Atrios writes about a heinous Jonah Goldberg post, and an excellent Glenn Greenwald response.
Both Atrios and Greenwald use this quote from Goldberg:
I understand the need for following the procedural niceties, but as a plain moral common sense issue, if you are a drug dealer and keep drugs on the premises with your child, you get zero-point-zero sympathy from me if your kids are searched, warrant or no. It may be wrong for the cops to do it. But you are not a victim for choosing a life where you can rationally expect to expose your kids to far greater risks than a search by a polite cop. The kid’s a victim — of bad parents.
(In case you’re not up on this issue, the reference is to Alito’s argument that a 10 year old girl could be strip-searched without a warrant, because there was an existing warrant to search the girl’s alleged drug-dealing father.)
Greenwald excellently describes how dangerous Goldberg’s ideas are; he wants to sell off the Bill of Rights for the sake of being “tough” on drugs. But neither Atrios nor Greenwald point out a rather reprehensible corollary to Goldberg’s ill-considered argument.
Goldberg says “The kid’s a victim — of bad parents.” Really? ‘Cause I thought the kid was a victim of a warrantless strip-search. While Goldberg is snotting off about how drug dealers (he doesn’t say “alleged”) aren’t “victims,” he completely forgets that they weren’t the ones victimized, that theirs weren’t the rights violated.
A ten year old girl was strip-searched. Without a warrant. And, it turns out, without finding any drugs. Goldberg thinks it’s the parents who are the portray themselves as victims, and the parents who may, or may not, deserve sympathy—presumably because children are simply parental property or appendages. But whether or not the child is a victim of having bad parents, she is certainly the victim of a violating and illegal search. Her rights should not be set aside while we discuss Constitutionality. She is the victim.
