Canadian Cincinnatus

The rise of the BNP in Great Britain

Warning signs have been growing about the increase in popularity of the British National Party (BNP), a group with significant National Socialist leanings. In the last round of elections to the EU parliament, two BNP candidates were elected. In a recent poll, 20% of Britons say that they will consider voting for this party. And the political classes do not know what to do about it.

The political classes are, of course, precisely the problem.

The reason such an extreme party has come from nowhere to be a contender is that they are able to cater an underserved market –white working class people. This group used to vote Labour overwhelmingly but the paths of England’s working people and the Labour Party has diverged in the past 20 years. The Labour Party was at one with the working class in the 1920’s and 30’s when the predominant problem facing workers was the stratified class structure in Great Britain (and most of Europe). Labour was the party of workers, the Liberals were the party of the middle class and the Conservatives were the party of the aristocracy. As a result, the rhetoric and issues championed by the Labour party reflected this fact. We in North America cannot imagine how much of a problem this was for ordinary people back then, not ever having a formal class structure. But to working class Britons in the 1930’s, the class structure was to them what Jim Crow was to blacks in the Southern US in the same time period.

However times change, and so has the Labour Party - and so has the white working class. These days, working class whites are worried about a different form of apartheid: affirmative action. They are also increasingly at odds with the Muslim underclass whose numbers grow as they become ever more truculent and less interested in assimilating with English society. Britain’s working people feel a genuine patriotism for their English heritage and worry about the EU’s encroachment on English sovereignty, a patriotism which the multi-culti Labourites increasingly hold in open disdain. This was made clear in recent revelations in the Telegraph, where a Labour party operative admitted that “Labour threw open Britain’s borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a ‘truly multicultural’ country.” In short, Labour politicians decided to choose a different set of voters, one they felt would be more congenial than their previous supporters, the indigenous working classes. This has created the situation where new Labour voters are at odds with old Labour voters. In contrast, the Labour aristocracy is above the fracas because they largely live in Tony flats in the fashionable quarters of London, where their love of immigrants can remain safely theoretical. Working class whites have increasingly come to the inescapable conclusion that Tony Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’ doesn’t include them. They are the uncool in Britain.

In the US, a similar process has also occurred, but the Republicans have generally picked up the slack when the Dem’s moved on. For instance, the coal miners in West Virginia used to be the staunchest Democrats. But when then-presidential candidate Al Gore promised to take away their guns and ban coal in the 2000 election, they switched to the GOP and haven’t returned. If West Virginia had stayed Democrat, the recount in Florida would have been irrelevant.

Has this happened in the UK? Have the Conservatives picked up the working class votes that Labour has discarded? Sort of, at least under Margaret Thatcher. In spite of her free market philosophy that was at odds with their trade union institutions, working people at least knew where she stood on cultural issues. With things like the Falkland Islands war, you know Mrs. Thatcher was an English patriot. When Tony Blair remade Labour into his own image, he kept the free market policies but canned all the patriotism stuff – the worst of both worlds from the perspective of the working class. And David Cameron, the new leader of the Conservatives? He apes Tony Blair the way Blair copied Thatcher, except that Cameron is closer to Blair than Blair ever was to Thatcher. Cameron’s big idea for revitalizing the Conservatives last year was making the Conservatives the green party of the UK.

So from the perspective of working class whites, the major parties in Britain today are Tweedledee and Tweedlededum, neither of which represents their interests.

As far as minor parties go, the Liberal Democrats are another identical choice. There is also the UKIP, the United Kingdom Independence Party. However, this reasonable anti-EU party has been unjustly tarred for so long with the ‘fascist’ label that a real fascist anti-EU party has come along – the BNP - and they are doing well.

