Patriots of Troy

2010-09-15T14:04:00.000-07:00

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The Three Biggest Myths About Tax Cuts and the Budget Deficit | The Heritage Foundation

2010-07-09T14:15:00.000-07:00

The Three Biggest Myths About Tax Cuts and the Budget Deficit The Heritage Foundation

A Hidden History of Evil by Claire Berlinski, City Journal Spring 2010

2010-05-14T11:51:00.000-07:00

We rightly insisted upon total denazification; we rightly excoriate those who now attempt to revive the Nazis’ ideology. But the world exhibits a perilous failure to acknowledge the monstrous history of Communism.

A Hidden History of Evil by Claire Berlinski, City Journal Spring 2010

The Fall of Obama

2010-01-15T10:55:00.000-08:00

The Fall of Obama

Ideas matter. Legislative proposals matter. Slick campaigns and dazzling speeches can work for a while, but the magic always wears off.

The Constitutional Crisis and the Security Crisis by Andrew C. McCarthy on National Review Online

2010-01-04T09:42:00.000-08:00

The Constitutional Crisis and the Security Crisis by Andrew C. McCarthy on National Review Online

Real Activisim

2009-03-04T16:51:00.000-08:00

I found this at the end of an article regarding gay marriage from the O.C. Register:

"Activist judges

"I long have thought that 'activism' is just a label that people use for the decisions that they don't like," Chemerinsky said.

Last year, for instance, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Heller v. District of Columbia that Washington's ban on handguns was unconstitutional. It's an intervention with parallels to the California court overturning Prop. 22, said Vitiello, but with a much different constituency.

"If you're opposed to the gay marriage ruling, are you opposed to Heller," in which the gun ban was lifted? Vietiello asked."

This is a fraudulent argument. The majority ruling in Heller v. District of Columbia was based on something called the CONSTITUTION! Activist decisions are where judges read in to the law a underlining penumbra of rights, aka their imagination.

The Insane Rage of the Same-Sex Marriage Mob

2008-11-24T17:03:00.000-08:00

November 19, 2008
The Insane Rage of the Same-Sex Marriage Mob
By Michelle Malkin

Before Election Day, national media handwringers forged a wildly popular narrative: The right was, in the words of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, gripped by "insane rage." Outbreaks of incivility (some real, but mostly imagined) were proof positive of the extremist takeover of the Republican Party. The cluck-cluckers and tut-tutters shook with fear.

But when the GOP took a beating on Nov. 4, no mass protests ensued; no nationwide boycotts erupted. Conservatives took their lumps and began the peaceful post-defeat process of self-flagellation, self-analysis and self-autopsy.

In fact, in the wake of campaign 2008 there's only one angry mob gripped by "insane rage": left-wing same-sex marriage activists incensed at their defeat in California. Voters there approved Proposition 8, a traditional marriage initiative, by 52 percent to 48 percent.

Instead of introspection and self-criticism, however, the sore losers who opposed Prop. 8 responded with threats, fists and blacklists.

That's right. Activists have published on the Internet an "Anti-Gay Blacklist" of Prop. 8 donors. If the tables were turned and Prop. 8 proponents created such an enemies list, everyone in Hollywood would be screaming "McCarthyism" faster than you could count to eight.

A Los Angeles restaurant whose manager made a small donation to the Prop. 8 campaign has been besieged nightly by hordes of protesters who have disrupted business, intimidated patrons and brought employees to tears. Out of fear for their jobs and their lives, workers at El Coyote Mexican Cafe pooled together $500 to pay off the bullies.

Scott Eckern, the beleaguered artistic director of California Musical Theatre in Sacramento, was forced to resign over his $1,000 donation to the Prop. 8 campaign. Rich Raddon, director of the Los Angeles Film Festival, is next on the chopping block after the anti-Prop. 8 mob discovered that he had also contributed to the "Yes on 8" campaign. Calls have been pouring in for his firing.
Over the last two weeks, anti-Prop. 8 organizers have targeted Mormon, Catholic and evangelical churches. Sentiments like this one, found on the anti-Prop.8 website "JoeMyGod," are common across the left-wing blogosphere: "Burn their f---ing churches to the ground, and then tax the charred timbers."

Thousands of gay-rights demonstrators stood in front of the Mormon temple in Los Angeles shouting "Mormon scum." The Mormon headquarters in Salt Lake City received threatening letters containing an unidentified powder. Religion-bashing protesters filled with hate decried the "hate" at Rick Warren's Saddleback Church in Orange County, Calif. Vandals defaced the Calvary Chapel in Chino Hills, Calif., because church members had collected Prop. 8 petitions. One worshiper's car was keyed with the slogans "Gay sex is love" and "SEX." Another car's antenna and windshield wipers were broken.

In Carlsbad, Calif., a man was charged with punching his elderly neighbors over their pro-Prop. 8 signs. In Palm Springs, Calif., a videographer filmed unhinged anti-Prop. 8 marchers who yanked a large cross from the hands of 69-year-old Phyllis Burgess and stomped on it.

In San Francisco, Christians evangelizing in the Castro District needed police protection after the same-sex marriage mob got physical and hounded them off the streets. Enthusiastically shooting themselves in the foot, anti-Prop. 8 boycotters are now going after the left-wing Sundance Film Festival because it does business in Mormon-friendly Utah.

Also targeted: Cinemark Theaters across the country. The company's CEO, Alan Stock, donated just under $10,000 to the traditional marriage measure. Never mind that Cinemark theaters are hosting the new biopic about gay icon Harvey Milk. They must pay for the sins of the company head who dared to exercise his political free speech.

Corporate honchos, church leaders and small donors alike are in the same-sex marriage mob's crosshairs, all unfairly demonized as hate-filled bigots by bona fide hate-filled bigots who have abandoned decency in pursuit of "equal rights." One wonders where Barack Obama -- himself an opponent of Proposition 8 -- is as this insane rage rages on. Soul-Fixer, Nation-Healer, where art thou?

Copyright 2008, Creators Syndicate Inc.

Ten Random, Politically Incorrect Thoughts

2008-11-24T16:47:00.000-08:00

Ten Random, Politically Incorrect Thoughts
By Victor Davis Hanson

1. Four years of high-school Latin would dramatically arrest the decline in American education. In particular, such instruction would do more for minority youths than all the 'role model' diversity sermons on Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X, Montezuma, and Caesar Chavez put together. Nothing so enriches the vocabulary, so instructs about English grammar and syntax, so creates a discipline of the mind, an elegance of expression, and serves as a gateway to the thinking and values of Western civilization as mastery of a page of Virgil or Livy (except perhaps Sophocles's Antigone in Greek or Thucydides' dialogue at Melos). After some 20 years of teaching mostly minority youth Greek, Latin, and ancient history and literature in translation (1984-2004), I came to the unfortunate conclusion that ethnic studies, women studies--indeed, anything "studies"-- were perhaps the fruits of some evil plot dreamed up by illiberal white separatists to ensure that poor minority students in the public schools and universities were offered only a third-rate education.

2. Hollywood is going the way of Detroit. The actors are programmed and pretty rather than interesting looking and unique. They, of course, are overpaid (they do to films what Lehman Brothers' execs did to stocks), mediocre, and politicized. The producers and directors are rarely talented, mostly unoriginal--and likewise politicized. A pack-mentality rules. Do one movie on a comic superhero--and suddenly we get ten, all worse than the first. One noble lion cartoon movie earns us eagle, penguin and most of Noah's Arc sequels. Now see poorer remakes of movies that were never good to begin with. I doubt we will ever see again a Western like Shane, the Searchers, High Noon, or the Wild Bunch. If one wishes to see a fine film, they are now usually foreign, such as Das Boot or Breaker Morant. Watching any recent war movie (e.g., Iraq as the Rape of Nanking) is as if someone put uniforms on student protestors and told them to consult their professors for the impromptu script.

3. All the old media brands of our youth have been tarnished and all but discredited. No one picks up Harpers or Atlantic expecting to read a disinterested story on politics or culture. (I pass on their inane accounts of 'getaways' and food.) The New York Times and Washington Post are as likely to have op-eds as news stories on the front page. Newsweek and Time became organs for paint-by-numbers Obamism, teased with People Magazine-like gossip pieces (at least, their editors still cared enough to seem hurt when charged with overt bias). NBC, ABC, and CBS would now make a Chet Huntley or Eric Sevareid turn over in his grave. A Keith Olbermann would not have been allowed to do commercials in the 1950s. Strangely, the media has offered up fashionably liberal politics coupled with metrosexual elite tastes in fashions, clothes, housing, food, and the good life, as if there were no contradictions between the two. No wonder media is so enthralled with the cool Obama and his wife. Both embody the new nexus between Eurosocialism in the abstract and the hip aristocratic life in the concrete.

4. After the junk bond meltdown, the S&L debacle, and now the financial panic, in just a few years the financial community destroyed the ancient wisdom: deal in personal trust; your word is your bond; avoid extremes; treat the money you invest for others as something sacred; don't take any more perks than you would wish others to take; don't borrow what you couldn't suddenly pay back; imagine the worse case financial scenario and expect it very may well happen; the wealthier you become the more humble you should act. And for what did our new Jay Goulds do all this? A 20,000 square-foot mansion instead of the old 6,000 sq. ft. expansive house? A Gulfstream in lieu of first class commercial? You milk your company, cash in your stock bonuses, enjoy your $50 million cash pile, and then get what--a Rolex instead of a reliable Timex? A Maserati for a Mercedes, a gold bathroom spout in preference to brushed pewter? The extra splurge was marginal and hardly worth the stain of avarice on one's immortal soul.

5. California is now a valuable touchstone to the country, a warning of what not to do. Rarely has a single generation inherited so much natural wealth and bounty from the investment and hard work of those more noble now resting in our cemeteries--and squandered that gift within a generation. Compare the vast gulf from old Governor Pat Brown to Gray Davis or Arnold Schwarzenegger. We did not invest in many dams, canals, rails, and airports (though we use them all to excess); we sued each other rather than planned; wrote impact statements rather than left behind infrastructure; we redistributed, indulged, blamed, and so managed all at once to create a state with about the highest income and sales taxes and the worst schools, roads, hospitals, and airports. A walk through downtown San Francisco, a stroll up the Fresno downtown mall, a drive along highway 101 (yes, in many places it is still a four-lane, pot-holed highway), an afternoon at LAX, a glance at the catalogue of Cal State Monterey, a visit to the park in Parlier--all that would make our forefathers weep. We can't build a new nuclear plant; can't drill a new offshore oil well; can't build an all-weather road across the Sierra; can't build a few tracts of new affordable houses in the Bay Area; can't build a dam for a water-short state; and can't create even a mediocre passenger rail system. Everything else--well, we do that well.

6. Something has happened to the generic American male accent. Maybe it is urbanization; perhaps it is now an affectation to sound precise and caring with a patina of intellectual authority; perhaps it is the fashion culture of the metrosexual; maybe it is the influence of the gay community in arts and popular culture. Maybe the ubiquitous new intonation comes from the scarcity of salty old jobs in construction, farming, or fishing. But increasingly to meet a young American male about 25 is to hear a particular nasal stress, a much higher tone than one heard 40 years ago, and, to be frank, to listen to a precious voice often nearly indistinguishable from the female. How indeed could one make Westerns these days, when there simply is not anyone left who sounds like John Wayne, Richard Boone, Robert Duvall, or Gary Cooper much less a Struther Martin, Jack Palance, L.Q. Jones, or Ben Johnson? I watched the movie Twelve O'clock High the other day, and Gregory Peck and Dean Jagger sounded liked they were from another planet. I confess over the last year, I have been interviewed a half-dozen times on the phone, and had no idea at first whether a male or female was asking the questions. All this sounds absurd, but I think upon reflection readers my age (55) will attest they have had the same experience. In the old days, I remember only that I first heard a variant of this accent with the old Paul Lynde character actor in one of the Flubber movies; now young men sound closer to his camp than to a Jack Palance or Alan Ladd.

7. We have given political eccentricity a bad name. There used to be all sorts of classy individualists, liberal and conservative alike, like Everett Dirksen, J. William Fulbright, Margaret Chase Smith, or Sam Ervin; today we simply see the obnoxious who claim to be eccentric like a Barbara Boxer, Al Franken, Barney Frank, or Harry Reid. The loss is detectable even in diction and manner; Dirksen was no angel, but he was witty, charming, insightful; Frank is no angel, but he merely rants and pontificates. Watch the You Tube exchange between Harvard Law Graduate Frank and Harvard Law Graduate Rains as they arrogantly dismiss their trillion-dollar Fannie/Freddie meltdown in the making. I suppose it is the difference between the Age of Belief and the Age of Nihilism.

8. Do not farm. There is only loss. To the degree that anyone makes money farming, it is a question of a vertically-integrated enterprise making more in shipping, marketing, selling, packing, and brokering than it loses on the other end in growing. No exceptions. Food prices stay high, commodity prices stay low. That is all ye need to know. Try it and see.

9. As I wrote earlier, the shrill Left is increasingly far more vicious these days than the conservative fringe, and about like the crude Right of the 1950s. Why? I am not exactly sure, other than the generic notion that utopians often believe that their anointed ends justify brutal means. Maybe it is that the Right already had its Reformation when Buckley and others purged the extremists--the Birchers, the neo-Confederates, racialists, the fluoride-in-the-water conspiracists, anti-Semites, and assorted nuts.--from the conservative ranks in a way the Left has never done with the 1960s radicals that now reappear in the form of Michael Moore, Bill Ayers, Cindy Sheehan, Moveon.org, the Daily Kos, etc. Not many Democrats excommunicated Moveon.org for its General Betray-Us ad. Most lined up to see the premier of Moore's mythodrama. Barack Obama could subsidize a Rev. Wright or email a post-9/11 Bill Ayers in a way no conservative would even dare speak to a David Duke or Timothy McVeigh--and what Wright said was not all that different from what Duke spouts. What separated Ayers from McVeigh was chance; had the stars aligned, the Weathermen would have killed hundreds as they planned.

10. The K-12 public education system is essentially wrecked. No longer can any professor expect an incoming college freshman to know what Okinawa, John Quincy Adams, Shiloh, the Parthenon, the Reformation, John Locke, the Second Amendment, or the Pythagorean Theorem is. An entire American culture, the West itself, its ideas and experiences, have simply vanished on the altar of therapy. This upcoming generation knows instead not to judge anyone by absolute standards (but not why so); to remember to say that its own Western culture is no different from, or indeed far worse than, the alternatives; that race, class, and gender are, well, important in some vague sense; that global warming is manmade and very soon will kill us all; that we must have hope and change of some undefined sort; that AIDs is no more a homosexual- than a heterosexual-prone disease; and that the following things and people for some reason must be bad, or at least must in public company be said to be bad (in no particular order): Wal-Mart, cowboys, the Vietnam War, oil companies, coal plants, nuclear power, George Bush, chemicals, leather, guns, states like Utah and Kansas, Sarah Palin, vans and SUVs.

Well, with that done--I feel much better.

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.

The L.A. Times Suppresses Obama’s Khalidi Bash Tape

2008-10-27T20:53:00.000-07:00

October 27, 2008, 6:00 a.m.

The L.A. Times Suppresses Obama’s Khalidi Bash Tape

Obama, Ayers, and PLO supporters toast Edward Said’s successor, but the press doesn’t think it’s quite as newsworthy as Sarah Palin’s wardrobe.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Let’s try a thought experiment. Say John McCain attended a party at which known racists and terror mongers were in attendance. Say testimonials were given, including a glowing one by McCain for the benefit of the guest of honor ... who happened to be a top apologist for terrorists. Say McCain not only gave a speech but stood by, in tacit approval and solidarity, while other racists and terror mongers gave speeches that reeked of hatred for an American ally and rationalizations of terror attacks.Now let’s say the Los Angeles Times obtained a videotape of the party.Question: Is there any chance — any chance — the Times would not release the tape and publish front-page story after story about the gory details, with the usual accompanying chorus of sanctimony from the oped commentariat? Is there any chance, if the Times was the least bit reluctant about publishing (remember, we’re pretending here), that the rest of the mainstream media (y’know, the guys who drove Trent Lott out of his leadership position over a birthday-party toast) would not be screaming for the release of the tape?

Do we really have to ask?

So now, let’s leave thought experiments and return to reality: Why is the Los Angeles Times sitting on a videotape of the 2003 farewell bash in Chicago at which Barack Obama lavished praise on the guest of honor, Rashid Khalidi — former mouthpiece for master terrorist Yasser Arafat? At the time Khalidi, a PLO adviser turned University of Chicago professor, was headed east to Columbia. There he would take over the University’s Middle East-studies program (which he has since maintained as a bubbling cauldron of anti-Semitism) and assume the professorship endowed in honor of Edward Sayyid, another notorious terror apologist.

The party featured encomiums by many of Khalidi’s allies, colleagues, and friends, including Barack Obama, then an Illinois state senator, and Bill Ayers, the terrorist turned education professor. It was sponsored by the Arab American Action Network (AAAN), which had been founded by Khalidi and his wife, Mona, formerly a top English translator for Arafat’s press agency. Is there just a teeny-weenie chance that this was an evening of Israel-bashing Obama would find very difficult to explain? Could it be that the Times, a pillar of the Obamedia, is covering for its guy? Gateway Pundit reports that the Times has the videotape but is suppressing it. Back in April, the Times published a gentle story about the fete. Reporter Peter Wallsten avoided, for example, any mention of the inconvenient fact that the revelers included Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, Ayers’s wife and fellow Weatherman terrorist. These self-professed revolutionary Leftists are friendly with both Obama and Khalidi — indeed, researcher Stanley Kurtz has noted that Ayers and Khalidi were “best friends.” (And — small world! — it turns out that the Obamas are extremely close to the Khalidis, who have reportedly babysat the Obama children.)Nor did the Times report the party was thrown by AAAN. Wallsten does tell us that the AAAN received grants from the Leftist Woods Fund when Obama was on its board — but, besides understating the amount (it was $75,000, not $40,000), the Times mentions neither that Ayers was also on the Woods board at the time nor that AAAN is rabidly anti-Israel. (Though the organization regards Israel as illegitimate and has sought to justify Palestinian terrorism, Wallsten describes the AAAN as “a social service group.”)

Perhaps even more inconveniently, the Times also let slip that it had obtained a videotape of the party. Wallsten’s story is worth excerpting at length (italics are mine):

It was a celebration of Palestinian culture — a night of music, dancing and a dash of politics. Local Arab Americans were bidding farewell to Rashid Khalidi, an internationally known scholar, critic of Israel and advocate for Palestinian rights, who was leaving town for a job in New York.

A special tribute came from Khalidi's friend and frequent dinner companion, the young state Sen. Barack Obama. Speaking to the crowd, Obama reminisced about meals prepared by Khalidi's wife, Mona, and conversations that had challenged his thinking.His many talks with the Khalidis, Obama said, had been "consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases. . . . It's for that reason that I'm hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that conversation — a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona and Rashid's dinner table," but around "this entire world."...[T]he warm embrace Obama gave to Khalidi, and words like those at the professor's going-away party, have left some Palestinian American leaders believing that Obama is more receptive to their viewpoint than he is willing to say.

Their belief is not drawn from Obama's speeches or campaign literature, but from comments that some say Obama made in private and from his association with the Palestinian American community in his hometown of Chicago, including his presence at events where anger at Israeli and U.S. Middle East policy was freely expressed.

At Khalidi's 2003 farewell party, for example, a young Palestinian American recited a poem accusing the Israeli government of terrorism in its treatment of Palestinians and sharply criticizing U.S. support of Israel. If Palestinians cannot secure their own land, she said, "then you will never see a day of peace."

One speaker likened "Zionist settlers on the West Bank" to Osama bin Laden, saying both had been "blinded by ideology."Obama adopted a different tone in his comments and called for finding common ground. But his presence at such events, as he worked to build a political base in Chicago, has led some Palestinian leaders to believe that he might deal differently with the Middle East than … his opponents for the White House....

At Khalidi's going-away party in 2003, the scholar lavished praise on Obama, telling the mostly Palestinian American crowd that the state senator deserved their help in winning a U.S. Senate seat. "

You will not have a better senator under any circumstances," Khalidi said.The event was videotaped, and a copy of the tape was obtained by The Times.

Though Khalidi has seen little of Sen. Obama in recent years, Michelle Obama attended a party several months ago celebrating the marriage of the Khalidis' daughter.

In interviews with The Times, Khalidi declined to discuss specifics of private talks over the years with Obama. He did not begrudge his friend for being out of touch, or for focusing more these days on his support for Israel — a stance that Khalidi calls a requirement to win a national election in the U.S., just as wooing Chicago's large Arab American community was important for winning local elections.

So why is the Times sitting on the videotape of the Khalidi festivities? Given Obama's (preposterous) claims that he didn’t know Ayers that well and was unfamiliar with Ayers’s views, why didn't the Times report that Ayers and Dohrn were at the bash? Was it not worth mentioning the remarkable coincidence that both Obama and Ayers — the “education reform” allies who barely know each other … except to the extent they together doled out tens of millions of dollars to Leftist agitators, attacked the criminal justice system, and raved about each others books — just happen to be intimate friends of the same anti-American Israel-basher? (Despite having watched the videotape, Wallsten told Gateway Pundit he “did not know” whether Ayers was there.) Why won’t the Times tell us what was said in the various Khalidi testimonials? On that score, Ayers and Dohrn have always had characteristically noxious views on the Israeli/Palestinian dispute. And, true to form, they have always been quite open about them. There is no reason to believe those views have ever changed. Here, for example, is what they had to say in Prairie Fire, the Weather Underground’s 1974 Communist manifesto (emphasis in original):

Palestinian independence is opposed with reactionary schemes by Jordan, completely opposed with military terror by Israel, and manipulated by the U.S. The U.S.-sponsored notion of stability and status-quo in the Mideast is an attempt to preserve U.S. imperialist control of oil, using zionist power as the cat's paw. The Mideast has become a world focus of struggles over oil resources and control of strategic sea and air routes. Yet the Palestinian struggle is at the heart of other conflicts in the Mideast. Only the Palestinians can determine the solution which reflects the aspirations of the Palestinian people. No "settlements" in the Mideast which exclude the Palestinians will resolve the conflict. Palestinian liberation will not be suppressed.The U.S. people have been seriously deceived about the Palestinians and Israel. This calls for a campaign to educate and focus attention on the true situation: teach-ins, debates, and open clear support for Palestinian liberation; reading about the Palestinian movement—The Disinherited by Fawaz Turki, Enemy of the Sun; opposing U.S. aid to Israel. Our silence or acceptance of pro-zionist policy is a form of complicity with U.S.-backed aggression and terror, and a betrayal of internationalism.

SELF-DETERMINATION FOR THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE!
U.S. OUT OF THE MIDEAST!
END AID TO ISRAEL!

Barack Obama wouldn’t possibly let something like that pass without a spirited defense of the Israel he tells us he so staunchly supports … would he? I guess to answer that question, we’d have to know what was on the tape. But who has time for such trifles? After all, isn’t Diana Vreeland about to critique Sarah Palin’s sartorial splendor?

— National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy chairs the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies’s Center for Law & Counterterrorism and is the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books 2008).

1976 Is Back

2008-10-24T16:39:00.000-07:00

1976 Is Back
Obama as Carter.
By Mark Moyar
A newcomer to national politics, he claimed to transcend partisan labels. He moved to the center during the campaign, at a time when the Democrats held large congressional majorities. In a troubled economy, he told voters he would keep taxes down for most Americans, limit spending, and balance the budget, all while implementing ambitious social programs. He planned to cut military spending to free money for other purposes, but assured moderates and conservatives that when it came to America’s enemies, he would be tougher than the Republicans. The media, droves of moderates, and some conservatives believed him, having pegged him as a man of character.His name was Jimmy Carter, the year was 1976, and he won. His presidency helps us predict the likely results of an Obama victory in 2008.

What did the majority of 1976 get in return for its votes? Carter’s campaign vow to avoid increasing payroll taxes went out the window: He and Congress raised Social Security taxes through the roof. They also slapped large new taxes on oil and gas. Meanwhile, Carter canceled his plan for a tax refund to Americans earning under $30,000. Casting aside more campaign pledges, Carter and Congress increased annual federal spending from $403 billion to $579 billion and grew the national debt from $709 billion to $914 billion. Tens of billions of dollars went to new jobs programs, urban aid, and mushrooming entitlements, and Carter’s promise to stop Democratic pork-barrel spending was abandoned.Carter and the Democratic Congress generated 18 percent inflation and economic stagnation at the same time. Unemployment rose. Americans came to regret the votes they had cast — Carter’s approval rating sank to 21 percent in 1980, the lowest in the history of polling.

Carter also threw out his professed hawkishness on foreign policy. Declaring America liberated from its “inordinate fear of Communism,” he sought better relations with the Communists in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and Vietnam. He was much less nice to America’s allies, withdrawing support from those who did not accept his self-righteous demands for human-rights reforms. Friendly regimes in Nicaragua and Iran fell to hostile tyrants.

If Obama abandons his promises the way Carter did, his presidency will be even more dangerous. Carter at least had longstanding tendencies toward fiscal restraint, and he, together with a large block of conservative Democrats in Congress, prevented the most left-wing elements of Congress from taxing and spending even more. Obama, on the other hand, has himself been part of the most left-wing element in the U.S. Senate, and conservatives do not have a significant presence on the Democratic side of the Reid-Pelosi Congress. Also, Obama has no history of breaking with his party before this year.

There are reasons to believe Obama will indeed break his promises. In March, he told the American public he would force Canada and Mexico to make concessions on NAFTA. Obama’s senior economic adviser privately assured Canadian officials that Obama’s public promises were “more reflective of political maneuvering than policy.” In the ensuing months, Obama likewise sent contradictory messages to different audiences on such issues as taxes, Iraq, and crime.In the second presidential debate, Obama made the most flagrant of his bogus promises yet, when he announced a “net spending cut.” The National Taxpayers Union has estimated that Obama will actually produce a net spending increase of at least $292 billion per year. Although the press would have pilloried McCain for such a brazen falsehood, Obama took so little heat that he repeated it again at the third debate.

Also during the third debate, Obama distanced himself from ACORN, denying any involvement with this organization since 1995. But as Sen. McCain pointed out, the Obama campaign paid $832,000 to an ACORN subsidiary earlier this year. Most ominous for the future is Obama’s statement to the Heartland Presidential Forum — which consists of ACORN and other leftist “community organizations” — that as soon as he wins the election, “we'll be calling all of you in to help us shape the agenda.”Perhaps most incriminating of all is Joe Biden’s Seattle speech. In words that received less media attention than the “international testing” remarks, Biden asserted that an Obama administration would make unpopular decisions, because “if they're popular, they’re probably not sound.” As a consequence, “You all are going to be sitting here a year from now going, ‘Oh my God, why are they there in the polls, why is the polling so down?’” In other words, Obama’s poll numbers will fall once Americans learn that his popular promises of 2008 have been supplanted in 2009 by actions that most Americans oppose.

Before casting a vote for Obama, Americans must consider the likelihood that he will follow the path of Jimmy Carter — that he will wreck the fragile economy by reneging on promises to cut taxes and spending, that he will be tough on America’s allies and soft on its enemies. The odds of Obama staying true to his current rhetoric are so poor that not even the boldest gambler should bet on it.

Obama Is as Untouchable as a Really Hot Chick

2008-10-23T12:00:00.000-07:00

October 23rd, 2008 10:16 AM Eastern
Gutfeld: Obama Is as Untouchable as a Really Hot Chick
By Greg GutfeldHost, “Red Eye”

So yesterday, during an ideas meeting, a staffer pitched a story about Sarah Palin, focusing on how little we know about her time in college.

My blood pressure spiked, because naturally her history — or lack thereof — is far less murkier than Barack Obama’s. But it didn’t seem to matter, because no matter what you have against the man, it just doesn’t stick.

Seriously, the man isn’t a presidential candidate, he’s a really hot chick. You know what I mean, right?

You know how when a friend starts dating some girl, let’s say a stripper with top of the line implants, he overlooks everything else. She could be spreading Chlamydia like a Jehovah’s Witness unloading a case of Watchtower pamphlets, and it won’t matter.

Blinded by beauty, he lets her get away with everything, until your buddy is left broken and broke, riddled with disease, sleeping in your garage and convinced a mob boyfriend wants him dead.

I’m not saying Barack is that harmful. I’m just saying that when it comes to the media, he possesses a force field that every hot chick has and no matter what you say or do to convince obsessed fans otherwise, it’s pointless.

Face it: If you found out that your new girlfriend, who happened to be Megan Fox, worked with ACORN, hung around with Bill Ayers and used to do coke back in college, would you care?
Of course you wouldn’t! It’s Megan Fox!

Congratulations. You’re now The New York Times.

And if you disagree with me, then you sir are worse than Hitler.

Greg Gutfeld hosts “Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld” weekdays at 3 a.m. ET. Send your comments to: redeye@foxnews.com

PC Effect, Not Bradley Effect, May Haunt Obama

2008-10-19T16:07:00.000-07:00

PC Effect, Not Bradley Effect, May Haunt Obama
October 18, 2008 - by Bernard Chapin

Barack Obama has recently improved in the [1] polls and is strongly favored to win our presidential [2] election. Should he fail in his attempt, a mythical excuse now hovers in the ether as a means to beatify him. Racism will be fingered as the rationale behind the public’s rejection. This explanation is entirely irrational but will soothe the tender sensitivities of Democrats, as it bolsters their (seemingly innate) feelings of self-righteousness. Tying Obama’s loss to racism will burnish pride. Manufactured will be the conclusion that pseudo-liberals are more morally advanced than their conservative foes. The political left will claim that they were above race and point to the mixed ethnicity of their champion, whereas it will be implied that the right was not “[3] ready” for a man of Obama’s stature and alleged excellence.

Various mainstream media [4] members have already embraced this illogical line of argumentation. CNN’s [5] Jack Cafferty proudly circulated the fallacy, noting: “Race is arguably the biggest issue in this election, and it’s one that nobody’s talking about. The differences between Barack Obama and John McCain couldn’t be more well-defined. Obama wants to change Washington. McCain is a part of Washington and a part of the Bush legacy. Yet the polls remain close. Doesn’t make sense … unless it’s race.”

Yet Mr. Cafferty overlooked the fact that leftists everywhere, such as Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, breathed so much life into this topic that it may well be able to transport itself to the polls on November 4. Sebelius [6] proclaimed, “Have any of you noticed that Barack Obama is part African-American? That may be a factor. All the code language, all that doesn’t show up in the polls. And that may be a factor for some people.”

Of course, allusions to racism are but a false dichotomy. There is a plethora of legitimate reasons for rejecting Barack Obama as president. That we must either endorse his candidacy or admit to being malignant racists is a risible notion. Much has been written about what is known as the [7] Bradley effect (peruse this fine article by [8] Stephen Green that appeared at Pajamas Media for more information). Specifically, the effect suggests that white voters may lie to pollsters about whom they are going to support if the candidate in question is black. The phenomenon is referenced whenever a black candidate garners impressive numbers in exit polling, but manages to under-perform once the final votes are tallied. (Of course, in disharmony with this effect, John Kerry was a perfect example of exit polling data not matching final vote tallies.) It receives its name from black politician Tom Bradley, who lost the 1982 California governor’s race after being significantly ahead in pre-election polling. To those who buy into the theory, Obama’s lead must be weighty in order for it to endure.

Perhaps its popularity is what caused Sebelius and Cafferty to intimate that the American people possess a nineteenth-century sensibility in regard to race. As always, the mainstream media were happy to lend their emotive keyboards to the process of validating these slanders, as demeaning the general population is a cause they cherish. They highlighted (re: celebrated) a [9] recent poll from Stanford which purportedly gave credence to such pessimism. The academic survey found that “[10] racial misgivings” may reduce Obama’s aggregate results. In the words of one of the researchers, “[t]here are a lot fewer bigots than there were 50 years ago, but that doesn’t mean there’s only a few bigots.” A closer examination of the data showcased that a third of white Democrats are the individuals who may harbor negative views of blacks.

That some Democrats — members of a party completely obsessed with race and every other form of politically correct effluvia — are racist is hardly surprising. The political left is to racism as [11] John Elway was to fourth-quarter comebacks. However, what quickly becomes apparent about this [12] survey of attitudes (go to the blue box on the right-hand side of the page and hit the link, “full poll results,” to see the study’s conclusions in detail) is that, while the demographics of the study group were broadly representative of the population as a whole, the researchers consciously chose to analyze whites in isolation.

Responses to questions were broken down into the subgrouping “whites only” and “all respondents.” What a queer and shady method by which to analyze data. Why, if the unstated purpose of their investigation was to ascertain what people think of Barack Obama, were “blacks only” omitted as a subgroup? No doubt it was intentional and a product of the academics’ belief that their inclusion would make a mockery of the study’s conclusions. This is due to blacks being human, and no random collection of human opinion will ever meet the strict parameters for enlightenment as set by the sterile dictates of political correctness.

The bottom line is that the poll’s discoveries were totally mundane. The media avoided the reporting of exculpating tidbits such as Barack Obama having led all public figures with a 30 percent “very favorable” rating. Further, that 82 percent of whites versus 84 percent of “all respondents” agreed with the statement that Barack Obama’s race was not going to influence their vote is another eventuality which journalists thought best not to mention.

More damning is that Pew Research conducted [13] a poll of their own earlier this year addressing the perceptions of blacks, whites, and Hispanics towards one another. Its revelation — “the overall portrait of race relations is one of moderation, stability, and modest progress” — was too positive for journalists to acknowledge. Pew differed from Stanford by neglecting to isolate whites as a group. On this occasion, 82 percent of whites had a “very favorable” or “mostly favorable” opinion of blacks. In harmony with Caucasian perception, 80 percent of blacks perceived whites in a “very favorable” or “mostly favorable” light. The proper conclusion to draw from this information is that America’s citizens are a high-functioning and kindly lot; however, good news will not pique the interest of our press corps, which remains mired in the days of segregation.

A defining characteristic of the fashion by which the media attempts to mislead and indoctrinate our people is through omission of fact. Should whites fail to embrace Senator Obama it proves their underlying racism, but if blacks back him near unanimously — as they [14] overwhelmingly did in the Democratic primaries of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi — it proves that they… supported a Democratic candidate. The sultans of spin were pleased to publicize the results from Stanford, yet analyzing it in the context of monolithic black support for Obama remains off limits. Clearly, racism is in the eye of the fabricator.

In all likelihood, a biracial background has been a net positive for the junior senator from Illinois. Were it not for his mixed ethnicity he would continue to merely represent my state as opposed to being the nation’s presumptive savior. [15] Geraldine Ferraro had it right when she said, “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman of any color, he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”

We certainly are, unfortunately. White guiltists everywhere have queued up in diversity droves to stand with him. My town now pulsates with every manner of yuppie sporting his kitsch. Personally, in regards to the Bradley effect, I do not doubt that Obama will under-perform on November 4 and perhaps even among those wearing the goofy symbols of his personality cult. The rationale for a possible disparity between pre-election polling and his final results will be more a product of political correctness than racism. Thus, a PC, or politically correct, effect is the accurate term, rather than one bearing the name of Bradley.

Many whites may countermand their public utterances in the privacy of the voting booth, and the most likely justification for their doing so is that political correctness has cowed and emasculated them to the point in which a passive-aggressive rebellion is the only one viable. PC is a bully which eventually alienates most of those who are exposed to it. The thought processes of the person who abandons Obama in private do not involve “I don’t like Barack because he’s black,” but instead, “Fine, I told those idiots what they wanted to hear and now I’ll do what I want to do.”

Most people do not want trouble and having vigorous arguments in the street with activists/pollsters counts as “trouble” in their eyes. This is definitely true of moderates who bear the appellation they do as a function of being less resolute than the rest of us. Swing voters are swing voters for a reason. Generally, they are not very serious about politics and possess no underlying ideology.

As opposed to answering questions about preference in the manner of conservatives — “Of course I’m not voting for Barack Obama. He’s a leftist!” — they will consider superfluous factors like confidence level, speaking style, appearance, and what others think of their choice. The latter is key in this context. The perceptions of others fuel what we term the PC effect. It’s politically correct to back Barack so many vow to do so, but ultimately they may reconsider.
Certainly, these are bleak days for the McCain campaign. Perhaps the natural inclination of people to stand up to a bully will force the timid to reverse their past declarations and assert themselves on Election Day — and, thereby, alter the course of history.

Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com
URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/pc-effect-not-bradley-effect-may-haunt-obama/

The judicial consequences of an Obama presidency

2008-10-14T14:58:00.000-07:00

Night of the Living Constitution
Explaining the judicial consequences of an Obama presidency
by Terry Eastland 10/20/2008, Volume 014, Issue 06

Have you noticed how the justices of the Supreme Court are living longer and longer, compiling more and more years of service--far more than they used to? Doubtless the justices tire of seeing their ages mentioned in stories triggered by the presidential race that contemplate who is most likely to retire and leave a vacancy to be filled. But here is what the birth certificates say:
John Paul Stevens, 88
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 75
Antonin Scalia, 72
Anthony Kennedy, 72
Stephen Breyer, 70
David Souter, 69
Clarence Thomas, 60
Samuel Alito, 58
John Roberts (the chief justice), 53.

Stevens has served the longest of the nine, and by next July he will have completed 34 years, than which only five justices ever recorded more. (He is threatening the record in this obscure competition, which was set by the justice whose seat he took in 1975, William O. Douglas, who served more than 36 years.) Because of his age and length of service, Stevens is widely considered the most likely to step down, followed by Ginsburg. Both happen to be judicial liberals on a Court that has four liberals (Breyer and Souter being the other two) and four judicial conservatives (Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Roberts). The fickle Kennedy tends to provide the fifth vote in close cases, particularly those involving abortion, race, and religion.

Now, John McCain promises to name judicial conservatives to the Court, while Barack Obama vows to pick judicial liberals. So you can see what could happen if McCain is elected president. For if there is a vacancy during his term, the departing justice is likely to be a judicial liberal. The same is true if there is a second vacancy. One can imagine a President McCain replacing liberals with conservatives and thus finally meeting that ancient Republican goal (dating from the 1968 presidential campaign) of an unambiguously conservative majority on the Court. In this liberal nightmare, the relatively youthful majority would be busy whittling away at Roe v. Wade, eliminating race-based preferences in the public sector, strengthening the government's hand in fighting terrorism, and facilitating a larger role for religion in public life--among many other bad, bad things.

But, for McCain, actually replacing liberals with conservatives would be far more easily said than done. Indeed, liberals who worry that a conservative majority could be created by the addition of a single McCain appointee also know that, regardless of who is elected president, a Democratic Senate will almost surely persist through the first two years of the next presidential term--and probably all four. With comfortable majorities, Senate Democrats will have the power to prevent the appointment of any nominee.

As for Obama, if he is elected president and Stevens or Ginsburg (or both) step down during his term of office, then he gets to replace a liberal with a liberal--maintenance work, you could call it, though the liberal cohort would become younger. Obama couldn't create a liberal majority unless at least one conservative, or man-in-the-middle Kennedy, were to step down, and that looks doubtful, at least in the next four years. Neither Kennedy nor Scalia shows signs of leaving the Court, and the three remaining conservatives are young, as young is measured on the Court--two of them have sat only briefly.

Still, if a conservative were to retire, President Obama would find himself in a winning situation as regards confirmation of his nominee. Indeed, it's hard to imagine a Democratic Senate rejecting any Obama nominee for any vacancy, at least not on grounds of judicial philosophy.
Which raises the question of Obama's judicial philosophy. We know what McCain's is. He is the nominee of a party that for decades has advocated interpreting the law on its own terms and not infusing it with ideas or values not found within the Constitution--a party that opposes government by judiciary and supports judicial restraint. The non-lawyer McCain reflects this philosophy in typically direct statements, such as this from a speech on the courts last spring at Wake Forest University: "A court is hardly competent to check the abuses of other branches of government when it cannot even control itself."

There can be little doubt that McCain accepts and will act in furtherance of his party's philosophy. He voted for the Roberts and Alito nominations, both of which Obama opposed, and he holds up both as models for the kind of judges he would appoint.

In sharp contrast to McCain, Obama is the nominee of a party that has embraced the activism of the Warren Court and its expansion under the Burger Court (think Roe v. Wade) and which has hardened in its hostility to judicial conservatism during the Bush presidency. Obama has proved to be one of his party's most determined opponents of judicially conservative nominees. He voted not only against Roberts and Alito but also against six circuit-court nominees and joined in the Democrats' filibustering of such nominees--which filibustering was without precedent in Senate history.

Obama, a Harvard-trained lawyer who for a decade taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School, has said "my judges" should have "the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it's like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old." He has characterized such people as being in "the minority" and "on the outside" and not having "a lot of clout." His judges should help them by importing to their deliberations their own "perspectives," "ethics," and "moral bearings." Thus his judges would carry out the judiciary's "historic role" of protecting those who "may be vulnerable in the political process," who have seen "the system not work for them," who don't "have access to political power," and who "can't protect themselves from being dealt with sometimes unfairly."

What's striking about comments like these is that Obama seems to be espousing a sort of "Footnote Four" judicial philosophy. Footnote Four is the most famous footnote in constitutional law. It's found in United States v. Carolene Products, the 1938 case in which the New Deal Court sustained a law prohibiting the shipment of so-called "filled milk" across state lines. (It is remembered today solely because of its renowned footnote.) Marking a turning point in constitutional law, Footnote Four confirmed the court's new-found deference to economic regulation while announcing the judicial intention, as Lucas A. Powe Jr. puts it in his history of the Warren Court, to protect "those who need protection." The footnote called them "discrete and insular minorities"--those Americans, says Powe, who "even in a well-functioning political process may not be able to form coalitions and thus may be subject to discriminatory legislation."
For Obama, it would seem that what he calls minorities or outsiders would encompass not only those "vulnerable" in the political process and thus "subject to discriminatory legislation" in a Footnote Four sense but also those who encounter a "system" that doesn't work for them. It appears for Obama that the courts must be involved in improving things for all of those "who need protection," and it could be a large group considering that Obama's informal, campaign-trail list hardly seems exhaustive.

Obama, who is a stout defender of the right to abortion announced in Roe, would seem to want judges sympathetic to arguments that the Constitution protects a fundamental right to education or health care or housing--perhaps even a right to credit. Though Obama has supported the death penalty in certain, narrowly defined circumstances, his philosophy would also seem to entail its judicial abolition. And with regard to race-based preferences, judges who share his philosophy could push for their permanent institution in higher education, employment, and contracting as a way of making the "system" work better for certain minorities.

An Obama judiciary would be a plainly liberal one. Not surprisingly, Obama has endorsed the idea of a "living Constitution," one judges adapt to meet the needs of a changing society. A living Constitution has its analogue in what might be called a "living U.S. Code," by which judges rewrite federal statutes they regard as somehow deficient, which for Obama could mean statutes having an adverse impact on people "who need protection." Obama's model justice is Earl Warren, who saw the role of the Court as that of doing justice, regardless of what the law at issue in a case might say. The senator must have cringed when he heard John Roberts, during his confirmation hearing to be chief justice, answer a question about what the biggest threats to the rule of law might be by saying there was really only one threat--that of judges who take their "authority and extend it into areas where they're going beyond the interpretation of the Constitution, where they're making the law. . . . Judges have to recognize that their role is a limited one. That is the basis of their legitimacy."

This election plainly poses the question, if voters realize it or not, of whether we want judges like Roberts or judges eager to extend their authority beyond what is legitimate and erase the venerable distinction between law and politics. This question will be there even if no Supreme Court vacancies occur during the next four years. For the next president will certainly name judges to the federal appeals courts. At the usual turnover rate, if Obama is elected, by the end of his four-year term eight of the twelve regular circuits could have majorities appointed by Democratic presidents. By the same measure, if McCain is elected, every one of the twelve circuits, including the notoriously liberal Ninth Circuit, could have a Republican-appointed majority. The appellate courts are especially important today because, with the Supreme Court deciding many fewer cases than it used to, they effectively function as the courts of final appeal in their jurisdictions.

Just as the appeals courts could go either way, so could the Supreme Court: a President McCain could have the opportunity to create a conservative majority or a President Obama could have the chance to create a liberal majority. On the other hand, it's possible that the composition of the Court when the next election rolls around will be the same as it is today. The same justices could be sitting in their same chairs. They would be four years older, and they would have served four more years. And Justice Stevens, age 92, would hold that record.

Terry Eastland is the publisher of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
© Copyright 2008, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.
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Obama's "Tax Cut" is Income Redistribution

2008-09-23T19:16:00.000-07:00

September 23, 2008
Obama's "Tax Cut" is Income Redistribution
By Ken Blackwell

During his Fox News interview with Bill O'Reilly, Sen. Barack Obama responded to one question where the statistics contradicted his position by saying that "there are lies, damned lies, and statistics." He then went on to say that 95 percent of Americans would get a tax break under his economic plan. That's ironic, because his comment on "damned lies and statistics" is the perfect commentary on his own plan. Taken with Sen. Joe Biden's novel definition of patriotism, Team Obama is making an argument that Americans have never bought.

The statistics speak for themselves. Only 62 percent of Americans pay federal income tax, meaning that 38 percent get a 100 percent refund of any taxes withheld. So Mr. Obama's 95 percent that will receive money from the government includes roughly 33 percent of Americans who pay no income tax. One-third of Americans pay no income taxes yet would receive a government check of perhaps $1,000 or more.

That is pure income redistribution. Some pundits argue that this is Keynesian demand-side economics. It is not. Having the government take money from business entities or affluent individuals and giving it to those who pay no federal income taxes is not Keynesian. It's Marxist.

American voters don't buy Team Obama's arguments. A recent Gallup poll shows that 53 percent of Americans believe that Mr. Obama would raise their taxes. A recent Zogby poll shows a majority of Americans understand that raising taxes will hurt the economy.

Energy prices have pounded the U.S. economy. The recent woes on Wall Street have further shaken our weakened economy. Certain pillars of our economy, such as productivity gains and American ingenuity, continue to be powerful economic assets. But the current debt situation, spending trends, the cost of combating global terrorism, along with the energy crisis, leaves our economy in a truly precarious position.

Most credible economists warn that raising taxes during an economic downturn only makes the situation worse. Given our current economic situation, Mr. Obama's tax plan is the equivalent of pouring gasoline on a fire.

Then we come to the Team Obama fantasy that the Obama plan would cut taxes for most Americans. Yes, Mr. Obama says he will cut rates for lower-income Americans, but will more than offset that by raising taxes on dividends, capital gains, higher incomes, corporations, estates, and payrolls. But most Americans own stock, either directly or through their IRA, 401k or union pensions. Dividend and capital gains taxes will take money from all those. Those Americans on Main Street who own a house or have other investments will be punished by a capital gains tax increase.

Businesses and corporations do not pay taxes; we do. Businesses don't have huge piles of money sitting in the closet that they simply turn over to government when taxes increase. For every dollar that you increase taxes on a business, they simply increase their prices by a dollar. Who then pays the tax? We do. We do, when the product that we bought last week for $20 suddenly costs $21.

Mr. Obama's plan for universal health care and increased spending on just about everything costs hundreds of billions of dollars. To keep his promises to provide those things while eliminating the deficit and giving checks to lower-income families, he will have to raise taxes by hundreds of billions of dollars. But if lower-income Americans receive a check for $1,000 under the Obama plan yet have to pay $2,000 more when buying food and clothes, they are worse off.
Affluent Americans have not had a tax holiday during the Bush administration. Most analysts agree that the affluent pay more under Mr. Bush. In 2000, the top 1 percent of earners paid less than one-third of all income tax; now they pay 40 percent. The affluent already carry more of the burden.

The ancient Roman philosopher Pliny the Elder once said, "In wine there is truth." It means that people tell you what they really think once they have a couple of drinks.

I don't think Mr. Biden was drinking on the campaign trail last week, but it was a rare moment of complete candor when he told ABC News that people who are well-off have a patriotic duty to pay higher taxes. That perfectly states the liberal Democratic philosophy that those who do the right things in their personal life to make more money have an obligation not only to pay more taxes (which they do even under a flat tax because 17 percent of higher-income is more than 17 percent of lower-income), but that they should pay an ever-higher additional percentage on top of that. Liberal Democrats consider it patriotic to pay more taxes, and have a consistent record of voting to help nurture our patriotism for us.

That reveals what is really going on here. The statistics don't lie. Team Obama's plan is not economically prudent, and it's not a patriotic tonic for what ails our economy.

Mr. Blackwell is a senior fellow at the Family Research Council, the American Civil Rights Union and the Buckeye Institute in Ohio.

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Liberals' Warnings About Obama Loss May Prove Self-Fulfilling

2008-09-23T19:12:00.000-07:00

September 23, 2008
Liberals' Warnings About Obama Loss May Prove Self-Fulfilling
By Dennis Prager

If Barack Obama loses the 2008 election, liberal hell will break loose.

Seven weeks before the 2008 presidential election, liberals are warning America that if Barack Obama loses, it is because Americans are racist. Of course, that this means that Democrats (and independents) are racist, since Republicans will vote Republican regardless of the race of the Democrat, is an irony apparently lost on the Democrats making these charges.

That an Obama loss will be due to racism is becoming as normative a liberal belief as "Bush Lied, People Died," a belief that has generated intense rage among many liberals. But "Obama lost because of white racism" will be even more enraging. Rage over the Iraq War has largely focused on President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. But if Obama loses, liberal rage will focus on millions of fellow Americans and on American society.

And it could become a rage the likes of which America has not seen in a long time, if ever. It will first and foremost come from within black America. The deep emotional connection that nearly every black American has to an Obama victory is difficult for even empathetic non-blacks to measure. A major evangelical pastor told me that even evangelical black pastors who share every conservative value with white evangelical pastors, including pro-life views on abortion, will vote for Obama. They feel their very dignity is on the line.

That is why the growing chorus -- already nearing unanimity -- of liberal commentators and politicians ascribing an Obama loss to American racism is so dangerous.

Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic: "White racism means that Obama needs more than a small but clear lead to win."

Jack Cafferty of CNN: "The polls remain close. Doesn't make sense ... unless it's race."

Jacob Weisberg of Newsweek and Slate: "The reason Obama isn't ahead right now is ... the color of his skin. ... If Obama loses, our children will grow up thinking of equal opportunity as a myth."
Nicholas D. Kristof of New York Times: "Religious prejudice (against Obama) is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice."

Gerald W. McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, in a speech to union workers: "Are you going to give up your house and your job and your children's futures because he's black?"

Similar comments have been made by Kansas's Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, a Democrat, and by writers in Time magazine. And according to The Associated Press: "A poll conducted by The Associated Press and Yahoo News, in conjunction with Stanford University, revealed that a fairly significant percentage of Democrats and independents may not vote for Sen. Barack Obama because of his race." If you read the poll, it does not in fact suggest this conclusion. The pollsters assert that any person with any negative view of black life means that the person is racist and means that he would not vote for Obama. Both conclusions are unwarranted. But "Obama will lose because of racism" is how the poll takers and the media spin it.

Why do liberals believe that if Obama loses it will be due to white racism?

One reason is the liberal elite's contempt for white Americans with less education -- even if they are Democrats.

A second reason is that it is inconceivable to most liberals that an Obama loss -- especially a narrow one -- will be due to Obama's liberal views or inexperience or to admiration for John McCain.

The third reason is that the further left you go, the more insular you get. Americans on the left tend to talk only to one another; study only under left-wing teachers; and read only fellow leftists. That is why it is a shock to so many liberals when a Republican wins a national election -- where do all these Republican voters come from? And that in turn explains why liberals ascribe Republican presidential victories to unfair election tactics ("Swift-boating" is the liberals' reason for the 2004 Republican victory). In any fair election, Americans will see the left's light.

If Obama loses, it will not be deemed plausible that Americans have again rejected a liberal candidate, indeed the one with the most liberal voting record in the U.S. Senate. Liberals will explain an Obama defeat as another nefarious Republican victory. Combining contempt for many rural and middle-class white Americans with a longstanding belief in the inevitability of a Democratic victory in 2008 (after all, everyone they talk to despises the Republicans and believes Republicans have led the country to ruin), there will be only one reason Obama did not win -- white racism.

One executive at a black radio station told me when I interviewed him on my radio show at the Democratic National Convention that he could easily see riots if Obama loses a closely contested election. Interestingly, he said he thought blacks would be far more accepting of a big McCain victory.

I pray he is wrong on the first point. But it does seem that liberals are continuing to do whatever they can to increase anger at America, or at least at "white America." For 40 years, liberals have described the most open and tolerant society on earth as racist and xenophobic. If Barack Obama loses, the results of this liberal depiction of America may become frighteningly apparent.

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Bad Will Hunting

2008-09-16T15:03:00.000-07:00

September 16, 2008
Bad Will Hunting
By Andrew Breitbart

Matt Damon is scared. Last week his e-mail runneth over with nasty Sarah Palin rumors. And before he could get his facts straight, the "Bourne" film series star and Barack Obama supporter spread false fears in a hysterical video that immediately went viral on the Internet.

"I want to know if she thinks dinosaurs were here 4,000 years ago or if she banned books or tried to ban books," Mr. Damon raged to the Associated Press. "I mean - you know, we can't - we can't have that."

Mrs. Palin has neither pushed for creationism in Alaska schools nor moved to ban a single book in Wasilla. Yet the "Ocean's 14" ensemble is currently unable to get through another smarmy scene for fear that a John McCain presidency will lead to an evangelical Christian theocracy and catastrophic artistic oppression.

The sad fact is that actual artistic oppression - book banning in its many modern forms - is a matter of course in the entertainment industry, especially when the underlying product is declared politically incorrect or runs contrary to the interests of Hollywood's political altar, the Democratic Party.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations runs rings around Hollywood's pious First Amendment absolutists.

"I hope you will be reassured that I have no intention of promoting negative images of Muslims or Arabs," director Phil Alden Robinson wrote after changing the script from Muslim terrorists to Austrian neo-Nazis in the Tom Clancy thriller, "The Sum of all Fears." "And I wish you the best in your continuing efforts to combat discrimination."

While Mr. Clancy put up an admirable fight, actor Ben Affleck acquiesced, cashed his multimillion-dollar check and fought the dreaded Austrians, whose flagging Teutonic self-confidence again took a hit. Thanks to Hollywood artistic appeasement, Arab youth in totalitarian Muslim countries indoctrinated in anti-Western thought dodged another esteem bullet.

Perhaps Mr. Affleck would still have a career as a leading man if the highly anticipated "The Sum of All Fears" added up to the realistic "war on terror" headlines that dominated news cycles as it came out in 2002 - or, God forbid, matched up to its authors' chosen words, characters and ideas. Now Mr. Affleck sits near the craft service table watching his wife, Jennifer Garner, fight the bad guys.

The silence of the celebrity political class was heartbreaking when Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was murdered by an Islamic radical in retaliation for making "Submission," a critically acclaimed film that portrayed horrific female oppression within the practice of Islam.

Yet Hollywood - quick to find martyrs near to its heart (Valerie Plame, et al) - ignored its fallen Dutch comrade and refused to celebrate the film and its maker, fulfilling his murderer's greatest desire.

"It's like a really bad Disney movie," Mr. Damon said of Mrs. Palin's political rise.

Yet it was a really good Disney movie that stands as a lasting symbol that censorship is alive and well in liberal Hollywood. In 2006, ABC and its parent company poured $40 million into a five-hour, commercial-free miniseries called "The Path to 9/11." Built to play every year on the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the docu-drama chronicles how the al Qaeda menace grew under the Clinton and Bush administrations.

Night 1 focused on the Clinton years; Night 2 looked into the eight months leading up to the attacks under President Bush. ABC considered the two-day movie experience a gift to the country, and over the two-night airing an astounding 28 million viewers tuned in.

Less about politics, "The Path to 9/11" focused on the emergence of radical Islamic terror as a clear and present American threat. Neither administration was cast as the villain; the Islamic terrorists were. Both administrations were rightfully portrayed as underestimating the threat.
Yet politicians and government employees tied to Bill and Hillary Clinton, all who admittedly hadn't seen the film, took to the airwaves to demand it not be aired or be radically edited, with only days to go before its premiere.

Former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, Rep. Louise M. Slaughter and even former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, who was convicted of destroying top-secret national security documents, demanded that Disney cut the movie to their liking or pull it from the air, within days of its anticipated airing.

Political hacks gleefully declared victory over free speech. Hollywood stood silent as the political class demanded blatant censorship.

Because the Clinton political family didn't like one scene in one movie - one that accurately portrayed that the Clinton administration had chances to take out Osama bin Laden - ABC and Disney folded to the pressure and, as a result, the film will likely never be seen on network television again, nor will it ever make its way to the lucrative DVD market - the modern equivalent of taking it off the library shelf.

Even $2 million movies make their way to the marketplace - let alone $40 million controversial ones that already have been seen by millions.

"It's censorship in the most blatant way," left-wing filmmaker Oliver Stone said. "I'm not vouching for its accuracy - it's a dramatization - but it's an important work and needs to be seen."

"Blocking the Path to 9/11" is a devastating documentary directed by former talk-show host John Ziegler that shows exactly how censorship works in America. As long as it is supported by Democratic politicians and by liberal Hollywood players, censorship is a useful tool to stifle dissent.

Mr. Ziegler's documentary is a cautionary tale on how the mainstream media play a crucial role in supporting Democratic causes and how liberal blogs bolster the media and Hollywood's leftward attack. No film better illuminates how censorship is operative in modern America and is utilized by the very people who demand absolute creative freedom.

If you can't find "The Path to 9/11" or the documentary that spells out the crime of its suppression, perhaps you should look out for Matt Damon's latest project, "The People Speak," featuring "dramatic live readings" from America-bashing usual suspects Danny Glover and Eddie Vedder, and honoring Howard Zinn, the celebrity left's favorite revisionist historian and the Marxist professor who inspired the Robin William's character in "Good Will Hunting."

Maybe Sarah Palin can give it a look on the campaign trail and understand why a beautiful and accomplished woman from Alaska poses such a threat to Hollywood and the Democratic Party - and why so many people in heartland America are rooting for her to win.

Andrew Breitbart is the founder of the news Web site breitbart.com and is co-author of "Hollywood Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon - the Case Against Celebrity."
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Top 7 Myths, Lies and Untruths About Sarah Palin

2008-09-05T17:53:00.000-07:00

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has been subjected to an intense amount of media and public scrutiny since she was named as John McCain’s vice presidential pick one week ago. Many of the attacks have come in the form of unconfirmed reports on the Internet. Among them:

1) Palin “Joined a Secessionist Political Party”

The Charge: Unsubstantiated Internet reports insisted Palin was once a member of the Alaska Independence Party, which critics call a secessionist political movement and supporters say is dedicated to seeking greater state control over federal lands across Alaska.

The Facts: Palin has been a registered Republican since 1982. There is no record of her ever being a member of the AIP, or any party but the GOP. Palin’s husband has been a member of the AIP in the past, but since 2002 has been a registered independent.
(See: Party Official Says Palin Was Not a Member)

2) Palin Supported a “Nazi Sympathizer”

The Charge: “Palin was a supporter of Pat Buchanan, a right-winger or, as many Jews call him: a Nazi sympathizer,” Obama Florida spokesman Mark Bubriski was quoted as saying in a Miami Herald article.

The Facts: While mayor of Wasilla, Palin wore a Buchanan button during the sometimes presidential candidate’s 1999 visit. But Palin actually supported Steve Forbes in 2000, and served as a co-chair on his Alaska campaign.

In the weeks after the 1999 report of her wearing the Buchanan button, Palin said: “When presidential candidates visit our community, I am always happy to meet them. I’ll even put on their button when handed one as a polite gesture of respect. … The article may have left your readers with the perception that I am endorsing this candidate, as opposed to welcoming his visit to Wasilla.”

(See: Obama campaign advisor quote is from an e-mail sent to the Miami Herald )

3) Palin “Wants Creationism Taught in School”

The Charge: Palin opposes the teaching of evolution, and would mandate the teaching of creationism in the state’s public schools.

The Facts: Palin said during her 2006 gubernatorial campaign that she would not push the state Board of Education to add creation-based alternatives to the state’s required curriculum, or look for creationism advocates when she appointed board members. She has kept this pledge, according to the Associated Press.

Palin has spoken in favor of classroom discussions of creationism, in some cases. “I don’t think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class. It doesn’t have to be part of the curriculum,” Palin told the Anchorage Daily News in a 2006 interview.

(See: ‘Creation science’ enters the race; Palin is only candidate to suggest it should be discussed in schools. By Tom Kizzia, Anchorage Daily News, 27 October 2006)

4) Palin “Was Nearly Recalled” While Mayor

The Charge: Palin was so controversial as mayor of Wasilla that she was almost recalled by a popular voter movement.

The Facts: The Wasilla City Council considered but never took up a recall motion after she fired a longtime police chief, who subsequently brought a lawsuit. A citizen’s group dropped their recall bid, and a judge ruled Palin had the authority to fire the chief.
(See: Foes Back Off Push to Recall Mayor)

5) Palin “Opposes Sex Education”

The Charge: Palin opponents say she supported the end of all sex education in public schools. In light of her daughter’s presumably unplanned teen pregnancy, this has been a particularly well discussed Internet topic.

The Facts: “The explicit sex-ed programs will not find my support,” Palin wrote in a 2006 questionnaire distributed among gubernatorial candidates. Palin favors abstinence-based sex education programs.

(See: McCain fought money on teen pregnancy programs, By Sharon Theimer, Associated Press, Sept. 2, 2008)

6) “This Picture Proves Palin is …”

The Charge: A slew of fake, Photoshopped or misdated photographs on the Internet purport to show Palin in any number of embarrassing or compromising poses. One photo claimed to show Palin standing poolside, wearing an American flag-themed bikini, toting a rifle with telescopic sight.

The Facts: The various photos are being discredited and shown to be fake on a number of Web sites. The original of the so-called bikini shot, probably the best-known of the pictures, was shown to have been taken of another woman, with Palin’s head Photoshopped above the body.
(See: Call to Arms)

7) Palin is the grandmother, and not the mother, of Trig Palin

The Charge: The most salacious rumor of all, this theory holds that Palin did not give birth to her son Trig in April, and was actually covering up for her daughter, Bristol.

The Facts: There are a number of photographs showing an apparently pregnant Sarah Palin, as well as a number of published eyewitness accounts of her pregnancy. These include First Lady Laura Bush, who says she spoke with a pregnant Palin at a governor’s conference in February. An assignment manager for KTVA news in Anchorage, Cherie Shirey, has also been quoted saying: “We worked with Governor Palin many times in 2008. Our reporters worked her on location and in the studio and I worked with her myself. She was definitely pregnant. You could see it in her belly and her face. The whole idea that Sarah Palin wasn’t pregnant with Trig is completely, absolutely absurd.”

The McCain campaign, in an apparent effort to counteract the rumors, announced last weekend that Bristol Palin is five months pregnant, which indicated she would have become pregnant before Trig was born.

(See: Palin Rebuts Rumors, Says Daughter Pregnant,Anchorage TV Station: Palin Was ‘Definitely Pregnant’ With Trig’ )

Pelosi: Save the Planet, Let Someone Else Drill

2008-08-01T12:28:00.000-07:00

August 01, 2008
Pelosi: Save the Planet, Let Someone Else Drill
By Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi opposes lifting the moratorium on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and on the Outer Continental Shelf. She won't even allow it to come to a vote. With $4 gas having massively shifted public opinion in favor of domestic production, she wants to protect her Democratic members from having to cast an anti-drilling election-year vote. Moreover, given the public mood, she might even lose. This cannot be permitted. Why? Because as she explained to Politico: "I'm trying to save the planet; I'm trying to save the planet."

A lovely sentiment. But has Pelosi actually thought through the moratorium's actual effects on the planet?

Consider: 25 years ago, nearly 60 percent of U.S. petroleum was produced domestically. Today it's 25 percent. From its peak in 1970, U.S. production has declined a staggering 47 percent. The world consumes 86 million barrels a day; the United States, roughly 20 million. We need the stuff to run our cars and planes and economy. Where does it come from?

Places like Nigeria where chronic corruption, environmental neglect and resulting unrest and instability lead to pipeline explosions, oil spills and illegal siphoning by the poverty-stricken population -- which leads to more spills and explosions. Just this week, two Royal Dutch Shell pipelines had to be shut down because bombings by local militants were causing leaks into the ground.

Compare the Niger Delta to the Gulf of Mexico where deep-sea U.S. oil rigs withstood Hurricanes Katrina and Rita without a single undersea well suffering a significant spill.
The United States has the highest technology to ensure the safest drilling. Today, directional drilling -- essentially drilling down, then sideways -- allows access to oil that in 1970 would have required a surface footprint more than three times as large. Additionally, the U.S. has one of the most extensive and least corrupt regulatory systems on the planet.

Does Pelosi imagine that with so much of America declared off-limits, the planet is less injured as drilling shifts to Kazakhstan and Venezuela and Equatorial Guinea? That Russia will be more environmentally scrupulous than we in drilling in its Arctic?

The net environmental effect of Pelosi's no-drilling willfulness is negative. Outsourcing U.S. oil production does nothing to lessen worldwide environmental despoliation. It simply exports it to more corrupt, less efficient, more unstable parts of the world -- thereby increasing net planetary damage.

Democrats want no oil from the American OCS or ANWR. But of course they do want more oil. From OPEC. From where Americans don't vote. From places Democratic legislators can't see. On May 13, Sen. Chuck Schumer -- deeply committed to saving just those pieces of the planet that might have huge reserves of American oil -- demanded that the Saudis increase production by a million barrels a day. It doesn't occur to him that by eschewing the slightest disturbance of the mating habits of the Arctic caribou, he is calling for the further exploitation of the pristine deserts of Arabia. In the name of the planet, mind you.

The other panacea, yesterday's rage, is biofuels: We can't drill our way out of the crisis, it seems, but we can greenly grow our way out. By now, however, it is blindingly obvious even to Democrats that biofuels are a devastating force for environmental degradation. It has led to the rape of "lungs of the world" rainforests in Indonesia and Brazil as huge tracts have been destroyed to make room for palm oil and sugar plantations.

Here in the U.S., one out of every three ears of corn is stuffed into a gas tank (by way of ethanol), causing not just food shortages abroad and high prices at home, but intensive increases in farming with all of the attendant environmental problems (soil erosion, insecticide pollution, water consumption, etc.).

This to prevent drilling on an area in the Arctic one-sixth the size of Dulles Airport that leaves untouched a refuge one-third the size of Britain.

There are a dizzying number of economic and national security arguments for drilling at home: a $700 billion oil balance-of-payment deficit, a gas tax (equivalent) levied on the paychecks of American workers and poured into the treasuries of enemy and terror-supporting regimes, growing dependence on unstable states of the Persian Gulf and Caspian basin. Pelosi and the Democrats stand athwart shouting: We don't care. We come to save the planet!

They seem blissfully unaware that the argument for their drill-there-not-here policy collapses on its own environmental terms.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com
Copyright 2008, Washington Post Writers GroupPage Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/08/pelosis_moratorium_puts_planet.html at August 01, 2008 - 12:36:43 PM PDT
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Bullshit on environmental alarmism

2008-07-31T20:01:00.000-07:00

Please view this Penn and Teller show calling bullshit on environmental alarmism:

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/30767_Penn_and_Teller_Take_on_Environmental_Hysteria

I am a Presumed Racist

2008-07-31T19:58:00.000-07:00

Presumed Racist [Peter Kirsanow]

Obama's statement yesterday about Republican scare tactics is merely the latest in a string of statements in which he suggests that certain Americans are intrinsically racist, and those Americans aren't just confined to political opponents. His declaration that his grandmother was a "typical white person," was, at the time, derided primarily because it was seen as Obama "throwing her under the bus" for political expediency. But the statement's premise — that the "typical" white person is a reflexive racist — is at least as offensive.

Similarly, the commentary surrounding Obama's statement to San Francisco elites about bitter, working class voters focused largely on the condescension in his claim that such folks "cling to guns or religion." Somewhat ignored was the clause "...or antipathy to people who aren't like them..." Again, Obama is branding a huge swath of the American populace in unsavory terms.

During the primaries his campaign lept upon any statement that was even remotely related to color as evidence of racist intent. This is, to say the least, peculiar for someone whose campaign was based in part on racial transcendence. Even more so for someone who doesn't seem to have encountered any pernicious racism or racial barriers in his personal life. His profligate insinuations of racism now are far beyond unseemly. As the possible next President of the United States, he needs to be called on it

From Gitmo to Miranda, With Love

2008-07-30T19:56:00.000-07:00

From Gitmo to Miranda, With Love
By DEBRA BURLINGAMEJ
uly 30, 2008; Page A15

Captive Miranda, Lord knows I have not given a thought to the paperwork you sent me.
Let me tell you, Captive, that our release is not in the hands of the lawyers or the hands of America. Our release is in the hands of He who created us.

The poem, "To My Captive Lawyer, Miranda," was written by Abdullah Saleh Al-Ajmi while he was a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. No doubt, it would have given the former detainee, who was released in 2005, immense satisfaction to know that his last earthly deed was referenced in Justice Antonin Scalia's dissenting opinion in Boumediene v. Bush. That's the recent Supreme Court decision that gave Guantanamo detainees the constitutional right to challenge, in habeas corpus proceedings, whether they were properly classified by the military as enemy combatants.

Abdullah Saleh Al-Ajmi, on the left, in a martyrdom video posted on an al Qaeda Web site.
Al-Ajmi, a 29-year-old Kuwaiti, blew himself up in one of several coordinated suicide attacks on Iraqi security forces in Mosul this year. Originally reported to have participated in an April attack that killed six Iraqi policemen, a recent martyrdom video published on a password-protected al Qaeda Web site indicates that Al-Ajmi carried out the March 23 attack on an Iraqi army compound in Mosul. In that attack, an armored truck loaded with an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 pounds of explosives rammed through a fortified gate, overturned vehicles in its path and exploded in the center of the compound. The huge blast ripped the façade off three apartment buildings being used as barracks, killing 13 soldiers from the 2nd Iraqi Army division and seriously wounding 42 others.

Using the name "Abu Juheiman al-Kuwaiti," Al-Ajmi is seen on the video brandishing an automatic rifle, singing militant songs and exhorting his fellow Muslims to pledge their allegiance to the "Commander of the Faithful" in Iraq. Later, Al-Ajmi's face is superimposed over the army compound, followed by footage of the massive explosion and still shots of several dead bodies lying next to the 25-foot crater left by the blast.

Abdullah Saleh Al-Ajmi killed 13 people in this March 23 truck bombing in Mosul, Iraq—after he was released from U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay.

In 2006, Al-Ajmi's "Miranda" poem was included in a recitation of detainee poetry at a "Guantanamo teach-in" sponsored by Seton Hall Law School. The all-day event was Webcast live to 400 colleges and law schools across the country and abroad. Some of the lead attorneys pushing for detainee rights participated in the event, which began with organizers boasting about the diversity of the event's participating schools as exemplified by the American University of Paris, the American University in Cairo, the U.N. University for Peace in Costa Rica, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Parsons School of Design in New York City. One of Al-Ajmi's lawyers gave a presentation about detainee treatment entitled, "Insults to Religion."

Marc Falkoff, a former Covington & Burling attorney-turned-law-professor who represents several detainees, read the poems and later published a selection of them in a book ("Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak," Iowa University Press, 2007.) In his introductory remarks to the students, Mr. Falkoff described Al-Ajmi and the other detainee poets as "gentle, thoughtful young men" who, though frustrated and disillusioned, expressed an abiding hope in the future. "One thing you won't hear is hatred," he said, "and the reason you won't hear it is not because I edited it out, it's because it's not there in the poetry." Then how to explain the fact that -- on the advice of Al-Ajmi's attorneys -- "To My Captive Lawyer, Miranda," was excluded from the published collection last year? Mr. Falkoff, who also has a Ph.D. in literature, refused to explain further, though he insists on describing Al-Ajmi's verse as a "love poem to his lawyer."
Miranda, antelope, I am madly in love with captive Roman gazelles.

I pledge that if I ever see you outside this jail, I shall capture you and take you in a starry night.
In light of Al-Ajmi's deadly suicide attack, his poem seems less, as Mr. Falkoff insisted in a recent interview, "a trope about being a prisoner of love," and more about taunting his lawyers and mocking the American legal system. As any devotee of the successful "Law & Order" television franchise knows, "Miranda" is more than a fanciful female name. It is also the name of another infamous prisoner -- Ernesto Miranda, the career criminal and itinerant sex offender whose 1966 landmark legal case resulted in the "Miranda rule," requiring law enforcement officers to inform criminal suspects in custody of their right to remain silent and their right to an attorney during questioning.

