Washington, DC, July 6, 2004 --  

With Dubya and his terror war cronies tightly wrapped in the American flag, it should come as no surprise that the administration's most fervent opponents sound less than patriotic. Neither does it help Bush opponents that America's left wing has a tradition of America bashing that goes back to the Vietnam War. The flag-burning hippies of the 1960s aged to become the same Al Gore voters who loudly threatened to desert their country rather than live under a Republican president after the hotly-contested 2000 election.

A perfect example of this anti-American tradition can be found in the tone of filmmaker Michael Moore, whose new anti-Bush diatribe, Fahrenheit 9/11 was released last month. The film's box office success, with $39.1 million¹ in sales in June, undoubtedly is an indication of its resonance with the rabidly anti-Bush crowd that dominates in urban and Northeastern markets.

To Europhile, Howard Dean Democrats, anti-Americanism is a justifiable response to Bush's transgressions. Such sentiments might win fans in Cambridge and San Francisco, but they simply don't play in places like Kalamazoo, where the fall election is likely to be decided.

The bash-America-first and ask-questions-later lefties are oblivious to a fundamental truth -- America is far more than and individual president, policy, or even an unjust war. America has been an inspirational beacon of freedom to the world for over 200 years, and while not without sin, it has a more impressive record at defending liberty over the long run than any other nation on the face of the earth.

It was immensely satisfying, therefore, to hear the Supreme Court's recent evisceration of the Bush administration's abysmal policy of imprisoning people without trial in Guantanamo Bay and South Carolina. Finally, a respected institution has stood up to say "no" to the Bush administration's violation of civil liberties -- and not a group of Europeans, not a group of activist lefties, not for heaven's sake Michael Moore, but a politically diverse block of America's highest judicial officials.

The greatest aspect of the Supreme Court's rebuke of the Bush administration was that it spanned the entire political spectrum. The court's most right-wing member, Justice Antonin Scalia, joined his most left-wing colleague, Justice John Paul Stevens, to go beyond the majority to dissent that the president should not have the right to hold Americans as enemy combatants at all. "If civil rights are to be curtailed during wartime, it must be done openly and democratically, as the constitution requires," Scalia wrote.²

This wholehearted rebuke shows just how terribly the Bush administration has defiled the rule of law -- the very rule of law that differentiates America from less free nations of the world, and provides the moral authority to fight against violent, closed-minded Islamists.

That a renegade president is subject to such a scathing ruling by the court's constitutional defenders shows the strength of America's system of liberty. This same court was once denounced by the anti-American left as the partisan tool that handed power to the Bush administration. The Supreme Court's strong stand for liberty and against Bush should silence those voices once and for all.

And it is the silence of precisely those voices that may prove the key to change in America. The anti-American rantings of Michael Moore and his lefty friends will do nothing to deliver Americans from their abysmal leadership. It is only via freedom-loving, patriotic voices like those heard from the Supreme Court that a majority of Americans can be convinced that Dubya simply has to go.

Related Web Columns:

Losing the War on Terror, June 11, 2002

Shameful Comparisons, November 26, 2001

Notes:

1. Reuters, ?Potter' Propels Box Office Past $1 Billion in June, July 5, 2004

2. Washington Post, Justices Back Detainee Access to U.S. Courts, June 28, 2004