McCain's Raging Heart Syndrome

The Other McCain: Dunk 'em again!

Robert Stacy McCain pretends to be this model conservative, yet he's always quick to abandon the belief that separates liberalism from conservatism: Unflinching, unapologetic devotion to the rule of law.

Liberals chafe against the law, which is blind to 'good' or 'bad,' black or white, male or female, and other superficialities and biographical details. Liberals are bleeding hearts, and their emotions get the better of them. They are compelled by sentiment to bend, ignore, overcome any law that they view as oppressive or injurious to black drug dealers, Hispanic border jumpers, whomever.

'Conservatives' of RSM's sort suffer from the opposite of bleeding heart syndrome. Call it raging heart syndrome: Raw emotions -- fury, hatred, contempt -- overwhelm the afflicted individual, forcing him to discard the liberal, rights based legal framework that has for centuries made us a free and orderly society.

Americans have long been adamant about extending to everyone -- even to monsters like the Nazis -- those basic rights which separate the mature order of the West from the totalitarian whimsy of the Orient. This is not the time to drop that wonderful and most civilized impulse.

I too have had fantasies of butchering our enemies, preferably in public (downtown Manhattan, say, in the footprints of the Trade Towers . . . let the cops and firefighters at 'em first). But that would be giving into the same vile, illiberal, and anti-human spirit that animates Islamists.

All Americans, but especially conservatives, must guard against raging heart syndrome. We must stand by our ancient legal methods and institutions. Torture and this practice of veiled back room 'trials' -- their outcomes all but predetermined -- might be satisfying and vindicating on a primal level. But they're ultimately great betrayals of the very principles that make our country and our civilization worth fighting so damn hard to defend.