It is easy to imagine the detainees' attorneys, upon first arriving at Guantanamo in 2004, earnestly explaining to their incredulous clients how the Miranda warning works. Incredulous, because detainees would certainly grasp that extending the full array of Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights to unlawful enemy combatants would have a devastating effect on vital intelligence-gathering efforts. Indeed, lawyers have already become part of the al Qaeda tool kit. When Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was apprehended in Pakistan in 2003 and handed over to the U.S., he reportedly told his initial interrogators, "I'll talk to you guys when you take me to New York and I can see my lawyer."

After the Boumediene decision, that is no longer an empty threat. While Justice Anthony Kennedy stated in his 5-4 majority opinion that detainees are entitled to habeas review in the federal courts, he failed to expressly outline what legal standards the government would have to meet for detainee cases to pass constitutional muster. Many legal experts contend that if the habeas lawyers succeed in attaining for detainees the same degree of procedural rights as those extended to ordinary criminal defendants in domestic cases, "lawyering up" would mean the end of terrorist questioning, not the beginning.

If this is what "Miranda" represents, no wonder an Islamist suicide bomber would love her.
Miranda, what can I say? The heart is incarcerated in prisons of injustice, tortured and deprived, targeted with sharp, poisoned arrows by the hands of oppressors who have no mercy. Tell the mothers about their sons, the prisoners, brothers in bondage . . . they shall walk home.

But many in the detainees' home countries aren't welcoming them with open arms. The bombings carried out by Al-Ajmi and two other Kuwaiti nationals have stirred a public outcry from their fellow citizens. Al-Ajmi's own father has reportedly threatened to sue the government of Kuwait for issuing his son a passport and failing to live up to the terms set forth in the transfer agreement with U.S. State Department as a condition of his release. Kuwait's negligence and the State Department's failure to follow up have resulted in calls from the public for the detainees to stay right where they are and for Guantanamo to stay in operation.

"I believe the U.S. State Department knows the prisoners well, their way of thinking, and their plans after being released from prison," wrote Ali Ahmad Al-Baghli, Kuwait's former Minister of Oil, in the Arab Times after news of Al-Ajmi's suicide attack broke. He specifically criticized the outspoken leader of the Kuwaiti detainee families committee, Khalid Al-Odah, (interestingly, he is one of the "translators" Mr. Falkoff acknowledges in his poetry book), whose son remains at Guantanamo. Al-Odah hired a Washington, D.C., public-relations firm to "humanize" the detainees with sympathetic press.

"We cannot romanticize them into fallen heroes of Western neo-imperialism," wrote Shamael Al-Sharikh, a columnist for the Kuwaiti Times, in an article advocating that Guantanamo stay open, "because we are as much potential victims of terrorist attacks as [Americans] are."

As an example of where we might be headed after Boumediene, consider the situation in Britain. In June, Abu Qatada, a radical imam wanted in connection with bombing conspiracies in several countries, was released from jail after seven years of fighting his deportation. Qatada, whose recorded sermons were found in the Hamburg apartment of the 9/11 hijackers, was described by an immigration appeals commission as a "truly dangerous individual" who was "heavily involved, indeed at the center of terrorist activities associated with al-Qa'eda."

But judges in Britain will not extradite him to Jordan, where he was convicted in absentia, because his lawyers allege that the evidence against him might have been obtained by torture. Sending him packing under these circumstances, the court ruled, would violate the European Convention on Human Rights.

The result is a perverse situation in which, to protect the human rights of the man who issued a fatwa to kill the wives and children of Egyptian police and army officers, the British public pays a yearly tab of $1.1 million to cover Qatada's round-the-clock police surveillance, housing and welfare assistance for him, his wife and five children.

For those who scoff at the idea that U.S. judges would release a dangerous terrorist here, think again. As Attorney General Michael Mukasey pointed out in a speech earlier this month at the American Enterprise Institute, the Boumediene decision was vague on every detail but one. The ruling said that for habeas review to mean anything, the court must have the power to release. What do we do with a graduate of al Qaeda training camps who hasn't yet committed an act of violence? What do we do if no country will take him? If Congress doesn't intervene, the most difficult detainee cases may end up being administered by federal judges who are dismissive of concerns about enemy combatants returning to the battlefield.

"Courts guarantee an independent process, not an outcome," wrote John Coughenour, the federal judge who presided over the trial of "millennium bomber" Ahmad Ressam in a Washington Post op-ed just this Sunday. Yes, and that is precisely why Congress has an obligation to formulate the substance and parameters of that process. Judges do not make law or policy. The scope of their review is limited to the immediate case before them.

Unless Congress weighs in, judges -- unaccountable to the body politic -- will decide what standards of proof and rules of evidence will apply to these detainees, resulting in an ad hoc, case-by-case body of law which focuses on the rights of the detainees, not on the consequences for our war fighters who risk their lives to capture them. Since when do we leave it to judges to decide when and to what degree our troops are required to engage in police duties in the heat of battle?

Further, judges only rule on the applications made by the lawyers who come before them. Despite their rhetoric about "rule of law," attorneys are not charged with acting in furtherance of the national security interests of the public. Their obligation is to their clients alone, the detainees. Hence, we have witnessed the six-year campaign by Gitmo lawyers to pressure the U.S. government into releasing dangerous men before their cases come before a military tribunal or are heard in the federal courts.

David Cynamon, a senior attorney at Pillsbury Winthrop Putnam Shaw, is one of the lead lawyers negotiating the repatriation of the Kuwaiti detainees. In an email last fall to Pentagon officials, Mr. Cynamon expressed frustration with what he perceived as foot-dragging in the release of the last four Kuwaitis still held at Gitmo. He attached an exhibit which compared the unclassified information on all original 12 Kuwaiti detainees who were captured in Afghanistan. "I find it impossible to deduce from this chart," he wrote, "that the four who remain are any more (or less) [sic] dangerous than the ones who were returned." After Al-Ajmi's devastating suicide attack in Mosul, one hopes the Pentagon is giving his chart a second look.

Meanwhile, the habeas attorneys' effort to smear the United States and paint their clients as innocent victims continues. "Poems from Guantanamo" was taught this spring in an undergraduate course called "Writers in Exile" at City University of New York in Queens, a short distance from Ground Zero. The book's introduction states that the detainee poets "follow in the footsteps of prisoners who wrote in the Gulag, the Nazi concentration camps, and, closer to home, Japanese-American internment camps." One of the students, posting on the class blog, wrote of the detainees' plight, "Wow, I had no idea. For the first time in my life, I am ashamed to be seen as an American."

Your whole being and your heart will be captivated by this night, who drove the Romans to madness. You will forget everything about Rome and will live the life of faith in Islam.
Abdullah Salem Al-Ajmi, the detainee who wrote of turning the tables on his lawyer, Miranda, should haunt the dreams of every member of Congress.

Ms. Burlingame, a former attorney and a director of the National September 11 Memorial Foundation, is the sister of Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame III, the pilot of American Airlines flight 77, which was crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.

Math Is Harder for Girls. . . and also, it seems, for the New York Times.

2008-07-29T20:59:00.000-07:00

Math Is Harder for Girls. . . and also, it seems, for the New York Times.
28 July 2008

The New York Times is determined to show that women are discriminated against in the sciences; too bad the facts say otherwise. A new study has “found that girls perform as well as boys on standardized math tests,” claims a July 25 article by Tamar Lewin—thus, the underrepresentation of women on science faculties must result from bias. Actually, the study, summarized in the July 25 issue of Science, shows something quite different: while boys’ and girls’ average scores are similar, boys outnumber girls among students in both the highest and the lowest score ranges. Either the Times is deliberately concealing the results of the study or its reporter cannot understand the most basic science reporting.

Lewin begins her piece with the mandatory mocking reference to former Harvard president Lawrence Summers’ suicidal speculations about why women are underrepresented on science and math faculties. She also manages to squeeze in a classic feminist trope for how our sexist society destroys girls’ innate abilities, invoking the infamous “talking Barbie doll [who] proclaimed that ‘math class is tough.’” Lewin implies that the new study blows Summers’ wide-ranging speculations on gender and math out of the water; all that holds women back from equal representation in MIT’s theoretical physics labs, it seems, is Mattel and other patriarchal marketers of gender myths.

On the contrary, Science’s analysis of math test scores only confirms the hypothesis that cost Summers his Harvard post: that boys are found more often than girls at the outer reaches of the bell curve of abstract reasoning ability. If you’re hoping to land a job in Harvard’s math department, you’d better not show up with average math scores; in fact, you’d better present scores at the absolute top of the range. And as studies have shown for decades, there are many more boys than girls in that empyrean realm. Unless science and math faculties start practicing the most grotesque and counterproductive gender discrimination, a skew in the sex of their professors will be inevitable, given the distribution of top-level cognitive skills. Likewise, boys will be and are overrepresented among math dunces—though the feminists never complain about the male math failure rate.

Lewin claims that the “researchers looked at the average of the test scores of all students, the performance of the most gifted children and the ability to solve complex math problems. They found, in every category, that girls did as well as boys.” This statement is simply wrong. Among white 11th-graders, there were twice as many boys as girls above the 99th percentile—that is, at the very top of the curve. (Asians, however, showed a very slight skew toward females above the 99th percentile, while there were too few Hispanics and blacks scoring above even the 95th percentile to compute their gender ratios.)

The Science researchers themselves try to downplay the significance of the two-to-one ratio for whites—the vast majority of students—on the grounds that it should produce a 67 percent to 33 percent disparity in male-to-female representation in math-dependent fields. Yet Ph.D. programs for engineering, they say, contain only about 15 percent women. Therefore, the authors conclude, “gender differences in math performance, even among high scorers, are insufficient to explain lopsided gender patterns in participation in some [science and math] fields.”

This reasoning is flawed, however, because the tests used in their study are pathetically easy compared with what would be required of engineering or other rigorous math-based Ph.D.s. The researchers got their data from math tests devised by individual states to fulfill their annual testing obligations under the federal No Child Left Behind act. NCLB has produced a mad rush to the bottom, as many states crafted easier and easier reading and math tests to show their federal overseers how well their schools are doing. The Science researchers analyzed the difficulty of those tests and found that virtually none required remotely complicated problem-solving abilities. That a gender difference at the highest percentiles shows up on tests pitched to such an elementary level of knowledge and skill suggests that on truly challenging tests, the gender difference at the top end of the distribution will be even greater. Indeed, between five and ten times as many boys as girls have been found to receive near-perfect scores on the math SATs among mathematically gifted adolescents, for example. Far from raising the presumption of gender bias among schools and colleges, the Science study strengthens a competing hypothesis: that the main drivers of success in scientific fields are aptitude and knowledge, in conjunction with personal choices about career and family that feminists refuse to acknowledge.

The same reality-denying feminists are itching to subject college science and math departments to gender quotas. They have already persuaded Congress to require university scientists to perform Title IX compliance reviews—a nightmare of bean-counting paperwork—covering everything from faculty composition to lab space. Misleading reporting like Lewin’s will only strengthen the movement to select cancer researchers and atomic engineers on the basis of their sex, not their abilities.

The Wall Street Journal, it should be noted, had no difficulty grasping the two main findings of the Science study: that “girls and boys have roughly the same average scores on state math tests,” as Keith J. Winstein reported on July 25, but that “boys more often excelled or failed.”

That the New York Times, in an article over twice as long as the Journal’s, couldn’t manage to squeeze in a reference to the fact that boys outperformed girls at the top end of the curve should put its readers on notice: trust nothing you read here.

Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Her latest book, coauthored with Victor Davis Hanson and Steven Malanga, is The Immigration Solution.

In the minds of the terrorists

2008-07-26T15:20:00.000-07:00

I ran across this and thought it was interesting.

What [people] don’t understand is that terrorism, whether in Tel Aviv, NYC, or Madrid, doesn’t stem primarily from Muslim poverty, US foreign policy, or Israeli settlements. In the minds of the terrorists Islam requires jihad, the murder of unbelievers, and the terrorists are not distorting the Islamic holy writings.

Prophet Mohammad and Osama bin Laden both said: “I was ordered to fight all men until they say—There is no God but Allah.”

Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheik who ordered the first bombing of the WTC: And the Quran makes it among the means to perform jihad for the sake of Allah, which is to terrorize the enemies of God and our enemies too….Then we must be terrorists and we must terrorize the enemies of Islam and frighten them and disturb them and shake the earth under their feet.From Willful Blindness by Andrew C. McCarthy, p. 188.

Ahhhh, the Times...

2008-07-26T15:17:00.000-07:00

Nicholas Kristof’s Moral Tourism
Noah Pollak - 07.25.2008 - 8:16 AM

It might be time to officially designate Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist, as an Israel-obsessed know-nothing. He is an illustration of the adage that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing; he recently visited Hebron, and since then has assumed the role of ignorant hysteric in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yesterday’s column is a marvel of the genre.

Kristof wants the United States to get tough on Israel. He describes one way to do this:

Particularly at a time when Israel seems to be contemplating military strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, the United States would be a better friend if it said: “That’s crazy”

For a humanitarian as great as Kristof imagines himself to be, this is staggeringly callous. Let me tell you: every member of the Israeli political and defense establishment genuinely believes that the Iranian nuclear program is a grave and existential threat. The Iranian regime has promised that its nuclear program will be a grave and existential threat. The IDF is not inventing a crisis, as if it needed more problems to deal with than Hamas and Hezbollah. Kristof may think that Israel is crazy, but then it’s always easy to be glib and condescending about nuclear weapons when someone else is their target.

It gets dumber. Kristof rejects the argument that Palestinian violence is worse than Israeli violence by offering the following:

B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, reports that a total of 123 Israeli minors have been killed by Palestinians since the second intifada began in 2000, compared with 951 Palestinian minors killed by Israeli security forces.

A few questions for the moral conscience of the Times‘ op-ed page: 1) how many of those “Palestinian minors” were implicated in terrorism? Kristof appears unaware that Hamas and Islamic Jihad do not forbid underage martyrdom. 2) Does it matter to Kristof that those 123 Israeli minors were murdered intentionally, whereas the Palestinian minors (at least those not involved in terrorism) were killed accidentally, in the course of Israeli self-defense that would not have been necessary in the first place if not for the Palestinian terror war? 3) Is Kristof aware that Palestinian terror groups employ tactics intentionally designed to raise the Palestinian death toll, precisely so that useful idiots like Kristof will then cite Palestinian civilian deaths as an example of Israeli barbarism?

At the moment, though, Israel has its most reasonable partner ever — Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas — and it is undermining him with its checkpoints and new settlement construction.

The problem with Mahmoud Abbas is that even on his best days, his authority perhaps extends to the falafel stand outside his office in Ramallah. Kristof is inventing a leader who doesn’t exist so that he can lay Palestinian failure on Israel’s unwillingness to take Palestinian governance seriously. Marty Peretz said recently that “Kristof never writes an analysis. He dishes out schwarmerei.” This time he tried to do an analysis, and it’s a train wreck of false premises. I wish he’d just stick to the schwarmerei.

A Step Back From Enviro Lunacy

2008-07-26T15:11:00.000-07:00

July 26, 2008
A Step Back From Enviro Lunacy
By Michael Barone

Sometimes public opinion doesn't flow smoothly; it shifts sharply when a tipping point is reached. Case in point: gas prices. $3 a gallon gas didn't change anybody's mind about energy issues. $4 a gallon gas did. Evidently, the experience of paying more than $50 for a tankful gets people thinking we should stop worrying so much about global warming and the environmental dangers of oil wells on the outer continental shelf and in Alaska. Drill now! Nuke the caribou!

Our system of divided government and litigation-friendly regulation makes it hard for our society to do things and easy for adroit lobbyists and lawyers to stop them. Nations with more centralized power and less democratic accountability find it easier: France and Japan generate most of their electricity by nuclear power and Chicago, where authority is more centralized and accountability less robust than in most of the country, depends more on nuclear power than almost all the rest of the nation.

In contrast, lobbyists and litigators for environmental restriction groups have produced energy policies that I suspect future generations will regard as lunatic. We haven't built a new nuclear plant for some 30 years, since a Jane Fonda movie exaggerated their dangers. We have allowed states to ban oil drilling on the outer continental shelf, prompted by the failure of 40- or 50-year-old technology in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1969, though current technology is much better, as shown by the lack of oil spills in the waters off Louisiana and Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina.

We have banned oil drilling on a very small portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that is godforsaken tundra (I have been to the North Slope oil fields, similar terrain -- I know) for fear of disturbing a herd of caribou -- a species of hoofed animals that is in no way endangered or scarce.

The ANWR ban is the work of environmental restriction groups that depend on direct-mail fundraising to pay their bills and keep their jobs. That means they must always claim the sky is falling. They can't get people to send a check or mouse-click a donation because they did a good job, the restrictions they imposed on the Alaska pipeline in the 1970s have done a good job in preserving the environment or because clean air acts of the past have vastly reduced air pollution.

ANWR is a precious cause for them because it can be portrayed (dishonestly) as a national treasure and because the pressure for drilling there has been unrelenting. Democrats have enlisted solidly in their army, and they have also been able to recruit Republicans who wanted to get good environmental scorecards to impress enviro-conscious voters in states like Florida, New Jersey and Minnesota.

Now all that is in danger, because the pain of paying $60 for a tank of gas has convinced most Americans to worry less about the caribou or the recurrence of an oil spill that happened 39 years ago. Democratic leaders are preventing Congress from voting on continental shelf and ANWR drilling or oil shale development because they fear their side would lose and are making the transparently absurd claim that drilling won't lower the price of oil. They're scampering to say that they would allow drilling somewhere -- mostly in places where the oil companies haven't found any oil.

In a country with less in the way of checks and balances, which can be gamed by adroit lobbyists and litigators, we would be building more nuclear plants, and would be drilling offshore and in ANWR. We would be phasing out the corn ethanol subsidies that are enriching Iowa farmers and impoverishing Mexican tortilla eaters, and we would be repealing the 54-cent tariff on Brazilian sugar ethanol (the sugar for which would be produced not in defoliated Amazon rainforests but in the desolate and currently unused certao).

On balance, of course, I prefer our system over the more centralized, less accountable systems of France and Japan (and Barack Obama's Chicago). But it sure does have its costs.

But it also has its benefits: Public opinion, when it has changed as it has with $4 gas, has an effect. Environmental restrictionists like Al Gore have been selling a form of secular religion: We have sinned against Mother Earth, we must atone and suffer, there can be no argument, but we must have faith.

That was an appealing argument to many, perhaps most, Americans when gas was selling for $1.40. It has a much more limited appeal now that gas is selling for $4.10. The time may be coming when our lunatic environmental policies are swept away by a rising tide of common sense.

Copyright 2008, Creators Syndicate Inc.Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/07/a_step_back_from_enviro_lunacy.html at July 26, 2008 - 05:10:40 PM CDT
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Arrogance Won't Win the Election

2008-07-26T14:55:00.000-07:00

Arrogance Won't Win the Election
By Susan Estrich

Now that Barack Obama has completed his beyond much-publicized overseas trip, it's hard to argue that the trip wasn't everything his strategists hoped for.

Could the speech have been better? I'm not sure how. Could the crowds have been bigger? They were plenty big. Could the coverage have been more exhaustive? The Beatles come to America! Barack Obama goes abroad!

True, each of the three network anchors, especially Katie Couric, who got savaged on the blogs the most harshly for it, managed to actually sound like reporters asking real questions, but who was listening? (Literally, in one of the few press availabilities, even if you were listening, you could only hear Obama, since he was the only one with a microphone). People watched, and the pictures couldn't have been better.

But, will it make any difference in terms of who is going to win this election? I'm not sure.

The point of the trip, of course, was to give Obama gravitas on foreign policy issues, to help voters forget that he is only six years removed from the Illinois State Senate and only eight years from having his credit card declined when he tried to rent a car at the 2000 Los Angeles convention (a story he used to tell on himself). So there he was, looking, acting, being treated, like he is already president, walking in the footsteps of John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan in Berlin, even borrowing their words. Every Obama supporter I know was in heaven.

Problem is, there aren't enough Obama supporters yet to carry the election. It's the folks in the middle, the folks who haven't deecided, the folks who need convincing or are inclined not to like him, or are still smarting from the defeat of Hillary Clinton, who will decide this election. Did the foreign trip move them?

In the prayer he left at the Western Wall, Senator Obama asked the Lord to protect him from pride and despair. Maybe he should have added something about protecting his campaign from the related danger of arrogance. It might be the biggest threat to Obama's success.

"They think they can't lose," one of the smartest people I know said to me this week, describing the attitude he sees on display in the Obama campaign. He isn't the first one to say it.

There was a crop of stories, as the trip was ending, suggesting that the Obama campaign, which used to pride itself on its openess and transparency as compared to the Clinton machine, has now abandoned openess and transparency in favor of tight controls, attacks on reporters who write less-than flattering pieces, and a particularly unattractive form of hardball that people who think they are on the way to the White House, or already there, often adopt. It will not serve him well.

There is no reason for arrogance. Yes, the economy stinks. Yes, people are sick of the war in Iraq. Yes, they think the country is headed in the wrong direction, that the Bush years have cost us dearly, that we need change. The generic Democrat beats the generic Republican. John McCain is old and has, since winning the nomination, run a pretty uninspired campaign. He's on a tightrope between now and the convention, rightly concerned that he not offend the right in a way that leads to a repeat of the disastrous 1992 Republican Convention, where conservatives were determined to dominate even at the expense of their candidate, and did, to his great detriment.

But even with all this, even with the press cooing, the Republican stumbling, his message muddled and his base shaky, the polls are showing the race neck-and-neck, Obama within the margin of error, behind in the key state of Ohio. And this without even factoring in, or trying to, just how many people are giving the politically correct answer to pollsters, saying they're for Obama when they aren't. This is, my solid blue friends, no time for arrogance.

Once he gets past the convention, McCain will run a better campaign. He will run as an insurgent, an independent, a man who defies labels, the guy who championed immigration reform and stood up to his colleagues on the left and right (remember the Gang of Fourteen that broke the logjam on judges), the guy who is tough enough and experienced enough to be president. If he's within a few points now, he will be stronger then. The Republicans will unite because they might not love McCain, but they love the White House and control even more.

I'm not saying McCain will win. Maybe the pollsters are all wrong in their predictions of what the electorate will look like this time. Maybe so many more blacks and 18-29 year olds will be moved to vote that it won't matter that seniors, who always vote, don't think McCain is too old. Maybe McCain the independent will lead at least some of the conservative Christians who helped put Bush in office, twice, to stay home, or not make their phone calls. I just wouldn't count on it. Obama could win, but he also could lose. If his campaign doesn't understand that now, they will pay for it in November.

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Obama's on a different planet

2008-07-26T14:34:00.000-07:00

One world? Obama's on a different planet
The senator's Berlin speech was radical and naive.
By John R. Bolton
July 26, 2008

SEN. BARACK OBAMA said in an interview the day after his Berlin speech that it "allowed me to send a message to the American people that the judgments I have made and the judgments I will make are ones that are going to result in them being safer."

If that is what the senator thought he was doing, he still has a lot to learn about both foreign policy and the views of the American people. Although well received in the Tiergarten, the Obama speech actually reveals an even more naive view of the world than we had previously been treated to in the United States. In addition, although most of the speech was substantively as content-free as his other campaign pronouncements, when substance did slip in, it was truly radical, from an American perspective.

These troubling comments were not widely reported in the generally adulatory media coverage given the speech, but they nonetheless deserve intense scrutiny. It remains to be seen whether these glimpses into Obama's thinking will have any impact on the presidential campaign, but clearly they were not casual remarks. This speech, intended to generate the enormous publicity it in fact received, reflects his campaign's carefully calibrated political thinking. Accordingly, there should be no evading the implications of his statements. Consider just the following two examples.

First, urging greater U.S.-European cooperation, Obama said, "The burdens of global citizenship continue to bind us together." Having earlier proclaimed himself "a fellow citizen of the world" with his German hosts, Obama explained that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Europe proved "that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one."

Perhaps Obama needs a remedial course in Cold War history, but the Berlin Wall most certainly did not come down because "the world stood as one." The wall fell because of a decades-long, existential struggle against one of the greatest totalitarian ideologies mankind has ever faced. It was a struggle in which strong and determined U.S. leadership was constantly questioned, both in Europe and by substantial segments of the senator's own Democratic Party. In Germany in the later years of the Cold War, Ostpolitik -- "eastern politics," a policy of rapprochement rather than resistance -- continuously risked a split in the Western alliance and might have allowed communism to survive. The U.S. president who made the final successful assault on communism, Ronald Reagan, was derided by many in Europe as not very bright, too unilateralist and too provocative.

But there are larger implications to Obama's rediscovery of the "one world" concept, first announced in the U.S. by Wendell Willkie, the failed Republican 1940 presidential nominee, and subsequently buried by the Cold War's realities.

The successes Obama refers to in his speech -- the defeat of Nazism, the Berlin airlift and the collapse of communism -- were all gained by strong alliances defeating determined opponents of freedom, not by "one-worldism." Although the senator was trying to distinguish himself from perceptions of Bush administration policy within the Atlantic Alliance, he was in fact sketching out a post-alliance policy, perhaps one that would unfold in global organizations such as the United Nations. This is far-reaching indeed.

Second, Obama used the Berlin Wall metaphor to describe his foreign policy priorities as president: "The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down."

This is a confused, nearly incoherent compilation, to say the least, amalgamating tensions in the Atlantic Alliance with ancient historical conflicts. One hopes even Obama, inexperienced as he is, doesn't see all these "walls" as essentially the same in size and scope. But beyond the incoherence, there is a deeper problem, namely that "walls" exist not simply because of a lack of understanding about who is on the other side but because there are true differences in values and interests that lead to human conflict. The Berlin Wall itself was not built because of a failure of communication but because of the implacable hostility of communism toward freedom. The wall was a reflection of that reality, not an unfortunate mistake.

Tearing down the Berlin Wall was possible because one side -- our side -- defeated the other. Differences in levels of economic development, or the treatment of racial, immigration or religious questions, are not susceptible to the same analysis or solution. Even more basically, challenges to our very civilization, as the Cold War surely was, are not overcome by naively "tearing down walls" with our adversaries.

Throughout the Berlin speech, there were numerous policy pronouncements, all of them hazy and nonspecific, none of them new or different than what Obama has already said during the long American campaign. But the Berlin framework in which he wrapped these ideas for the first time is truly radical for a prospective American president. That he picked a foreign audience is perhaps not surprising, because they could be expected to welcome a less-assertive American view of its role in the world, at least at first glance. Even anti-American Europeans, however, are likely to regret a United States that sees itself as just one more nation in a "united" world.

The best we can hope for is that Obama's rhetoric was simply that, pandering to the audience before him, as politicians so often do. We shall see if this rhetoric follows him back to America, either because he continues to use it or because Sen. John McCain asks voters if this is really what they want from their next president.

John R. Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of "Surrender Is Not an Option."

Media Love of Obama Doesn't Equal Victory

2008-07-24T14:27:00.000-07:00

July 24, 2008
Media Love of Obama Doesn't Equal Victory
By Susan Estrich

Some years ago, a friend of mine who was then District Attorney of Los Angeles held a press conference on the beach with a couple of high-powered celebrities to trumpet efforts to use the criminal law to crack down on polluters. The press covering the event included representatives of the courthouse/political press corps and the entertainment/celebrity media. The difference was so stark that it made for a great story, which my friend told with relish. The political reporters were their usual selves: yelling questions, demanding answers, cynical, skeptical, giving nothing and showing no respect. Another day at the beach. The entertainment/celebrity reporters groveled, fawning and apologizing, grateful for the opportunity to be in the presence of the stars, eager not to offend, showing more courtesy than my political pal got from his own staff. The celebs themselves were appalled by how crudely and rudely behaved the political reporters were; my friend the politician couldn't believe that the members of the entertainment press actually considered themselves to be "reporters."

I can't help but think of that story as I watch some of our nation's finest -- or at least our most famous -- political reporters fawning all over Barack Obama like entertainment reporters covering a movie star. Is this good for them? Or for him, for that matter?

I certainly understand exactly why it is happening. Right now, Obama is bigger than any rock star. Right now, every reporter wants to be close to him, on his good side, at the front of the bus, or at least the front of the line for an interview. They are reporting what they are getting, which in many cases means what they are given, not exactly reporting by any definition. But who's to complain? No one wants to offend a guy who just might be President. No one wants to be on the "bad" list, the list of the last to know, of people who don't get the invites or the leaks or the tidbits that their editors and bosses back home are reading in somebody else's blog or watching on someone else's broadcast.

No one, or almost no one, attacks the press for tossing softballs. Oh, John McCain can complain about the coverage, but complaining makes him look smaller, not bigger; he gets attacked for whining, which may be one reason he has backed off from any such complaints and is now going out of his way to say that he is not making an issue of the press love-in with Obama. Andrea Mitchell made the point that the press is running video and pictures they are being given with no idea of what's been edited in or out, but that certainly hasn't stopped her own network from doing so. Katie Couric, in the nicest possible way (the old, "not that I'm criticizing you but people are scratching their heads trying to understand approach") tried to pin Obama down on whether he now sees the surge as a success, whether he would still be against it if he knew then what he does now (sort of like, Hillary -- was your vote for the war a mistake?), and what are people saying all over the Internet? Bad Katie. How dare she do that? How dare she push that way? How dare she do her job? Next thing you know, CBS will be joining FOX News on the "no interview" list.

The problem with all this fawning is threefold. First of all, the fact that the press doesn't push doesn't mean that, sooner or later, the Republicans won't. They will. Every question the press doesn't ask and Obama doesn't have to answer will be the subject of a speech at the Republican convention, an ad down the road, a tirade by somebody that will ring truer than it should precisely because it hasn't been addressed before. Do you really think McCain and his friends won't push hard for Obama to admit he was "wrong" about the surge? Of course they will; every bit as hard as Obama pressed Hillary on her war vote. Better to deal with it in questions from Katie, get an answer down that puts the question to rest rather than leaving her hypothetical viewer scratching his head than waiting for it to come back in a debate. Attacking Katie is not the answer -- Katie isn't running for President.

Second, being the favorite of the press doesn't necessarily win you votes. Most people don't actually like the press. The friend of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. Being liked by the boys and girls on the bus doesn't necessarily earn you the respect of the people back home. Standing up to them, giving as good as you get, all that helps. But if being loved by the press were a sure route to success, Hillary Clinton would never have carried all those big states after March 1. Ronald Reagan would never have gotten elected President. George Bush would have lost, twice.

Third, and perhaps most important, the American press corps is the most fickle lover you could ever have. They make my worst ex-boyfriend look like a paragon of loyalty and devotion, giving new meaning to the old expression, "love 'em and leave 'em." Except the press doesn't just leave, they destroy. The better the coverage at the outset, the worse it will almost certainly be later on. I can't begin to count how many times I have warned politicians and candidates to worry as much about the good coverage as the bad, because the more air they put in your balloon, the bigger the target when they start shooting.

Maybe the media will remain as firmly in Obama's camp as they seem to be right now, fighting for seats on the plane, celebrating his every move. But if so, he will really be a first. And it won't necessarily help him win.

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The Grand Exaggerator

2008-07-24T14:21:00.000-07:00

The Grand Exaggerator
[Patrick J. Michaels]

What is it with Al Gore? Why is he compelled to exaggerate climate change (excuse me, “the climate crisis”), and then to propose impossible policy responses? It’s like he’s inventing the Internet all over again!

OK, it’s pretty much standard rhetoric in Washington to say that if you don’t do as I say, there will be massive consequences. But to say, as Gore recently did: “The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk;” and: “The future of human civilization is at stake” — that’s a bit much, even for the most faded and jaded political junkie.

Here’s how Gore works. He’ll cite one scientific finding that shows what he wants, and then ignore other work that provides important context. Here’s a list of his climate exaggerations from his well-publicized July 17 rant, along with a few sobering facts.

Gore: “Scientists . . . have warned that there is now a 75 percent chance that within five years the entire [North Polar] ice cap will completely disappear during the summer months.”

Fact: The Arctic Ocean was much warmer than it is now for several millennia after the end of the last ice age. We know this because there are trees buried in the tundra along what is now the arctic shore. Those trees can be dated using standard analytical techniques that have been around for decades. According to Glen MacDonald of UCLA, the trees show that July temperatures could have been 5-13°F warmer from 9,000 to about 3,000 years ago than they were in the mid-20th century. The arctic ice cap had to have disappeared in most summers, and yet the polar bear survived!

Gore: “Our weather sure is getting strange, isn’t it? There seem to be more tornadoes than in living memory. . . .”

Fact: The reason there “seems” to be more tornadoes is because of national coverage by Doppler radar, which can detect storms that were previously missed (not to mention that every backyard tornado winds up on YouTube nowadays). Naturally, the additions are weak ones that might, if lucky, tip over a cow. If there were a true increase in tornadoes, then we would see a definite upswing in severe ones, too. If anything, the historical record indicates a slight negative trend in the frequency of major tornadoes, based upon death statistics.

Gore: “ . . . longer droughts . . . ”

Hogwash. The U.S. drought history, given by the Palmer Drought Severity Index, is readily available and extends back to 1895. There’s not a shred of evidence for “longer droughts” in recent decades. The longest ones were in the 1930s and 1950s, decades before “global warming” became “the climate crisis.”

Gore: “ . . . bigger downpours and record floods . . . ”

It’s true, U.S. annual rainfall has increased about 10 percent (three inches) in the last 100 years. But it’s equally true that this is a net benefit. Temperatures haven’t warmed nearly enough to increase the annual surface evaporation by the same amount, so what has resulted is a wetter country during the growing season. Farmers love this, because most of the nation runs a moisture deficit during the hot summer growing season. Increasing rain cuts that deficit.

Gore: “The leading experts predict that we have less than 10 years to make dramatic changes in our global warming pollution lest we lose our ability to ever recover from this environmental crisis.”

This is likely James Hansen of NASA, Gore’s climate guru. He has written and given sworn testimony that six feet of sea-level rise, caused by the rapid shedding of Greenland’s ice, could happen by 2100. Why didn’t Gore defer instead to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an organization with at least a few hundred bona fide climate scientists? Its 2007 compendium estimates that the contribution of Greenland’s ice to sea level during this century will be around two inches.

Gore also forgot the embarrassing truth that there has been no net change in the planetary surface temperature, as measured both by thermometers and satellites, for the last ten years.

It would be easy to go on, particularly about the preposterousness of Gore’s “solution,” which is to produce all of our electricity from solar, wind and geothermal sources within ten years. I’ll leave that for the energy economists to tear apart.

— Patrick J. Michaels is a senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and an active member of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

A Tale of Two Flip-Floppers

2008-07-23T20:43:00.000-07:00

A Tale of Two Flip-Floppers
By KARL ROVE
July 24, 2008

John McCain and Barack Obama have both changed positions in this campaign. That's OK. Voters understand that politicians can and, sometimes, should change their views. After all, voters do. Witness the wide swings in their answers to opinion polls.

But before accepting the changes, voters typically ask themselves three questions: Does the candidate admit he's shifting? What's the new information that altered his thinking? Does the change seem reasonable and not calculating?

Sen. McCain has changed his position on drilling for oil on the outer continental shelf. But because he explained this change by saying that $4-a-gallon gasoline caused him to re-evaluate his position, voters are likely to accept it. Of course, Mr. McCain doesn't explain why prices at the pump haven't also forced him to re-evaluate his opposition to drilling on 2000 acres in the 19.2-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But, then, what politician is always consistent?

Mr. McCain flip-flopped on the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. He'd voted against them at the time, saying in 2001 that he'd "like to see more of this tax cut shared by working Americans." Now he supports their continuation because, he says, letting them expire would increase taxes and he opposes tax hikes. Besides, he recognizes that the tax cuts have helped the economy.

At least Mr. McCain fesses up to and explains his changes. Sen. Obama has shifted recently on public financing, free trade, Nafta, welfare reform, the D.C. gun ban, whether the Iranian Quds Force is a terrorist group, immunity for telecom companies participating in the Terrorist Surveillance Program, the status of Jerusalem, flag lapel pins, and disavowing Rev. Jeremiah Wright. And not only does he refuse to explain these flip-flops, he acts as if they never occurred.

Then there is Iraq. Throughout 2006 and early 2007, Mr. Obama pledged to remove all U.S. troops, even voting to immediately cut off funds for the troops while they were in combat. Then, in July 2007, he started talking about leaving a residual U.S. force, in Kuwait and elsewhere in the region, able to go back into Iraq if needed.

