Web Letters: Why Obama Needs Tough Love

The man has boxed himself into a corner. You can sum up his difficulty in three simple points.

1. He cares about the rule of law. He said so standing in front of the Constitution the other day, and he’s a constitutional lawyer. He’s said it before.

2. The law is entirely--100 percent--a matter of punishing people who have committed crimes in the past. The only direction the law ever looks is back into the past. It never looks ahead to punish you for what you may do in the future. To take up the rule of law is precisely to turn your face to the past. This is plain fact, beyond dispute or debate.

3. But this man would like to look forward into the future, not back into the past. Instead of punishing people in the Bush administration for crimes they commited in the past, he wants to punish other people for crimes they may commit in the future. He’ll need to punish them without a trial, since a court of law knows nothing about trying people for what they may do in the future.

You can buy either 1 or 3. But in the light of 2, you can’t buy them both. If you care about the rule of law, you need to give up 3. If you want to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, that’s your only option.

The man needs our help, even more than he did during the election.

Stephen Voss

Istanbul, Turkey

By disingenuously using religion as his sole reason for denying "fundamental" civil rights to one class of his fellow Americans, Barack Obama has betrayed his oath of office not once but twice, for he violates the First Amendment ("separation of church and state") for the nefarious and invidious purpose of denying a "fundamental" civil right right (marriage) guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment's "due process" and "equal protection" clauses. By doing this, this so-called "civil rights lawyer" has betrayed his heritage and, most of all, he has betrayed the fundamental principal of equal protection he taught as a professor of law. This dynamic is a no-brainer that should not escape one of his first-year law students. See my article "Untangling Barack Obama's audacious mumbo jumbo" and, for a complete analysis of the issue, my Salon.com blog.

John P. Mortimer, Esq.

San Francisco, CA