Humankind are creatures of community and community is what we are primarily about. Sustaining that community requires that its members perceive the way things are done is fair. Of course, the meaning of fair is subject to dispute, wherein lies our political rancor. However, it seems obvious that one characteristic of fair is that whatever is done, it is done openly. That openness demands that everybody has a chance to challenge the outlines of the outcomes. It is only such openness that has any chance to produce an outcome that everyone (nearly) can accept.

No free and fair society exists when people can be subject to arrest and detention at the arbitrary decision of a single person or group of persons. No free and fair society exists when a person does not have the right to answer charges against themselves in the open (a court of law). No free and fair society exists when even the evidence of alleged crimes cannot be confronted, indeed even known. No free and fair society exists when even the evidence of alleged crimes can be constructed from secret denunciations, inadvertent associations and god only knows what else.

This is issue is often discussed, even by critics, in terms of innocent people being caught in a web from which they cannot escape. And surely that possibility is an awful to contemplate. But everybody must be afforded the openness, most especially the clearly guilty. (Never mind how, in the context outlined above, we might actually know they were guilty.) Unfortunately, many simply cannot bring themselves to stand with this principle. Recall how in 2004, a key member of a leading progressive ? presidential campaign was behind the centrist democrat’s scurrilous attacks on Howard Dean that faded HD’s image into that of Ossama Bin Laden. Why? Because, among other things HD had the temerity to suggest that even Ossama should be openly tried for his crimes notwithstanding that he was widely understood to have publicly accepted responsibility. And of course they were desperate that a Democrat who really had progressive views about the constitution, the war in Iraq, national Health Insurance, etc. might actually get the nomination.

Moreover, make no mistake, the constitutional rights being torn down, the laws being written and the precedents being constructed, are not really about foreign terrorists. The real Republican Party (the party of the McKinley’s, the Taft’s, Dick Cheney and GWB, etc.) lost out to progressive forces in a big way with the ascendancy of the New Deal in 1932. It took 32 years to begin a real comeback and 68 years to regain full ascendancy power in the Fraudulency of GWB and the Republican controlled congress. Their economic policies will lead great economic dislocations like those of that earlier era, as night follows day. (Indeed their economic philosophy glories in this `creative destruction`.) They have no intention of losing out the second time around. They intend to have effective tools in place to protect against any such outcome.

Wherein lies the great danger Robie decries.

In the attempt to constrain the right of Habeas Corpus, the Republican party and their President are doing the greatest possible damage to the future of this erstwhile great republic. This more than any other single thing must be stopped and reversed. Undoing the Military Commissions Act among other things, must be the number one priority of everyone who believes in the possibility of a free and fair society. Though only a step, we can begin this standing up to tyranny by ensuring the resignation or impeachment of Alberto Gonzales - a leading figure in the destruction of our constitution.