This is what happens when the leaders of the liberal order (both Conservative and Labour) become insular and corrupt. The only way the BNP threat can be eliminated is if the Conservatives start challenging the increasingly unsustainable status quo and begin to offer real solutions to the working people’s legitimate problems. The Conservatives don’t have to go all the way. Deep down, people don’t want to vote for extremist fringe parties but they do vote for them when they are desperate and no one else will listen to them. If the Conservatives acknowledge 80% of their grievances, they will happily vote Tory because the Conservatives have the respectability that the BNP lacks.

This is what John Howard did when he won his fourth term as Prime Minister in 2004. He was able to increase his share of the popular vote by 3.4% even though the voter share of his principal opponent – Labour – hardly budged. He got those votes from the fringe parties, whose supporters flocked to Howard’s strong leadership and his red meat platform.

Can the Conservative Party of Great Britain do the same? Well, the first obstacle is their leader, David Cameron, who is temperamentally disinclined to go that route. So I guess we will see more of the BNP in the future.

The Real Reason Toronto's Mayor Quit

Ontario Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty's massive deficit.

Yes, those two men have gone hand in hand for the last seven years, the best of friends.  The City of Toronto act that McGuinty shoved through could have been called the "Everything David Miller Wants Act" and led to many new taxes for Toronto, including the $60 per year vehicle tax and the Land Transfer Tax.

I even wondered if it was quid pro quo when David Miller chose to resign his NDP party membership before the last provincial election and refused to support NDP leader Howard Hampton, despite the fact that his platform was designed to give Toronto absolutely everything that a lefty politician could desire.

But now that friendship, while still strong, has reached a limit.  Dalton is out of money.  The province of Ontario posted a massive $24 billion dollar deficit, double the bad old days of Bob Rae's provincial NDP government.  The province is already spending 45 billion more per year than when McGuinty took office, so there is absolutely no wiggle room left.

Since Toronto depended on a $400 million dollar hand out from the province last year to balance its budget, as well as raiding the LAST of the reserve fund for another $20 million, it all adds up to a tax blood bath at city hall next spring.

The budget chief is already asking for 5% cuts across the board on THIS year's budget. Yes, the same budget that approved 1300 new hires a scant six months ago.  The Millerites have amazingly blamed the recession, as if they didn't notice the financial crisis last fall, a full year ago, until now.

Miller probably got all the bad news in September: he lost his fund-raiser (who was unhappy with Miller's performance over the strike), he lost the support of the unions, again because of the strike, his popularity plummeted over the summer (you guessed it), and council had called for an inquiry into when Miller knew about the $200 million dollar error in liability of the sick days, and whether he withheld this critical information from council before they voted on the union's contract after a strike that was all about sick days.

That's a lot of heat.

But I'm guessing the nail in the coffin was a quiet word from Dalton that there would be no money for Toronto's budget next year.  In fact, it's amazing how all the left-wing councillors are suddenly discussing cuts and none are loudly calling on the province to bail them out.  It's because they already know the answer.

David Miller has chosen to leave while he is still the progressive mayor, the green mayor, and not the mayor who will bring about the most punishing tax increases the city has ever seen.

Instead of facing the music on election day a year from now, he has chosen an easier path: to take over as CEO of Invest Toronto, a post vacated when former liberal attorney-general Michael Bryant was charged in the death of a bike courier.

Indeed, maybe that was the final incentive, a chance road rage argument that turned the course of local history.  Whatever the case, Miller doesn't need to be mayor of Toronto anymore.  He's already got another fashionable job, and if a left-wing candidate is elected mayor next year, I bet Miller gets to keep that job.

Either way, Mr. Miller will land on his feet.

Toronto, however, will have to live with the hangover of his party.

Mike Downtown

Why isn’t Obama as tough on Iran and Russia as he is on Limbaugh and Fox News?

It constantly amazes me how liberals like Obama and Bill Clinton can act so effectively against their domestic foes while simultaneously being such pussies around America’s foreign enemies.

