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?" Hillary's latest bit of triangulation is to co-sponsor a bill banning flag burning. 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. At Daily Kos, georgia10 astutely quotes Justice William Brennan:
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.
Maybe Ezra is right: Obama '08.
