Steyn Rings the Bell

Mark Steyn has written another great one. As creepy as John Edwards is, and he is pretty darn creepy, the most scary thing for you and I is the abusive power of the Federal government.

" ...the prosecution has too many advantages. With corporate fraud, the tradition is that, in order to skewer the CEO, the government buys the CFO. Having deemed a politician's "family image" to be in effect a business venture, the feds identified Andrew Young as Edwards's CFO.

Young is a confessed liar whose loyalty to his boss was such that he claimed to be the father of Edwards's baby. But it's remarkable how the offer of federal immunity can wither the devotion of even the most stout-hearted of retainers. Having bought its witnesses, the Justice Department files multiple counts, generally ensuring that jurors wishing to appear sophisticated can dismiss the majority of them while convicting on enough to send the accused to jail for longer than the average European serial killer, and for a crime no one can explain to anybody who isn't a federal prosecutor.

John Edwards lives with the two youngest children of his official government-regulated "family image." Emma Claire is thirteen and Jack is eleven.

They have no mother. For some reason the United States regards it as a priority to see that they be more comprehensively orphaned."

As wrong as the prosecution of Conrad Black was for him, for us the prosecution of John Edwards is equally vile. The expansion of governmental power and its intrusion into the freedoms of the common, or uncommon, citizen has become grotesque in the extreme. Let us be a free people yet, and to that end let us require the government to reign itself in.

Read his whole piece here.