Asked about the Afghanistan War at the UN, Obama blithely declares that he “doesn’t care about victory”, doubtlessly expressing his deeply held view that concepts like “victory” are ‘simplistic’ and too ‘black and white’ for the complex world in which we live, the unstated background assumption being that victory is a stupid concept believed in primarily by those ignorant, rural white people who “cling to their guns and religion”. But when it comes to fighting domestic foes like Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, all the nuance goes out the window. Here, Obama and Rahm Emmanuel charge for victory with the single-mindedness of a panzer division in Northern France. With Ahmedinejad, Obama gullibly buys all of Iran’s stalling tactics as evidence of good faith - tactics that are transparently obvious to any disinterested bystander. But when confronted with tea parties, his mindset changes to that of a paranoid, conspiracy theorist, ready to accept the worst rumour as incontrovertible fact.

Bill Clinton was the same way. At the time when Clinton was running procedural circles around Newt Gingrich and the Republican Congress, Saddam Hussein was making Clinton into just as much of a fool as Obama is being made of currently by Vladimir Putin. As Rush put it at the time, “Saddam Hussein is doing to Bill Clinton what Bill Clinton is doing to the Republican Congress”.

As an admirer of Machiavelli, I can respect somebody’s skill at dispatching his opponents, even though I may disagree with the ends. However, why is it that these people never seem to be able to employ these same skills when they are running the country’s foreign policy? At least we’d get some good use out of the skill-set that these people evidently do possess.

I think the simple answer is that liberal surrenderists view fellow citizens who disagree with them as the real enemy, and foreign anti-American madmen with nuclear weapons as fellow travelers, people they have something in common with. Damn those white Bible belt Christians!

Well, this is what America gets when it votes in left-wing, anti-American schemers, wedded to defeat. Heaven help us.

Charles Krauthammer on Obama’s foreign policy: “It is amateurishness, wrapped in naiveté, inside credulity.”

Charles Krauthammer gave the best one sentence summary of the Obama approach to foreign policy I have yet run across.

Look at Obama’s approach to Russia. First his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, gives Russian Foreign ministry a symbolic “overcharge” button, which meant to say “reset” but was mistranslated. If this had happened under the Bush administration, the incident would have entered public consciousness as an example of Bush’s provincialism and stupidity. But because the MSM is running cover for him, it is conveniently forgotten. But what did he mean by reset? We found out when he unilaterally decided (without consultation) to remove the missile shield being set up in Poland and Czech Republic. This was a project near and dear to George W Bush’s heart, as was the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe. Whatever his other faults, Bush knew that the fledgling democracies of Eastern Europe need American protection to keep them from being swallowed up by the rabid bear to the east. The next phase in NATO’s expansion was to have been Georgia and the Ukraine. What Obama is really doing by cancelling this largely symbolic missile shield (nobody in Eastern Europe cares about Iran and the installation was too limited to really deter an all out Russian nuclear attack) is to say, to hell with you. I don’t care that you are sending troops to fight and die in Iraq and Afghanistan, I want to cozy up to the big boys in the Kremlin. The Eastern Europeans felt betrayed. The Champaign was flowing in the Kremlin.

So what concession did Obama get in return from the Russians?

To find out, let’s examine Hillary’s recent and disastrous foreign policy trip to Russia. As Krauthammer relates,

 

“Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declared that ‘threats, sanctions and threats of pressure’ are ‘counterproductive.’ Note: It's not just sanctions that are worse than useless, but even the threat of mere pressure.

 

It gets worse. Having failed to get any movement from the Russians, Clinton herself moved -- to accommodate the Russian position! Sanctions? What sanctions? ‘We are not at that point yet,’ she averred. ‘That is not a conclusion we have reached . . . it is our preference that Iran work with the international community.’”

 

In other words, Hillary was humiliated. To add insult to injury, while she was there, the Russian Duma publicly declared that Russia has reserved the right to pre-emptively strike its (as yet unspecified) enemies with nuclear weapons if it feels threatened by them. Hillary didn’t comment.

