In an article last week, New Yorker legal affairs writer Jeffrey Toobin quotes Chief Justice John Roberts, who was questioning an attorney about the deterrent effect of a part of the Voting Rights Act, as making this comment:
“That’s like the old elephant whistle. You know, ‘I have this whistle to keep away the elephants.’ You know, well, that’s silly. ‘Well, there are no elephants, so it must work.’ ”
I can't resist applying this little tale about deterrence, handily supplied by the Chief Justice, to different subject matter, namely, Vice President Cheney's recent unprovable mantra that the Bush administration's anti-terrorism program, including dubious interrogation methods and the Guantánamo detentions, kept the country safe for the past eight years. Evidently Cheney's elephant whistle worked.
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