By October, he shifted again, pledging to station the residual U.S. troops inside Iraq with two "limited missions of protecting our diplomats and carrying out targeted strikes on al Qaeda."
Last week, writing in the New York Times, Mr. Obama changed again. He increased the missions his residual force would perform to three: "going after any remnants of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security forces." That's not all that different from what U.S. troops are doing now.

And just how many U.S. troops would Mr. Obama leave in Iraq? Colin Kahl, an Obama adviser on Iraq, has said the senator wants to have "perhaps 60,000-80,000 forces" in Iraq by December 2010. So much for withdrawing all combat troops.

It's dizzying. Yet, Mr. Obama acts as if he is a paradigm of consistency. He told a Georgia rally this month that "the people who say [I've been changing] apparently haven't been listening to me." In a PBS interview last week he said, "this notion that somehow we've had wild shifts in my positions is simply inaccurate."

Compounding all this is Mr. Obama's stubborn refusal to admit the surge was right and that he was wrong to oppose it. On MSNBC in January 2007, he said more U.S. troops would not "solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse." Later that month he said at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing that the new strategy would "not prove to be one that changes the dynamics significantly." In fact, the surge has done far more than its advocates hoped in a much shorter period.

Yet Mr. Obama told ABC's Terry Moran this week that even in retrospect, he would oppose the surge. He also told CBS's Katie Couric that he had "no idea what would have happened" without the new strategy. And he still declares, in the New York Times last week, "The same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true." Given all that has happened, it's hard to understand how Mr. Obama can say, as he did Tuesday in a story on NBC Nightly News, that "I don't have doubts about my ability to apply sound judgment to the major national security problems that we face."

Americans have seen both candidates flip-flop. Mr. McCain at least has a record of being a gutsy leader willing to take unpopular stands who admits his shifts and explains the new information that caused them.

Mr. Obama has detached himself from past positions at record speed. And in doing so he runs the risk of being seen as a cynical politician, not an inspiring leader. If this happens, voters in large numbers may ask -- despite his rhetorical acrobatics -- if he is the change they've been waiting for.

Mr. Rove is a former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.

The Soldier Voting Scandal

2008-07-23T20:38:00.000-07:00

July 24, 2008
The Soldier Voting Scandal
By Robert Novak

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Rep. Roy Blunt, the House Republican whip, on July 8 introduced a resolution demanding that the Defense Department better enable U.S. military personnel overseas to vote in the November elections. That act was followed by silence. Democrats normally leap on an opportunity to find fault with the Bush Pentagon. But not a single Democrat joined Blunt as a co-sponsor, and an all-Republican proposal cannot pass in the Democratic-controlled House.

Analysis by the federal Election Assistance Commission, rejecting inflated Defense Department voting claims, estimated overseas and absentee military voting for the 2006 midterm elections at a disgracefully low 5.5 percent. The quality of voting statistics is so poor that there is no way to tell how many of the slightly over 330,000 votes actually were sent in by the absentee military voters and their dependents and how many by civilian Americans living abroad -- 6 million all total.

Nobody who has studied the question objectively sees any improvement since 2006, and that is a scandal. Retired U.S. Marine Corps Capt. Charles Henry wrote in the July issue of the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings: "While virtually everyone involved ... seems to agree that military people deserve at least equal opportunity when it comes to having their votes counted, indications are that in November 2008, many thousands of service members who try to vote will do so in vain."

Henry, now an independent broadcast journalist, has personal experience with this enduring scandal. While serving as a Marine at sea off Iran, he received his 1980 presidential ballot too late to count. President Harry Truman said of troops fighting in Korea, "The least we at home can do is to make sure that they are able to enjoy the rights they are being asked to fight to preserve." But the U.S. military that has so perfected the art of war over the past half-century is at a loss to enable soldiers to vote.

A combat officer has enough to do without handling the votes of troopers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. A Defense Department Inspector General's report in March last year recommended "appointment of civilian personnel" as "voting assistance officers." The Pentagon brass rejected the idea.

I reported four years ago that the problems of 2000 overseas military voting had not been corrected for the 2004 presidential election. At that time, Under Secretary of Defense David Chu was put in charge of the problem. During massive turnover at the Pentagon, Chu remains in place -- best known among critics of the military vote problem for his chronic failure to return telephone calls.

Congressional attention to the problem has been scattered and limited mostly to Republicans such as Sen. John Cornyn, who earlier this year decried "a lack of will" at the Pentagon to solve the voting problem. Democratic interest about tackling the problem might be tempered by apprehension that soldiers will cast too many Republican votes.

Nevertheless, at least one prominent Democrat -- House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer -- described himself to me as eager to deal with this problem. (Hoyer's home state of Maryland is one of the worst offenders, with ballots of only 4.1 percent of overseas voters counted in 2006.) Hoyer and Blunt, who have become friendly adversaries in a bitterly partisan Congress, conferred several weeks ago and agreed in principle on co-sponsoring a resolution aimed at getting the Defense Department moving.

Hoyer wanted the resolution to cover expatriate Americans as well as the military, and Blunt did not object. They turned the issue over to their staffers and went about the business of major legislation. Blunt had instructed his staff to seek agreement with Democrats but, if not, to introduce a resolution applying only to the military, which was the outcome.

One presidential staffer who is familiar with the situation privately dismisses the Pentagon bureaucrats as "hopeless." In a lame-duck administration counting the days before a troubled eight years finally end, American fighting men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan deprived of their right to vote constitute the least of White House worries.

Copyright 2008, Creators Syndicate Inc.Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/07/the_soldier_voting_scandal.html at July 23, 2008 - 08:45:40 PM PDT
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Is Obama a Buckeye? :-)

2008-07-23T20:14:00.000-07:00

Hey, Buckeyes: Why should Palmer apologize?

July 22nd, 2008, 4:55 pm · 4 Comments · posted by JEFF MILLER, OCREGISTER.COM

So Carson Palmer had to apologize — through a team spokesman, no less — and for what, exactly?

Suggesting Ohio State football fans are passionate, confident and convinced the Buckeye program is one of the best in the country?

Folks, this isn’t a crime. It’s the truth.

Who would be upset because a fan of one team openly rooted for that team to “pound” another team? I believe in most cultures this is known as cheering for your side.

But in our culture, our Internet-driven, dumbed-down, hypersensitive culture that grows more hollow by the day, this is behavior deserving of reprimand.

Ridiculous, just not as ridiculous as those Jim Tressel sweater vests.

AN AMERICAN 'HONOR KILLING'

2008-07-23T16:26:00.000-07:00

July 23, 2008 --

ON July 6, police say, a Pakistani named Chaudhry Rashid strangled his 25-year-old daughter San- deela Kanwal with a Bungee cord in her bedroom because she wanted to end her arranged marriage. This "honor killing" came not in Pakistan, but in Jonesboro, Ga. - a suburb 16 miles outside Atlanta.

At his arraignment, Rashid said through an Urdu interpreter that he was "not in the state of mind to talk because of the death of his daughter," but stated "I have done nothing wrong."
This is not the same as declaring innocence. His attorney, Tammy Long, explained, "My client is going through a difficult time. As you can imagine, he is distraught." Apparently, it takes a stronger man to murder his daughter without sentiment.

The national media has paid little attention to the story of Kanwal's murder, though most outlets found plenty of time to debate the cover of The New Yorker.

When a blonde girl goes missing, cable networks stop in their tracks - but when a Muslim woman is murdered by her father, there's not a ripple of sustained interest. Where's the outrage?
Maybe it's muted because we've grown reluctant to pass judgment on other culture's customs - but multiculturalism hits a crossroads when honor killings come to America.

The United Nations estimates that the world sees 5,000 honor killings a year - overwhelmingly in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa, but increasingly among Muslim immigrant communities in Europe.

The United States has avoided this bloodstained trend until recently. Some consider Kanwal's death the first documented honor killing here. Others point to the murder of sisters Amina and Sarah Said in Irving, Texas, on New Years' 2007. (Their MySpace page remains up. Featuring assimilated teen culture and American music, it is haunting.) Their father remains on the run from police.

Few doubt that other honor killings have occurred behind closed doors. In upstate Monroe County just a few days ago, a girl was stabbed by her brother for wearing immodest western clothing and wanting to move to New York City. According to court documents, Waheed Allah Mohammad explained the stabbing by saying his sister was a "bad Muslim girl."

"Honor killing is a misnomer," author and exile Ayaan Hirsi Ali told me. "The killing occurs because these girls have allegedly brought shame on their family. The paradox is that these are individuals who have emancipated themselves.

"These girls embody the American dream. They want to become self-reliant - deciding who they marry, when they marry and how many children they will have."

On the surface, this sounds like a classic case for the left - outrages well worth protesting. Honor killings and other tribal customs like female genital mutilation represent a far greater threat to human rights than comparatively benign examples of Western sexism, like unrealistic measurements on a Barbie doll.

But this would require recognizing that the greatest danger to civil liberties in the world today comes not from the United States, but from a medieval tribalism that's still murdering people around the world under the guise of enforcing piousness.

"America is an assimilating nation," affirms Ayaan, "and so when immigrant Muslim men assimilate into American society they are applauded for it. But when some immigrant Muslim women assimilate into American society, they find themselves ostracized - beaten and even killed by their own families. And the American public ignores their plight to protect the immigrant Muslim community from stigma."

There should be wall-to-wall coverage when Rashid's pretrail hearings begin tomorrow in Atlanta. By any standards, this is a sensational crime.

Instead, the trial may well get dismissed as old news or swept under the rug as just another domestic-violence case. These rationalizations cover up a discomfort with wading into cultural judgment - and a desire to avoid the risk of violence that always comes with criticizing radical Islam.

There's a cost to such squeamishness. In England, Lord Chief Justice Phillips, the country's top judge, has said that sharia law should be incorporated into British law, while the Archbishop of Canterbury described such incorporation as "inevitable."

This slippery slope threatens to undermine liberal democracy and even the concept of civilized norms. America must make a stand, because many Europeans either can't or won't.

As Ayaan says: "As an immigrant Muslim woman running for your life, from your own family, I think America is a better place for us, because we know that Americans are individualist enough that they will ultimately chose to protect us - while Europeans choose to stick their heads in the sand and pretend nothing is going on."

Our ultimate victory in the War on Terror will be to encourage a Muslim reformation by offering examples of successful Muslim-American citizens - especially women - who thrive within the equal rights and open opportunities of American society. For Muslim women who want to live in freedom, America is the last best hope on earth - and we must remain nothing less.
John P. Avlon is the author of "Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics."

NEW YORK POST is a registered trademark of NYP Holdings, Inc. NYPOST.COM, NYPOSTONLINE.COM, and NEWYORKPOST.COMare trademarks of NYP Holdings, Inc. Copyright 2008 NYP Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved.

Filipino war's lessons for Iraq

2008-07-22T15:24:00.000-07:00

Filipino war's lessons for Iraq

A century ago, success seemed unlikely in an unpopular war — that is, until the tide turned. Can the shift in the Philippines show the way forward today?
By Michael Medved

The handsome young Democratic nominee is the most spellbinding orator of his generation, promising dramatic change to correct economic injustice and bring an end to a bloody, unpopular war. Republicans deride him as a showboating demagogue with scant governmental experience and place their faith in a gruff, battle-tested veteran who asks for public patience to fight the war till victory. Meanwhile, halfway around the world, anti-American insurgents have recently lost thousands of fighters to desertion and improved U.S. tactics, but they believe they can exploit their enemy's war weariness. The guerrilla fighters, therefore, intensify their gruesome attacks as part of a conscious effort to influence the November election on behalf of the Democratic "peace" candidate.

Though contemporary Americans will assume the above description applies to Iraq and the 2008 campaign, it's also an accurate summary of the situation leading up to the fateful election of 1900 and the darkest days of our four-year war against insurrectionists in the Philippines. This nearly forgotten conflict deserves renewed attention today since the parallels with our present predicament count as both eerie and illuminating.

Heavy casualty toll

For one thing, the United States lost 4,234 troops on Filipino battlefields — a close match to the raw number killed in Iraq. But with a national population less than one-fourth what it is today, the war in the Philippines took a far greater toll on the nation: the equivalent of some 17,000 battlefield deaths today. Moreover, the struggle 100 years ago claimed the lives of at least 200,000 Filipino civilians in a nation of just 7 million, for a relative impact vastly more devastating than even the darkest casualty estimates of Iraqis. Initially, the military achieved an almost effortless, "mission accomplished" takeover of the Philippines (as part of our Spanish American War) but policymakers found no good alternatives for the Asian archipelago and stumbled into a violent occupation for which they had never properly prepared. From 1898 to 1902, 126,468 U.S. troops served in the jungle struggle, but commanders always seemed short of men.

In 1900, the inexperienced but charismatic "anti-imperialist" Democrat who challenged the war was 40-year-old William Jennings Bryan, "Boy Orator of the Platte." He had emerged from obscurity (and only two brief terms in Congress) through a single electrifying speech at the Democratic convention, four years before. The tough, fight-it-out Republican was William McKinley, a hero in his youth (three decades earlier) in the Civil War.

Like 2008, the nation's leading celebrities decried the "senseless" bloodletting and focused on alleged U.S. atrocities. Mark Twain expressed disgust at tales of massacres and torture (including the infamous "water cure"), suggesting a redesign of the Stars and Stripes "with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and crossbones." He shared anti-war sentiments with former president Grover Cleveland, reformer Jane Addams, industrialist Andrew Carnegie, labor leader Samuel Gompers and others.

For the most part, America's volunteer troops maintained high morale, resenting anti-war activists back home because they understood this agitation encouraged the enemy. Maj. Gen. Henry Lawton, a Medal of Honor winner for bravery in the Civil War, grumbled that "if I am shot by a Filipino bullet, it might as well be from one of my own men … because … the continuance of fighting is chiefly due to reports that are sent out from America." Lawton received just such a fatal bullet a few weeks later when he was picked off by an insurgent sharpshooter while leading his men in the Battle of Paye.

Anti-war fever ebbs

Nevertheless, voters ultimately turned against anti-war politicians and gave the GOP ticket of McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt a resounding victory. Less than seven years later, with the insurrection crushed and the archipelago pacified, Filipinos convened an elected legislature, the first such body in Asia. In 1946, after many Filipinos fought the Japanese alongside American troops, the islands achieved final independence.

The U.S. succeeded through generous policies during the occupation as much as through courage on the battlefield. Max Boot described U.S. efforts in his superb book The Savage Wars of Peace: "Soldiers built schools, ran sanitation campaigns, vaccinated people, collected customs duties, set up courts run by natives, supervised municipal elections, and generally administered governmental functions efficiently and honestly. A thousand idealistic young American civilians even journeyed to the Philippines to teach school in a precursor of the Peace Corps."

Manuel Quezon, first president of the Philippines' "autonomous commonwealth" in 1935, once served as a major in the insurgent army and lamented the American kindness that undermined the insurrection: "Damn the Americans! Why don't they tyrannize us more?" Our failure to "tyrannize" our Iraqi allies could similarly destroy the chances of the Islamist terrorists who oppose us.

The outcome in today's Middle East remains uncertain, but our painful Philippine experience a century ago suggests that a positive result is still possible through a combination of public patience, battlefield brilliance and compassionate determination to provide better lives and freedom to the far-away people who became the war's chief victims.

Nationally syndicated radio talk host Michael Medved is the author of the upcoming book The 10 Big Lies About America. He is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.

Do as Al says, not as Al does

2008-07-21T16:00:00.000-07:00

Do as Al says, not as Al does
Lorne Gunter, National Post Published: Monday, July 21, 2008

On Thursday, former U. S. vice-president Al Gore delivered a major address calling on his country to abandon all fossil fuels within 10 years. By 2018, U. S. electricity and fuel should come entirely from "renewable energy and truly clean, carbon-free sources," he said. Tickets to the event encouraged attendees to "please use public transit, bicycling or other climate-friendly means" to reach the lecture hall.

So how did Mr. Gore and his retinue arrive? In two Lincoln Town Cars and a full-sized SUV that sat idling with the air conditioners blasting while the Gore party was inside.

It was 34 C in Washington. Al Gore can't be expected to get into an overheated vehicle after he's worked up a sweat telling others how to save the planet.

Remember, too, the Nobel prizewinning environmentalist lives in a Tennessee mansion that produces a carbon footprint 20 times that of the average American home. A sizeable chunk of his personal fortune comes from royalties on a zinc mine which had to be temporarily closed five years ago in part because the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency ruled it one of the worst-polluting mine sites in America. Illegal toxins were frequently discharged into nearby rivers.
Mr. Gore's Live Earth benefit concert last summer flew scores of rock bands to stages around the world in carbon-spewing private jets. To cover the emissions from his own frequent use of private jets, Mr. Gore set up a company that buys carbon offsets, so that in effect he is paying himself for his carbon indulgences, writing off the expense on one hand, while pocketing the proceeds on the other.

Apparently if the world is ever to reach the carbon-free future Mr. Gore dreams of, it will have to get there without Al's help.

But take heart, there is increasing evidence that man-made carbon dioxide may not be causing global warming. Indeed, there is increasing debate in the scientific community whether there is even any warming occurring at all. Mr. Gore might just be able to keep going from jet to limo to estate guilt-free (if not carbon-free) for as long as he wishes.

On Tuesday, the Associated Press reported that seven mountain glaciers in northern California were advancing. They joined glaciers in southern Norway, Sweden, the New Zealand Alps and the Hindu Kush mountains of Pakistan. Indeed, worldwide, there are nearly half as many glaciers advancing as retreating.

How did the AP explain this? Well, all the shrinking glaciers it mentioned in its story were melting due to global warming, while the growing ones were "benefitting from changing weather patterns." Glacier melt is proof of a climate crisis, while--on the same planet, under the same global conditions --glacier melt is chalked up as a mere natural phenomenon.

Facts that don't fit the global-warming dogma -- call them inconvenient truths -- are to be dismissed as unimportant. Only those that feed the environmental hysteria are proof of something ominous.

So I'm sure they're entirely inconsequential, but here, anyway, are some anecdotes that cast doubt on the notion that emissions from our SUVs and power plants are dangerously harming the climate.

Greenland isn't melting. And while Arctic sea ice may have thinned in the past three decades by about 3% per decade, according to the U. S. National Snow and Ice Date Center, Antarctic ice (which is about 20 times as voluminous as the Arctic kind) has grown by 1% per decade,
Also, after last summer's record melt in the Arctic, this summer's melt in Antarctica was the smallest on record. And NASA satellites have found that Arctic Sea ice coverage this year is more than one million square kilo-metres greater than last year's, greater than the average of the last three years and 10-20 centmetres thicker than in 2007. According to observations by the Danish Meteorological Institute, we "have to go back 15 years to find ice expansion so far south."

Snow coverage in North America this winter was greater than at any time in recorded history. China had its worst winter in a century, and the southern hemisphere its worst in the past 50 years.

And while global temperatures increased slightly in June, through the end of May, the nine-month decline in temperatures beginning in September was greater (0.8C) than all the warming of the 20th century (0.6C).

All of this may prove nothing (although if these signals pointed toward warming, you can bet they'd be billed as proof a coming climate catastrophe). But they should at least give Mr. Gore comfort that he need not sacrifice his high-carbon lifestyle just to prove he can walk the walk.

lgunter@shaw.ca

Obama's Pompous Clichés

2008-07-20T16:58:00.000-07:00

July 20, 2008
Obama Wraps Up the Bush Status Quo in Pompous Clichés
By Robert Tracinski

I am quickly coming to the conclusion that all there has ever been to Barack Obama is symbolism and grandiloquent speeches. There is the symbolism of him as the (potential) first black president. And there is his ability to give portentous speeches in high-flown Harvard rhetoric, perfectly pitched to sound thoughtful to college-educated liberals--without actually saying anything.

And here we go again, with another one of Obama's patented Big Speeches, this time on Iraq. It is pitched to sound sincere and intellectual, and to sell us on his allegedly superior foreign-policy judgment--so long as we drift through it and don't start asking any questions.

The speech has two purposes. One is to artfully evade Obama's massive misjudgment of the "surge," which he unequivocally opposed. Thus, while he half-acknowledges the enormous turnaround in Iraq, here is how he describes its cause:

As I have said many times, our troops have performed brilliantly in lowering the level of violence. General Petraeus has used new tactics to protect the Iraqi population. We have talked directly to Sunni tribes that used to be hostile to America, and supported their fight against al Qaeda. Shiite militias have generally respected a cease-fire. Those are the facts, and all Americans welcome them.

Here's a tip. When Obama begins a sentence with "As I have said many times," this means that he is about to announce a totally new position that contradicts everything he has said before. For a little reminder of what Obama has actually said about the surge "many times," check out this video clip helpfully posted to YouTube by the Republican National Committee.

The rest of that passage shows a total, willful ignorance about what the surge actually consisted of and what it has done. He says that we "talked directly to Sunni tribes that used to be hostile to America." Well, we did a little more than talk. We backed up the Sunni "Awakening" movement with some serious military action--which is precisely what the extra "surge" troops were needed for.

But the most ridiculous line is that "Shiite militias have generally respected a cease-fire." This Spring saw pitched fighting between Iraqi troops and the Iranian-backed Mahdi Army militia--fighting that ended because the Mahdi Army lost. Does Obama not even watch the news?

But that is not what is most interesting about the speech. What is most interesting is its main purpose, which is to make it sound as if Obama is offering a whole new strategic direction for the War on Terrorism--while he declares that he would implement precisely the policies that are already being followed by the Bush administration.

He says that "True success" in Iraq--note that he has even borrowed Bush's habit of saying "success" in place of "victory"--"will take place when we leave Iraq to a government that is taking responsibility for its future--a government that prevents sectarian conflict, and ensures that the al Qaeda threat which has been beaten back by our troops does not reemerge." But that is precisely what is already happening. Sectarian killings in Iraq, for example, have dropped to zero for about ten weeks running.

And how does Obama propose to ensure that we keep on enjoying this "true success" in Iraq? "We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010--one year after Iraqi Security Forces will be prepared to stand up; two years from now, and more than seven years after the war began. After this redeployment, we'll keep a residual force to perform specific missions in Iraq: targeting any remnants of al Qaeda; protecting our service members and diplomats; and training and supporting Iraq's Security Forces."

Note the part about the "residual" combat force, whose size Obama never specifies, which will target the remnants of al Qaeda and train and support Iraqi forces--which is precisely the end result envisioned by the Bush administration if the current progress in Iraq continues.

But maybe the big difference is that Obama will stick to his 16-month timetable no matter what, while Bush and McCain want to make withdrawal dependent on conditions on the ground. Well no, Obama would "make tactical adjustments" after consulting with "commanders on the ground and the Iraqi government."

That final flip-flop that the left has been dreading, when Obama throws out his commitment to a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq? It just happened. I wonder how long it will take them to notice.

Obama's policies for Afghanistan and Pakistan also read like a giant "me-too" to the current administration. His "new strategy" is to do more of what we're already doing: increase troops, increase economic aid, and try jawboning the Pakistani government into fighting the militants.
But the biggest piece of misdirection in the whole speech is about Iran. One of the centerpieces of Obama's strategy is a plan to "secur[e] all nuclear weapons and materials from terrorists and rogue states." So that means shutting down Iran's nuclear weapons program. How does he propose to do that?

Preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons is a vital national security interest of the United States.... I commend the work of our European allies on this important matter, and we should be full partners in that effort.... We will...present a clear choice. If you abandon your nuclear program, support for terror, and threats to Israel, there will be meaningful incentives. If you refuse, then we will ratchet up the pressure, with stronger unilateral sanctions; stronger multilateral sanctions in the Security Council, and sustained action outside the UN to isolate the Iranian regime. That's the diplomacy we need

So he'll cooperate closely with our European allies to offer the Iranians incentives to stop their nuclear program and threaten them with sanctions and diplomatic "isolation" if they refuse. In other words: precisely the policy the Bush administration has followed for the past six years, and especially since the summer of 2006--all with no results.

So on these issues, there is nothing to Obama's speech. It is a whole bunch of pompous clichés--stuff like "it falls to us to act with the same sense of purpose and pragmatism as an earlier generation, to join with friends and partners to lead the world anew"--wrapped around the conventional wisdom.

And that's all there ever has been to Barack Obama: symbolism and grandiloquent speeches.

Robert Tracinski writes daily commentary at TIADaily.com. He is the editor of The Intellectual Activist and TIADaily.com.
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Is Obama for real?

2008-07-17T21:30:00.000-07:00

July 18, 2008
Obama's Greatest Admirer
By Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama wants to speak at the Brandenburg Gate.

He figures it would be a nice backdrop. The supporting cast -- a cheering audience and a few fainting frauleins -- would be a picturesque way to bolster his foreign policy credentials.

What Obama does not seem to understand is that the Brandenburg Gate is something you earn. President Reagan earned the right to speak there because his relentless pressure had brought the Soviet empire to its knees and he was demanding its final "tear down this wall" liquidation. When President Kennedy visited the Brandenburg Gate on the day of his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, he was representing a country that was prepared to go to the brink of nuclear war to defend West Berlin.

Who is Obama representing? And what exactly has he done in his lifetime to merit appropriating the Brandenburg Gate as a campaign prop? What was his role in the fight against communism, the liberation of Eastern Europe, the creation of what George Bush 41 -- who presided over the fall of the Berlin Wall but modestly declined to go there for a victory lap -- called "a Europe whole and free"?

Does Obama not see the incongruity? It's as if a German pol took a campaign trip to America and demanded the Statue of Liberty as a venue for a campaign speech. (The Germans have now gently nudged Obama into looking at other venues.)

Americans are beginning to notice Obama's elevated opinion of himself.

There's nothing new about narcissism in politics. Every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president. Nonetheless, has there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements?

Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted "present" nearly 130 times. As president of the Harvard Law Review, as law professor and as legislator, has he ever produced a single notable piece of scholarship? Written a single memorable article? His most memorable work is a biography of his favorite subject: himself.

It is a subject upon which he can dilate effortlessly. In his victory speech upon winning the nomination, Obama declared it a great turning point in history -- "generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment" -- when, among other wonders, "the rise of the oceans began to slow." As economist Irwin Stelzer noted in his London Daily Telegraph column, "Moses made the waters recede, but he had help." Obama apparently works alone.

Obama may think he's King Canute, but the good king ordered the tides to halt precisely to refute sycophantic aides who suggested that he had such power. Obama has no such modesty.
After all, in the words of his own slogan, "we are the ones we've been waiting for," which, translating the royal "we," means: "I am the one we've been waiting for." Amazingly, he had a quasi-presidential seal with its own Latin inscription affixed to his podium, until general ridicule -- it was pointed out that he was not yet president -- induced him to take it down

He lectures us that instead of worrying about immigrants learning English, "you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish" -- a language Obama does not speak. He further admonishes us on how "embarrassing" it is that Europeans are multilingual but "we go over to Europe, and all we can say is, 'merci beaucoup.'" Obama speaks no French.

His fluent English does, however, feature many such admonitions, instructions and improvements. His wife assures us that President Obama will be a stern taskmaster: "Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism ... that you come out of your isolation. ... Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed."

For the first few months of the campaign, the question about Obama was: Who is he? The question now is: Who does he think he is?

We are getting to know. Redeemer of our uninvolved, uninformed lives. Lord of the seas. And more. As he said on victory night, his rise marks the moment when "our planet began to heal." As I recall -- I'm no expert on this -- Jesus practiced his healing just on the sick. Obama operates on a larger canvas.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com
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For Obama, Facts are Obsolete

2008-07-14T20:44:00.000-07:00

July 15, 2008
Are Facts Obsolete?
By Thomas Sowell

In an election campaign in which not only young liberals, but also some people who are neither young nor liberals, seem absolutely mesmerized by the skilled rhetoric of Barack Obama, facts have receded even further into the background than usual.

As the hypnotic mantra of "change" is repeated endlessly, few people even raise the question of whether what few specifics we hear represent any real change, much less a change for the better.

Raising taxes, increasing government spending and demonizing business? That is straight out of the New Deal of the 1930s.

The New Deal was new then but it is not new now. Moreover, increasing numbers of economists and historians have concluded that New Deal policies are what prolonged the Great Depression.
Putting new restrictions of international trade, in order to save American jobs? That was done by Herbert Hoover, when he signed the Hawley-Smoot tariff when the unemployment rate was 9 percent. The next year the unemployment rate was 16 percent and, before the Great Depression was over, unemployment hit 25 percent.

One of the most naive notions is that politicians are trying to solve the country's problems, just because they say so-- or say so loudly or inspiringly.

Politicians' top priority is to solve their own problem, which is how to get elected and then re-elected. Barack Obama is a politician through and through, even though pretending that he is not is his special strategy to get elected.

Some of his more trusting followers are belatedly discovering that, as he "refines" his position on various issues, now that he has gotten their votes in the Democratic primaries and needs the votes of others in the coming general election.

Perhaps a defining moment in showing Senator Obama's priorities was his declaring, in answer to a question from Charles Gibson, that he was for raising the capital gains tax rate. When Gibson reminded him of the well-documented fact that lower tax rates on capital gains had produced more actual revenue collected from that tax than the higher tax rates had, Obama was unmoved.

The question of how to raise more revenue may be the economic issue but the political issue is whether socking it to "the rich" in the name of "fairness" gains more votes.

Since about half the people in the United States own stocks-- either directly or because their pension funds buy stocks-- socking it to people who earn capital gains is by no means socking it just to "the rich." But, again, that is one of the many facts that don't matter politically.

What matters politically is the image of coming out on the side of "the people" against "the privileged."

If you are a nurse or mechanic who will be depending on your pension to take care of you when you retire-- as Social Security is unlikely to do-- you may not think of yourself as one of the privileged. But unless you connect the dots between capital gains tax rates and your retirement income, you may fall under the spell of the well-honed Obama rhetoric.

Obama is for higher minimum wage rates. Does anyone care what actually happens in countries with higher minimum wage rates? Of course not.

Economists may point to studies done in countries around the world, showing that higher minimum wage rates usually mean higher unemployment rates among lower skilled and less experienced workers.

That's their problem. A politician's problem is how to look like he is for "the poor" and against those who are "exploiting" them. The facts are irrelevant to maintaining that political image.

Nowhere do facts matter less than in foreign policy issues. Nothing is more popular than the notion that you can deal with dangers from other nations by talking with their leaders.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain became enormously popular in the 1930s by sitting down and talking with Hitler, and announcing that their agreement had produced "peace in our time"-- just one year before the most catastrophic war in history began.

Senator Obama may gain similar popularity by advocating similar policies today-- and his political popularity is what it's all about. The consequences for the country come later.

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Hollywood...tsk,tsk,tsk

2008-07-14T20:30:00.000-07:00

BREITBART: Spielberg, tear down this wall
Andrew BreitbartMonday, July 14, 2008
ANALYSIS/OPINION:

LOS ANGELES — The conventional wisdom is that Hollywood has never before been so gaga over any candidate as she is now for Democratic Sen. Barack Obama. In addition to raking in Oprah-level campaign cash, Mr. Obama is making Sen. John McCain, despite the Republican's comedic turns on "Saturday Night Live" and in "The Wedding Crashers," look like an out-of-it grandfather.

While it is true that the ratio of Obama-to-McCain bumper stickers in West L.A. is about 250-to-1, there are untold closet Republicans in the entertainment industry who dare not advertise their beliefs in movie studio parking lots. (Unfortunately, car keying is a tactic wielded liberally by the self-described "tolerant.")

But in this land of superficiality and augmented assets, the inconvenient truth is that, in Hollywood, absolute conformity to the Democratic Party is a well-constructed facade. The environment is not so much unfavorable to the Grand Old Party as it is utterly totalitarian. There's simply no lifestyle choice that receives a worse response at dinner parties.

Convicted murderer? Has anyone optioned the rights to your story?
Avowed Marxist? Viva la revolucion!
Scientologist? Do you take Visa or Mastercard?
Syphilitic drug abuser? Let's talk!
Conservative? You should go.

Only proclaiming one's self a practicing Christian is met with greater disdain - making Christian Republicans the gold standard in Hollywood pariah status. Fortunately, their Savior - that dude from Mel Gibson's highest-grossing blockbuster that was shunned by the major studios - wrote the script on how to live with an unpopular point of view.

Since the communist-sympathizing Jane Fonda aerobicized her way into the mainstream of Hollywood politics, and about the time that John Wayne died, most Republicans in Hollywood began to shut their mouths. Other Republicans attempt to win over the bullies by referring to themselves as "moderate," "libertarian," "independent," "classical liberal," "pragmatist" or "JFK Democrat."

The tandem of social and vocational ostracism usually shuts down even the strongest voices. Yet recently during the "Iron Man" media blitz, a New York Times profile on Robert Downey Jr. featured the following quote buried in the 23rd paragraph: "I have a really interesting political point of view, and it's not always something I say too loud at dinner tables here, but you can't go from a $2,000-a-night suite at La Mirage to a penitentiary and really understand it and come out a liberal. You can't. I wouldn't wish that experience on anyone else, but it was very, very, very educational for me and has informed my proclivities and politics ever since."

Yes we can!

Maybe the cryptic Mr. Downey now considers himself a French separatist? Or perhaps a Zapatista? The Hollywood dinner party test strongly hints that the talented actor has lurched rightward during his long road to recovery. Playwright David Mamet recently expressed a similar Road to Da Masses conversion. "I took the liberal view for many decades," Mr. Mamet bravely wrote in a Village Voice op-ed, "but I believe I have changed my mind."

Si se puede!

Two entertainment icons go against the political grain during ascendant Obama times, yet there's nary a peep from the media heralding their journeys. And their peers ignore the rejection of their faith for fear of creating sequels.

Mr. Downey and Mr. Mamet have reached points high enough in the food chain where they won't always be disinvited from macrobiotic power lunches. They join an elite brunch that includes Adam Sandler, Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton who also brazenly wear the Scarlet "R" in the middle of the school cafeteria.

Michael Crichton - who, to the chagrin of Al Gore, exposes "environmentalism as a religion" - and comic genius Dennis Miller show that there are cracks in the wall artificially separating Hollywood from much of America. This stealth contrarian trend (featuring high-end talent with iconoclastic reputations) could gain steam in an election featuring a "maverick" like Mr. McCain, who gives nervous showbiz conservatives far greater career cover than toxic avenger George W. Bush ever did.

When asked recently what it was like to work with "Republican" Clint Eastwood (the question speaks volumes), Angelina Jolie, a "surge" supporter who also wants to produce Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged," surprised Entertainment Weekly with her answer: "Actually, we don't disagree as much as you'd think. I think people assume I'm a Democrat. But I'm registered independent and I'm still undecided. So I'm looking at McCain as well as Obama."

You hedge, girl.

The situation in Los Angeles is fundamentally different from that in Washington, D.C., where members of both parties openly embrace their party affiliation (for now). Republicans in the federal government accept that they are the freaks and geeks. Democrats, the "cool kids," have their status affirmed by frequent jaunts to town by Hollywood's "Creative Coalition" - bestowing upon our congressman, Henry A. Waxman, a status he certainly didn't hold in 11th grade. Only a Democrat can recount sipping a latte with Christine Lahti.

In New York while the liberal mind-set dominates - especially in the media - there are enough dominant industries (i.e. Wall Street) in which free marketers flourish. So the outnumbered and the outshouted experience in Manhattan is tempered by pockets of confident oppositionism, which explains the rise of Rudy Giuliani.

But Los Angeles is a one-company town. And because of bullying (or what Democrats would call blacklisting or "political discrimination," if the shoe were on the other foot), Hollywood has become a one-party town. History will show this dynamic hurt both the creative and the political processes.

In the absence of checks and balances, we end up with a system that creates a mainstream film about Ronald Reagan - written, produced and directed by narcissistic and myopic partisans who only viewed the Gipper through the lens of AIDS activism. Like anyone would watch an epic movie about America's victory in the Cold War.

Oliver Stone - a left-wing conspiracy theorist - gets to take a cinematic stab at George W. Bush before he even leaves office. Thankfully, he assures us he will treat the subject evenhandedly.
Every big-screen cartoon warns toddlers of anthropogenic global warming or the wrongs of corporate America. It's almost like they conceived a process to scientifically extract the joys from childhood.

There are tons of movies on Nazi Germany. But why the dearth of stories on the rise and fall of the Iron Curtain? Are there no stories of tragedy and triumph in the 100 million or so dead, or those who came out alive?