In short, Obama got nothing at all from the Putinistas.

Of course, Russia could have probably done better in the long run if they had not humiliated the US so publicly, but had, instead, played along with them employing soothing, empty rhetoric of their own, while doing exactly what they wanted to do anyway. However, the current inhabitants of the Kremlin are thugs and goons who can’t help themselves but let their true nature out

I think Bill Whittle, over at PJTV also said it right, “Obama isn’t Hitler, he is Neville Chamberlain.”

And as long as such a weak fool inhabits the White House, I will remain fearful of my homeland Estonia’s independence.

A funny thing happened on the way to New York’s congressional district 23

Congressional district 23 is at the northernmost end of upper New York State. It has a history of reliably electing Republicans and, until recently, was represented by the conservative John McHugh. However, this changed when Obama tapped him on the shoulder to become Secretary of the Army, creating the need for a special election.

In the latest poll, Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava, is in second place (29%) to the Democrat candidate, who is at 33%. Why is Dede in trouble in a normally safe Republican seat? Because of Doug Hoffman, the Conservative candidate, who got 23% in the most recent poll and who has risen 7% in the past two weeks, did so at the expense of poor Dede.

And I, for one, couldn’t be happier.

You see, the problem with Dede, and the reasons for her current woes, is that she is an insider RINO squish, a tax-and-spender who loves stimulus money and union card check, who voted for New York State’s $180 billion bank bailout and who has publicly supported ACORN. This caused conservatives in NY 23 to rally behind the Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman, for, unlike Dede, he is a real conservative. Dede is backed by the RNC. Hoffman is backed by the conservative press as well as grass roots conservatives like the tea partiers. If there is any doubt about any of this, consider the following incident: She recently called the cops on a reporter from the conservative Weekly Standard when he dared to ask her some inconvenient questions about tax increases and Obamacare.

In my opinion there can be no bad outcomes in this election. If the Democrat wins, it will shock the GOP establishment into thinking twice about supporting weak nonconservative Republicans the next time around. If Hoffman were to win – and he might, he has all the momentum – even better. Even if Dede were to squeak in, her near death experience would also be a teachable moment for the RNC. In any event, the position in the House of Representatives is so lopsidedly in favour of the Dems that a seat here or there doesn’t matter. What does matter greatly is the midterm elections next November. For the GOP to do well, it can’t go around nominating RINO losers like Dede.

I think this illustrates one positive factor in the development of the Tea Party movement. They are a conservative movement, not a Republican movement. This is a very important point and totally lost on the mainstream press who are trying to tar the tea partiers as Republicans. The thing is, you need both a conservative movement and a conservative party in order to succeed, and the two have to be separate and distinct. Because an elected official’s first priority is re-election, a conflict will always develop between politicians and their conservative principles. The elected conservative must always be prepared to abandon some principles to make sure he gets re-elected. A conservative movement who doesn’t care about the politician’s re-election chances is needed to hold the politician’s feet to the fire. If this safety mechanism is not there, then all the conservative politicians we spent so much time and money getting elected will inevitably drift to the left and they will be of no use to conservatism any more. This has long been an advantage of the left, who have a constellation of non-partisan advocacy groups to pressure elected politicians to vote for left-wing stuff.

In a sense NY 23 is a microcosm of Canada in the 90’s, when the Reform Party rose up from nowhere to teach the party of Joe Clark, Brian Mulroney and Kim Campbell a lesson.

What's a Liberal Media To Do?

The liberal bias of the print media stands out glaringly in the case of Michael Bryant versus the Metis down-on-his-luck bicycle courier.

This morning I learned from a relatively conservative paper, The Toronto Sun, that a dozen bike couriers showed up for the first court appearance of Michael Bryant, charged with criminal negligence causing the death of Darcy Allan Sheppard, who spent 60 seconds somehow attached to the side of Bryant's Saab convertible before being smashed off against a mail box.

