Hillary Clinton has moved rapidly in my mind from “You’re kidding, she won’t run for President, she doesn’t have a chance” to “Well, looks like she will run, maybe it won’t be a total fiasco” to “What a disaster — where do I donate money to her opponents?”<\/p>\n
Hillary’s latest bit of triangulation is to co-sponsor a bill banning flag burning<\/a>. It would be hard to come up with a better example of empty pandering. The United States is a rare country, one founded on ideals (liberty, self-government) rather than on an ethnic identity. The flag is a symbol of those national ideals. Laws against burning the flag have it precisely backwards: they protect the symbol by sacrificing the ideals themselves. Perhaps a subtle concept when first presented in tenth-grade social studies, but by the time you’re a United States Senator it should have sunk in.<\/p>\n At Daily Kos<\/a>, georgia10 astutely quotes Justice William Brennan<\/a>:<\/p>\n We can imagine no more appropriate response to burning a flag than waving one’s own, no better way to counter a flag burner’s message than by saluting the flag that burns, no surer means of preserving the dignity even of the flag that burned than by — as one witness here did — according its remains a respectful burial. We do not consecrate the flag by punishing its desecration, for in doing so we dilute the freedom that this cherished emblem represents.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n