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Now that syndicates are taking over local newspapers, almost all   Southern newspapers are like The State here in Columbia, SC. It used to be  a South Carolina newspaper with our own attitudes. Now it is a Northern newspaper.

Every person hired by The State is a minor leaguer in the faceless national news bureaucracy. Each of these stamped-out little bureaucrats dreams of an afterlife. He hopes that, if he is good, he will die and go to The Washington Post.

Like all good Yankees, including galvanized ones, each of these little bureaucrats accepts every  Southern stereotype his betters in Washington and New York serve up. If   you are in the South or from the South, any expression of doubt about these stereotypes means your media career ends instantly.

It labels you as a Southern provincial. Every media bureaucrat must assume that Southern opinions exist simply because of provincial nastiness. Once again, if you are in or from the South, you are supposed to be even more fanatically attached to these stereotypes. Otherwise you are a Southern Provincial, and you are OUT.

So, especially in the South, media bureaucrats never hesitate to use nastiness to crush Southern opinions. For example, at the very time when The State was waging war to get the Confederate flag taken down from the state capitol dome, pictures of major independence demonstrations in Eastern Europe appeared on front pages all over America.

Prominently featured in pictures of these demonstrations were huge Confederate flags. Almost every newspaper in America carried these stories, but not The State. To include these front-page stories would require The State to show these lead photographs. This would demonstrate that the Confederate flag is a universally recognized symbol of rebellion against tyranny.

To avoid that, The State simply spiked two major international stories! This was the kind of mind control the demonstration was against. But such small-minded media bureaucrats never hesitate to use this kind of pure viciousness against what they consider Southern Evil, which has no right to be heard in their world.

But The State made a major error in fighting the Confederate flag. They let the other side have SOME right to object. They were absolutely one-sided and bent over backwards to give anti-flag people all the advantages. But they did publish letters on the pro-flag side. So they lost.

On another issue, The State fought desperately against "right to carry" gun permits. This law, adopted by some 42 of 50 states, allows a person to have a gun permit if he qualifies for it by taking a course and passing a rigid, three-month background check. Before "right to carry" laws, a gun permit was entirely a matter of political pull. You gave money to your sheriff's election campaign or you had other connections, and you got a permit. No other qualifications were required.

As Southerners, we were very much in favor of the right to bear arms. New York and Washington are against it. So The State is against it. The State declared that if people without political connections were allowed to get permits, blood would flow in the streets.

"Dodge City"! was what every major member of the news bureaucracy screamed in The Washington Post and The New York Times. So the little media bureaucrats at The State screamed "Dodge City"! Of course, despite the fact that these permits have been issued by the tens of thousands all over America for years, nothing of the sort has happened.

But the media bureaucrats ignored that, as did their big brothers in the big cities. Once again, The State took a media bureaucrat position that made no sense. And once again, because they allowed some opposition to be heard, they lost. Once again, The State favored everyone who was against "right to carry."

Of course The State printed one editorial after another which was a straight copy of editorials in The Washington Post, The New York Times and anything else by the top media bureaucrats they worship. Of course Arail had cartoons picturing "right to carry" advocates as evil, fascistic, and, above all, Provincial.

But The State allowed some opposition to be expressed in its pages. And, once again, The State lost in its battle against Evil Southern Provincialism. The State lost these two battles because it allowed the other side to speak out.

By the time they got to a third issue, they were tired of getting beaten. So they went to straight censorship. And this time, they won. Every state that ratified the Bill of Rights had and enforced an antimiscegenation law. Every state but one which ratified the Fourteenth Amendment had and enforced an antimiscegenation law. The congress which proposed the Fourteenth Amendment had and enforced an antimiscegenation law in the District of Columbia.

So in the 1960s, the federal courts declared that the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment outlawed antimiscegenation laws. The State wanted South Carolina voters to approve this court decision by taking the antimiscegenation law out of the state constitution in the November ballot. The State had editorials demanding this. It printed letters to the editor demanding that South Carolinians get rid of antimiscegenation provisions inside thick lines around them to draw special attention to them. This was what The State routinely does when it fights Evil Southern Provincialism.

But it took another step: The State banned all opposition from its pages. Not one word of opposition to ratifying the court's unconstitutional decision was allowed. Every letter I had written to The State previously had been published. I wrote two letters
on this subject. The State did not even bother to send my letters back or openly reject them.

I called the guy in charge of the The State editorial page letters. He was forced to answer, and pleaded complete ignorance of the whole process. I sent him another letter, as I had sent the two earlier ones, both by email and regular mail. He admitted he had gotten them, but he refused even to reject them. He sounded like the operatives for Communist governments I dealt with in Eastern Europe. The proposition won, 62% to 38%. No opposition had been allowed anywhere.

And no one but Robert Whitaker has said one single word about this. To this day, absolutely nobody anywhere but me has said a word about this complete and blatant censorship. And I am NOT going to let it go.

So, now that South Carolina has agreed to the 1968 court decision removing all antimiscegenation laws in the teeth of constitutional intent, there are three lessons I want everybody to recognize:

First, South Carolinians have no right to question ANY Federal court decision. We have ratified the proposition that the court can decide anything it wants to without any reference to original intent.

The second lesson is that the media bureaucracy can win if it uses outright censorship.

The third lesson is that, if outright censorship is used on a really Politically Incorrect issue like this, absolutely no one but me will object to it. So censorship works in South Carolina. And South Carolinians don't even have the guts to object to it.



