturalism, and crime─the State will always side with the scofflaws and other arrivals.

Forced to pick between the wellbeing of wildlife versus human life and livelihoods; the State’s pack animals will fight like wild dogs for the critters.

If it comes down to Urdu versus English in the classroom, the sounds of India (and the H-1B Visa) will trump the language of Washington and Jefferson.

Samuel P. Huntington hinted at something similar. In his wonderfully learned, Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity,” Huntington characterized America as an unrepresentative democracy in which the patriotic public is routinely flouted by the ruling elites, especially “on domestic and foreign policy issues affecting national identity” (p. 325).

“Chilling” and “gruesome” is how the libertarian and liberal Left tagged the “torture” memos, penned by the Office of Legal Counsel. Others consider the documents careful and deliberative. The latter tend to believe Abu Zubaydah was al-Qaida’s operations chief. The former say Zubaydah was merely misguided, or mentally ill.

Wherever the truth lies, there is a vigorless, extinction-courting quality to those who squeal about placing a bug in the bug-phobic Abu Zubaydah’s “confinement box.” These are just the type of insects the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would delight in squashing.

What would the same suspects say about SERE, the acronym for “Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape” training, undertaken by pilots and other special operations soldiers? They are often deprived of sleep, placed in stress positions, made to crouch in confined quarters, and tormented by insects and the water-board. The military calls this a drill. Being bombarded with loud rock music: for some toughies that’s entertainment.

Of one thing I’m certain: Whatever verdict the establishment elites─from Chris Matthews to John McCain─pass on enhanced interrogation methods, these moderators can be counted on to rule counter to the interests of ordinary Americans. To wit: In publically and self-righteously expiating for—and eliminating—the use of these methods with terrorists, other aspiring mass murderers rising through the ranks will no longer fear incarceration in American prisons. They can look forward to a painless transition through those Pearly Gates promised by the religion of peace.

More materially, torturing the torture issue has thrown the country off-scent, to the great advantage of the puppet masters. The torture kerfuffle is secondary to─and subsumed within─the broader category of an unjust war, waged by George Bush with Democratic assent. Talk about a bipartisan effort; a pox on both Houses!

You can make the case for harsh interrogation techniques in desperate, dire circumstances. But how on earth do you justify lugging an army across the ocean to occupy a third-world country that is no danger to you and has not threatened you? You don’t, and you can’t.

Forgotten in the faff over “enhanced interrogation” tactics is the invasion of Iraq. Of this war crime, most Democrats are as guilty as Republicans. The torture fracas is like manna from heaven for both parties and their media lapdogs, who cannot be coaxed out of a coma.
Whether to bug Zubaydah’s cage or not: this is a limited, small, relatively safe distraction that allows complicit journalists, jurists, politicians and pointy heads to skirt the real issue: the need to prosecute Bush, Cheney, Clinton, Kerry, for invading Iraq.