All historical political episodes are seen through the eyes of Democrat protagonists and Republicans are cast as the villains. If only the GOP could outsource its PR burden to the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). Those guys sure know how to erase negative stereotypes from the big screen.

More than a dozen box office failures vilify the troops without a single counterperspective seeing the light of day. Yet one positive Iraq war film, "Brothers at War," dares to tell the story of a noble and patriotic American family - but it can't find a distributor.

The litany of negative consequences to the ideological rigidity of modern Hollywood is virtually limitless. The lack of tension between competing ideas has made the arts increasingly tedious and rendered the celebrities woefully uninteresting.

What's worse, when Mr. Obama can come to town to cherry-pick untold millions in donations - and Mr. McCain is shunned because a simple FEC search of his artsy donors could ruin a phalanx of careers (not to mention many Lexus paint jobs) - then something's desperately wrong.

Andrew Breitbart is the founder of the news Web site breitbart.com and is co-author of "Hollywood Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon - the Case Against Celebrity."

Foreign Courts Take Aim at Our Free Speech

2008-07-14T20:28:00.000-07:00

Foreign Courts Take Aim at Our Free Speech

By ARLEN SPECTER and JOE LIEBERMANJuly 14, 2008; Page A15

Our Constitution is one of our greatest assets in the fight against terrorism. A free-flowing marketplace of ideas, protected by the First Amendment, enables the ideals of democracy to defeat the totalitarian vision of al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.

That free marketplace faces a threat. Individuals with alleged connections to terrorist activity are filing libel suits and winning judgments in foreign courts against American researchers who publish on these matters. These suits intimidate and even silence writers and publishers.
Under American law, a libel plaintiff must prove that defamatory material is false. In England, the burden is reversed. Disputed statements are presumed to be false unless proven otherwise. And the loser in the case must pay the winner's legal fees.

Consequently, English courts have become a popular destination for libel suits against American authors. In 2003, U.S. scholar Rachel Ehrenfeld asserted in her book, "Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed and How to Stop It," that Saudi banker Khalid Bin Mahfouz helped fund Osama bin Laden. The book was published in the U.S. by a U.S. company. But 23 copies were bought online by English residents, so English courts permitted the Saudi to file a libel suit there.
Ms. Ehrenfeld did not appear in court, so Mr. Bin Mahfouz won a $250,000 default judgment against her. He has filed or threatened to file at least 30 other suits in England.

Fear of a similar lawsuit forced Random House U.K. in 2004 to cancel publication of "House of Bush, House of Saud," a best seller in the U.S. that was written by an American author. In 2007, the threat of a lawsuit compelled Cambridge University Press to apologize and destroy all available copies of "Alms for Jihad," a book on terrorism funding by American authors. The publisher even sent letters to libraries demanding that they destroy their copies, though some refused to do so.

To counter this lawsuit trend, we have introduced the Free Speech Protection Act of 2008, a Senate companion to a House bill introduced by U.S. Rep. Pete King (R., N.Y.) and co-sponsored by Rep. Anthony Weiner (D., N.Y.). This legislation builds on New York State's "Libel Terrorism Protection Act," signed into law by Gov. David Paterson on May 1.

Our bill bars U.S. courts from enforcing libel judgments issued in foreign courts against U.S. residents, if the speech would not be libelous under American law. The bill also permits American authors and publishers to countersue if the material is protected by the First Amendment. If a jury finds that the foreign suit is part of a scheme to suppress free speech rights, it may award treble damages.

First Amendment scholar Floyd Abrams argues that "the values of free speech and individual reputation are both significant, and it is not surprising that different nations would place different emphasis on each." We agree. But it is not in our interest to permit the balance struck in America to be upset or circumvented by foreign courts. Our legislation would not shield those who recklessly or maliciously print false information. It would ensure that Americans are held to and protected by American standards. No more. No less.

We have seen this type of libel suit before. The 1964 Supreme Court decision in New York Times v. Sullivan established that journalists must be free to report on newsworthy events unless they recklessly or maliciously publish falsehoods. At that time, opponents of civil rights were filing libel suits to silence news organizations that exposed state officials' refusal to enforce federal civil rights laws.

Now we are engaged in another great struggle -- this time against Islamist terror -- and again the enemies of freedom seek to silence free speech. Our legislation will help ensure that they do not succeed.

Mr. Specter is a Republican senator from Pennsylvania. Mr. Lieberman is an Independent Democratic senator from Connecticut.

George W Bush - buffoon or great leader?

2008-07-09T11:14:00.000-07:00

Holy Cows: George W Bush - buffoon or great leader?
By Sameh El-Shahat
Last updated: 1:40 AM BST 09/07/2008

Sameh El-Shahat argues that George W Bush has been the most under-rated president... ever.

So, the hot news now is Barack Obama.

Obama this, Obama that... Naturally, it is very laudable that the United States may have chosen to look beyond the issue of race and opted for a person purely on the merit of his character. But what will they find?

The usual hot air that Washington politicians seem to have made their own. Mr Obama is no different. We’re just too politically correct to say that the only thing refreshing about him is his colour. So we say he’s “bipartisan”, or he’s a “uniter”.

Whatever happened to leadership and honesty as presidential traits? I happen to believe that the only leader in the West to have these two admirable qualities in droves is the leader of the free world: George W Bush.

Yes, we’ve all heard the Bushisms and laughed at them but do you really think somebody supposedly that thick can make it to the top of the most sophisticated political system the world has ever seen?

No, and that is because Mr Bush is far cleverer than most of his predecessors. He may not have been a Rhodes Scholar, but he has the ability to reach out to his people and read them.

Take the Iraq war for example. OK, so he got us into Iraq in the first place. But for Pete’s sake, he’s the leader of the world’s only superpower. He needs to take decisions, even if sometimes they have nasty consequences - which is far better than we do in Europe, where we enjoy dithering not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself.

Something had to be done about Iraq and our government was all for attacking it too. So let’s not blame G.W. for the war.

And when things did go wrong in Iraq, and there were calls to pull out, Mr Bush just followed his own counsel and doubled his bet with the Surge.

And he was right because Iraq is in a relatively better shape today than it ever was and Al Qa'eda is a shadow of its former self in that country.

This is a man who has the courage of his convictions.

Let’s not forget how Europe does wars.

Usually we wait and wait until the enemy starts attacking, then we let them win a bit, then we fight until we are tired, then we just call the US to come over to clean our mess.

That is what happened in WWI, WWII, and the Balkans.

Bush is just showing us what a bunch of dangerous ditherers we are and we hate him for it. Naturally.

And the Olympics. Bush said right from the beginning that he’s going to the opening ceremony because he saw the whole boycott thing as silly and counterproductive.

Compare that with Sarkozy who has changed his mind twice so far and to Gordon Brown who, well... err.

Not much leadership from Europe here, as usual, just doublespeak. Once again, it is to Bush that we look for leadership.

Bush may not have the slickness of his predecessor, but he is a man you can trust and who prefers to tell it like it is.

This is refreshing, and very scary for us who are used to our politicians always talking grandly about principles and hiding behind political mumbo-speak.

The fact is you guys hate Mr Bush because he is not a hypocrite and you are used to hypocrites as your leaders. We hate what we don’t understand.

Yes, yes, all you bleeding heart liberals are cringing out there. I can just hear you. But the fact is, Mr Bush has had to take some very tough decisions and the world needs people who can not only talk but also act tough and admit mistakes.

Of course you think Mr Obama is going to make a difference, but as I write this, he’s already giving all the signs of somebody who will say anything to get into power only to act in exactly the same way as the Washington clique he aims to replace!

Hating George W. Bush is not only dull and unoriginal, but it shows a complete lack of understanding of the world in which we live in.

You want liberty but you don’t want to defend it... right.

And for those of you who still don’t buy into what I’m saying, look at the Middle East. Bush single-handedly managed to unite the Arabs in their hate for him.

Given how difficult uniting the Arabs is, it takes a special man with special skills to achieve this. He is just the kind of man to bring about peace in that region!

INTELLECTUALS LIE, THE POWERLESS DIE

2008-07-09T11:07:00.000-07:00

July 9, 2008 --

THE greatest lie intellectuals tell us is that "the pen is mightier than the sword." That's what cowards claim when they want to preen as heroes.

Billions of words have been hurled at Sudan's government. The misery in Darfur not only continues but deepens. While intellectuals wrestled with compound sentences, Darfur degenerated from selective oppression to savage anarchy.

Legions of columnists and commentators have deplored Robert Mugabe's monstrous rule in Zimbabwe. But none of the hand-wringing by American, European or even African intellectuals restrained one fist or stopped one club in midair. Guess who "won" that election.

Regiments of professors and pundits have bemoaned China's gobbling of Tibet for half a century. The result? Beijing cracked down even harder.

"Brave" columnists wrote countless columns bemoaning the suffering of the Kurds and the Shia under Saddam Hussein. Their earnest paragraphs didn't save a single life.

Only when better men acted did the surviving victims of one of the world's worst dictatorships glimpse freedom - an imperfect freedom but better than a mass grave.

Nothing positive is going to happen in Sudan or Zimbabwe (or Tibet) until rule-of-law states take action. As outraged activists scribble on, Beijing blithely continues supporting these and other rogue regimes (and our president crawls to the Olympics - it's as if FDR had rushed to the games in Berlin).

There was a good reason the assassins of 9/11 attacked the targets they did, rather than steering those planes into Columbia University or Harvard Yard: They knew that the potency of the intellectual is illusory, that it dissolves at the first shot.

As I pointed out on July 4, even our glorious Declaration of Independence and our Constitution would be no more than bizarre artifacts had they not been defended by patriots willing to fight.

Does anyone really believe that there's anything we can write or say that will persuade al Qaeda to make nice? It's on the strategic defensive today but only because our soldiers and Marines thumped the hell out of its cadres in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The point isn't that military solutions are always the best solutions - any problem that can be resolved without bloodshed should be handled peaceably. But we've got to stop playing pretend: In this hate-plagued, often merciless world, events sometimes demand action, not just talk.

Our diplomats and "distinguished commentators" see the world from the 17th floor of a luxury hotel or the office of an English-speaking Cabinet member. The insular safety of their lives has convinced them that every problem has a peaceful solution if only we can all have a good chat.
But those who rule by the sword (or the fist, or engineered famines or outright genocide) don't want to hash things out. They want to win. No elegant phrase has ever stopped a bullet in midflight.

Please, educate me: In over 5,000 years of more or less recorded history, how many tyrannies have been overthrown by noble sentiments? How many genocides have been averted by reasonable discussions? How many wars have been prevented by Quakers?

As William James - no archconservative - put it a century ago, "History is a bath of blood." It's been a long time since we got badly splashed (9/11's casualties were an average day in Normandy). We're so spoiled that we've forgotten how brutal humankind can be. But our enemies are determined to remind us. Meanwhile, they practice on the innocents close at hand.
If the pen truly were mightier than the sword, the defense industry would be making ink, paper and keyboards, rather than smart bombs and body armor. A pen wielded by a talented writer may wound a target's ego, but a sword will cut off the writer's head.

Pacifists mean well. But they're a dictator's best friends. The man who won't fight for justice abets the terrorist, the tyrant and the concentration-camp guard.

All decent men want peace. But wise men know that not all men are decent.

The use of the pen is an indulgence we can afford only because better men and women grip the sword on our behalf.

Ralph Peters' new book is "Looking for Trouble: Adventures in a Broken World."
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Beyond the existential level

2008-06-28T17:58:00.000-07:00

The Debate McCain Must Force
By Dick Morris

Have you noticed a change in Barack Obama's campaign? Instead of avoiding controversies over values, religion and race, he seems to welcome them and wade into the debates with an increasing enthusiasm.

Characterizing how the Republicans will attack him, he predicted that they would criticize his "funny name" and add "and by the way, did you notice that he's black?"

Obama used to go out of his way to avoid this kind of reference, but now he brings it on. Deliberately.

Why?

Obama and the conservative right are mutually trying to keep the debate about his candidacy on the existential level -- is he the hope for America's future or a Manchurian Candidate, a kind of sleeper agent sent to destroy our democracy? That debate, which pits Obama's rhetoric against the Rev. Wright's rantings, is a contest that could go on all day, and Obama would win it. It is simply a bridge too far to believe that Obama is that evil and that invidious.

But the more the debate covers such fundamental questions, the more it ignores the details -- details which could bring Obama down.

Quite simply, Obama would rather address his religious views and his optimism about America and his embrace of diversity than talk about his plans to raise taxes, let gasoline prices soar and socialize healthcare.

In our new book, Fleeced, we try to bring the debate back down to earth, focusing on the specific plans that Obama has announced during his presidential primary campaign and discussing the consequences. This is the debate Barack Obama hopes he can avoid.
Consider his proposals:

• In effect, he would legislate a 60 percent tax bracket for upper-income Americans, killing all initiative and innovation. He'd raise the top bracket to 40 percent. He'd apply FICA taxes to all income, not just that under $100,000 as at present. So add 40 percent plus FICA's 12.5 percent plus Medicare's 2 percent plus state and local taxes averaging, after deduction, at 5-6 percent, and you have a 60 percent bracket.

• He would double the capital gains tax, saddling the 50 percent of Americans who own stock with dramatically higher taxes.

• He'd double the dividend tax, hitting elderly coupon-clippers now retired and depending on fixed incomes.

• He wants to cover 12 million illegal immigrants with federally subsidized health insurance, dramatically driving up costs and forcing federal rationing of healthcare. As in the U.K. and Canada, you will not be permitted certain medical procedures if the bureaucrats decide you are not worth it.

• He proposes requiring Homeland Security operatives to notify terror suspects that they are under investigation within seven days of starting the investigation.

• He says that unless they can establish that there is "probable cause to believe that a certain individual is linked to a specific terrorist group," Homeland Security cannot seize his documents and search his business. The current standard is only that the search be "relevant" to a terror investigation.

He does not oppose $5-per-gallon gasoline but only says that he wishes there had been a more "gradual adjustment" to the higher prices.

Obama can talk about the Rev. Wright and flag lapel pins and his wife's love of America all day long. But what he resists is a specific discussion of his own plans for our country. That's the discussion he fears and he avoids. And it's the discussion John McCain must force upon him if he is to have any realistic chance of winning the election.

Morris, a former political adviser to Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and President Bill Clinton, is the author of “Outrage.” To get all of Dick Morris’s and Eileen McGann’s columns for free by email, go to www.dickmorris.com.

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Disabled Babies Have Rights, Too

2008-06-25T12:44:00.000-07:00

Down Syndrome Babies Have Rights, Too

By Father Jonathan Morris
FOX News Religion Contributor

Imagine a world free of Down syndrome. Now imagine a world free of babies who already have Down syndrome. There’s a difference in these two scenarios, but you would never know it by reading newspapers in the United Kingdom. For these reporters and for the researchers they quote, Down babies are not babies—they are a disease.

No matter your stance on abortion, the following story should be appalling.

Without exception, the major papers in the U.K. today are praising as “risk-free” a new procedure being developed in Hong Kong that will detect in the mother’s bloodstream a Down syndrome pregnancy. This simple blood test would replace the current “risky” method of inserting a needle into the mother’s womb to extract amniotic fluid near the fetus, a procedure that takes place sometime after the 14th week of pregnancy and sometimes results in miscarriage.

The “risk” the papers all reference is the possibility of harming a non-Down baby.

Listen to the twisted logic of the lead researcher, Professor Dennis Lo, from the Chinese University of Hong Kong: “I think the major impact of our test would be to make prenatal testing safer for the fetuses.” And then he goes on, “It would have the positive effect of saving normal fetuses from invasive and potentially dangerous procedures such as amniocentesis. This would also alleviate the stress of pregnant women going through prenatal testing.”

I can hardly believe so many journalists allowed Professor Lo to get away with suggesting prenatal testing for Down syndrome is all about looking out for the wellbeing of the fetuses! Is a Down fetus not a fetus, or is its wellbeing not important? Neither of these tests can be good for him or her.

Which reminds me… The abortion debate today is in transition. Roe vs. Wade framed the conversation in terms of a woman’s constitutional right to privacy. Pro-life political wrangling has done little to change this. But today, science—and ultra-sound technology in particular—is calling into question the relevance of the court’s ruling.

Even if there is a right to privacy in the Constitution (not easily found), we know we have that right not because we are women or men, but rather because we are human beings. Today, as never before, when parents go to the doctor’s office and see live video of their child, they come to know with both their hearts and minds they are looking at another human being. If parents have rights because they are human, and if doctors show us the child, too, is human, it follows that babies, too, have rights.

It’s no wonder, then, that more than seventy-five percent of mothers considering an abortion who see an ultra-sound image of the fetus, and hear its heartbeat, decide to keep the child.

Science—not religion and not pro-life politics—will transform the way we think about abortion.
Unless, of course, we decide some human beings (the healthy, for example) have more rights than others.

God bless,
Father Jonathan

P.S. I look forward to all of your comments, especially those from people, like me, who are blessed to have very happy Down syndrome relatives.

10 Concerns about Barack Obama (only 10?)

2008-06-24T18:06:00.000-07:00

10 Concerns about Barack Obama
It's policy.
By William J. Bennett & Seth Leibsohn

1. Barack Obama’s foreign policy is dangerous, naïve, and betrays a profound misreading of history. For at least the past five years, Democrats and liberals have said our standing in the international community has suffered from a “cowboy” or “go-it-alone” foreign policy. While politicians with favorable views of our president have been elected in Germany, Italy, France, and elsewhere, Barack Obama is giving cause to make our allies even more nervous.

This past Sunday’s Washington Post reported, “European officials are increasingly concerned that Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign pledge to begin direct talks with Iran on its nuclear program without preconditions could potentially rupture U.S. relations with key European allies early in a potential Obama administration.”

Barack Obama’s stance toward Iran is as troubling as it is dangerous. By stating and maintaining that he would negotiate with Iran, “without preconditions,” and within his first year of office, he will give credibility to, and reward for his intransigence, the head of state of the world’s chief sponsor of terrorism. Such a meeting will also undermine and send the exact wrong signal to Iranian dissidents.

And, he will lower the prestige of the office of the president: In his own words he stated, “If we think that meeting with the president is a privilege that has to be earned, I think that reinforces the sense that we stand above the rest of the world at this point in time.” Not only has his stance toward Iran caused concern among our allies in Europe, U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton called it, “Irresponsible and frankly naïve.”Barack Obama’s position on negotiating with U.S. enemies betrays a profound misreading of history. In justifying his position that he would meet with Iran without precondition and in his first year of office, Barack Obama has said, “That is what Kennedy did with Khrushchev; that’s what Nixon did with Mao; what Reagan did with Gorbachev.”

In reverse order, Ronald Reagan met with no Soviet leader during the entirety of his first term in office, not (ever) with Brezhnev, not (ever) with Andropov, not (ever) with Chernenko. He met only with Gorbachev, and after he was assured Gorbachev was a different kind of Soviet leader — and after Perestroika, not before.

If Barack Obama wants to affiliate with Richard Nixon, that’s certainly his call. But one question: Was Taiwan’s expulsion from the U.N. worth “Nixon to China”? That was the price of that meeting.

As for the Kennedy-Khrushchev summit of 1961, Kennedy himself said “He beat the hell out of me.” As two experts recently wrote in the New York Times: “Paul Nitze, the assistant secretary of defense, said the meeting was ‘just a disaster.’ Khrushchev’s aide, after the first day, said the American president seemed ‘very inexperienced, even immature.’ Khrushchev agreed, noting that the youthful Kennedy was ‘too intelligent and too weak.’ The Soviet leader left Vienna elated — and with a very low opinion of the leader of the free world.” So successful was the summit that the Berlin Wall was erected later that year and the Cuban Missile Crisis, with Soviets deploying nuclear missiles in Cuba, commenced the following year.

2. Barack Obama’s Iraq policy will hand al-Qaeda a victory and undercut our entire position in the Middle East, while at the same time put a huge source of oil in the hands of terrorists. Barack Obama brags on his website that “In January 2007, he introduced legislation in the Senate to remove all of our combat troops from Iraq by March 2008.” His website further states that “Obama will immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq. He will remove one to two combat brigades each month, and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months.” This, at the very time our greatest successes in Iraq have taken place. And yet, as Gen. David Petraeus has stated (along with other military experts from Michael O’Hanlon at the Brookings Institution to members of the U.S. military), our progress in Iraq is “fragile and reversible.”

Obama’s post-invasion analysis of Iraq is anything but credible or consistent, leading one to even greater doubt about his strategy as commander-in-chief. When President Bush announced the surge strategy in January 2007, Barack Obama opposed it, saying it “would not prove to be one that changes the dynamics significantly,” and that “the President’s strategy will not work.” Of course, the surge is one of the greatest achievements in Iraq since the initial months of the invasion, and is has reversed much of the loss suffered since the invasion.

Beyond these miscalculations and poor judgment on Iraq strategy, Obama has been anything but consistent on Iraq. For example, the same year (2007) he stated it would be a good idea to bring home the U.S. troops from Iraq within March of 2008, three months later he stated, we should bring them home “immediately…. Not in six months or one year — now.”

3. Barack Obama has sent mixed, confusing, and inconsistent messages on his policy toward Israel. Earlier this month, Barack Obama told an audience at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.” The next day, Obama backtracked, stating: “Obviously, it’s [Jerusalem] going to be up to the parties to negotiate a range of these issues…And Jerusalem will be part of the negotiations.” Later, Obama’s Middle East adviser tried to explain the flipping of positions on Jerusalem by stating Obama did not understand what he was saying to AIPAC: “[h]e used a word to represent what he did not want to see again, and then realized afterwards that that word is a code word in the Middle East.”Such quick switches of policy may stem from mere inexperience or they may stem from a general tone-deafness on the meaning of words and policy when it comes to the Middle East. After all, earlier this year, a leading Hamas official endorsed Barack Obama stating, “I do believe [Obama] is like John Kennedy, a great man with a great principle. And he has a vision to change America to make it in a position to lead the world community, but not with humiliation and arrogance.” Rather than immediately renouncing such an endorsement, Obama’s chief political strategist, David Axelrod, embraced the endorsement, saying “We all agree that John Kennedy was a great president, and it’s flattering when anybody says that Barack Obama would follow in his footsteps.” Given Barack Obama’s long-standing ties to Palestinian activists in the U.S., one has good cause to wonder.

4. While his Mideast policy may have been the quickest turnaround or flip-flop on a major issue, it is not the only one. In the primary campaign, Barack Obama consistently campaigned against NAFTA, but has now changed his tune, as he has with other issues. During the primary, Obama sent out a campaign flier that said “Only Barack Obama consistently opposed NAFTA,” and called it a “bad trade deal.” He also said NAFTA was “devastating,” “a big mistake,” and in what the Washington Post labeled as a unilateral threat to withdraw from NAFTA, Obama said “I think we should use the hammer of a potential opt-out as leverage.”No longer. Recently, Barack Obama backtracked on NAFTA and said, “I’m not a big believer in doing things unilaterally.” “I’m a big believer in opening up a dialogue and figuring out how we can make this work for all people.” He explained his primary campaign opposition this way: “Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified.”

This is of a piece with his further change of position on public campaign financing. As a primary candidate, he touted his support for the public financing of presidential campaigns, but then witnessing his own fundraising prowess, as a general election candidate he has gone the unique route of forswearing the system.

As David Brooks put it in the New York Times:
Barack Obama has worked on political reform more than any other issue. He aspires to be to political reform what Bono is to fighting disease in Africa. He’s spent much of his career talking about how much he believes in public financing. In January 2007, he told Larry King that the public-financing system works. In February 2007, he challenged Republicans to limit their spending and vowed to do so along with them if he were the nominee. In February 2008, he said he would aggressively pursue spending limits. He answered a Midwest Democracy Network questionnaire by reminding everyone that he has been a longtime advocate of the public-financing system. But Thursday, at the first breath of political inconvenience, Fast Eddie Obama threw public financing under the truck.

5. Barack Obama’s judgment about personal and professional affiliations is more than troubling. On March 18, after several clips of sermons by his longtime friend and pastor Jeremiah Wright surfaced (showing Wright condemning the United States with vitriolic comparisons and denunciations), Obama defended his friend stating: “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother.” After Rev. Wright delivered two more talks along the same lines as the clips that led to the March 18 speech, Sen. Obama finally denounced Wright the following month, stating: “His comments were not only divisive and destructive, but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate, and I believe that they do not portray accurately the perspective of the black church.” “They certainly don’t portray accurately my values and beliefs,” he said.

It strained credulity to believe Obama was unaware of Wright’s previous rants — especially after a 20-year membership in Wright’s church, especially when in February of last year Obama asked Wright not to attend his campaign announcement because he “could get kind of rough in sermons,” and especially when his church’s magazine honored on its front cover such a man as Louis Farrakhan. Nonetheless, once he ceased being a political asset and turned into a political liability, Obama dumped him.Jeremiah Wright is, of course, not the only person close to Barack Obama who holds vitriolic anti-American views. Bill Ayers was a founding member of the Weather Underground.

According to his own memoir, Ayers participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, the Pentagon in 1972. As recently as 2001, Ayers said “I don’t regret setting bombs….I feel we didn’t do enough.’’ When asked if he would engage in such terrorism again, Ayers responded: “I don’t want to discount the possibility.” When confronted with his friendship with Bill Ayers, Barack Obama dismissed the negative connections saying he is also friendly with abortion opponent U.S. Senator Tom Coburn. While Obama has never, himself, discussed his relationship with Ayers, what we do know is that Ayers hosted a fundraiser for Obama in his home and, according to the Los Angeles Times:
Obama and Ayers moved in some of the same political and social circles in the leafy liberal enclave of Hyde Park, where they lived several blocks apart. In the mid-1990s, when Obama was running for the Illinois Senate, Ayers introduced Obama during a political event at his home, according to Obama’s aides….Obama and Ayers met a dozen times as members of the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago, a local grant-making foundation, according to the group’s president. They appeared together to discuss juvenile justice on a 1997 panel sponsored by the University of Chicago, records show. They appeared again in 2002 at an academic panel co-sponsored by the Chicago Public Library.

6. Obama is simply out of step with how terrorists should be handled; he would turn back the clock on how we fight terrorism, using the failed strategy of the 1990s as opposed to the post-9/11 strategy that has kept us safe. The most recent example is his support for the Supreme Court decision granting habeas-corpus rights to terrorists, including — theoretically — Osama bin Laden. When the 5-4 Supreme Court decision was delivered, Obama said, “I think the Supreme Court was right.” His campaign advisers held a conference call where they claimed the Supreme Court decision was “no big deal” according to ABC News, even if applied to Osama bin Laden, because a judge would find that the U.S. has “ample grounds to hold him.”In a recent interview, Obama stated: “What we know is that, in previous terrorist attacks — for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center, we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in U.S. prisons, incapacitated. And the fact that the administration has not tried to do that has created a situation where not only have we never actually put many of these folks on trial, but we have destroyed our credibility when it comes to rule of law all around the world, and given a huge boost to terrorist recruitment in countries that say, ‘Look, this is how the United States treats Muslims.’”Ask the legal officials during the 1990s just how cowed terrorists were by our continued indictments against them. Or, witness the bombings at the African embassies, the attack on the USS Cole, or the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Now, ask yourself why we have not been attacked since 9/11, and, even more specifically, why there have been no successful attacks against American civilian interests abroad since 2004.7. Barack Obama’s economic policies would hurt the economy. As Kimberly Strassel recently put it in the Wall Street Journal: “Mr. Obama is hawking a tax policy that would take the nation back to the effective marginal tax rates of the Carter days. He wants to further tax income, payroll, capital gains, dividends and death. His philosophy is pure redistribution.” When Barack Obama speaks of taxing only the wealthy, keep in mind this could have a devastating effect on new small businesses. As Irwin Stelzer has written: “Taxes change behavior. By raising rates on upper income payers, Obama is reducing their incentive to work and take risks. The income tax increase is not all that he has in mind for them. He plans to increase their payroll taxes, the taxes they pay on dividends received and capital gains earned, and on any transfers they might have in mind to their kith and kin when they shuffle off this mortal coil. If the aggregate of these additional taxes substantially diminishes incentives to set up a small business of the sort that has created most of the new jobs in recent decades, the $1,000 tax rebate will be more than offset by the consequences of reduced growth and new business formation.”

8. Barack Obama opposes drilling on and offshore to reduce gas and oil prices. While Barack Obama has opposed off-shore drilling and a gas-tax holiday (as supported by John McCain or Hillary Clinton), his solution to our energy crisis does include additional tax burdens on oil company profits, taxes we can only imagine will be passed on to the consumer, thus causing an even more expensive trip to the gas station. As the New York Times recently detailed, ethanol subsidies are a major plank in Barack Obama’s view of energy independence and national security; the “Obama Camp is Closely Linked with Ethanol,” and “Mr. Obama…favors [ethanol] subsidies, some of which end up in the hands of the same oil companies he says should be subjected to a windfall profits tax.”

9. Barack Obama is to the left of Hillary Clinton and NARAL on the issue of life. As a state senator in Illinois, Barack Obama voted against the Induced Infant Liability Act, a law that would have protected babies if they survived an attempted abortion and were delivered alive. When a similar bill was proposed in the United States Senate, it passed unanimously and even the National Abortion Rights Action League issued a statement saying they did not oppose the law.

10. Barack Obama is actually to the left of every member of the U.S. Senate.

According to the National Journal, “Sen. Barack Obama…was the most liberal senator in 2007.” As the magazine reported: “The ratings system — devised in 1981 under the direction of William Schneider, a political analyst and commentator, and a contributing editor to National Journal — also assigns ‘composite’ scores, an average of the members’ issue-based scores. In 2007, Obama’s composite liberal score of 95.5 was the highest in the Senate. Rounding out the top five most liberal senators last year were Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.), with a composite liberal score of 94.3; Joseph Biden (D., Del.), with a 94.2; Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), with a 93.7; and Robert Menendez (D., N.J.), with a 92.8.”

Whom will a man this far left appoint to the Supreme Court?

William J. Bennett is the host of the nationally syndicated radio show Bill Bennett’s Morning in America . Seth Leibsohn is the show’s producer.

Obama's childish foreign policy

2008-06-22T18:43:00.000-07:00

Obama's Pooh-bah
A childish foreign policy.
by William Kristol
06/30/2008, Volume 013, Issue 40

"Winnie-the-Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental text on national security."--former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, one of Barack Obama's key foreign policy advisers, June 11

The gathering of oh-so-sober pro-Obama foreign policy experts was drowning in solemnity and earnestness. Speaker after speaker had laboriously dilated on the important distinction--unappreciated by the oh-so-stupid-and-bad Bush administration--between soft power and hard power. And this is to say nothing of the synthesis of soft and hard in ... smart power!

Richard Danzig, the luncheon speaker, hoped to wake the slumberers from their torpor. So he took A.A. Milne rather than Joseph Nye as his fundamental text. As the basis of his criticism of the Bush administration, he read the famous opening sentences of Winnie-the-Pooh:

Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump on the back of his head behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming down stairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping a minute and think about it.

The earnest Washington foreign policy types were dazzled by Danzig's daringly outside-the-box citation. How clever! And how true! If only Bush had stopped to think that there was "another way" to pursue our national security goals, rather than staying the course in Iraq, or detaining terrorists without habeas corpus at home. Alas! And really, isn't Bush also "a Bear of Very Little Brain"?

Or is he? Richard Danzig is an intelligent and well-read man. He's a graduate of Bronx High School of Science and Reed College, with a law degree from Yale and a Ph.D. from Oxford. He was a Supreme Court law clerk. He is well aware that, outside the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, al Qaeda has failed to launch successful attacks on Americans since 9/11. Couldn't Bush have been doing something right?

Indeed, Danzig served as Bill Clinton's secretary of the Navy from November 1998 to the end of that administration. During that time the U.S.S. Cole was attacked by al Qaeda, with 17 sailors killed and 39 wounded. So Danzig saw firsthand the insufficiency of the Clinton administration's efforts to prosecute the war on terror through the criminal justice system.

He therefore must know how foolish it is to say, as Barack Obama did last week, "I have confidence that our system of justice is strong enough to deal with terrorists." The lesson of the Cole, as of 9/11, was that "our system of justice" can't deal with terrorists as well as our military and intelligence services. And he must know that there really isn't a pain-free way to fight the war on terror very different from the way the Bush administration has chosen.

As for the war in Iraq, well ... there Bush did find another way. In January 2007, he changed commanders and strategy. The new strategy, backed by a surge of troops, worked. Violence is way down, political reconciliation is proceeding, the additional troops are almost all back home--and progress has exceeded the hopes even of those who strongly supported the surge. Danzig is well aware that Obama's stated policy would snatch defeat in Iraq out of the jaws of victory.
But he's ostensibly an Obama adviser. What's the man to do? First proclaim the indispensability of Winnie-the-Pooh as a text on national security, in order subtly to indicate how childish Obama's foreign policy is. Second, quote the first paragraph of the book--but do so incompletely. Here's the sentence that follows the passage Danzig quoted: "And then he feels that perhaps there isn't [another way]."

In other words: What Danzig is indicating, by his quotation, and his purposeful and suggestive omission of the very next sentence, is that there isn't another way than Bush's. Richard Danzig is said to be a leading candidate to be national security adviser if Obama should win. How selfless and patriotic of him to indicate to discerning listeners why Obama shouldn't become president!

--William Kristol
© Copyright 2008, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.

The acquittals and dismissals continue.

2008-06-19T19:50:00.000-07:00

Justice?Haditha again.
By Mackubin Thomas Owens

In November 2005, the Marine Corps reported that a number of civilians had been killed in Haditha by an improvised explosive device (IED) that also killed Marine Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, and that eight insurgents were killed in the ensuing firefight.

But in March of 2006, Time ran a story, “Collateral Damage or Civilian Massacre in Haditha?” which claimed, based on interviews with locals, that the Marines had killed 24 civilians in cold blood in retaliation for Terrazas’s death. In May, the Marine Corps charged a number of Marines from Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, with killing the civilians, and a number of officers for covering up the alleged killings. Although the investigation had hardly begun, opponents of the war pounced. The press, especially Time and the New York Times, presumed the Marines guilty. Rep. John Murtha (D., Pa.) piled on, claiming that “there was no firefight, there was no IED that killed these innocent people. Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood.” This incident, said Murtha, “shows the tremendous pressure that these guys are under every day when they’re out in combat.”

Appearing on This Week on ABC, Murtha also contended that the shootings in Hadithah had been covered up. “Who covered it up, why did they cover it up, why did they wait so long? We don’t know how far it goes. It goes right up the chain of command.” When Alan Colmes asked Barack Obama about Murtha’s charge in June of 2006, Senator Obama replied, “I would never second-guess John Murtha . . . I think he’s somebody who knows of which he speaks.”

But a strange thing happened on the way to the lynching. The case against the Marines began to fall apart, and a deafening media silence ensued. Eight Marines were originally charged with offenses ranging from murder to dereliction of duty, but charges against six have been dismissed, and one has been acquitted. The case began to unravel in 2007, when then-Lt. Gen. James Mattis, Commanding General of the First Marine Expeditionary Force (IMEF), accepted the recommendations of the Article 32 investigating officer and dropped charges against two of the Marines charged with murder and an officer charged with dereliction of duty. In the case of Lance Corporal Justin Sharratt, one of four enlisted Marines charged with murder in the Hadithah incident, General Mattis wrote that Sharratt:

has served as a Marine infantryman in Iraq where our nation is fighting a shadowy enemy who hides among the innocent people, does not comply with any aspect of the law of war, and routinely targets and intentionally draws fire toward civilians.With the dismissal of these charges, LCpl Sharratt may fairly conclude that he did his best to live up to the standards, followed by U.S. fighting men throughout our many wars, in the face of life or death decisions made in a matter of seconds in combat. And as he has always remained cloaked in the presumption of innocence, with this dismissal of charges, he remains in the eyes of the law — and in my eyes — innocent.

