Horse Feathers

There's a memorable line in the Marx Brothers' Horse Feathers. Groucho, the president of a college, is informed that there is not enough money in the budget for the college and the football team.

"Tomorrow," he says, "We start tearing down the college."

Judge Richard “A Chicken in Every Pot, a Closed Circuit Camera in Every Home” Posner is a fan of the argument that The Constitution Is Not a Suicide Pact. Posner views the 18th-century document with the same amused disdain most of us reserve for leisure suits—antiquated, démodée, the product of a bygone, go-go era. (But wasn’t the very existence of the Constitution precipitated 13 years earlier by . . . a suicide pact? Lives, liberties, and sacred honor. All that jazz. John Hancock was willing to see his neck in a noose, in other words, that he might live a free man. The sucker.)

Glenn Greenwald hits most of the high points. I only wade in to point out, once again, that terrorism is not particularly terrifying. The interstate highway system is a greater threat to our national wellbeing than a bunch of monotheistic medievalists. Would Judge Posner advocate that the government ration all foodstuffs ingested by all Americans in order to prevent the statistically far graver threat to American health and welfare of Diabetes Mellitus? Does he advocate surveillance cameras in every home to prevent the epidemic danger of suicide?

Of course not. Any man who suggested such a thing would be laughed out of public life. Increasingly, the question to ask is not: Why are we ruled by these madmen?

It is: Why are we ruled by these cowards?