The National Post, another relatively conservative paper, also mentioned the disgruntled bicycle couriers, noting that one stated, "“I hope justice will be done. Whether it will be or not, I don’t know. This will be a big test.”

What surprised me was that coverage in the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail didn't mention the bike couriers at Bryant's hearing.  In fact, I had to do a search on both websites to even find a mention of the hearing, and the Star's breathless headline described how eager Bryant is to get to court.

I submit that if this were a former conservative cabinet member, say from Mike Harris's government, both newspapers would've led with frontpage photographs of "enraged cyclists."

I actually believe the Toronto Star and the Globe are giving this sad little tale of road rage gone bad all the coverage it deserves.  I just don't believe that a conservative charged with killing a bike courier with his Saab convertible would get the same quiet respect.

Mike Downtown

What the Gerald Keddy “big cheque” incident teaches us

Colby Cosh has a good article in the National Post about the recent kafuffle over the oversize novelty cheque handed out by Conservative MP Gerald Keddy.

The problem for the media and the Liberals was, of course, that the cheque had a prominently displayed Conservative Party of Canada logo on it, thereby crossing the line, in an unmistakable fashion, that is suppose to separate partisan political activity from actual governance. While these critics are absolutely right in this case, I have, in addition, another bone to pick with the government over this incident as well.

Us small government, small-c conservative/libertarian activists are constantly being enjoined by Conservative Party strategists and ‘moderate’ conservatives to buck up and put up with all the pork barrel largess and the accompanying photo-ops that we instinctively find so cringe inducing because these things are necessary to expand the party’s appeal with the voters. We can’t win, we are told, with just our base of conservative supporters so we must reach out to the ‘center’ and the way to do that is by publicly handing out government money in a high profile fashion.

We hate things like ribbon cutting ceremonies when the Liberals do them because we believe in a modest, minimal government that measures its success by how much it is able to leave the people alone. We therefore don’t want the government we volunteered for in election campaigns to be aping the Liberals’ worst habits. But we are told that we have to put up with all these Liberal appearances because that is what real world politics demands. 

So now, since the people (presumably including those crucial centrists) are up in arms over the big cheque with the Conservative logo - confirming their worst fears that the Conservatives are just another bunch of corrupt politicians, just like the Liberals - I think us principled, grass roots, small government activists are owed an explanation. 

We jettisoned some of our principles to increase our popularity and lost both. So tell me again why is it ‘smart politics’ to do this crap?

The inexplicable presumption of competence regarding Obama

Conrad Black wrote a very good article in the National Post the other day about the state of Barack Obama’s presidency. I nevertheless have to nitpick because one sentence still bothers me:

"Barack Obama is obviously a very intelligent man, and should be a popular and successful President."

Why is there always an automatic presumption of competence about him? What reason do we have to presume that Obama should be successful?  His 3 1/2 years in the Senate when he spent most of his time campaigning; his time in the Illinois State Senate where he sat around voting present; his complete lack of academic publications even though he was a scholar at top universities; his utter lack of executive experience prior to Jan 20; or his dubious friends and associates who are either left-wing extremists or unrepentant former terrorists? Simply put, we have no reason at all to prejudge him positively, but everybody does it all the time anyway.

In contrast, lets look at Stephen Harper. After taking over the Canadian Alliance when it was broke and demoralized, he completely rebuilt it and restored its pride. Then, against high odds and determined opposition from factions of parties, he united the right. He then held the unstoppable Paul Martin juggernaught to one weak minority. He then won two strong minorities where he has been demonstrating his abilities as a master parliamentary tactician ever since. Yet, at no point in his career has anybody given him half the presumption of success as Obama. In fact, every misstep he has made along the way, has been held up as proof positive of his incompetence: saying the east coasters have a culture of dependency, holding up Belgium as an example of federalism (I still don’t know why this was such a laughable example), calling an election last fall for no adequate reason or pushing the opposition parties into the three stooges coalition by threatening to remove their government subsidies.

