What a great catch by Andrew Sullivan:
"We look upon authority too often and focus over and over again, for 30 or 40 or 50 years, as if there is something wrong with authority. We see only the oppressive side of authority. Maybe it comes out of our history and our background. What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do," - Rudy Giuliani, March 1994.
Giuliani calls himself a conservative? This is so ass backwards I'm literally at a loss for words.
"Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do."
That's just mind-bogglingly wrong. Has this man ever read any political theory? Any?
UPDATE: Good catch by Matt here
. As he makes clear, yes, in fact there are political theorists who argued something very similar to what Giuliani says here, Hegel being the most prominent.
Although you clearly cannot tell it from what I originally wrote, when I said "any political theory," I meant "any of the political theory on which this nation's constitution was based." Clearly, however, I said something that meant something else entirely. Which is unfortunate, given the tone in which it was written. Mea culpa.
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