“I Have a File”
J. Edgar Hoover had a file too. Here’s a hard and fast rule of 1930-60’s America, don’t piss of J. Edgar or you’ll find yourself with a file. Fast forward to Canada, 2009, and discover another bureaucrat who keeps files: Canadian Human Rights commissioner Jennifer Lynch:
Please, please, look. We have experienced 16 months of invective hurled at us, and at any time when anybody has tried to speak up and correct misinformation, gross distortions, caricaturizations,[sic] then the very next day there’s been some full-frontal assault through the blogs, through mainstream media. I have a file. I’m sure I have 1,200, certainly several hundred of these things.
Twelve-hundred files. On whom? may we ask. Bloggers who speak ill of your institution? Ezra Levant? Mark Steyn? No doubt all of the above, but here’s a question for you Jennifer, do you have a file on Warren Kinsella, defender of the HRC’s? But of course, they’re her files, and she being a mere public servant, none of my business.
Of course, Ms. Lynch says so much more, including defending her job:
I’m a public servant responsible for giving effect to the principle that ‘individuals should have the right equal to others to make for themselves a life they are able and wish to have,’ and I’m going to do it.
I always like to pull out the old UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights which, when people like Jennifer Lynch want to debate these things always seems like a good place to start. Oh, and speaking of starting, here’s something from the second paragraph of the Preamble, you don’t get much more basic human rights than that which appears in the preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human rights:
…the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief
I searched in vain, by the way, for any reference to the “right equal to others to make for themselves a life they are able and wish to have,” whatever that actually means.
At the end of the day, that’s what this fight is about, everybody’s right to speak and think freely, without intimidation from some government lackey, whether in the form of hauling your sorry self before a tribunal, or just keeping a file on you.
free speech, freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy, human rights, Jacobian Piece of Impertinence, pimply minions of bureaucracy
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