True Harper has made some real mistakes along the way, but he achieved far more than the dithering Hamlet down south, whose only real accomplishment to date is bankrupting the US federal government. I think this pesumption will only end when Obama’s Presidency crashes and burns 3 ½ years from now.

Barack Obama – enemy of human rights

Now that the Nobel Peace Prize committee has given Barack Obama the Miss Congeniality award, I think it would be a good time to review the President’s record on human rights:

1. In Eastern Europe, he abrogated an agreement made by his predecessor George W Bush to install a missile defense shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. While nobody in Eastern Europe is particularly concerned about Iranian nukes – the stated reason for the deployment - many are very worried about a certain nuclear-armed neighbour to the east. For Eastern Europeans – and Vladimir Putin – the Eastern European missile defense installations had a huge symbolic significance, telling the Putinists, in no unmistakable terms, that Eastern Europe is in the western sphere of influence (to borrow a memorable phrase from the Molotov – Ribbentrop pact). Thanks to Obama’s unilateral and unprovoked concession to the Kremlin, many currently free people in Eastern Europe now sleep far less soundly. And, oh yeah, what did Obama get from Russia for this move? Nothing that anybody can tell.

2. In Honduras, President Obama’s wrong-headedness is most clearly on display. The trouble there began when the former president, left-wing Manuel Zelaya, was ousted from office and arrested by the Supreme Court of Honduras because he agitated for the Honduras’ constitution to be changed so that he could serve another term as president (currently presidents are limited to one term by the Honduras constitution). The Chavez wannabe was warned several times to cease and desist by the Supreme Court, which has the backing of every member of the Honduran Congress, even those of his own party. In other words, Zelaya was morphing into that typical scourge of South American politics - the populist strongman, and the forces of constitutional legitimacy decided to do something about it. Even though this conflict is about as clear-cut a choice between constitutional democracy and authoritarianism as it is possible to have, Obama is so blinded by his reflexive anti-Americanism that he has chosen to side with the anti-American would-be dictator by cutting off aid to Honduras, threatening to seize Honduran assets in the US and threatening to pull US entry visas from members of the Honduran judiciary. Finding he has more friends in high places than he thought, Zelaya has been emboldened into threatening civil unrest. In other words, thanks to Obama’s meddling, the peaceful removal of a potential dictator has been transformed into a tense standoff that could spill out into civil war. Yes we can!

3. In Washington, a tradition has developed that whenever the Dalai Lama is in Washington, he gets an audience with the President. Ever since 1991, the President has always met with him every time he visits the US capital. The last time President George W Bush awarded him a Congressional Gold Medal at a high-profile Capitol Hill ceremony. The purpose, of course, is to poke Communist China in the eye about their occupation of Tibet. This noble tradition ended last week, when President Obama refused to meet with the Dalai Lama because it might complicate his visit to China next month. Thanks to Obama’s reticence, China has learned that the US will do nothing about China’s ongoing suppression of Tibetan culture and religion.

4. In June of this year, potentially the most significant blow to Islamic fundamentalism occurred. I am of course referring to the Green Revolution that erupted in Teheran and other Iranian cities after the fraudulent re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iran is the only functioning country run by Islamic fundamentalists. It funds and trains most Islamic terrorist groups. Therefore if this government were to be toppled by a popular movement of its own citizenry, it would be body blow from which Islamic fundamentalism might not be able to recover. So what has Obama done ever since Iranian citizens began bravely challenging their government? Nothing. He still persists on wanting to talk to its increasingly illegitimate government. While it is true that much of what is going on inside Iran is out of America’s hands, there is nevertheless a lot that the US could do. First of all, it could loudly condemn of the mullahs. Sometimes moral support, offered at a critical juncture, is enough to push fast moving events over the cusp. Another is that it could covertly help Iranian freedom fighters. With American forces on both the Iraqi and Afghani borders, the US is uniquely well positioned to help. For instance, it could set up a string of Voice of America-type radio stations along the borders and get the CIA and SOCOM to advise and training Iranian resistance groups. There is a window of opportunity that is still open for the mullahs to be overthrown at extremely little American cost (because the revolution is continuing, even though you don’t hear much about it in the media), for the Iranians would be doing all the fighting and risktaking (as it should be in a revolution). But if our Hamlet continues to pretend the thing isn’t happening, this window will soon close.

