Reflections  

Tender loving care — On March 5, it was announced that Vice President Cheney has blood clots in his left leg. With any luck, a major political figure such as Cheney will be sent for treatment to Walter Reed Medical Center, the premier government facility in the D.C. area. There he can receive the treatment he so richly deserves. — Ross Levatter

Buen provecho — "Have a nice day" is the verbal equivalent of a smiley face. In the course of a normal day, we must hear it more than a dozen times from the countless clerks, checkout personnel, receptionists, Wal-Mart greeters, business attendants, and various other people with whom we deal on a daily basis. For a little novelty, I've taken to responding with "Make lots of money." I feel it is particularly apt, on libertarian grounds. And it wishes good fortune on the recipient.

I'm amazed at the responses. Most people chuckle — or at least smile — at the unexpected quip. But it's the follow-up response that always gives me pause for reflection. A few folks, mostly entrepreneurs, take the exhortation for what it is; a sincere wish for the person to prosper. However, most people respond wryly that they don't make the money, the employer does.

There is, however, a surprising consistency in the reaction of Hispanics — whether recent arrivals or long-time residents — of whom there are many in my home state of Arizona. Invariably, they break into a big grin and thank me profusely for the good wishes. Maybe open immigration isn't such a bad idea. — Robert H. Miller

Jury stultification — The week the Scooter Libby verdict was announced, I was a member of a jury pool. It wasn't my first stint on jury duty, and it probably won't be my last. I declare during voir dire that I won't convict anyone for anything I consider a victimless crime, nor in certain other cases, and I have yet to be put on a jury. But they keep summoning me.

A court official explained to us on the morning of the first day the things we needed to know in order to "do our honored duty." (I swear, she called it that.) The official finished her little speech and invited questions. A juror asked whether, if seated on a trial, we were allowed to take notes — since already in our first ten minutes we'd been told both that note-taking was encouraged and prohibited. The answer was, "That's up to the judge in each case."

I thought of a little book I once saw, called "How Many Three Cent Stamps in a Dozen?" It contains simple logic puzzles such as the one in the title. Feeble minds might puzzle over it for a long time; an able thinker, undistracted by the number "three" in the title, quickly answers "twelve."

The woman asking about taking notes was stuck on the "three." So were most of her fellow jurors. Here we were, a body of people who deliberate in secret, who have the ultimate power to decide guilt or lack thereof, being given instructions on how to rubber-stamp the wishes of lawyers and a judge — right down to proper note-taking procedure. The last time someone tried to teach me when and how to take notes was in primary school, for God's sake.

I imagine the deliberations in the Libby trial were much the same: a roomful of people stuck on the "three," asking the judge a question here about the circumstances under which they ought to find Libby guilty, a question there about what evidence they were "allowed" to consider. Right after the trial, a juror was already calling for Libby to be pardoned, in a tragic but common case of believing the lie that a juror's duty is not to judge the law and the facts, but simply to solve a logic puzzle according to the judge's instructions. — Patrick Quealy

Big ball ban — "The truck ornament industry is not amused," reports the Washington Post (Feb. 23). The reason for their dearth of frivolity? A bill in the Maryland Assembly that would ban oversized plastic testicles from the undercarriages of vehicles statewide. David Ham, the founder of Your Nutz, a company that offers for sale "more than 200 kinds of fake testicles," certainly isn't laughing. "It's not a perverted sexual thing at all," he says. "It's a sense of humor."

But the sponsor of the bill, Delegate LeRoy E. Myers, Jr., disagrees, calling the ornaments vulgar and immoral, a "pretty serious problem" meriting some sort of punitive action. For what it's worth, I agree with Delegate Myers. Any person crass enough to attach a giant scrotum to his vehicle deserves some sort of punishment. Only problem is, I can't think of anything more fitting than to require such a person to keep the balls on his bumper, to make sure the rest of the world knows what a tremendous goober he is. — Andrew Ferguson

Santorum's new digs — "I'm sorry, I didn't think I was going to talk about 'man-on-dog' with a United States Senator — it's sort of freaking me out." That reaction came from an Associated Press reporter during a 2003 interview with Sen. Rick Santorum, right after Santorum explained that he didn't have any problem with people's orientations, just so long as they didn't act on them, say with a goat or a laid-back Shar-Pei.

With a knack for freaking out an ever-growing multitude of people over the ensuing three years, Santorum stumbled into the November 2006 election, according to the polling firm Rasmussen Reports, as the nation's "most vulnerable incumbent." Ranking dead last in voter approval in the Senate at the time of the election, Santorum's drubbing at the polls by Bob Casey, 59% to 41%, was statistically the biggest win by a Democratic Senate candidate in Pennsylvania history.

In his new job, Mr. Santorum is an employee of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Washington-based thinktank. "Our mission is to explore how the Judeo-Christian tradition applies to public policy," explains the center's president, M. Edward Whelan. More specifically, Santorum will create and run EPPC's new "America's Enemies" program. "It's a stark name," says Santorum, "but we wanted to be candid about the fact that America really does have enemies and to point out that the nature of these enemies is much more complex than what people realize."

Note that we're dumb — again. Just as we were moral pygmies when it came to understanding the gathering man-on-dog storm, now we're foreign policy pygmies when it comes to recognizing that America "really does have enemies" and that "the nature of these enemies is much more complex" than we dumbos realize. "I was left after the election with a very clear sense of two things," explains Santorum. "Number one, the more I looked into the threat that confronts us, the more concerned I was about the gravity of that threat. And, number two, the more convinced I was that the American people didn't understand it."

The ex-senator is "convinced," in short, that we just don't get it, don't see the "gravity" of things, don't "understand it" — just as too many of us didn't understand his make 'em suffer prescription for helping the poor. "Making people struggle a little bit," he maintained, "is not necessarily the worst thing." We were also too dumb to "understand it" when Santorum suggested that our time alone wasn't exactly none of the government's business. Asserting that "the right to privacy doesn't exist, in my opinion, in the United States Constitution," Santorum blamed the Supreme Court for our overly libertarian notions about individual freedom and privacy: "It all comes from, I would argue, this right that was created, created in Griswold — Griswold is the contraception case — and abortion."

Griswold is the 1965 case in which the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution protected a right to privacy. The case involved an 1879 Connecticut statute that outlawed the use of "any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception." Start by giving married couples the right to use contraceptives, and the next thing you know it'll be man-on-dog, a full-blown barnyard free-for-all. "What I'd like to do," explained Santorum, "is have these kinds of incredibly important moral issues be decided by the American public, not by nine unelected, unaccountable judges."

Mob rule? No Constitution? No birth control if the majority of Americans become Quiverfulls? The Quiverfull movement draws its inspiration from Psalm 127: "Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them." In any case, John J. Miller, National Review's national political correspondent, reports on how Santorum views his new "America's Enemies" job: "One of his focal points will be religious liberty and how people of faith might confront radical Islam."

On the liberty part, Mr. Santorum might want to begin by studying what the Founding Fathers had to say — for starters, this thought from Thomas Jefferson: "Reading, reflection and time have convinced me that the interests of society require the observation of those moral precepts only in which all religions agree." Or this, also from Jefferson: "I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it." — Ralph R. Reiland

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