Cowboy Confessional

The ability to laugh remove can remove pain … mainly by preventing us from telling people what we really think about them.

A book I’m peddling to publishers titled Catalog of Canards describes how political lies are created and spread. My tongue-in-cheek prose help mollify the reader who otherwise would self-destruct from anger inflicted by the realization of how thoroughly hoodwinked they have been. In outlining the book I was reasonably sure that I described nearly every form of fib in the dirty dregs of democracy.

I may be wrong.

Attending a meeting of the American Constitution Society — a conclave of left-wing people interested in rigging the judiciary to defeat the will of the people — I heard a form of lie that I am uncertain how to codify. The panel composed of law professors and civil rights litigators (including a lone libertarian from the Pacific Legal Foundation) opened their review of the 2007/2008 Supreme Court season with a discussion of D.C. v. Heller, the now famous gun ban case.

The discussion was academic, which was entertaining for a constitutional autodidact like myself (incidentally, never use the word autodidact when speaking to your congressional representative … I did that to mine and his limited intellect kept him from understanding the concept). Most commentators conducted light ridicule of the majority decision in the case, disliking a ruling that said the Second Amendment does secure an individual right.

A seeming sane legal strumpet from Stanford lobbed a lie which I’m still struggling to classify. In referring to the Heller decision she claimed the court “created a new right.”

If I wanted to torture my readers, I could wax for hours on the nature of reserved rights, preexisting rights, 10th Amendment prerogative and any number of conlaw constructions confirming that everything in the Bill of Rights was purposefully composed and ratified to document sacrosanct individual rights jealously guarded by “the people.” It is mechanically impossible for a judge to create a new right since the basic theory of the American legal system is that all rights are reserved by the people and that we grant government select powers in order to maintain a more-or-less civil society.

That someone so clueless teaches law should scare everyone.

So I’m stuck. Throughout my book I cite the various forms of falsehoods as the lie of … For example, when the media omits pertinent information from a news story it is called The Lie of Context. The Stanford professor’s perjury is difficult to classify. It is in essence Orwellian but defies even George’s subterfuge schema.

Suggestions for a codification are welcome.

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