The acquittals and dismissals continue. Earlier this month, First Lt. Andrew Grayson, a Marine intelligence officer, was acquitted of contributing to the Haditha “cover up” by having a military photographer erase digital photos of the dead Iraqis. Grayson had turned down a plea deal to face charges on five counts that could have led to a maximum of 20 years in prison. The military judge in the case had previously dismissed an obstruction-of-justice charge against Grayson.And now, a military judge has dismissed charges of dereliction of duty against the battalion commander at the time of the incident, Lt. Col. Jeffery Chessani, for failure to investigate the killings. The issue in Chessani’s case was undue “command influence.” The military judge in the case, Col. Steven Folsom, observed that "unlawful command influence is the mortal enemy of military justice." The one Marine remaining under indictment is Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, who faces nine counts of involuntary manslaughter, charges that were earlier reduced from unpremeditated murder. Wuterich was the squad leader of the unit involved in the Haditha incident. His court martial was postponed at the end of February and has not been rescheduled. Let me be clear. If Wuterich and his Marines had killed civilians in Haditha in revenge for the IED attack, he and they would be guilty of a war crime. But as the complete story has emerged, it seems to be the case that the killings, though a tragedy, did not rise to the level of war crime or atrocity. There was a great deal of wisdom in the observations by Lt. Col. Paul Ware, the Article 32 investigating officer in the case of Sharratt (whose charges Mattis dismissed). Ware wrote that “the government version is unsupported by independent evidence. . . . To believe the government version of facts is to disregard clear and convincing evidence to the contrary.” Ware continued, “whether this was a brave act of combat against the enemy or tragedy of misperception born out of conducting combat with an enemy that hides among innocents, Lance Corporal Sharratt's actions were in accord with the rules of engagement and use of force.” He concluded that further prosecution of Sharratt could set a “dangerous precedent that . . . may encourage others to bear false witness against Marines as a tactic to erode public support of the Marine Corps and its mission in Iraq. . . . Even more dangerous is the potential that a Marine may hesitate at the critical moment when facing the enemy.” These observations apply as well in the case of Wuterich.

In September of 2007, Wuterich told 60 Minutes, “What I did that day, the decisions that I made, I would make those decisions today. What I’m talking about is the tactical decisions. It doesn’t sit well with me that women and children died that day. There is nothing that I can possibly say to make up or make well the deaths of those women and children and I am absolutely sorry that that happened that day.

”What can we say about Haditha? As I have observed previously, our opponents in Iraq have chosen to deny us the ability to fight the sort of conventional war we would prefer and forced us to fight the one they want — an insurgency. Insurgents blend in with the people, making it hard to distinguish between combatant and noncombatant. A counterinsurgency always has to negotiate a fine line between too much and too little force. Indeed, it suits the insurgents’ goal when too much force is applied. For insurgents, there is no more powerful propaganda tool than the claim that their adversaries are employing force in an indiscriminate manner. It is even better for the insurgents’ cause if they can credibly charge the forces of the counterinsurgency with the targeted killing of noncombatants. For many people even today, the entire Americans enterprise in Vietnam is discredited by the belief that the U.S. military committed atrocities on a regular basis and as a matter of official policy — even though, as Jim Webb has noted, stories of atrocious conduct, e.g. My Lai, “represented not the typical experience of the American soldier, but its ugly extreme.” Under the circumstances, what is most remarkable is not that incidents such as Haditha have occurred, but that there have been so few of them. As the Wall Street Journal observed in an editorial published on October 19, 2007:

While some violent crimes have been visited on civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, overall the highly disciplined U.S. military has conducted itself in an exemplary fashion. When there have been aberrations, the services have typically held themselves accountable. The same cannot be said of the political and media classes. Many, including Members of Congress, were looking for another moral bonfire to discredit the cause in Iraq, and they found a pretext in Haditha. The critics rushed to judgment; facts and evidence were discarded to fit the antiwar template. Most despicably, they created and stoked a political atmosphere that exposes American soldiers in the line of duty, risking and often losing their lives, to criminal liability for the chaos of war. This is the deepest shame of Haditha, and the one for which apologies ought to be made.

I expect that we will be waiting for these apologies for some time. As Field Marshal Slim noted, it is so much easier to twist, misinterpret, falsify, or invent facts to slander the soldier as “an inhuman monster wallowing in innocent blood.”

— Mackubin Thomas Owens is an associate dean of academics and a professor of national-security affairs at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. and editor of Orbis, the journal of the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Washington’s successful voucher experiment

2008-06-17T12:20:00.000-07:00

Many a child left behind
By David Keene
Posted: 06/16/08 05:19 PM [ET]

The news that the District’s representative in Congress has joined with organized labor and liberals within the Democratic Party to demand an end to Washington’s successful voucher experiment shouldn’t come as much of a shock.

Voucher programs and public charter schools are under attack all over the country by the very people who like to justify more federal programs than I can possibly list here as needed “for the children.” The problem is that in the liberal ideological and political world, the interests of the “children” almost always take a back seat to their belief that every interest must be serviced through government and unionized government workers or not at all.

The liberal mindset sees this insistence on denying children, and particularly minority children, access to any institutions other than traditional public schools as evidence of some ethereal goodness and insists that anyone who seeks to change the educational status quo is an enemy of education itself. It seems not to matter a whit to most of these people that many of the schools they would force children to attend don’t work.

The answer, they tell us, is not competition or innovation, but money. It is their belief that if government at all levels will simply dump enough money into the existing system, all will be well, though the evidence suggests otherwise. With one of the most expensive per-student expenditures in the country, the problem in the District of Columbia certainly isn’t money, but an educational, administrative and municipal bureaucracy that is bloated and largely incompetent. The best teachers are ground down and forced to become little more than babysitters or to seek more rewarding employment elsewhere as quickly as possible.

That schools in the District and many other areas of the country are broken is no secret, yet most everyone within the existing system continues to spend more energy blaming others for the problem than trying to fix it. When they aren’t blaming the tax system, the taxpayer or Congress, in fact, they tend to blame parents for sending them children who are unruly or ill-prepared. The one thing they know is that it isn’t their fault. The result is that we are turning out class after class of young adults who are finding it harder and harder to compete in a global economy against workers from nations that actually take education seriously.

The rise of the charter and voucher movements, along with the skyrocketing number of parents choosing to home-school their children rather than entrust them to a system that doesn’t work, represent a rational response to the problem. Union representatives and elected officials like Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) claim that rather than giving up on traditional public schools, these parents should stick with them and help fix them.

What she is really asking, of course, is for parents to accept the fact of an ugly and unacceptable status quo. The District’s schools have been a disaster for decades and have helped keep the children of District residents from achieving their dreams or the success every parent wishes for his or her children. What Ms. Norton and her cohorts are telling those who have found a better way is that the greater good dictates that they sacrifice the hopes and dreams of their children to the ideological and political demands of those who have failed and continue to fail.

That’s the ugly truth in Washington and elsewhere. Charter schools and private schools are under attack around the country today, not because they don’t work, but because they do. The fact that the victims of these attacks are often those poor and minority kids who most need a good education seems of little concern to folks like Ms. Norton.

Charter schools and vouchers were originally seen by many as a means not only of providing a way out for children trapped in failing schools that weren’t being fixed, but as a way to inject competitive pressure into a monopolistic structure and thus force the traditional public school systems to change and improve. Unfortunately, however, the existing system is responding to competition like most monopolies — by trying to close down its competitors rather than improve what it has to offer.

Barack Obama, like John McCain, claims to be interested in educational innovation and in actually finding solutions to the educational mess in which the country finds itself.

Perhaps he ought to give Ms. Norton a call and tell her it’s about the children, not the bureaucrats.Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, can be reached at

Will gay rights trample religious freedom?

2008-06-17T12:11:00.000-07:00

Will gay rights trample religious freedom?
By Marc D. Stern
June 17, 2008

Early this morning, gay and lesbian couples were surely lining up at county clerk's offices across the state to exercise their new right to marry, bestowed on them last month by the California Supreme Court.

In its controversial decision, the court insisted that these same-sex marriages would not "diminish any other person's constitutional rights" or "impinge upon the religious freedom of any religious organization, official or any other person." Religious liberty would be unaffected, the chief justice wrote, because no member of the clergy would be compelled to officiate at a same-sex ceremony and no church could be compelled to change its policies or practices.

And yet there is substantial reason to believe that these assurances about the safety of religious liberty are either wrong or reflect a cramped view of religion.

The case for same-sex marriage, reduced to its essentials, is an attractive one. It is that the government in a liberal democracy ought not to impose any one moral vision on its citizens; moral decisions ought to be, as much as possible, a matter of private choice and not law.

But it should not follow that having allowed same-sex couples to come out of the closet, as it were, that religious people should in turn be confined to the sanctuary.

In the same-sex marriage decision, the state Supreme Court suggests that all will be well and good as long as the "official" activities of the clergy aren't affected. But that excludes religion entirely from a broad range of social welfare and other activities, despite the fact that the California Constitution declares: "Free exercise and enjoyment of religion without discrimination or preference are guaranteed."

Evidence from previous and pending cases indicates that the court tends to take an extremely narrow view of people's "free exercise and enjoyment of religion" when they clash with another group's need for equal protection. This would seem particularly true following the In re Marriage Cases ruling, in which the majority equated the ban on same-sex marriage to the now discredited (and unconstitutional) ban on interracial marriages.

Religious liberty claims rarely, if ever, have prevailed in the face of complaints about racial discrimination. Conflicts about the rights of gays and those of religious believers demonstrate that these are not hypothetical fears. Consider the following:

* A San Diego County fertility doctor was sued for refusing to perform artificial insemination for one partner of a lesbian couple for religious reasons. The doctor referred the patient to a colleague, promised there would be no extra cost and offered to care for her during her subsequent pregnancy. The case is now before the California Supreme Court, and justices seemed hostile to the doctor's defense during oral arguments last month.

* Catholic Charities in Boston and San Francisco ended adoption services altogether rather than be compelled by anti-discrimination laws to place children with same-sex couples. In the Boston case, Catholic Charities was prepared to refer same-sex couples seeking to adopt to other providers, but that was not sufficient.

* A Lutheran school in Riverside County was sued in 2005 under California's Unruh Act (which forbids discrimination by businesses) for expelling two students who allegedly were having a lesbian relationship, in contravention of the religious views of the school. The case was thrown out in Superior Court in January, but the students have appealed.

* Public school officials in Poway, Calif., so far have successfully barred students from wearing T-shirts that register their opposition to homosexuality on campus. One lawsuit made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court before being dismissed (as moot, because the students had graduated), but another federal lawsuit is pending.

In each of these cases, and other similar ones, the government has acted in some way to forbid gays and lesbians from being demeaned. But allowing same-sex couples to force religious individuals or organizations to act out of accord with their faith is not cost-free either. Their dignity is no less affected. Unless claims rooted in equal protection under the law are to sweep away claims rooted in freedom of religion, a more sensitive balancing approach is essential.

This is particularly true in California. The state Supreme Court has treated such clashes as all-or-nothing propositions, and it seems to believe that once outside the church or synagogue doors, equality is always more important than religious liberty. California's high court, for example, denied a landlord's religion-based refusal to rent an apartment to an unmarried heterosexual couple, but Massachusetts' high court was willing to sanction such a refusal in cases in which alternative housing was readily available.

Given the array of church views on homosexuality, and the number of secular organizations offering social services to same-sex couples, allowing religious groups opposed to same-sex marriage to put that opposition into practice beyond the sanctuary is not likely to often seriously impede anyone.

Concurring in the May 15 California marriage judgment, Justice Joyce L. Kennard observed that the court's most important role was to preserve constitutional rights "from obliteration by the majority."

If past rulings are any guide, it is religious rights that are likely to be "obliterated" by an emerging popular majority supporting same-sex relationships -- and it seems unlikely that the California courts will intervene. That's a shame.

Marc D. Stern is general counsel of the American Jewish Congress and a contributor to a forthcoming book, "Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty."

The Supreme Court Goes to War

2008-06-17T11:58:00.000-07:00

The Supreme Court Goes to War
By JOHN YOOJune 17, 2008; Page A23

Last week's Supreme Court decision in Boumediene v. Bush has been painted as a stinging rebuke of the administration's antiterrorism policies. From the celebrations on most U.S. editorial pages, one might think that the court had stopped a dictator from trampling civil liberties. Boumediene did anything but. The 5-4 ruling is judicial imperialism of the highest order.

Boumediene should finally put to rest the popular myth that right-wing conservatives dominate the Supreme Court. Academics used to complain about the Rehnquist Court's "activism" for striking down minor federal laws on issues such as whether states are immune from damage lawsuits, or if Congress could ban handguns in school. Justice Anthony Kennedy -- joined by the liberal bloc of Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer -- saves his claims of judicial supremacy for the truly momentous: striking down a wartime statute, agreed upon by the president and large majorities of Congress, while hostilities are ongoing, no less.

First out the window went precedent. Under the writ of habeas corpus, Americans (and aliens on our territory) can challenge the legality of their detentions before a federal judge. Until Boumediene, the Supreme Court had never allowed an alien who was captured fighting against the U.S. to use our courts to challenge his detention.

In World War II, no civilian court reviewed the thousands of German prisoners housed in the U.S. Federal judges never heard cases from the Confederate prisoners of war held during the Civil War. In a trilogy of cases decided at the end of World War II, the Supreme Court agreed that the writ did not benefit enemy aliens held outside the U.S. In the months after the 9/11 attacks, we in the Justice Department relied on the Supreme Court's word when we evaluated Guantanamo Bay as a place to hold al Qaeda terrorists.

The Boumediene five also ignored the Constitution's structure, which grants all war decisions to the president and Congress. In 2004 and 2006, the Court tried to extend its reach to al Qaeda terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay. It was overruled twice by Congress, which has the power to define the jurisdiction of the federal courts. Congress established its own procedures for the appeal of detentions.

Incredibly, these five Justices have now defied the considered judgment of the president and Congress for a third time, all to grant captured al Qaeda terrorists the exact same rights as American citizens to a day in civilian court.

Judicial modesty, respect for the executive and legislative branches, and pure common sense weren't concerns here either. The Court refused to wait and see how Congress's 2006 procedures for the review of enemy combatant cases work. Congress gave Guantanamo Bay prisoners more rights than any prisoners of war, in any war, ever. The justices violated the classic rule of self-restraint by deciding an issue not yet before them.

Judicial micromanagement will now intrude into the conduct of war. Federal courts will jury-rig a process whose every rule second-guesses our soldiers and intelligence agents in the field. A judge's view on how much "proof" is needed to find that a "suspect" is a terrorist will become the standard applied on the battlefield. Soldiers will have to gather "evidence," which will have to be safeguarded until a court hearing, take statements from "witnesses," and probably provide some kind of Miranda-style warning upon capture. No doubt lawyers will swarm to provide representation for new prisoners.

So our fighting men and women now must add C.S.I. duties to that of capturing or killing the enemy. Nor will this be the end of it. Under Boumediene's claim of judicial supremacy, it is only a hop, skip and a jump from judges second-guessing whether someone is an enemy to second-guessing whether a soldier should have aimed and fired at him.

President Bush has declared, rightly, that the government will abide by the decision. No American lives are yet imperiled, as the courts will have to wrestle with the cases for months, if not years. But the upshot of Boumediene is that courts will release detainees from Guantanamo Bay, or the Defense Department will do so voluntarily, in the near future.

Just as there is always the chance of a mistaken detention, there is also the probability that we will release the wrong man. As Justice Antonin Scalia's dissenting opinion notes, at least 30 detainees released from Guantanamo Bay -- with the military, not the courts, making the call -- have returned to Afghanistan and Iraq battlefields.

The Boumediene majority has two hopes for getting away with its brazen power grab. It assumes that we have accepted judicial control over virtually every important policy in our society, from abortion and affirmative action to religion. Boumediene simply adds war to the list. The justices act like we are no longer really at war. Our homeland has not suffered another 9/11 attack for seven years, and our military and intelligence agencies have killed or captured much of al Qaeda's original leadership. What's left is on the run, due to the very terrorism policies under judicial attack.

Justice Kennedy and his majority assume that terrorism is some long-term social problem, like crime, so the standard methods of law enforcement can be used to deal with al Qaeda. Boumediene reflects a judicial desire to return to the comfortable, business-as-usual attitude that characterized U.S. antiterrorism policy up to Sept. 10, 2001.

The only real hope of returning the Supreme Court to its normal wartime role rests in the November elections. Sometimes it is difficult to tell Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain apart on issues like campaign finance or global warming. But they have real differences on Supreme Court appointments. Mr. Obama had nothing but praise for Boumediene, while Mr. McCain attacked it and promised to choose judges like Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, both dissenters.

Because of the advancing age of several justices (Justice Stevens is 88, and several others are above 70), the next president will be in a position to appoint a new Court that can reverse the damage done to the nation's security.

Mr. Yoo is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He was an official in the Justice Department from 2001-03.

A blind eye to Mugabe's reign of terror

2008-06-15T17:48:00.000-07:00

A blind eye to Mugabe's reign of terror
By Jeff Jacoby June 15, 2008

THE AGONIES being inflicted on Zimbabwe by its corrupt and brutal president are worsening. Earlier this month, the government of Robert Mugabe ordered international aid agencies to put a halt to the operations that have been keeping hundreds of thousands of Zimbabwe's people alive. With most of the country's population out of work and in dire poverty, the food and other humanitarian assistance provided by groups like CARE and Save the Children are more desperately needed than ever. By shutting them down, Mugabe and his henchmen were knowingly condemning countless vulnerable Zimbabweans to death.

Mugabe claimed, preposterously, that the humanitarian agencies were trying "to cripple Zimbabwe's economy" and bring about "illegal regime change."

Actually, it his own demented and dictatorial misrule that has destroyed the country, turning what was once a prosperous land into the world's most rapidly collapsing economy. And it is his determination to cling to power by any means - including starving and terrorizing voters who support a change in government - that has filled Zimbabwe not just with hunger and sickness but with savagery and bloodshed as well.

Less than two weeks remain until the presidential election runoff between Mugabe, Zimbabwe's autocratic president for the last 28 years, and the popular opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who leads the Movement for Democratic Change. Tsvangirai and the MDC won the first round of elections in March, and supporters of Mugabe and his ZANU-PF ruling party have been waging a vicious campaign of intimidation and violence against them ever since.

Opposition rallies have been obstructed by police, and Tsvangirai has repeatedly been detained for hours at a time. On Thursday, the MDC's secretary general, Tendai Biti, was arrested and charged with treason. Thousands of opposition supporters have been attacked, arrested, or forced to flee for their lives. Homes have been torched; scores of people have been killed.
International aid workers say they were shut down to keep them from witnessing the government's increasingly lethal crackdown.

The depravity of those attacks is suggested by UNICEF, which has said that 10,000 children have been driven from their homes by the violence, and that schools taken over by progovernment forces are being used as torture centers. Peter Osborne, in a dispatch from Zimbabwe for The Mail on Sunday, a British newspaper, itemizes the methods of abuse favored by Mugabe's men: pouring boiling plastic on victims' backs, burning their extremities, and administering whippings violent enough to transform an adult's buttocks into a horrifying "mess of raw flesh."

The latest description of Zimbabwe's reign of terror comes from Human Rights Watch, which in a new report documents numerous cases of brutal repression by Mugabe supporters.

"ZANU-PF and its allies have . . . established torture camps and organized abusive 're-education' meetings around the country to compel MDC supporters into voting for Mugabe," the report says. Hundreds of voters have been flogged with sticks, whips, bicycle chains, and metal bars. In one "re-education" meeting May 5, "ZANU-PF officials and 'war veterans' beat six men to death and tortured another 70 men and women, including a 76-year-old woman publicly thrashed in front of assembled villagers."

In other meetings, military officers have threatened to kill anyone who votes for the opposition. "Each villager would be given a bullet to hold in their hands. Then a soldier would say, 'If you vote for MDC in the presidential runoff election, you have seen the bullets, we have enough for each one of you, so beware.' "

Mugabe's savage onslaught is likely to achieve its goal. Faced with starvation, dispossession, and threats of revenge, how many Zimbabweans will muster the courage to stand against him?
But why do the rest of us do nothing? Why is the free world so indifferent to the enormities committed by Mugabe and his bullies? Where are the worldwide demonstrations outside Zimbabwe's embassies? Where are the international boycotts, the UN resolutions, the presidential and papal condemnations? Where is the International Criminal Court indictment of Mugabe for his long career of murder, torture, and other crimes against humanity?

Let us be honest: If the people of Zimbabwe were being terrorized by a white despot - if it were a white ruling party whose goons were beating them and burning their homes - the whole world would be aroused on their behalf. Surely they deserve no less just because their oppressor is black.

Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com.

World War II was unnecessary??? WRONG!!!

2008-06-15T17:39:00.000-07:00

I must ask, is there any one who does not believe Pat Buchanan is a moronic idiot?

A War Worth Fighting
Revisionists say that World War II was unnecessary. They're wrong.
Christopher Hitchens
NEWSWEEK
Updated: 3:36 PM ET Jun 14, 2008

Is there any one shared principle or assumption on which our political consensus rests, any value judgment on which we are all essentially agreed? Apart from abstractions such as a general belief in democracy, one would probably get the widest measure of agreement for the proposition that the second world war was a "good war" and one well worth fighting. And if we possess one indelible image of political immorality and cowardice, it is surely the dismal tap-tap-tap of Neville Chamberlain's umbrella as he turned from signing the Czechs away to Adolf Hitler at Munich. He hoped by this humiliation to avert war, but he was fated to bring his countrymen war on top of humiliation. To the conventional wisdom add the titanic figure of Winston Churchill as the emblem of oratorical defiance and the Horatius who, until American power could be mobilized and deployed, alone barred the bridge to the forces of unalloyed evil. When those forces lay finally defeated, their ghastly handiwork was uncovered to a world that mistakenly thought it had already "supped full of horrors." The stark evidence of the Final Solution has ever since been enough to dispel most doubts about, say, the wisdom or morality of carpet-bombing German cities.

Historical scholarship has nevertheless offered various sorts of revisionist interpretation of all this. Niall Ferguson, for one, has proposed looking at the two world wars as a single conflict, punctuated only by a long and ominous armistice. British conservative historians like Alan Clark and John Charmley have criticized Churchill for building his career on war, for ignoring openings to peace and for eventually allowing the British Empire to be squandered and broken up. But Pat Buchanan, twice a candidate for the Republican nomination and in 2000 the standard-bearer for the Reform Party who ignited a memorable "chad" row in Florida, has now condensed all the antiwar arguments into one. His case, made in his recently released "Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War," is as follows:

That Germany was faced with encirclement and injustice in both 1914 and 1939.
Britain in both years ought to have stayed out of quarrels on the European mainland.
That Winston Churchill was the principal British warmonger on both occasions.
The United States was needlessly dragged into war on both occasions.
That the principal beneficiaries of this were Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong.
That the Holocaust of European Jewry was as much the consequence of an avoidable war as it was of Nazi racism.

Buchanan does not need to close his book with an invocation of a dying West, as if to summarize this long recital of Spenglerian doomsaying. He's already opened with the statement, "All about us we can see clearly now that the West is passing away." The tropes are familiar—a loss of will and confidence, a collapse of the desire to reproduce with sufficient vigor, a preference for hedonism over the stern tasks of rulership and dominion and pre-eminence. It all sounds oddly … Churchillian. The old lion himself never tired of striking notes like these, and was quite unembarrassed by invocations of race and nation and blood. Yet he is the object of Buchanan's especial dislike and contempt, because he had a fondness for "wars of choice."

This term has enjoyed a recent vogue because of the opposition to the war in Iraq, an opposition in which Buchanan has played a vigorous role. Descending as he does from the tradition of Charles Lindbergh's America First movement, which looked for (and claimed to have found) a certain cosmopolitan lobby behind FDR's willingness to involve the United States in global war, Buchanan is the most trenchant critic of what he considers our fondest national illusion, and his book has the feel and stamp of a work that he has been readying all his life.

But he faces an insuperable difficulty, or rather difficulties. If you want to demonstrate that Germany was more the victim than the aggressor in 1914, then you must confine your account (as Buchanan does) to the very minor legal question of Belgian neutrality and of whether Britain absolutely had to go to war on the Belgian side. (For what it may be worth, I think that Britain wasn't obliged to do so and should not have done.) But the rest of the kaiser's policy, most of it completely omitted by Buchanan, shows that Germany was looking for a chance for war all over the globe, and was increasingly the prisoner of a militaristic ruling caste at home. The kaiser picked a fight with Britain by backing the white Dutch Afrikaner rebels in South Africa and by butchering the Ovambo people of what is now Namibia. He looked for trouble with the French by abruptly sending warships to Agadir in French Morocco, which nearly started the first world war in 1905, and with Russia by backing Austria-Hungary's insane ultimatum to the Serbs after the June 1914 assassinations in Sarajevo. Moreover, and never mentioned by Buchanan at all, the kaiser visited Damascus and paid for the rebuilding of the tomb of Saladin, announced himself a sympathizer of Islam and a friend of jihad, commissioned a Berlin-to-Baghdad railroad for the projection of German arms into the Middle East and Asia and generally ranged himself on the side of an aggressive Ottoman imperialism, which later declared a "holy war" against Britain. To suggest that he felt unjustly hemmed in by the Royal Navy's domination of the North Sea while he was conducting such statecraft is absurd.

And maybe a little worse than absurd, as when Buchanan writes: "From 1871 to 1914, the Germans under Bismarck and the Kaiser did not fight a single war. While Britain, Russia, Italy, Turkey, Japan, Spain, and the United States were all involved in wars, Germany and Austria had clean records." I am bound to say that I find this creepy. The start of the "clean record" has to be in 1871, because that's the year that Prussia humbled France in the hideous Franco-Prussian War that actually annexed two French provinces to Germany. In the intervening time until 1914, Germany was seizing colonies in Africa and the Pacific, cementing secret alliances with Austria and trying to build up a naval fleet that could take on the British one. No wonder the kaiser wanted a breathing space.

Now, this is not to say that Buchanan doesn't make some sound points about the secret diplomacy of Old Europe that was so much to offend Woodrow Wilson. And he is excellent on the calamitous Treaty of Versailles that succeeded only—as was noted by John Maynard Keynes at the time—in creating the conditions for another world war, or for part two of the first one. He wears his isolationism proudly: "The Senate never did a better day's work than when it rejected the Treaty of Versailles and refused to enter a League of Nations where American soldiers would be required to give their lives enforcing the terms of so dishonorable and disastrous a peace."
Actually, no soldier of any nation ever lost so much as a fingernail in the service of the League, which was in any case doomed by American abstention, and it's exactly that consideration which invalidates the second half of Buchanan's argument, which is that a conflict with Hitler's Germany both could and should have been averted. (There is a third Buchanan sub-argument, mostly made by implication, which is that the democratic West should have allied itself with Hitler, at least passively, until he had destroyed the Soviet Union.) Again, in order to believe his thesis one has to be prepared to argue that Hitler was a rational actor with intelligible and negotiable demands, whose declared, demented ambitions in "Mein Kampf" were presumably to be disregarded as mere propaganda. In case after case Buchanan shows the abysmal bungling of British and French diplomacy—making promises to Czechoslovakia that could never have been kept and then, adding injury to insult, breaking those promises at the first opportunity. Or offering a guarantee to Poland (a country that had gleefully taken part in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia) that Hitler well knew was not backed by any credible military force.

Buchanan is at his best here, often causing one to whistle at the sheer cynicism and stupidity of the British Tories. In the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of June 1935, for example, they astounded the French and Italians and Russians by unilaterally agreeing to permit Hitler to build a fleet one third the size of the Royal Navy and a submarine fleet of the same size as the British! Not only was this handing the Third Reich the weapon it would soon press to Britain's throat, it was convincing all Britain's potential allies that they would be much better off making their own bilateral deals with Berlin. Which is essentially what happened.

But Buchanan keeps forgetting that this criminal foolishness is exactly the sort of policy that he elsewhere recommends. In his view, after all, Germany had been terribly wronged by Versailles and it would have been correct to redraw the frontiers in Germany's favor and soothe its hurt feelings (which is what the word "appeasement" originally meant). Meanwhile we should have encouraged Hitler's hostility to Bolshevism and discreetly rearmed in case he should also need to be contained. This might perhaps have worked if Germany had been governed by a right-wing nationalist party that had won a democratic vote. However, in point of fact Germany was governed by an ultra-rightist, homicidal, paranoid maniac who had begun by demolishing democracy in Germany itself, who believed that his fellow countrymen were a superior race and who attributed all the evils in the world to a Jewish conspiracy. It is possible to read whole chapters of Buchanan's book without having to bear these salient points in mind. (I should say that I intend this observation as a criticism.) As with his discussion of pre-1914 Germany, he commits important sins of omission that can only be the outcome of an ideological bias. Barely mentioned except in passing is the Spanish Civil War, for example, where for three whole years between 1936 and 1939 Germany and Italy lent troops and weapons in a Fascist invasion of a sovereign European nation that had never threatened or "encircled" them in any way. Buchanan's own political past includes overt sympathy with General Franco, which makes this skating-over even less forgivable than it might otherwise be.

On the one occasion where Spain does get a serious mention, it illustrates the opposite point to the one Buchanan thinks he's making. The British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Neville Henderson, is explaining why Hitler didn't believe that Britain and France would fight over Prague: "[Hitler] argued as follows: Would the German nation willingly go to war for General Franco in Spain, if France intervened on the side of the Republican government? The answer that he gave himself is that it would not, and he was consequently convinced that no democratic French government would be strong enough to lead the French nation to war for the Czechs."

In this instance, it must be admitted, Hitler was being a rational actor. And his admission—which Buchanan in his haste to indict Anglo-French policy completely fails to notice—is that if he himself had been resisted earlier and more determinedly, he would have been compelled to give ground. Thus the whole and complete lesson is not that the second world war was an avoidable "war of choice." It is that the Nazis could and should have been confronted before they had fully rearmed and had begun to steal the factories and oilfields and coal mines and workers of neighboring countries. As Gen. Douglas MacArthur once put it, all military defeats can be summarized in the two words: "Too late." The same goes for political disasters.

As the book develops, Buchanan begins to unmask his true colors more and more. It is one thing to make the case that Germany was ill-used, and German minorities harshly maltreated, as a consequence of the 1914 war of which Germany's grim emperor was one of the prime instigators. It's quite another thing to say that the Nazi decision to embark on a Holocaust of European Jewry was "not a cause of the war but an awful consequence of the war." Not only is Buchanan claiming that Hitler's fanatical racism did not hugely increase the likelihood of war, but he is also making the insinuation that those who wanted to resist him are the ones who are equally if not indeed mainly responsible for the murder of the Jews! This absolutely will not do. He adduces several quotations from Hitler and Goebbels, starting only in 1939 and ending in 1942, screaming that any outbreak of war to counter Nazi ambitions would lead to a terrible vengeance on the Jews. He forgets—at least I hope it's only forgetfulness—that such murderous incitement began long, long before Hitler had even been a lunatic-fringe candidate in the 1920s. This "timeline" is as spurious, and as sinister, as the earlier dates, so carefully selected by Buchanan, that tried to make Prussian imperialism look like a victim rather than a bully.

One closing example will demonstrate the corruption and prejudice of Buchanan's historical "method." He repeatedly argues that Churchill did not appreciate Hitler's deep-seated and respectful Anglophilia, and he continually blames the war on several missed opportunities to take the Führer's genially outstretched hand. Indeed, he approvingly quotes several academic sources who agree with him that Hitler invaded the Soviet Union only in order to change Britain's mind. Suppose that Buchanan is in fact correct about this. Could we have a better definition of derangement and megalomania than the case of a dictator who overrules his own generals and invades Russia in wintertime, mainly to impress the British House of Commons? (Incidentally, or rather not incidentally, it was precisely that hysterical aggression that curtain-raised the organized deportation and slaughter of the Jews. But it's fatuous to suppose that, without that occasion, the Nazis would not have found another one.)

It is of course true that millions of other people lost their lives in this conflict, often in unprecedentedly horrible ways, and that new tyrannies were imposed on the countries—Poland, Czechoslovakia and China most notably—that had been the pretexts for a war against fascism. But is this not to think in the short term? Unless or until Nazism had been vanquished, millions of people were most certainly going to be either massacred or enslaved in any case. Whereas today, all the way from Portugal to the Urals, the principle of human rights and popular sovereignty is at least the norm, and the ideas of racism and totalitarianism have been fairly conclusively and historically discredited. Would a frightened compromise with racist totalitarianism have produced a better result?

Winston Churchill may well have been on the wrong side about India, about the gold standard, about the rights of labor and many other things, and he may have had a lust for war, but we may also be grateful that there was one politician in the 1930s who found it intolerable even to breathe the same air, or share the same continent or planet, as the Nazis. (Buchanan of course makes plain that he rather sympathizes with Churchill about the colonies, and quarrels only with his "finest hour." This is grotesque.) As he closes his argument, Buchanan again refuses to disguise his allegiance. "Though derided as isolationists," he writes, "the America First patriots kept the United States out of the war until six months after Hitler had invaded Russia." If you know anything at all about what happened to the population of those territories in those six months, it is rather hard to be proud that America was neutral. But this is a price that Buchanan is quite willing to pay.

I myself have written several criticisms of the cult of Churchill, and of the uncritical way that it has been used to stifle or cudgel those with misgivings. ("Adlai," said John F. Kennedy of his outstanding U.N. ambassador during the Bay of Pigs crisis, "wanted a Munich.") Yet the more the record is scrutinized and re-examined, the more creditable it seems that at least two Western statesmen, for widely different reasons, regarded coexistence with Nazism as undesirable as well as impossible. History may judge whether the undesirability or the impossibility was the more salient objection, but any attempt to separate the two considerations is likely to result in a book that stinks, as this one unmistakably does.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/141501

Reporting for Duty -- Not

2008-06-15T17:33:00.000-07:00

June 15, 2008
Reporting for Duty -- Not
By Debra Saunders

Iraq isn't the big story this month. Gas prices are. In May, the Associated Press reported, U.S. military deaths plunged to the lowest monthly level in four years and civilian casualties were down sharply, too. Gasoline also hit $4 a gallon. And you don't see as many "No war for oil" bumper stickers as you used to.

The success of the Bush surge -- with Iraqi forces having led offensives in three major cities and taking on Shiite militias -- has been greeted in America with a collective shrug. "My perhaps overly cynical view is that it's probably too much to hope for -- a lot of good news stories coming out of Iraq," U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker said during a recent conference call. But also, with the al-Maliki government clearing once dangerous areas and violence dropping, "Iraq no longer occupies the status as the overarching, all-encompassing crisis that requires full national attention."

Reporters based in Iraq have seen improvements. NBC News' Richard Engel told the New York Observer about a recent trip to Najaf, "I was walking around the city doing interviews, without any kind of security or back up at all. That felt great. I hadn't done that in years. A Chinese restaurant, takeout, just opened up down the street from our bureau. There were no businesses opening in '06 and '07. People are getting out more. You see more people on the streets going to markets. When I go to do interviews, I can stay longer."

And yet, there is a "marked drop-off in the appetite for stories from Iraq," ABC news' Terry McCarthy told the Observer. "That's partly due to the election, partly because of the fatigue, and partly because things have started to go right here. The spectacular car bombs, the massive attacks, you just don't see them anymore. A drip, drip story that's getting a little better day by day doesn't make a headline."

CNN's Michael Ware calls it "audience fatigue." Other journalists, who have risked their lives covering the war, complain that Americans aren't paying attention to their stories on Iraq.
If reporters think their work is unappreciated, imagine how U.S. troops in Iraq feel. They're working miracles -- to insufficient applause.

Four years ago, before the U.S. troop death toll hit 1,000 in September 2004, the war was the moral issue. When liberal Democrats were trying to take over Congress in 2006, they used the war to clobber President Bush and told America that if they were in power, the war would end. Well, they took control of Congress, and the war continues. So now there are fewer political points to be won banging the war.

As of Thursday, 4,098 U.S. troops had died in the Iraq war. Yet Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's No. 1 issue is the U.S. economy. When the senator talks about the war, he often does so in terms of the $12 billion spent each month in Iraq. Clearly, Team Obama figures that it's not the toll of American blood but the price tag that enrages voters in this short-attention span nation.

It seems the better the war goes, the less interest some partisans show in Iraq. Their attention wanders if they can't play the blame game and chant, "Bush lied."

Ah, and this time, the critics were wrong when they argued the surge could not work. Obama was wrong, and, face it, opposing the surge was the politically easy thing to do.

Conversely, John McCain supported the surge -- and he did so in opposition to well-wishers and pundits who argued that his support for the war would doom his campaign.

So Team Obama is reduced to nitpicking at McCain. When McCain told NBC's "Today" show that it's "not too important" when U.S. troops are brought home -- "We will be able to withdraw, but the key to it is that we don't want any more Americans in harm's way" -- Obama surrogates pounced.

