They're all based on the same totalitarian, pre-crime principle, says Eric Peters:
Consider: You are liable to arrest for “drunk driving” in America today even if you aren’t driving at all. You merely have to be in your car – even if you’re in the passenger seat and the car is parked. People who have had one too many and decided to sleep it off in their car have been arrested for DWI just the same as if they had been straddling the double yellow at 65 MPH with a gin and tonic in one hand and their left leg hanging out the window.
The courts have said that drinking “x” amount of alcohol not only defines “impairment” – it also amounts to intent to drive drunk, whether you’re driving or not. And that intent- imputed, perceived, ginned-up out of nothingness – is what matters.
Is it really a great leap to imagine that political speech – hatriolic speech, as it is being styled – will soon be treated the same way? That to say or even to think something – anything – that smacks of criticism of government and its flunkies will shortly be regarded as tantamount to shooting people?
Gun laws – and the TSA – already operate on this principle.
You have no record of criminal misconduct or mental illness. You’re a taxpayer, a responsible citizen. Yet in several states (and of course, Washington, D.C.) you’re assumed to have criminal intent, and thus, denied the right to own a firearm. If you possess one anyway – even if you have done nothing with it to harm or even threaten to harm another person – then you’re subject to being cuffed and stuffed just the same as if you had actually used it to threaten or harm others.
Pre-crime again.
The TSA subjects people at random – and en masse – to rough and humiliating searches, including invasive physical pat downs, just like cops do to felony suspects. Not because of anything they’ve actually done or even hinted they may do but only because the TSA apes impute “terrorist intent” to anyone who desires to travel by commercial airplane.
Ipso facto.
Just like having a drink before you drive makes you a “drunk” driver – no matter how good your actual driving happens to be.
We’ve upended perhaps the most basic concept of Western jurisprudence – that for their to be a crime, or wrongdoing, there must be an actual criminal act, or wrongdoing.
But a society that embraced the tar baby of pre-emptive wars should not be surprised to wake up one day to find it is now also snuggling the concept of pre-crime – with all its consequences. God bless America. Land of the Free.
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