When his delicate constitution permits, Greenwald uses a lot of scary words to describe my perfectly reasonable observation that as a moral and practical (as opposed to a legal matter) the real outrage is when drug dealers ensnare or otherwise put at risk their own children in order to sell drugs. The rest of his post argues with a position I don’t hold and if his reading comprehension skills were up to snuff and his ideological gag reflex were less hair-triggered he’d understand that.

He can get his panties as bunched up over my use of the word “niceties” as he likes, I don’t see anything wrong with what I wrote and his effort to ratchet up its significance into some cri de coeur about the phantasms of lost liberty strikes me as flatly hysterical.

But I would like to note one thing. He writes “What people like Jonah Goldberg stupidly refer to as these ‘procedural niceties’ happen to be the only things which distinguish our country from every two-bit dictatorship around.”

This is a classically Dershowitzian (i.e. asinine) statement. Yes, our legal system is one of the things — and an important one — separating us from two-bit dictatorships. But it takes a level of obtuseness I cannot adequately summarize briefly to suggest that our criminal law procedures are “the only things” which separate us from dictatorial societies. We have a culture, a heritage and countless institutions which stand opposed to dictatorship. And the wall between dictatorship and liberty does not stand or fall depending on whether or not drug dealers have extra legal manuevering room to hide drugs in the pants of their ten year old daughters.