After emperor Chimpsky II’s constant talk about exporting democracy around the world, I guess this is what Obama really means by the words “hope and change”.

 

 

 

 

Random breath tests for DUI is a bad idea

According to the National Post, the Commons Justice committee has recommended:

“that police officers be given the power to conduct random roadside breath tests on drivers, a change that would remove the legal requirement for officers to have a "reasonable" suspicion that drivers are drunk.

Under current provincial and federal law, police can stop a vehicle to check the condition of the driver, including his or her sobriety. Police cannot request a breath sample unless they reasonably suspect that a driver is drunk.

The Commons justice committee recommended in a report released Thursday that police be able to request a breath test at any time, regardless of whether the driver smells of alcohol or shows signs of impairment.”

This idea is absolutely flat out wrong. In a free society it should be the case that a citizen can move about at will without ever being hindered by the police. The job of the police officer, who used to be called a peace officer, is to keep the public peace. If the public peace has not been broken he should leave well enough alone, not go around making criminals out of people minding their own business. It is for that reason that the traditional requirement of ‘reasonable grounds” was put into place.

I know that we have had RIDE spot-checks for years, but I have been always been against them for the same reason. Fortunately, the Supreme Court has progressively narrowed the RIDE loophole. Once upon a time, a RIDE stop was an open invitation for the cops to go on a fishing expedition. I was pulled over at a RIDE spot-check once, and when the cops did not smell liquor on my breadth, they proceeded to do a safety check on my car and search my trunk. I remember thinking that this should not happen in a free society. Evidently the Supreme Court agreed with me because they subsequently ruled that now, all the police can do at those spot-checks is to ask if you had anything to drink. Period. No, “where are you going? where are you coming from? what’s in your trunk?” That stuff was no longer allowed.

But if this new idea gets implemented, it will become open season again on every motorist, no matter how well they are driving.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MAD) is an organization suffering from a bad case of mission creep. What I mean by that is that, like the feminist movement before it, most of the reasonable things they have wanted they have gotten, but because nobody wants to close up shop, they have moved on to hectoring citizens on matters that are increasingly petty and intrusive.

Take the movement to lower the permissible blood alcohol level from 0.08 to 0.05. According to the same Post article, MAD says that “0.05 level represents the threshold at which a driver is sufficiently impaired to ‘present an imminent danger to himself and others.’” Logical fiddlesticks! At that level of impairment I bet most people are better at driving a car than somebody who is tired, coming home from night shift, over 80 years old or just plain inexperienced.  To be consistent, do we need to take their licenses away too?

One statistic the MAD bunch doesn’t like to mention is the fact that half of the people killed by drunk drivers have at least double the legal blood alcohol limit. They don’t like it because it implies that, on a sliding scale, drivers who are barely over the legal limit are probably not that bad. It suggests that problems associated with drunk driving are overwhelmingly caused by a small cadre of hard-core problem drinkers who are sloshed behind the wheel. Unfortunately, these are also the people who are the least responsive to legal incentives, so MAD - and the law - targets ordinary people who have a glass or two of sherry instead.

The ‘carnage on the freeways’ is not caused by people with two beers in them, and it is not caused by motorists who drive so well that the police have no cause to pull them over. The fact that a driver is so competent behind the wheel of a car that a peace officer can find nothing wrong in his driving to criticize should be a compelling argument in his mind to leave him alone.