My personalized Google home page shared this Thomas Jefferson quote with me today:

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.

This hits the nail on the head in regards to how wrong the Right can be. They see the inconveniences of “too much liberty” and they seek to minimize them by taking away our liberties. There are many examples but to use a dumb one: flag burning. I’d rather live in a society where freedom of expression includes rather idiotic acts such as burning a flag than live in a society with less liberty where you can be arrested and jailed for such behavior. The inconvenience of watching someone disrespect our national flag is, to me, more tolerable than the inconvenience of jailing people for expressing ideas, even unpopular or idiotic ones.

To me, this is self-evident.

The same is true for this torture debate. I’ve heard that Bush may veto the McCain bill which would ban torture as a tactic of our government or armed forces

I can handle the inconveniences of living in a world where bad people do bad things. I can’t handle living in a world where supposedly good people do bad things. That we hold ourselves to a higher standard than the bad guys is something we should be proud of, even though it does create inconveniences. We shouldn’t even be debating torture — it should be so fucking obvious that we could never condone such tactics.

Let me point out, too, whenever our service men and women are captured by the enemy we go on and on about how they better not be tortured and the Geneva convention should be applied, etc. I agree with this. Why on earth do we think this shouldn’t be the case when we capture foreign nationals? Double-standards don’t work.

The Republican party is in many ways the party of anti-liberty, as evidenced by their hatred of the ACLU, an organization whose sole mission is to protect our liberties.

Jefferson was right, the Right is wrong (again).