Aaron Tobey vs. Obama's "Negative Liberties"

Barack Obama famously said (during a long and dreary radio interview): " that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states cant do to you. Says what the Federal government cant do to you, but doesnt say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf..." You may suffer the entire four minutes here.

Well, one of those "negative liberties," Mr. Obama bemoans is the 4th Amendment, which states in part: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated..." Leave aside the fact that Obama is using Orwellian contortions to suit his purposes, see Bruce Walker's thoughts below.

But those negative liberties, what the government may not do to you, is the point which Aaron Tobey, a student at the University of Cincinnati was making, when he scrawled that part of the Constitution on his body and stripped to his shorts to protest the insane policies of the TSA.


And, writing in the American Thinker, Bruce Walker, sums up the twisted logic that Obama uses to describe our Constitution as a charter of negative liberties, saying in part: "The 2001 audio tape of Barack Obama describing the Constitution as a document of "negative liberties" reveals an utterly Orwellian Obama. How can liberty be anything other than negative? Liberty is the absence of external control. Only in our age of collective thinking and untidy language could such a thing as "positive liberty" be conceived. The state power to coerce is not liberty."