The Constitution is very specific about what the Senate is to do once the House of Representatives has impeached the president. The House impeaches, or indicts, and the Senate conducts the trial.

Period.

But the usual people, Republican ex-presidents, Democratic liberals, and respectable conservatives, are all saying the Senate doesn't have to conduct a trial. They demand a censure or something. They say that the old, dead words of the Constitution are not binding. That is because those who wrote the old document are dead, and we have a "Living Constitution."

The twentieth century is full of "Living Constitutions."

In 1936, Joseph Stalin promulgated a new Soviet Constitution. In comparison with the words of that Soviet Constitution of 1936, the United States Constitution looks totally undemocratic. The Stalinist Constitution of 1936 contains a ringing endorsement of free speech and a long list of other freedoms. Its guarantees of freedom are absolutely poetic, and perfectly ironclad.

The 1936 Soviet Constitution declares absolute sovereignty for local government, even including the right to secede! Those who have read it are always impressed by the long list of rights that are guaranteed. It also contains repeated assurances of every Soviet citizen's personal safety.

So much for the words. Now for the music.

Before, during, and after 1936, people were snatched from their homes and sent off to die in Siberian work camps, by the TENS OF MILLIONS.

So how did the millions of Stalinists in the United States and Europe justify all that horror and hold up the Stalinist Constitution as an ideal document at the same time?

They pointed out that, while we bourgeois types might think Stalin was doing things his Constitution forbade, that was because we did not understand the Marxist Interpretation of that Constitution.

Yes, that is EXACTLY what they said! Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

You see, the Stalinist Constitution was a "Living Document." That is to say, the government was not bound by the mere verbiage in a document as you or I might understand it. The leaders of the Soviet Union were free to adjust their interpretation of that document to the times and to Marxist Reality.

So after 1936 Stalin continued a slaughter larger than Hitler's. And Stalin's slaughter was no War Crime. It was just as massive IN PEACETIME as it was in wartime!

Speaking of Hitler, one thing most people don't know about him was that his entire Third Reich was perfectly constitutional. The Weimar Constitution of Germany was written right after World War I, and established Germany as a democracy. Until May 8, 1945, the Weimar Constitution was still in force. All of Hitler's actions were conducted under that document.

You see, there was one little provision in the Weimar Constitution which allowed for the indefinite imposition of emergency powers. So Hitler did not nullify the democratic Weimar Constitution when he took power. He merely INTERPRETED it. Using that Constitution, Hitler simply had the Parliament give him absolute emergency powers after the Reichstag Fire.

True, everybody knew that the writers of the Weimar Constitution did not mean for it to justify a permanent dictatorship. But Hitler adjusted the words to his new and modern age.

Sound familiar?

Let us say that you and I have worked hard together to accumulate some assets. We sit down and make up a very, very serious contract between us for the conduct of business in the future. Obviously, since so much is at stake and it was so hard for us to make this agreement, we make any changes in it very hard. It goes without saying that we are very, very specific about how it can be amended, changed, or, if you like, "interpreted" differently. A few years later, you decide you want more. You get very large, paid thugs to back you up, and you make whatever changes you decide are fair.

So you declare that what we really have is not just a bunch of old dead words on a piece of paper. What we have is "A Living Contract."

I would say that what we now have is no contract at all. I would call you a thug. And I would not appreciate it if someone agreed with you that you were doing the right thing.

And I would think it was crazy if the same people who agreed with you and the other thugs today started getting mad at you for being a thug tomorrow.

It is therefore amusing to hear respectable conservatives accusing Clinton of violating his oath "to protect and defend the Constitution."

WHAT Constitution? Every single respectable conservative has long since agreed that the United States Constitution is nothing but the opinion of nine lawyers sitting in Washington wearing black robes. Nobody can take the idea of a United States Constitution seriously if he goes along with the court's decision to strike down all state antimiscegenation laws, for example.

In striking down state antimiscegenation laws, the Supreme Court declared openly, and once and for all, that any hint of original intent meant nothing whatsoever. To accept that decision is to reject original intent absolutely.

And ALL respectable conservatives not only accept that decision, but try to prove they are more fanatically in favor of it than any liberal who was ever born. Racial intermarriage is critical to liberals, so respectable conservatives do not hesitate to toss the Constitution into the toilet for it.

A "Living Constitution" is sillier than a joke. It is an oxymoron.

And every single respectable conservative demands a "Living Constitution" when it comes to things liberals really want, like racial intermarriage.

It is important to make all these points before one discusses anything to do with this mythical "United States Constitution."

A new wrinkle has developed in the very unfunny joke that calls itself "constitutional law" in the United States. The "dead words" of the old document contain a provision in Article I that makes the Congress the sole judge of the qualifications of its own members. The Congress, for example, may censure its own members.

When the Congress found it couldn't actually impeach Andrew Jackson, as required by the Constitution, it decided to censure him. Jackson pointed out that that was unconstitutional, since it did not give him the right to argue back. More important, it did not carry the enormous gravity of a vote for impeachment.

Censure of its members is part of Congress's job of judging its own members. There is no provision for congress to judge the  qualifications of a sitting president, except for impeachment.

Now, congress can DENOUNCE the president. Congress can DENOUNCE the Pope. Congress can denounce Sasquatch if it wants to.

But a censure, in the same sense as censuring a member of congress, is a different matter altogether.

 

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Issue: Jan. 2, 1999
Editor: Virgil H. Huston, Jr.
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