Too Much To Dream

No more Mister Nice Guy

Steven Den Beste gets grouchy.

But that's not the point. Magullo wants Hamdi to be treated as a full citizen because Magullo is trying to claim that the act of aiming a rifle at an American soldier, who is serving his nation in a declared war, and of pulling the trigger and killing that soldier, is protected speech under the First Amendment (in the generalized form of "protected expression").

After all, it's not as if the soldier he kills matters to anyone, is it? He's a soldier; it's not like he's anyone's son or brother or cousin or father or anything. Soldiers are grown in a farm under Cheyenne Mountain out of piles of horse manure just like any fungus; it's perfectly OK to kill them – at least, it is if they've got US flags sewed on their shoulders. Killing anyone else in the world is wrong, but killing Americans? Well, that's just fine and dandy.

Therefore, Magullo is claiming that Hamdi should be released so he can get back to his exercise of his First Amendment rights, and kill more US soldiers or maybe some US civilians while he's at it. Can't have too much freedom of expression, after all.

Besides which, the good guys in this war are having a hard time coming up with people to fight on their side and they need all the people they can get. Hamdi needs to be released so he can go back to fighting on behalf of the good guys, so that they can defeat the evil Americans.

I somehow thought that it was obvious that actively attempting to kill US soldiers wasn't "protected expression" under the First Amendment. I somehow thought it obvious that any kind of violence wasn't "protected expression". I thought it was obvious that this was top bracket sophistry. Silly me; I forgot that killing American soldiers is actually performance art!

Sweet. Go, Steve!

Posted by Andrea Harris at January 15, 2003 11:24 AM