Attorney Lynne Stewart got 28 months for relaying instructions from her client, the “Blind Sheik” to his followers. That’s a lot less than corporate executives routinely get for financial malfeasance. And it’s a hell of a lot less than she’d have gotten if her client had been merely a mobster rather than a terrorist.
She has however, been disbarred. Poor woman will have to live off the lecture circuit, at least until some university offers her a nice high-pay low-work chairmanship in “social justice something-or-other”.
The judge (whom everyone on the Right has gleefully pointed out was a Clinton appointee) cited her recent cancer and previous good works. Another Clinton appointee went to bat for her at her sentencing hearing. George Soros contributed a reported $20,000 for her defense.
Are we beginning to see a pattern here?
The Left, from Hard to just that side of Moderate, obviously sees America as broken beyond the capacity of reform to fix it. The Right sees it as imperfect but fixable. Libertarians are predictably, split between the extremes. (There is an America-hating Right sect though. As they say, extremes meet around the other end of the circle.)
The Right wraps itself in the flag, the Left reacts indignantly to the charge that they are not patriotic and hate America. Well damn it, if you spend time ridiculing the symbols of patriotism and embracing people and causes dedicated to the destruction of quaint American institutions such as say, the Constitution, you’ve got to expect that kind of thing.
BTW, “quaint” describes rather well the attitude towards the Constitution of a fair number of young people I’ve talked to. Not a hostility so much as a, “Well, it was a really good idea at the time but don’t you think it’s a bit old-fashioned and out of date these days?” attitude. I have no idea how common that attitude is among the current college-age generation – and I’m afraid to ask.
We’ve all heard the expression “self-hating Jew” and someone who is “ashamed they are Black”, usually used to dismiss the opinions of someone who is perceived as being outside the mainstream of their demographic group. (And it really cracks me up to see middle-class WASPs applying these kind of labels, but I digress.) Why don’t we hear about the “self-hating American” or “self-hating WASP”? A far more common phenomenon.
(WASP is by the way, the last nasty racial slur it is socially acceptable to use. And for the record, I’m not one. I’m an Anglo-Celt (with a few exotic touches) and get indignant when you can’t see the difference. Maybe I’ll even sue you for it.)
It has been well-documented that native Americans who hate America tend strongly to come from privileged classes. Even the 30s generation of “red diaper babies” raised in immigrant families benefited enormously from American society, however close to the bottom they started. Likewise, Jihadist terrorists come largely from affluent families and are pretty intimately familiar with Western culture – or how else could they operate in our countries?
The question that should automatically occur to any observer is, for God’s sake why?
Well, I believe that two men, living centuries apart, both saw why and warned us about it and I’ll deal with this in a future post.