Fools on the Left, A Brute on the Right

Were this The New York Times, we might be moved this sweltering week to pen a fascinating editorial about the implications of the heat wave New York City is currently experiencing, complete with wry evocations of the plight of the sweating citizenry and Olympian observations about the soporific quality of the city's unseasonably overheated air. As it is, however, we'd rather address the political bad air that's been generated recently by culprits on both the left and the right. In the former instance, we adduce that rabble of activists, celebrities and irrelevant politicians responsible for the pro-Mumia rally at Madison Square Garden last Sunday. In the latter case there's Mayor Giuliani?who else??who's exceeded even himself in political grotesquerie by extending civil asset-forfeiture laws?originally meant for drug dealers and other felons?to motorists who commit traffic misdemeanors.

Yes, that's correct?to motorists who commit traffic misdemeanors. Under Giuliani's characteristically brutish new dispensation, the police are free to seize the vehicles?on the spot?of drivers who commit such outrages against civil society as running yellow lights, rolling through stop signs and changing lanes without signaling. In other words, the same minor violations citizens often talk themselves out of in the country's freer municipalities mean in New York that you can be pulled over, ripped from your car, handcuffed and?would it surprise anybody??perhaps even beaten with a club as you watch your car get towed away into the bowels of the city's bureaucracy. It's important to note that such seizures of property happen at the point of apprehension and/or arrest, and not after a trial. This means that even if you're subsequently deemed innocent, you'll have to suffer in court through the expensive, time-consuming process of redeeming your vehicle. As The Washington Times notes, innocence under these circumstances doesn't ensure the return of property. The Mayor's policy is draconian, and shouldn't be tolerated.

Aficionados of civil liberties and those who cling romantically to an idea of the necessity of a free society will note that, predictably, the louts of the national GOP?who can be expected piously to invoke the concepts of "property rights" and "smaller government" when it's necessary to promote their own agendas?have maintained a coy silence about this latest obscenity from the New York City Mayor and Republican senatorial candidate.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the political spectrum, New Yorkers who bothered paying attention were treated on Sunday to a display of the so-called left's intellectual and moral degradation, as such political ghosts as David Dinkins rallied at the Garden on behalf of fashionable murderer Mumia Abu-Jumal. As the Mumia case makes clear, being a "leftist" in 2000 means standing with Hollywood actors, rock superstars and other capitalist elites and millionaires in defense of an NPR commentator, intellectual and litterateur who decided to murder a member of the working class.

We'll listen to arguments that the death penalty?that cornerstone of both the Clinton and Giuliani approaches to law enforcement?should be abolished. That capital punishment represents both a horrifying expansion of government power into the lives (and deaths) of its citizens, and the bureaucratic rationalization of the process of killing. But as long as Mumia Abu-Jamal, NPR commentator to the haute bourgeoisie and killer of workingmen, remains the poster boy for its abolition, we're not willing to listen very hard.