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., called McCain "unbelievably out of touch with the needs and concerns of Americans, particularly of the families of the troops that are over there." Sure, McCain spent five years as a prisoner of war in the Hanoi Hilton. His 19-year-old son, Jimmy, just returned from his first tour in Iraq and another son, Jack, is in the U.S. Naval Academy. Yet somehow Team Obama paints McCain as out-of-touch with military families.

Four years ago, when Iraq was center stage and Democrats thought opposition to the war would lead to electoral victory, Kerry led off his address to the Democratic National Committee with a salute as he announced, "I'm John Kerry and I'm reporting for duty."

In 2008, now that prices at the pump are his big issue and Iraq is framed as an economic issue, what will Obama say: You deserve a break today?

Right-wingers really are nicer people

2008-06-15T17:25:00.000-07:00

Don't listen to the liberals - Right-wingers really are nicer people, latest research shows
By Peter Schweizer
Last updated at 10:25 PM on 14th June 2008

George Orwell once wrote that politics was closely related to social identity. 'One sometimes gets the impression,' he wrote in The Road To Wigan Pier, 'that the mere words socialism and communism draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, nature-cure quack, pacifist and feminist in England'.

Orwell was making an observation. But today a whole body of academic research shows he was correct: your politics influence the manner in which you live your life. And the news is not so good for those on the political Left.

There is plenty of data that shows that Right-wingers are happier, more generous to charities, less likely to commit suicide - and even hug their children more than those on the Left.
Come on, you miserable Lefties...

Prove Peter Schweizer wrong and tell us below why Left-wingers are really more lovable. The three best replies will win a bottle of Bollinger champagne and a donation of £100 to the Red Cross appeal to help Burma cyclone victims...

In my experience, they are also more honest, friendly and well-adjusted.

Much of this springs from the destructive influence of modern liberal ideas.

In the Sixties, we saw the beginning of a narcissism and self-absorption that gripped the Left and has not let go.

The full-scale embrace of the importance of self-awareness, self-discovery and being 'true' to oneself, along with the idea that the State should care for the less fortunate, has created a swathe of Left-wing people who want to outsource their obligations to others.

The statistics I base this on come from the General Social Survey, America's premier social research database, but they are just as relevant to the UK, as I believe political belief systems drive one's attitudes, regardless of where you happen to live.

Those surveyed were asked: 'Is it your obligation to care for a seriously injured/ill spouse or parent, or should you give care only if you really want to?' Of those describing themselves as 'conservative', 71 per cent said it was. Only 46 per cent of those on the Left agreed.

To the question: 'Do you get happiness by putting someone else's happiness ahead of your own?', 55 per cent of those who said they were 'very conservative' said Yes, compared with 20 per cent of those who were 'very liberal'.

It's been my experience that conservatives like to talk about things outside of themselves while progressives like to discuss themselves: how they are feeling and what their desires are. That might make for a good therapy session but it's not much fun over a long dinner.

Research also indicates those on the Left are less interested in getting married: 30 per cent of those who were 'very liberal' said it was important, in contrast to 65 per cent of Right-wingers.
The same holds true when the question of having children arises. Progressive American cities such as San Francisco and Seattle have become 'childless liberal boutique' cities, according to Joel Kotkin, an expert on urban development.

While 69 per cent of those who called themselves 'very conservative' said it was important for them to have children, only 38 per cent of corresponding liberals agreed.

Many on the Left proudly proclaim themselves 'child-free'. While some do not want children on ecological grounds, much has to do with the fact that they simply don't want the responsibility of having a child.

When asked by the World Values Survey whether parents should sacrifice their own well-being for those of their children, those on the Left were nearly twice as likely to say No.

'I'll have babies if you pay for them,' one Leftie blogger said on the social networking website yelp.com.

Billionaire Ted Turner, a self-described socialist, publicly regrets that he had five children. 'If I was doing it over again, I wouldn't have had that many,' he says. 'But I can't shoot them now they're here.'

All of this should not come as a surprise to anyone watching the drift of progressive thinking over the past 40 years.

Starting with British anthropologist Edmund Leach, who said: 'Far from being the basis of a good society, the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all its discontents', feminists, progressives and others have seen the family as an oppressive force.
Feminist Gloria Steinem says on behalf of women: 'The truth is, finding ourselves brings more excitement and wellbeing than anything romance can offer.'

Linda Hirshman tells women not to have more than one baby so they can concentrate on a career. 'Find the money,' she advises. Ah, the important things in life.

Even when they do have children, research carried out at Princeton University shows liberals hug them less than conservatives. My wife thinks they're too busy hugging trees.

Most surprising of all is reputable research showing those on the Left are more interested in money than Right-wingers.

Both the World Values Survey and the General Social Survey reveal Left-wingers are more likely to rate 'high income' as an important factor in choosing a job, more likely to say 'after good health, money is the most important thing', and agree with the statement 'there are no right or wrong ways to make money'.

You don't need to explain that to Doug Urbanski, the former business manager for Left-wing firebrand and documentary-maker Michael Moore. 'He [Moore] is more money-obsessed than anyone I have known - and that's saying a lot,' claims Urbanski.

How is it possible that those who seem to renounce the money culture are more interested in money?

One might suggest those on the Left are simply being more honest when they answer such questions. The problem is that there is no evidence to support this.

Instead, I believe the results have more to do with the powerful appeal of progressive thinking.
Many on the Left apparently believe that espousing liberal ideals is a 'get out of jail free' card that inoculates them from the evils of the money culture.

Cherie Blair, for example, never lets her self-proclaimed socialist attitudes stop her making money. She is even willing to be paid (as she was in Australia) to appear at charity events.
Such progressives, sure that they are not overly interested in money and possessions, believe they are then free to acquire them.

Studies also indicate that those on the Left are less likely to give to charity or to volunteer their time to charity. When they do support charity, it is often less the sort of organisation that helps people and more one that advocates political action.

Uber-progressive Barbra Streisand gives lots of money to charity but the largest recipients are not organisations that feed the hungry - the cash goes to advocacy organisations such as The Bill Clinton Foundation.

Similarly, Michael Moore gives to film festivals and elite cultural institutions such as the Lincoln Center - but barely a penny goes to needy people.

Progressives see economic equality as the highest form of social justice, so they have become obsessed with questions of income inequality.

Can there be any surprise then that those on the Left tend to be more envious and jealous of successful people? That's what studies indicate.

Professor James Lindgren, of Northwestern University in Chicago, found those who favour the redistribution of wealth are more envious than those who do not.

Scholars at Oxford and Warwick Universities found the same sort of behaviour when they conducted an experiment.

Setting up a computer game that allowed people to accumulate money, they gave participants the option to spend some of their own money in order to take away more from someone else.
The result? Those who considered themselves 'egalitarians' (i.e. Left of centre) were much more willing to give up some of their own money if it meant taking more money from someone else.
Much of the desire to distribute wealth and higher taxation is motivated by envy - the desire to take more from someone else - and bitterness.

The culprit here is not those on the Left who embrace progressive ideas but the ideas themselves.

As John Maynard Keynes reminds us: 'The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and wrong, are more powerful than commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else.' Or, as the American theorist Richard Weaver once declared: 'Ideas have consequences.'

And it seems that today modern progressive ideas can often bring out the worst in people.

• Peter Schweizer is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His book, Makers And Takers, is published by Doubleday.

The Gitmo Nightmare What the Supreme Court has wrought.

2008-06-15T17:20:00.000-07:00

The Gitmo Nightmare
What the Supreme Court has wrought.
by Matthew Continetti
06/23/2008, Volume 013, Issue 39

It's hard to summarize a decision as long and complicated as the Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling last week in Boumediene v. Bush. But we can try. Unprecedented. Reckless. Harmful. Breathtakingly condescending.

The Court, in an opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, ruled that non-citizens captured abroad and held in a military installation overseas--the remaining 270 or so inmates at the terrorist prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba--have the same constitutional right as U.S. citizens to challenge their detention in court. Furthermore, the current procedures by which a detainee's status is reviewed--procedures fashioned in good faith and at the Court's behest by a bipartisan congressional majority in consultation with the commander in chief during a time of war--are unconstitutional.

The upshot is the prisoners at Camp Delta can now file habeas corpus petitions in U.S. district courts seeking reprieve. Hence lawyers, judges, and leftwing interest groups will have real influence over the conduct of the war on terror. Call it the Gitmo nightmare.

As it happens, some of the most effective arguments against Boumediene come from the decision itself. For example, Justice Kennedy wrote that in cases involving terrorist detention, "proper deference must be accorded to the political branches." Then he overrode them.
Kennedy further noted that "unlike the President and some designated Members of Congress, neither the Members of this Court nor most federal judges begin the day with briefings that may describe new and serious threats to our Nation and its people." They had better start, because the courts are about to be flooded with petitions to release terrorists sworn to America's destruction.

He also wrote that now the "political branches can engage in a genuine debate about how best to preserve constitutional values while protecting the Nation from terrorism." But that is precisely what Congress and the president were doing when they passed legislation laying out a process for detainee review, one that in fact addressed concerns previously raised by the Court. The Court now says this process is inadequate. What would be adequate? Kennedy's answer: I'll get back to you on that.

In his opinion, Kennedy conceded that "before today the Court has never held that non-citizens detained by our Government in territory over which another country maintains de jure sovereignty have any rights under our Constitution." Inventing rights seems to be what some of today's Supreme Court justices do best. In 1950 the Court ruled in Johnson v. Eisentrager that foreign nationals held in a military prison on foreign soil (in that case, Germany) had no habeas rights. But, without overruling Eisentrager, Kennedy said the Guantánamo detainees are different from the German prisoners 58 years ago.

Why? Kennedy wrote that Eisentrager had a unique set of "practical considerations," and the United States did not have "de facto" sovereignty over Germany as it does over Guantánamo Bay. That territory, "while technically not part of the United States, is under the complete and total control of our Government." But these slippery distinctions only raise more questions. Doesn't the United States government exercise "complete and total control" over its military and intelligence facilities worldwide? If so, what's to stop foreign combatants held in those locations from asserting their habeas rights?

And what precise form will these habeas hearings take? What standards of judgment are the courts to apply? Will plaintiffs' attorneys be allowed to go venue shopping and file their petitions in the most liberal courts in the nation? Will they conduct discovery? Will they recall soldiers and intelligence agents from the field to testify? What happens when the available evidence does not satisfy judges who are used to adjudicating under the exclusionary rule? Will the cases be thrown out? Will the detainees be freed, able to return to the battlefield? That, after all, is what some 30 released detainees seem already to have done.

The Supreme Court does not worry about such things. Instead it piously reminded the people that "the laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times." No kidding. Has anyone ever argued otherwise?

Kennedy's sanctimony points to the ultimate tragedy of the Boumediene mess. In their visceral, myopic hatred of President Bush, liberals will see the ruling as a blow to the president and not the broad, foolish, and dangerous judicial power grab it is. The New York Times's editorialists wrote that "compliant Republicans and frightened Democrats" allowed Bush to deny foreign enemy combatants during wartime "the protections of justice, democracy and plain human decency."

Give us a break. One day soon Bush will be gone. But thanks to the Court, we'll still all be living the Gitmo nightmare.

--Matthew Continetti, for the Editors
© Copyright 2008, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.

It Isn't Tilting in The Same Old Ways

2008-06-15T17:16:00.000-07:00

It Isn't Tilting in The Same Old Ways
By Dahlia Lithwick
Sunday, June 15, 2008; B01

With just two weeks left in the Supreme Court's term, everything we thought we knew about the Roberts court seems wrong. The question now is: Who plans to tell the presidential candidates?
Both Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain are finally beginning to campaign as though the composition of the Supreme Court actually matters. And that's a good thing, because -- the American public's lack of interest notwithstanding -- the court counts as much as almost every other issue facing the voters in November. Assuming that you work, worship, vote, parent, own property the government might covet or occasionally have sex, the high court will intimately affect your life. This is particularly true now that the average justice is older than Mount Rushmore and the next president may well have two or three new court picks in the space of a few years.

But it's hard to generate much public hysteria over nameless, faceless future jurists deciding nameless, faceless future cases. And so the court plods along undisturbed, like the tortoise, while presidential elections zoom by like the hare.

But the dialogue about the judiciary now taking place between the two presidential nominees is antiquated. (Bear in mind that in picking their way among the minefields of abortion, affirmative action, same-sex marriage and school prayer, presidential candidates tend to discuss the courts only in code.) Both McCain and Obama have now taken predictable stands on the Supreme Court of their dreams. In a speech last month, McCain offered a jeremiad about the evils of "judicial activism," deriding the "common and systematic abuse of our federal courts by the people we entrust with judicial power." Last March, Obama offered up his own judicial ideal: a judge with "enough empathy, enough feeling, for what ordinary people are going through."

The main problem: Both McCain and Obama start from the premise that the Supreme Court is tidily balanced among four conservative judicial minimalists, four liberal judicial empaths and the inscrutable Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, swinging away at the center. This is a useful model for trying to stir up public concern about the court's composition, and the decision in at least one blockbuster case -- last Thursday's ruling that the Bush administration is violating the constitutional rights of foreign terrorism suspects being held indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- did indeed go down along the traditional lines. Still, the current term is rapidly proving the simple conservatives-vs.-liberals construct to be a thing of the past. This court term has revealed a series of patterns that aren't so easy to neatly file away: conservative moderation, moderate conservatism, liberal pragmatism and pragmatic minimalism. And that's just for starters.

Court watchers have stood dumbfounded all spring as the high court rejected and renounced the 5 to 4 conservative-liberal splits that seemed to have calcified after last term's bitter divisions. The end of June 2007 saw a full third of the court's cases decided by a 5 to 4 margin; as of this writing, the court has decided just four cases that way this year. At this point last year, Kennedy had cast his vote with the prevailing five justices every single time. But this term has seen a slew of ideology-busting unanimous, 7 to 2, and 6 to 3 decisions, which have not just baffled the experts but also made the usual end-of-term chatter about "activists," "minimalists" and "strict constructionists" sound as old-fashioned as the Bee Gees.

Last week, the high court handed down five more unanimous opinions. The week before, it served up a 5 to 4 split decision in which the dissenters included the usually conservative Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., his fellow Bush appointee Samuel A. Alito Jr., the moderate Kennedy and the liberal Stephen G. Breyer. We've passed the point of crying "strange bedfellows" at the Supreme Court. As of this month, conservative and liberal justices are routinely sharing a toothbrush.

So what has happened? Have the liberals caved, are the conservatives becoming more restrained, or is something else afoot? Most court watchers have been astonished to witness the liberal lion, John Paul Stevens, voting with the conservative bloc in cases upholding Kentucky's lethal-injection process, Indiana's rigid voter-identification law and Texas's fast-and-loose treatment of a Mexican on death row. (One commentator joked that 2007 might have been the year in which Stevens remembered that "he is a Republican.") Linda Greenhouse, who covers the court for the New York Times, speculated that the court's liberals may be joining with the conservatives to dilute the force of right-leaning decisions, extracting "modest concessions as the price of helping the conservatives avoid another parade of 5-to-4 decisions."

Perhaps all the newfound bipartisanship is explained by the fact that it's an election year, putting the justices on their best behavior. And of course, there are still a couple of weeks left in the term, which might not turn out to be so harmonious after all; the potentially explosive cases still pending include the decades-in-the-making D.C. gun rights case and a fight over expanding the death penalty to rapists. But here's one more hypothesis to explain the implosion of judicial ideology at the high court this year: It may simply have to do with the strange physics of time.
Last year, dissenting in the school affirmative-action case, the liberal Breyer lashed out at the slash-and-burn tendencies of the new conservative majority: "It is not often that so few have so quickly changed so much." Breyer was chiding the conservatives for their push to eviscerate decades' worth of abortion, affirmative-action and church-state doctrine in a week-long binge at the end of June. But even before Breyer's outburst, a key rift had been carved into the court's right wing: Alito and Roberts were declining to go as far as Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas wanted to in several big cases that logically demanded that established precedents be overturned. In a church-state case last term, Alito wrote cryptically that he would not overrule a key precedent but "leave [it] as we found it." That language seems to have enraged Scalia, who dressed down Alito and Roberts for clinging to the empty shells of old cases. In yet another case, Scalia accused the two young conservative justices of "faux judicial restraint." The seeds of a split between two generations of conservatives had been sown: The younger justices opted for the tortoise, while their impatient elders chose the hare. Scalia and Thomas call to mind the famous quip about Gladstone being an old man in a hurry.

The urgency that Thomas and Scalia feel about "fixing" constitutional doctrine in big, sweeping ways may simply be caused by their lengthy tenures on the bench. Scalia and Thomas have served for 22 and 17 years respectively. Roberts and Alito have each served just over two. The young Turks are not sitting on decades of accumulated frustration and outrage. (Scalia barely bothers to hide his scorn for his lily-livered colleagues these days; he sneered in his dissent that last Thursday's Guantanamo ruling "will almost certainly cause more Americans to get killed.") But Roberts and Alito can afford to move slowly, with an eye toward how things look to observers already sourly suspicious -- especially after the travesty of Bush v. Gore-- that the court has become crassly political. And with the court hearing fewer cases every year -- it heard just 70 this year, its shortest docket in modern history -- the decision to slow the pace of change is probably a savvy one.

At the liberal end of the spectrum, Breyer and Stevens appear increasingly inclined to work with the court's conservatives to sidestep the trap of a 5 to 4 stalemate. Again, that may have more to do with age than you'd think. At 88, Stevens may well be the justice closest to retirement, and he may not to want to end his brilliant career with a series of brokenhearted dissents. At 69, Breyer may feel -- much like Alito and Roberts -- that he can afford to be a bit patient. He may also be learning the lesson that Sandra Day O'Connor taught in recent years: You can catch more votes with honey than with vinegar.

But the notion that time heals all wounds may mask what really lies beneath the new compromises at the high court. Consider how these new majorities of six, seven or eight justices are actually forged. Time and again, the justices have converged around the narrowest possible reading of a case -- in effect using the decision as a placeholder to say, "We'll decide the present case on very narrow facts, but we reserve the right to revisit the underlying issues in years to come."

This approach certainly represents judicial minimalism, or humility, and it was the young chief justice's confirmation promise to the American people. But it also does very little to guide future litigants. It's a deflection -- a constitutional push of the pause button that allows legislatures and the electorate to catch up. This new conciliation is a way for the younger justices to defer ideological disagreements and for the aging justices to pass the baton to their more energetic successors. And it may simply reflect an understanding on the part of various justices that some of them have big dreams but very little time remaining, while others have big dreams and all the time in the world.

Go to do source: Justice Scalia

2008-06-13T17:19:00.000-07:00

Normally, I post an interesting article that I agree with in whole or in part regarding an issue of the day. Given the disastrous Supreme Court decision of June 12, 2008, I simply could not find an article that adequately places the majority decision in proper perspective. Who better to articulate this travesty then Justice Scalia in his dissenting opinion?

Unfortunately, most Americans do not fully appreciate the magnitude of the coming presidential election on the future of the Supreme Court. Senator Obama welcomed and heralded this decision. Senator McCain called it one of the worst decisions ever. With possibly four Justices being replaced within the next four years, it is not the economy, it is not Iraq, it is the Supreme Court stupid!

Justice Scalia, with whom The Chief Justice, Justice Thomas, and Justice Alito join, dissenting.

Today, for the first time in our Nation's history, the Court confers a constitutional right to habeas corpus on alien enemies detained abroad by our military forces in the course of an ongoing war. The Chief Justice's dissent, which I join, shows that the procedures prescribed by Congress in the Detainee Treatment Act provide the essential protections that habeas corpus guarantees; there has thus been no suspension of the writ, and no basis exists for judicial intervention beyond what the Act allows. My problem with today's opinion is more fundamental still: The writ of habeas corpus does not, and never has, run in favor of aliens abroad; the Suspension Clause thus has no application, and the Court's intervention in this military matter is entirely ultra vires.

I shall devote most of what will be a lengthy opinion to the legal errors contained in the opinion of the Court. Contrary to my usual practice, however, I think it appropriate to begin with a description of the disastrous consequences of what the Court has done today.

America is at war with radical Islamists. The enemy began by killing Americans and American allies abroad: 241 at the Marine barracks in Lebanon, 19 at the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, 224 at our embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, and 17 on the USS Cole in Yemen. See National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report, pp. 60-61, 70, 190 (2004). On September 11, 2001, the enemy brought the battle to American soil, killing 2,749 at the Twin Towers in New York City, 184 at the Pentagon in Washington, D. C., and 40 in Pennsylvania. See id., at 552, n. 9. It has threatened further attacks against our homeland; one need only walk about buttressed and barricaded Washington, or board a plane anywhere in the country, to know that the threat is a serious one. Our Armed Forces are now in the field against the enemy, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Last week, 13 of our countrymen in arms were killed.

The game of bait-and-switch that today's opinion plays upon the Nation's Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed. That consequence would be tolerable if necessary to preserve a time-honored legal principle vital to our constitutional Republic. But it is this Court's blatant abandonment of such a principle that produces the decision today. The President relied on our settled precedent in Johnson v. Eisentrager, 339 U. S. 763 (1950), when he established the prison at Guantanamo Bay for enemy aliens. Citing that case, the President's Office of Legal Counsel advised him "that the great weight of legal authority indicates that a federal district court could not properly exercise habeas jurisdiction over an alien detained at [Guantanamo Bay]." Memorandum from Patrick F. Philbin and John C. Yoo, Deputy Assistant Attorneys General, Office of Legal Counsel, to William J. Haynes II, General Counsel, Dept. of Defense (Dec. 28, 2001). Had the law been otherwise, the military surely would not have transported prisoners there, but would have kept them in Afghanistan, transferred them to another of our foreign military bases, or turned them over to allies for detention. Those other facilities might well have been worse for the detainees themselves.

In the long term, then, the Court's decision today accomplishes little, except perhaps to reduce the well-being of enemy combatants that the Court ostensibly seeks to protect. In the short term, however, the decision is devastating. At least 30 of those prisoners hitherto released from Guantanamo Bay have returned to the battlefield. See S. Rep. No. 110-90, pt. 7, p. 13 (2007) (Minority Views of Sens. Kyl, Sessions, Graham, Cornyn, and Coburn) (hereinafter Minority Report). Some have been captured or killed. See ibid.; see also Mintz, Released Detainees Rejoining the Fight, Washington Post, Oct. 22, 2004, pp. A1, A12. But others have succeeded in carrying on their atrocities against innocent civilians. In one case, a detainee released from Guantanamo Bay masterminded the kidnapping of two Chinese dam workers, one of whom was later shot to death when used as a human shield against Pakistani commandoes. See Khan & Lancaster, Pakistanis Rescue Hostage; 2nd Dies, Washington Post, Oct. 15, 2004, p. A18. Another former detainee promptly resumed his post as a senior Taliban commander and murdered a United Nations engineer and three Afghan soldiers. Mintz, supra. Still another murdered an Afghan judge. See Minority Report 13. It was reported only last month that a released detainee carried out a suicide bombing against Iraqi soldiers in Mosul, Iraq. See White, Ex-Guantanamo Detainee Joined Iraq Suicide Attack, Washington Post, May 8, 2008, p. A18.

These, mind you, were detainees whom the military had concluded were not enemy combatants. Their return to the kill illustrates the incredible difficulty of assessing who is and who is not an enemy combatant in a foreign theater of operations where the environment does not lend itself to rigorous evidence collection. Astoundingly, the Court today raises the bar, requiring military officials to appear before civilian courts and defend their decisions under procedural and evidentiary rules that go beyond what Congress has specified. As The Chief Justice's dissent makes clear, we have no idea what those procedural and evidentiary rules are, but they will be determined by civil courts and (in the Court's contemplation at least) will be more detainee-friendly than those now applied, since otherwise there would no reason to hold the congressionally prescribed procedures unconstitutional. If they impose a higher standard of proof (from foreign battlefields) than the current procedures require, the number of the enemy returned to combat will obviously increase.

But even when the military has evidence that it can bring forward, it is often foolhardy to release that evidence to the attorneys representing our enemies. And one escalation of procedures that the Court is clear about is affording the detainees increased access to witnesses (perhaps troops serving in Afghanistan?) and to classified information. See ante, at 54-55. During the 1995 prosecution of Omar Abdel Rahman, federal prosecutors gave the names of 200 unindicted co-conspirators to the "Blind Sheik's" defense lawyers; that information was in the hands of Osama Bin Laden within two weeks. See Minority Report 14-15. In another case, trial testimony revealed to the enemy that the United States had been monitoring their cellular network, whereupon they promptly stopped using it, enabling more of them to evade capture and continue their atrocities. See id., at 15.

And today it is not just the military that the Court elbows aside. A mere two Terms ago in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 548 U. S. 557 (2006), when the Court held (quite amazingly) that the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 had not stripped habeas jurisdiction over Guantanamo petitioners' claims, four Members of today's five-Justice majority joined an opinion saying the following:

"Nothing prevents the President from returning to Congress to seek the authority [for trial by military commission] he believes necessary.

"Where, as here, no emergency prevents consultation with Congress, judicial insistence upon that consultation does not weaken our Nation's ability to deal with danger. To the contrary, that insistence strengthens the Nation's ability to determine--through democratic means--how best to do so. The Constitution places its faith in those democratic means." Id., at 636 (Breyer, J., concurring).1

Turns out they were just kidding. For in response, Congress, at the President's request, quickly enacted the Military Commissions Act, emphatically reasserting that it did not want these prisoners filing habeas petitions. It is therefore clear that Congress and the Executive--both political branches--have determined that limiting the role of civilian courts in adjudicating whether prisoners captured abroad are properly detained is important to success in the war that some 190,000 of our men and women are now fighting. As the Solicitor General argued, "the Military Commissions Act and the Detainee Treatment Act ... represent an effort by the political branches to strike an appropriate balance between the need to preserve liberty and the need to accommodate the weighty and sensitive governmental interests in ensuring that those who have in fact fought with the enemy during a war do not return to battle against the United States." Brief for Respondents 10-11 (internal quotation marks omitted).

But it does not matter. The Court today decrees that no good reason to accept the judgment of the other two branches is "apparent." Ante, at 40. "The Government," it declares, "presents no credible arguments that the military mission at Guantanamo would be compromised if habeas corpus courts had jurisdiction to hear the detainees' claims." Id., at 39. What competence does the Court have to second-guess the judgment of Congress and the President on such a point? None whatever. But the Court blunders in nonetheless. Henceforth, as today's opinion makes unnervingly clear, how to handle enemy prisoners in this war will ultimately lie with the branch that knows least about the national security concerns that the subject entails.

The Suspension Clause of the Constitution provides: "The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it." Art. I, §9, cl. 2. As a court of law operating under a written Constitution, our role is to determine whether there is a conflict between that Clause and the Military Commissions Act. A conflict arises only if the Suspension Clause preserves the privilege of the writ for aliens held by the United States military as enemy combatants at the base in Guantanamo Bay, located within the sovereign territory of Cuba.

We have frequently stated that we owe great deference to Congress's view that a law it has passed is constitutional. See, e.g., Department of Labor v. Triplett, 494 U. S. 715, 721 (1990); United States v. National Dairy Products Corp., 372 U. S. 29, 32 (1963); see also American Communications Assn. v. Douds, 339 U. S. 382, 435 (1950) (Jackson, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). That is especially so in the area of foreign and military affairs; "perhaps in no other area has the Court accorded Congress greater deference." Rostker v. Goldberg, 453 U. S. 57, 64-65 (1981). Indeed, we accord great deference even when the President acts alone in this area. See Department of Navy v. Egan, 484 U. S. 518, 529-530 (1988); Regan v. Wald, 468 U. S. 222, 243 (1984).

In light of those principles of deference, the Court's conclusion that "the common law [does not] yiel[d] a definite answer to the questions before us," ante, at 22, leaves it no choice but to affirm the Court of Appeals. The writ as preserved in the Constitution could not possibly extend farther than the common law provided when that Clause was written. See Part III, infra. The Court admits that it cannot determine whether the writ historically extended to aliens held abroad, and it concedes (necessarily) that Guantanamo Bay lies outside the sovereign territory of the United States. See ante, at 22-23; Rasul v. Bush, 542 U. S. 466, 500-501 (2004) (Scalia, J., dissenting). Together, these two concessions establish that it is (in the Court's view) perfectly ambiguous whether the common-law writ would have provided a remedy for these petitioners. If that is so, the Court has no basis to strike down the Military Commissions Act, and must leave undisturbed the considered judgment of the coequal branches.2

How, then, does the Court weave a clear constitutional prohibition out of pure interpretive equipoise? The Court resorts to "fundamental separation-of-powers principles" to interpret the Suspension Clause. Ante, at 25. According to the Court, because "the writ of habeas corpus is itself an indispensable mechanism for monitoring the separation of powers," the test of its extraterritorial reach "must not be subject to manipulation by those whose power it is designed to restrain." Ante, at 36.

That approach distorts the nature of the separation of powers and its role in the constitutional structure. The "fundamental separation-of-powers principles" that the Constitution embodies are to be derived not from some judicially imagined matrix, but from the sum total of the individual separation-of-powers provisions that the Constitution sets forth. Only by considering them one-by-one does the full shape of the Constitution's separation-of-powers principles emerge. It is nonsensical to interpret those provisions themselves in light of some general "separation-of-powers principles" dreamed up by the Court. Rather, they must be interpreted to mean what they were understood to mean when the people ratified them. And if the understood scope of the writ of habeas corpus was "designed to restrain" (as the Court says) the actions of the Executive, the understood limits upon that scope were (as the Court seems not to grasp) just as much "designed to restrain" the incursions of the Third Branch. "Manipulation" of the territorial reach of the writ by the Judiciary poses just as much a threat to the proper separation of powers as "manipulation" by the Executive. As I will show below, manipulation is what is afoot here. The understood limits upon the writ deny our jurisdiction over the habeas petitions brought by these enemy aliens, and entrust the President with the crucial wartime determinations about their status and continued confinement.

The Court purports to derive from our precedents a "functional" test for the extraterritorial reach of the writ, ante, at 34, which shows that the Military Commissions Act unconstitutionally restricts the scope of habeas. That is remarkable because the most pertinent of those precedents, Johnson v. Eisentrager, 339 U. S. 763, conclusively establishes the opposite. There we were confronted with the claims of 21 Germans held at Landsberg Prison, an American military facility located in the American Zone of occupation in postwar Germany. They had been captured in China, and an American military commission sitting there had convicted them of war crimes--collaborating with the Japanese after Germany's surrender. Id., at 765-766. Like the petitioners here, the Germans claimed that their detentions violated the Constitution and international law, and sought a writ of habeas corpus. Writing for the Court, Justice Jackson held that American courts lacked habeas jurisdiction:

"We are cited to [sic] no instance where a court, in this or any other country where the writ is known, has issued it on behalf of an alien enemy who, at no relevant time and in no stage of his captivity, has been within its territorial jurisdiction. Nothing in the text of the Constitution extends such a right, nor does anything in our statutes." Id., at 768.

Justice Jackson then elaborated on the historical scope of the writ:

"The alien, to whom the United States has been traditionally hospitable, has been accorded a generous and ascending scale of rights as he increases his identity with our society... .

"But, in extending constitutional protections beyond the citizenry, the Court has been at pains to point out that it was the alien's presence within its territorial jurisdiction that gave the Judiciary power to act." Id., at 770-771.

Lest there be any doubt about the primacy of territorial sovereignty in determining the jurisdiction of a habeas court over an alien, Justice Jackson distinguished two cases in which aliens had been permitted to seek habeas relief, on the ground that the prisoners in those cases were in custody within the sovereign territory of the United States. Id., at 779-780 (discussing Ex parte Quirin, 317 U. S. 1 (1942), and In re Yamashita, 327 U. S. 1 (1946)). "By reason of our sovereignty at that time over [the Philippines]," Jackson wrote, "Yamashita stood much as did Quirin before American courts." 339 U. S., at 780.

Eisentrager thus held--held beyond any doubt--that the Constitution does not ensure habeas for aliens held by the United States in areas over which our Government is not sovereign.3

The Court would have us believe that Eisentrager rested on "[p]ractical considerations," such as the "difficulties of ordering the Government to produce the prisoners in a habeas corpus proceeding." Ante, at 32. Formal sovereignty, says the Court, is merely one consideration "that bears upon which constitutional guarantees apply" in a given location. Ante, at 34. This is a sheer rewriting of the case. Eisentrager mentioned practical concerns, to be sure--but not for the purpose of determining under what circumstances American courts could issue writs of habeas corpus for aliens abroad. It cited them to support its holding that the Constitution does not empower courts to issue writs of habeas corpus to aliens abroad in any circumstances. As Justice Black accurately said in dissent, "the Court's opinion inescapably denies courts power to afford the least bit of protection for any alien who is subject to our occupation government abroad, even if he is neither enemy nor belligerent and even after peace is officially declared." 339 U. S., at 796.

The Court also tries to change Eisentrager into a "functional" test by quoting a paragraph that lists the characteristics of the German petitioners:

"To support [the] assumption [of a constitutional right to habeas corpus] we must hold that a prisoner of our military authorities is constitutionally entitled to the writ, even though he (a) is an enemy alien; (b) has never been or resided in the United States; (c) was captured outside of our territory and there held in military custody as a prisoner of war; (d) was tried and convicted by a Military Commission sitting outside the United States; (e) for offenses against laws of war committed outside the United States; (f) and is at all times imprisoned outside the United States." Id., at 777 (quoted in part, ante, at 36).

But that paragraph is introduced by a sentence stating that "[t]he foregoing demonstrates how much further we must go if we are to invest these enemy aliens, resident, captured and imprisoned abroad, with standing to demand access to our courts." 339 U. S., at 777 (emphasis added). How much further than what? Further than the rule set forth in the prior section of the opinion, which said that "in extending constitutional protections beyond the citizenry, the Court has been at pains to point out that it was the alien's presence within its territorial jurisdiction that gave the Judiciary power to act." Id., at 771. In other words, the characteristics of the German prisoners were set forth, not in application of some "functional" test, but to show that the case before the Court represented an a fortiori application of the ordinary rule. That is reaffirmed by the sentences that immediately follow the listing of the Germans' characteristics:

"We have pointed out that the privilege of litigation has been extended to aliens, whether friendly or enemy, only because permitting their presence in the country implied protection. No such basis can be invoked here, for these prisoners at no relevant time were within any territory over which the United States is sovereign, and the scenes of their offense, their capture, their trial and their punishment were all beyond the territorial jurisdiction of any court of the United States." Id., at 777-778.

Eisentrager nowhere mentions a "functional" test, and the notion that it is based upon such a principle is patently false.4

The Court also reasons that Eisentrager must be read as a "functional" opinion because of our prior decisions in the Insular Cases. See ante, at 26-29. It cites our statement in Balzac v. Porto Rico, 258 U. S. 298, 312 (1922), that " 'the real issue in the Insular Cases was not whether the Constitution extended to the Philippines or Porto Rico when we went there, but which of its provisions were applicable by way of limitation upon the exercise of executive and legislative power in dealing with new conditions and requirements.' " Ante, at 28. But the Court conveniently omits Balzac's predicate to that statement: "The Constitution of the United States is in force in Porto Rico as it is wherever and whenever the sovereign power of that government is exerted." 258 U. S., at 312 (emphasis added). The Insular Cases all concerned territories acquired by Congress under its Article IV authority and indisputably part of the sovereign territory of the United States. See United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 U. S. 259, 268 (1990); Reid v. Covert, 354 U. S. 1, 13 (1957) (plurality opinion of Black, J.). None of the Insular Cases stands for the proposition that aliens located outside U. S. sovereign territory have constitutional rights, and Eisentrager held just the opposite with respect to habeas corpus. As I have said, Eisentrager distinguished Yamashita on the ground of "our sovereignty [over the Philippines]," 339 U. S., at 780.

The Court also relies on the "[p]ractical considerations" that influenced our decision in Reid v. Covert, supra. See ante, at 29-32. But all the Justices in the majority except Justice Frankfurter limited their analysis to the rights of citizens abroad. See Reid, supra, at 5-6 (plurality opinion of Black, J.); id., at 74-75 (Harlan, J., concurring in result). (Frankfurter limited his analysis to the even narrower class of civilian dependents of American military personnel abroad, see id., at 45 (opinion concurring in result).) In trying to wring some kind of support out of Reid for today's novel holding, the Court resorts to a chain of logic that does not hold. The members of the Reid majority, the Court says, were divided over whether In re Ross, 140 U. S. 453 (1891), which had (according to the Court) held that under certain circumstances American citizens abroad do not have indictment and jury-trial rights, should be overruled. In the Court's view, the Reid plurality would have overruled Ross, but Justices Frankfurter and Harlan preferred to distinguish it. The upshot: "If citizenship had been the only relevant factor in the case, it would have been necessary for the Court to overturn Ross, something Justices Harlan and Frankfurter were unwilling to do." Ante, at 32. What, exactly, is this point supposed to prove? To say that "practical considerations" determine the precise content of the constitutional protections American citizens enjoy when they are abroad is quite different from saying that "practical considerations" determine whether aliens abroad enjoy any constitutional protections whatever, including habeas. In other words, merely because citizenship is not a sufficient factor to extend constitutional rights abroad does not mean that it is not a necessary one.

The Court tries to reconcile Eisentrager with its holding today by pointing out that in postwar Germany, the United States was "answerable to its Allies" and did not "pla[n] a long-term occupation." Ante, at 38, 39. Those factors were not mentioned in Eisentrager. Worse still, it is impossible to see how they relate to the Court's asserted purpose in creating this "functional" test--namely, to ensure a judicial inquiry into detention and prevent the political branches from acting with impunity. Can it possibly be that the Court trusts the political branches more when they are beholden to foreign powers than when they act alone?

After transforming the a fortiori elements discussed above into a "functional" test, the Court is still left with the difficulty that most of those elements exist here as well with regard to all the detainees. To make the application of the newly crafted "functional" test produce a different result in the present cases, the Court must rely upon factors (d) and (e): The Germans had been tried by a military commission for violations of the laws of war; the present petitioners, by contrast, have been tried by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) whose procedural protections, according to the Court's ipse dixit, "fall well short of the procedures and adversarial mechanisms that would eliminate the need for habeas corpus review." Ante, at 37. But no one looking for "functional" equivalents would put Eisentrager and the present cases in the same category, much less place the present cases in a preferred category. The difference between them cries out for lesser procedures in the present cases. The prisoners in Eisentrager were prosecuted for crimes after the cessation of hostilities; the prisoners here are enemy combatants detained during an ongoing conflict. See Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U. S. 507, 538 (2004) (plurality opinion) (suggesting, as an adequate substitute for habeas corpus, the use of a tribunal akin to a CSRT to authorize the detention of American citizens as enemy combatants during the course of the present conflict).

The category of prisoner comparable to these detainees are not the Eisentrager criminal defendants, but the more than 400,000 prisoners of war detained in the United States alone during World War II. Not a single one was accorded the right to have his detention validated by a habeas corpus action in federal court--and that despite the fact that they were present on U. S. soil. See Bradley, The Military Commissions Act, Habeas Corpus, and the Geneva Conventions, 101 Am. J. Int'l L. 322, 338 (2007). The Court's analysis produces a crazy result: Whereas those convicted and sentenced to death for war crimes are without judicial remedy, all enemy combatants detained during a war, at least insofar as they are confined in an area away from the battlefield over which the United States exercises "absolute and indefinite" control, may seek a writ of habeas corpus in federal court. And, as an even more bizarre implication from the Court's reasoning, those prisoners whom the military plans to try by full-dress Commission at a future date may file habeas petitions and secure release before their trials take place.

There is simply no support for the Court's assertion that constitutional rights extend to aliens held outside U. S. sovereign territory, see Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 U. S., at 271, and Eisentrager could not be clearer that the privilege of habeas corpus does not extend to aliens abroad. By blatantly distorting Eisentrager, the Court avoids the difficulty of explaining why it should be overruled. See Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U. S. 833, 854-855 (1992) (identifying stare decisis factors). The rule that aliens abroad are not constitutionally entitled to habeas corpus has not proved unworkable in practice; if anything, it is the Court's "functional" test that does not (and never will) provide clear guidance for the future. Eisentrager forms a coherent whole with the accepted proposition that aliens abroad have no substantive rights under our Constitution. Since it was announced, no relevant factual premises have changed. It has engendered considerable reliance on the part of our military. And, as the Court acknowledges, text and history do not clearly compel a contrary ruling. It is a sad day for the rule of law when such an important constitutional precedent is discarded without an apologia, much less an apology.

What drives today's decision is neither the meaning of the Suspension Clause, nor the principles of our precedents, but rather an inflated notion of judicial supremacy. The Court says that if the extraterritorial applicability of the Suspension Clause turned on formal notions of sovereignty, "it would be possible for the political branches to govern without legal constraint" in areas beyond the sovereign territory of the United States. Ante, at 35. That cannot be, the Court says, because it is the duty of this Court to say what the law is. Id., at 35-36. It would be difficult to imagine a more question-begging analysis. "The very foundation of the power of the federal courts to declare Acts of Congress unconstitutional lies in the power and duty of those courts to decide cases and controversies properly before them." United States v. Raines, 362 U. S. 17, 20-21 (1960) (citing Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137 (1803); emphasis added). Our power "to say what the law is" is circumscribed by the limits of our statutorily and constitutionally conferred jurisdiction. See Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U. S. 555, 573-578 (1992). And that is precisely the question in these cases: whether the Constitution confers habeas jurisdiction on federal courts to decide petitioners' claims. It is both irrational and arrogant to say that the answer must be yes, because otherwise we would not be supreme.

But so long as there are some places to which habeas does not run--so long as the Court's new "functional" test will not be satisfied in every case--then there will be circumstances in which "it would be possible for the political branches to govern without legal constraint." Or, to put it more impartially, areas in which the legal determinations of the other branches will be (shudder!) supreme. In other words, judicial supremacy is not really assured by the constitutional rule that the Court creates. The gap between rationale and rule leads me to conclude that the Court's ultimate, unexpressed goal is to preserve the power to review the confinement of enemy prisoners held by the Executive anywhere in the world. The "functional" test usefully evades the precedential landmine of Eisentrager but is so inherently subjective that it clears a wide path for the Court to traverse in the years to come.

III

Putting aside the conclusive precedent of Eisentrager, it is clear that the original understanding of the Suspension Clause was that habeas corpus was not available to aliens abroad, as Judge Randolph's thorough opinion for the court below detailed. See 476 F. 3d 981, 988-990 (CADC 2007).

The Suspension Clause reads: "The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it." U. S. Const., Art. I, §9, cl. 2. The proper course of constitutional interpretation is to give the text the meaning it was understood to have at the time of its adoption by the people. See, e.g., Crawford v. Washington, 541 U. S. 36, 54 (2004). That course is especially demanded when (as here) the Constitution limits the power of Congress to infringe upon a pre-existing common-law right. The nature of the writ of habeas corpus that cannot be suspended must be defined by the common-law writ that was available at the time of the founding. See McNally v. Hill, 293 U. S. 131, 135-136 (1934); see also INS v. St. Cyr, 533 U. S. 289, 342 (2001) (Scalia, J., dissenting); D'Oench, Duhme & Co. v. FDIC, 315 U. S. 447, 471, n. 9 (1942) (Jackson, J., concurring).

It is entirely clear that, at English common law, the writ of habeas corpus did not extend beyond the sovereign territory of the Crown. To be sure, the writ had an "extraordinary territorial ambit," because it was a so-called "prerogative writ," which, unlike other writs, could extend beyond the realm of England to other places where the Crown was sovereign. R. Sharpe, The Law of Habeas Corpus 188 (2d ed. 1989) (hereinafter Sharpe); see also Note on the Power of the English Courts to Issue the Writ of Habeas to Places Within the Dominions of the Crown, But Out of England, and On the Position of Scotland in Relation to that Power, 8 Jurid. Rev. 157 (1896) (hereinafter Note on Habeas); King v. Cowle, 2 Burr. 834, 855-856, 97 Eng. Rep. 587, 599 (K. B. 1759).

But prerogative writs could not issue to foreign countries, even for British subjects; they were confined to the King's dominions--those areas over which the Crown was sovereign. See Sharpe 188; 2 R. Chambers, A Course of Lectures on the English Law 1767-1773, pp. 7-8 (Curley ed. 1986); 3 W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 131 (1768) (hereinafter Blackstone). Thus, the writ has never extended to Scotland, which, although united to England when James I succeeded to the English throne in 1603, was considered a foreign dominion under a different Crown--that of the King of Scotland. Sharpe 191; Note on Habeas 158.5 That is why Lord Mansfield wrote that "[t]o foreign dominions, which belong to a prince who succeeds to the throne of England, this Court has no power to send any writ of any kind. We cannot send a habeas corpus to Scotland . . . ." Cowle, supra, at 856, 97 Eng. Rep., at 599-600.

The common-law writ was codified by the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, which "stood alongside Magna Charta and the English Bill of Rights of 1689 as a towering common law lighthouse of liberty--a beacon by which framing lawyers in America consciously steered their course." Amar, Sixth Amendment First Principles, 84 Geo. L. J. 641, 663 (1996). The writ was established in the Colonies beginning in the 1690's and at least one colony adopted the 1679 Act almost verbatim. See Dept. of Political Science, Okla. State Univ., Research Reports, No. 1, R. Walker, The American Reception of the Writ of Liberty 12-16 (1961). Section XI of the Act stated where the writ could run. It "may be directed and run into any county palatine, the cinque-ports, or other privileged places within the kingdom of England, dominion of Wales, or town of Berwick upon Tweed, and the islands of Jersey or Guernsey." 31 Car. 2, ch. 2. The cinque-ports and county palatine were so-called "exempt jurisdictions"--franchises granted by the Crown in which local authorities would manage municipal affairs, including the court system, but over which the Crown maintained ultimate sovereignty. See 3 Blackstone 78-79. The other places listed--Wales, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Jersey, and Guernsey--were territories of the Crown even though not part England proper. See Cowle, supra, at 853-854, 97 Eng. Rep., at 598 (Wales and Berwick-upon-Tweed); 1 Blackstone 104 (Jersey and Guernsey); Sharpe 192 (same).

The Act did not extend the writ elsewhere, even though the existence of other places to which British prisoners could be sent was recognized by the Act. The possibility of evading judicial review through such spiriting-away was eliminated, not by expanding the writ abroad, but by forbidding (in Article XII of the Act) the shipment of prisoners to places where the writ did not run or where its execution would be difficult. See 31 Car. 2, ch. 2; see generally Nutting, The Most Wholesome Law--The Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, 65 Am. Hist. Rev. 527 (1960).

The Habeas Corpus Act, then, confirms the consensus view of scholars and jurists that the writ did not run outside the sovereign territory of the Crown. The Court says that the idea that "jurisdiction followed the King's officers" is an equally credible view. Ante, at 16. It is not credible at all. The only support the Court cites for it is a page in Boumediene's brief, which in turn cites this Court's dicta in Rasul, 542 U. S., at 482, mischaracterizing Lord Mansfield's statement that the writ ran to any place that was "under the subjection of the Crown," Cowle, supra, at 856, 97 Eng. Rep., at 599. It is clear that Lord Mansfield was saying that the writ extended outside the realm of England proper, not outside the sovereign territory of the Crown.6

The Court dismisses the example of Scotland on the grounds that Scotland had its own judicial system and that the writ could not, as a practical matter, have been enforced there. Ante, at 20. Those explanations are totally unpersuasive. The existence of a separate court system was never a basis for denying the power of a court to issue the writ. See 9 W. Holdsworth, A History of English Law 124 (3d ed. 1944) (citing Ex parte Anderson, 3 El. and El. 487 (1861)). And as for logistical problems, the same difficulties were present for places like the Channel Islands, where the writ did run. The Court attempts to draw an analogy between the prudential limitations on issuing the writ to such remote areas within the sovereign territory of the Crown and the jurisdictional prohibition on issuing the writ to Scotland. See ante, at 19-20. But the very authority that the Court cites, Lord Mansfield, expressly distinguished between these two concepts, stating that English courts had the "power" to send the writ to places within the Crown's sovereignty, the "only question" being the "propriety," while they had "no power to send any writ of any kind" to Scotland and other "foreign dominions." Cowle, supra, at 856, 97 Eng. Rep., at 599-600. The writ did not run to Scotland because, even after the Union, "Scotland remained a foreign dominion of the prince who succeeded to the English throne," and "union did not extend the prerogative of the English crown to Scotland." Sharpe 191; see also Sir Matthew Hale's The Prerogatives of the King 19 (D. Yale ed. 1976).7

In sum, all available historical evidence points to the conclusion that the writ would not have been available at common law for aliens captured and held outside the sovereign territory of the Crown. Despite three opening briefs, three reply briefs, and support from a legion of amici, petitioners have failed to identify a single case in the history of Anglo-American law that supports their claim to jurisdiction. The Court finds it significant that there is no recorded case denying jurisdiction to such prisoners either. See ante, at 21-22. But a case standing for the remarkable proposition that the writ could issue to a foreign land would surely have been reported, whereas a case denying such a writ for lack of jurisdiction would likely not. At a minimum, the absence of a reported case either way leaves unrefuted the voluminous commentary stating that habeas was confined to the dominions of the Crown.

What history teaches is confirmed by the nature of the limitations that the Constitution places upon suspension of the common-law writ. It can be suspended only "in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion." Art. I, §9, cl. 2. The latter case (invasion) is plainly limited to the territory of the United States; and while it is conceivable that a rebellion could be mounted by American citizens abroad, surely the overwhelming majority of its occurrences would be domestic. If the extraterritorial scope of habeas turned on flexible, "functional" considerations, as the Court holds, why would the Constitution limit its suspension almost entirely to instances of domestic crisis? Surely there is an even greater justification for suspension in foreign lands where the United States might hold prisoners of war during an ongoing conflict. And correspondingly, there is less threat to liberty when the Government suspends the writ's (supposed) application in foreign lands, where even on the most extreme view prisoners are entitled to fewer constitutional rights. It makes no sense, therefore, for the Constitution generally to forbid suspension of the writ abroad if indeed the writ has application there.

It may be objected that the foregoing analysis proves too much, since this Court has already suggested that the writ of habeas corpus does run abroad for the benefit of United States citizens. "[T]he position that United States citizens throughout the world may be entitled to habeas corpus rights ... is precisely the position that this Court adopted in Eisentrager, see 339 U. S., at 769-770, even while holding that aliens abroad did not have habeas corpus rights." Rasul, 542 U. S., at 501, 502 (Scalia, J., dissenting) (emphasis deleted). The reason for that divergence is not difficult to discern. The common-law writ, as received into the law of the new constitutional Republic, took on such changes as were demanded by a system in which rule is derived from the consent of the governed, and in which citizens (not "subjects") are afforded defined protections against the Government. As Justice Story wrote for the Court,
"The common law of England is not to be taken in all respects to be that of America. Our ancestors brought with them its general principles, and claimed it as their birthright; but they brought with them and adopted only that portion which was applicable to their situation." Van Ness v. Pacard, 2 Pet. 137, 144 (1829).

See also Hall, The Common Law: An Account of its Reception in the United States, 4 Vand. L. Rev. 791 (1951). It accords with that principle to say, as the plurality opinion said in Reid: "When the Government reaches out to punish a citizen who is abroad, the shield which the Bill of Rights and other parts of the Constitution provide to protect his life and liberty should not be stripped away just because he happens to be in another land." 354 U. S., at 6; see also Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 U. S., at 269-270. On that analysis, "[t]he distinction between citizens and aliens follows from the undoubted proposition that the Constitution does not create, nor do general principles of law create, any juridical relation between our country and some undefined, limitless class of noncitizens who are beyond our territory." Id., at 275 (Kennedy, J., concurring).

In sum, because I conclude that the text and history of the Suspension Clause provide no basis for our jurisdiction, I would affirm the Court of Appeals even if Eisentrager did not govern these cases.

* * *

Today the Court warps our Constitution in a way that goes beyond the narrow issue of the reach of the Suspension Clause, invoking judicially brainstormed separation-of-powers principles to establish a manipulable "functional" test for the extraterritorial reach of habeas corpus (and, no doubt, for the extraterritorial reach of other constitutional protections as well). It blatantly misdescribes important precedents, most conspicuously Justice Jackson's opinion for the Court in Johnson v. Eisentrager. It breaks a chain of precedent as old as the common law that prohibits judicial inquiry into detentions of aliens abroad absent statutory authorization. And, most tragically, it sets our military commanders the impossible task of proving to a civilian court, under whatever standards this Court devises in the future, that evidence supports the confinement of each and every enemy prisoner.

The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done today. I dissent.

Time to Retire 'Denier'

2008-06-10T10:50:00.000-07:00

Junk Science: Time to Retire 'Denier'

Thursday , June 05, 2008
By Steven Milloy

In Charles Krauthammer's May 30 must-read column, "Carbon Chastity," he rightly lambastes environmentalists as resurrected communists/socialists who have latched on to the environment and climate change as a means to advance their anti-people social agenda.

The specific occasion for his justifiable outrage is a recent proposal by a British parliamentary committee to institute a personal carbon ration card for every citizen.

The plan would place limits on food and energy consumption in the form of credits not to be exceeded — except through the potential for heavy-carbon users, often the wealthy, to purchase credits from lower-carbon users, often the less wealthy. In other words, their answer to global warming is wealth redistribution.

Though I thoroughly endorse Krauthammer's condemnation of the plan, I have to take issue with his adoption of loaded terms straight out of the green lexicon to argue his point.
In trying to position his agnosticism on whether man-made CO2 emissions are actually cause for concern, his column begins: "I am not a global warming believer. I am not a global warming denier."

The term "denier" is the environmentalists' preferred means of tar-and-feathering anyone who dares question climate alarmism — a key tactic in their effort to dupe the nation into consuming the green Kool-Aid.

Environmentalists have convinced many in the mainstream media that skepticism toward the very shaky science behind global warming alarmism is akin to the indescribeably creepy views of anti-Semitics who deny that the Holocaust occurred.

One event is an indisputable historical fact of hideous dimensions; the prophesied specter of catastrophic global warming, however, is just a politically driven fear scenario based on unreliable computer models and the wishful bending of the laws of climate physics.

There is no comparison.

Can anyone reasonably equate, say, the 31,000 U.S. scientists, engineers and physicians who recently signed a petition against global warming alarmism — including Princeton theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson and Massachusetts Institute of Technology climatologist Richard Lindzen — with the likes of neo-Nazis and Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who constantly calls for Israel's destruction?

Surely Krauthammer doesn't intend to make any such equation, but his adoption of the greens' most effective word weaponry nonetheless plays into their thought-shaping rhetoric.

Even when embedded in an argument contrary to green policies, the word "denier" still demonizes by summoning the vile immorality of those who would deny crimes against humanity.
One also could build a case against man's "carbon footprint," another fiendishly effective green-sponsored image and a term Krauthammer uses matter-of-factly even as he logically details the possibility that Earth's own massive outpouring of CO2 very well may dwarf man-made carbon output into total irrelevance.

Let's consider a few facts.

CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas in the atmosphere that is measured in parts per million, or ppm. The vast majority of CO2 emissions, about 97 percent, comes from Mother Nature.
CO2 is nowhere near the most important greenhouse gas; water vapor holds that distinction. An astounding 99.9 percent of Earth's greenhouse gas effect has nothing to do with manmade CO2 emissions.

If that's not enough, we can look at graphs of the historical relationship between carbon dioxide and global temperature. Ice core data going back 650,000 years show that global temperatures increase before CO2 levels. Data from the 20th century indicate no particular relationship between CO2 emissions and global temperature.

Finally, there is no scientific proof that the current level of atmospheric CO2 or that levels projected by the United Nations — about 700 ppm by 2095 if no greenhouse gas regulations are put in place — has or will cause any harm to the environment.

Alarmist gloom-and-doom forecasts also are based on nothing more than the rankest speculation dressed up as computer models that remain wholly unverifiable.

Yet, despite all this lack of evidence, the solitary term "man's carbon footprint" manages to concretize the notion of mankind producing indelible damage upon the Earth while in the process of stampeding its flora and fauna.

For any effective critique of global warming hysteria, we have to move beyond these powerful yet baseless buzz words that undermine any rational case in which they are found.

Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and DemandDebate.com. He is a junk science expert, advocate of free enterprise and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Church of the Environment

2008-06-10T10:46:00.000-07:00

Carbon Chastity
The First Commandment of the Church of the Environment

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, May 30, 2008; A13

I'm not a global warming believer. I'm not a global warming denier. I'm a global warming agnostic who believes instinctively that it can't be very good to pump lots of CO2into the atmosphere but is equally convinced that those who presume to know exactly where that leads are talking through their hats.

Predictions of catastrophe depend on models. Models depend on assumptions about complex planetary systems -- from ocean currents to cloud formation -- that no one fully understands. Which is why the models are inherently flawed and forever changing. The doomsday scenarios posit a cascade of events, each with a certain probability. The multiple improbability of their simultaneous occurrence renders all such predictions entirely speculative.

Yet on the basis of this speculation, environmental activists, attended by compliant scientists and opportunistic politicians, are advocating radical economic and social regulation. "The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity," warns Czech President Vaclav Klaus, "is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism."

If you doubt the arrogance, you haven't seen that Newsweek cover story that declared the global warming debate over. Consider: If Newton's laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor to believe that global warming -- infinitely more untested, complex and speculative -- is a closed issue.

But declaring it closed has its rewards. It not only dismisses skeptics as the running dogs of reaction, i.e., of Exxon, Cheney and now Klaus. By fiat, it also hugely re-empowers the intellectual left.

For a century, an ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous knowledge class -- social planners, scientists, intellectuals, experts and their left-wing political allies -- arrogated to themselves the right to rule either in the name of the oppressed working class (communism) or, in its more benign form, by virtue of their superior expertise in achieving the highest social progress by means of state planning (socialism).

Two decades ago, however, socialism and communism died rudely, then were buried forever by the empirical demonstration of the superiority of market capitalism everywhere from Thatcher's England to Deng's China, where just the partial abolition of socialism lifted more people out of poverty more rapidly than ever in human history.

Just as the ash heap of history beckoned, the intellectual left was handed the ultimate salvation: environmentalism. Now the experts will regulate your life not in the name of the proletariat or Fabian socialism but -- even better -- in the name of Earth itself.

Environmentalists are Gaia's priests, instructing us in her proper service and casting out those who refuse to genuflect. (See Newsweek above.) And having proclaimed the ultimate commandment -- carbon chastity -- they are preparing the supporting canonical legislation that will tell you how much you can travel, what kind of light you will read by, and at what temperature you may set your bedroom thermostat.

Only Monday, a British parliamentary committee proposed that every citizen be required to carry a carbon card that must be presented, under penalty of law, when buying gasoline, taking an airplane or using electricity. The card contains your yearly carbon ration to be drawn down with every purchase, every trip, every swipe.

There's no greater social power than the power to ration. And, other than rationing food, there is no greater instrument of social control than rationing energy, the currency of just about everything one does and uses in an advanced society.

So what does the global warming agnostic propose as an alternative? First, more research -- untainted and reliable -- to determine (a) whether the carbon footprint of man is or is not lost among the massive natural forces (from sunspot activity to ocean currents) that affect climate, and (b) if the human effect is indeed significant, whether the planetary climate system has the homeostatic mechanisms (like the feedback loops in the human body, for example) with which to compensate.

Second, reduce our carbon footprint in the interim by doing the doable, rather than the economically ruinous and socially destructive. The most obvious step is a major move to nuclear power, which to the atmosphere is the cleanest of the clean.

But your would-be masters have foreseen this contingency. The Church of the Environment promulgates secondary dogmas as well. One of these is a strict nuclear taboo.

Rather convenient, is it not? Take this major coal-substituting fix off the table, and we will be rationing all the more. Guess who does the rationing.

There Is a Military Solution to Terror

2008-06-03T12:07:00.000-07:00

There Is a Military Solution to Terror
June 3, 2008

Sadr City in Baghdad, the northeastern districts of Sri Lanka and the Guaviare province of Colombia have little in common culturally, historically or politically. But they are crucial reference points on a global map in which long-running insurgencies suddenly find themselves on the verge of defeat.

For the week of May 16-23, there were 300 "violent incidents" in Iraq. That's down from 1,600 last June and the lowest recorded since March 2004. Al Qaeda has been crushed by a combination of U.S. arms and Sunni tribal resistance. On the Shiite side, Moqtada al Sadr's Mahdi Army was routed by Iraqi troops in Basra and later crumbled in its Sadr City stronghold.
In Colombia, the 44-year-old FARC guerrilla movement is now at its lowest ebb. Three of its top commanders died in March, and the number of FARC attacks is down by more than two-thirds since 2002. In the face of a stepped-up campaign by the Colombian military (funded, equipped and trained by the U.S.), the group is now experiencing mass desertions. Former FARC leaders describe a movement that is losing any semblance of ideological coherence and operational effectiveness.

In Sri Lanka, a military offensive by the government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa has wrested control of seven of the nine districts previously held by the rebel group LTTE, better known as the Tamil Tigers. Mr. Rajapaksa now promises victory by the end of the year, even as the Tigers continue to launch high-profile terrorist attacks.

All this is good news in its own right. Better yet, it explodes the mindless shibboleth that there is "no military solution" when it comes to dealing with insurgencies. On the contrary, it turns out that the best way to end an insurgency is, quite simply, to beat it.

Why was this not obvious before? When military strategies fail – as they did in Vietnam while the U.S. pursued the tactics of attrition, or in Iraq prior to the surge – the idea that there can be no military solution has a way of taking hold with civilians and generals eager to deflect blame. This is how we arrived at the notion that "political reconciliation" is a precondition of military success, not a result of it.

There's also a tendency to misjudge the aims and ambitions of the insurgents: To think they can be mollified via one political concession or another. Former Colombian president Andres Pastrana sought to appease the FARC by ceding to them a territory the size of Switzerland. The predictable result was to embolden the guerrillas, who were adept at sensing and exploiting weakness.

The deeper problem here is the belief that the best way to deal with insurgents is to address the "root causes" of the grievance that purportedly prompted them to take up arms. But what most of these insurgencies seek isn't social or moral redress: It's absolute power. Like other "liberation movements" (the PLO comes to mind), the Tigers are notorious for killing other Tamils seen as less than hard line in their views of the conflict. The failure to defeat these insurgencies thus becomes the primary obstacle to achieving a reasonable political settlement acceptable to both sides.

This isn't to say that political strategies shouldn't be pursued in tandem with military ones. Gen. David Petraeus was shrewd to exploit the growing enmity between al Qaeda and their Sunni hosts by offering former insurgents a place in the country's security forces as "Sons of Iraq." (The liberal use of "emergency funds," aka political bribes, also helped.) Colombian President Álvaro Uribe has more than just extended amnesty for "demobilized" guerrillas; he's also given them jobs in the army.

But these political approaches only work when the intended beneficiaries can be reasonably confident that they are joining the winning side. Nobody was abandoning the FARC when Mr. Pastrana lay prostrate before it. It was only after Mr. Uribe turned the guerrilla lifestyle into a day-and-night nightmare that the movement's luster finally started to fade.

Defeating an insurgency is never easy even with the best strategies and circumstances. Insurgents rarely declare surrender, and breakaway factions can create a perception of menace even when their actual strength is minuscule. It helps when the top insurgent leaders are killed or captured: Peru's Shining Path, for instance, mostly collapsed with the capture of Abimael Guzmán. Yet the Kurdish PKK is now resurgent nine years after the imprisonment of Abdullah Ocalan, thanks to the sanctuary it enjoys in Northern Iraq.

Still, it's no small thing that neither the PKK nor the Shining Path are capable of killing tens of thousands of people and terrorizing whole societies, as they were in the 1980s. Among other things, beating an insurgency allows a genuine process of reconciliation and redress to take place, and in a spirit of malice toward none. But those are words best spoken after the terrible swift sword has done its work.

The failed theology of arms control

2008-05-24T10:02:00.000-07:00

The failed theology of arms control

So-called experts are frequently certain about what they know about nuclear material -- and they're frequently wrong.

By Gabriel Schoenfeld
May 24, 2008

ONE OF THE least noticed and most peculiar campaign promises made by Barack Obama is his pledge, if elected president, to "secure all loose nuclear materials in the world within four years." Without doubt that is a laudable goal, but one is left wondering how exactly he expects to accomplish it in four years, or even, for that matter, in 40.

One of many obstacles is that our intelligence agencies seldom know where loose nuclear materials are, especially when they are hidden on the territory of hostile states. An even bigger problem is that when we they do locate them, there always will be some expert or another telling us that, despite all the evidence, they are not really there. Obama, of all people, should know this.

He has one such expert advising his campaign.

On Sept. 6, 2007, Israeli jets destroyed a large box-shaped structure built in Syria at Al Kibar, not far from the Euphrates River. Although Israel maintained a discreet silence about the raid, and Syria confined itself to denouncing Israel for violating its airspace, suspicion immediately began to mount that the target was a nuclear reactor. In the weeks that followed, satellite photos and other data buttressing that suspicion rapidly began to emerge.

But not everyone was convinced. Among the skeptics was Joseph Cirincione, formerly a staff member for Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) on the House Armed Services Committee and more recently a denizen of the Washington think-tank world, who has been an informal advisor on nuclear affairs for Obama and has written a series of memos for the campaign.

Interviewed by Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker after the Israeli raid, Cirincione was emphatic: "Syria does not have the technical, industrial or financial ability to support a nuclear weapons program. I've been following this issue for 15 years, and every once in awhile a suspicion arises and we investigate and there's nothing. There was and is no nuclear weapons threat from Syria."

Thanks to materials made public by the U.S. on April 24, we now know that the facility at Al Kibar was a nuclear reactor and that it had been built with North Korean assistance. Indeed, it was a close copy of the North Korean plutonium producing reactor at Yongbyon that the U.S. has been trying, via negotiations, to shut down. Cirincione has admitted that he got it wrong, explaining that the evidence "seems strong" that Syria was building a reactor and that no one can bat 1,000.

Cirincione is correct about the difficulty of attaining a perfect batting average. But still, why did he miss this particular ball?

One obvious explanation is that he fell victim to Syrian deception. As a report by the Institute for Science and International Security makes plain, Syrian engineers and architects went to "astonishing lengths" to erase the "signature" of the reactor at Al Kibar and to camouflage and/or bury "commonly expected attributes and conceal the building's true purpose." So successful was the Syrian concealment effort that even after 2005, when U.S. intelligence officials first became aware of the structure and a North Korean presence at it, they labeled it an "enigma facility."

Yet secrecy and camouflage are par for the course. No country with a covert nuclear program has failed to use such means to keep its effort hidden from the world. And no nuclear nonproliferation expert worth his boron would be unaware of this. What else must have been at work here?

Experts, like generals, have a tendency to fight the last war. In this instance, the last war was the Iraq war, in which the U.S. invaded in no small part to dismantle a nuclear weapons program that turned out not to exist. A good many nuclear specialists within and outside the intelligence world appear to have become so fearful of repeating that sorry experience that they are afraid even to acknowledge things that do exist. Last year's National Intelligence Estimate on Iran that declared, misleadingly, that Iran's nuclear weapons program ended in 2003 is a prominent case in point.

Cirincione seems to have been snared by precisely the same trap. Reports of a Syrian nuclear reactor, he wrote a week after the Israeli strike, were "nonsense," the handiwork "of a small group of officials leaking cherry-picked, unvetted 'intelligence' to key reporters in order to promote a preexisting political agenda. If this sounds like the run-up to the war in Iraq, it should."

It "is all political," he insisted to Hersh. Those peddling the story of the nonexistent reactor appear to have been aiming "at derailing the U.S.-North Korean agreement that administration hard-liners think is appeasement."

In his solicitude for the U.S.-North Korean agreement -- itself a deeply flawed document and one repeatedly violated by Pyongyang -- the solution to the riddle becomes clear. Cirincione is now the president of an outfit called the Ploughshares Fund, a foundation dedicated to funding advocates of arms control negotiations around the world. To him and his fellow members of the arms control creed, the admission that North Korea was illicitly shipping nuclear technology abroad -- and that a country such as Syria, a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, had been caught in a brazen violation of its commitments -- might be taken as an acknowledgment that the arms control regime on which they have staked their reputations and dedicated their lives has failed utterly.

But it is as irrational to suggest that weapons never exist as it would be to suggest that they always exist. As the Syrian episode demonstrates, there may not be weapons of mass destruction under every dictator's bed, but sometimes there will be, and it is not something about which we -- or, in this instance, the Israelis -- can afford to be wrong.

In short, when the Israelis obliterated the reactor at Al Kibar, the reverberations of the blast also shattered a theology. If Obama is to make any headway at all on his quixotic pledge to secure all loose nuclear materials in the world in four years, he might begin by securing some more realistic nuclear advisors.

Gabriel Schoenfeld is senior editor of Commentary magazine.

Rev. Wright Connection Still Haunts Obama

2008-05-24T09:41:00.000-07:00

May 24, 2008
Rev. Wright Connection Still Haunts Obama
By Michael Barone

As Barack Obama makes his slow but steady way toward the Democratic nomination, the assumption in the admiring precincts of the press corps is that voters have dismissed as irrelevant his longtime association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But that may prove as mistaken as the assumption, back in 1988, that voters would not be impressed by Michael Dukakis's 11-year support of a law granting weekend furloughs to convicts sentenced to life without parole, an issue brought up in the primaries by Al Gore but largely ignored in press coverage at the time.

Evidence for this comes in the exit polls from the West Virginia and Kentucky primaries on May 13 and 20. In both, about half the voters -- and these are voters in the Democratic primary -- said that they believe Obama shares Wright's views either somewhat or a lot. And slightly under 50 percent of these voters said that Obama is honest and trustworthy.

To be sure, these were primaries in which Obama was beaten, and beaten badly, by Hillary Clinton -- 67 percent to 26 percent in West Virginia, 66 percent to 30 percent in Kentucky. So they would be inclined, one might believe, to think ill of Obama. Yet it is not universally the case that voters who choose one candidate in a hotly contested election doubt whether the other candidate is honest. You can oppose someone who you believe to be trustworthy. Only 38 percent of Americans voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964 and George McGovern in 1972. But probably a higher percentage believed that they were basically honest.

Which leads me to ask why these voters declined to say Obama is honest. When have they seen him lie or being caught in a lie? The response to the question on Wright may provide the answer. They know that he attended Wright's church for 20 years. They know that he said, both on March 18 when he refused to renounce Wright and on April 29 when he did renounce him, that he was not aware of his pastor and spiritual mentor's incendiary comments. Yet half of these voters also think that, despite those statements, Obama agrees with what Wright has been saying.

It's a little dangerous in interpreting polls to assume that voters' thinking proceeds along logical lines. People who aren't professionally involved in politics, whose knowledge comes from bits and snippets of news, can hold beliefs that are contradictory or in tension with each other. They don't feel obliged to resolve contradictions. But even granting that, it seems to me that about half of West Virginia and Kentucky Democratic primary voters were saying that Obama lied about not knowing what Wright has been preaching and that he agrees with him a lot more than he has let on.

Now West Virginia and Kentucky are not typical primary states. They, together with Arkansas, where Hillary Clinton was first lady for 12 years, were Obama's weakest states in this year's primaries. And some percentage of registered Democrats in these states have been voting Republican in recent presidential elections. Nevertheless, the negative verdict these voters render on Obama's honesty and his relationship with Wright is likely to be typical of some significant quantum of potential Democratic voters this year. And not just in states like West Virginia and Kentucky, which he will certainly lose, but in marginal states which he must carry in order to be elected.

I find confirmation from this in a recent focus group conducted for the Annenberg Public Policy Center by pollster Peter Hart (for whom I worked for seven years) of non-primary voters in Charlottesville, Va. As Hart and Alex Horowitz note in their analysis of reactions to Obama, "When asked to recount any two memories of the total presidential campaign so far, seven of the 12 participants cite Rev. Wright by name. So far, clips of Rev. Wright clearly are the one 'key defining moment' of this campaign."

Most reporters are liberals, whose circles of friends and acquaintances have included people with views not dissimilar to those of Wright or William Ayers, the unrepentant Weather Underground bomber with whom Obama served on a nonprofit board and at whose house his state Senate candidacy was launched. Such reporters don't find these views utterly repugnant or particularly noteworthy. But most American voters do. And they wonder whether a candidate who associates with such people agrees with them -- or disbelieve him when he says he doesn't.

Though most in the press won't admit it, that's a problem -- for the Obama candidacy and for the whole Democratic Party once it nominates him.

Copyright 2008, Creators Syndicate Inc.Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/05/the_rev_wright_connection_stil.html at May 24, 2008 - 09:46:02 AM PDT
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