It doesn’t look like Kagan will be following the Kagan standard.
Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Say it ain’t so, Elena.
Elena Kagan thinks that the “Borking” of Robert Bork during his 1987 confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court would deserve a commemorative plate if the Franklin Mint launched a “Great Moments in Legal History” line of dishware.
This is not the time to rehearse all the reasons why Kagan is wrong on that score. Still, there is one adverse result of the Bork hearings worth dwelling on. Bork was the last Supreme Court nominee to give serious answers to serious questions. But because he was successfully anathematized by the Left, no nominee since has dared to show Borkian forthrightness.
Consider Monday’s thunderclap from the judicial Mount Olympus: The Second Amendment right to own a gun extends to state and local government. Personally, I think Justice Clarence Thomas’s separate opinion in favor of the 14th Amendment’s “privileges and immunities” clause over the due-process clause was the better argument. But that’s a debate for another day.
The more newsworthy opinion came from rookie Justice Sonia Sotomayor. She concurred with Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent, which held that there is no fundamental right to bear arms in the U.S. Constitution. “I can find nothing in the Second Amendment’s text, history or underlying rationale that could warrant characterizing it as ‘fundamental’ insofar as it seeks to protect the keeping and bearing of arms for private self-defense purposes,” Breyer wrote for the minority.
But when Sotomayor was before the Senate Judiciary Committee one year ago for her own confirmation hearings, she gave a very different impression of how she saw the issue. Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy asked her, “Is it safe to say that you accept the Supreme Court’s decision as establishing that the Second Amendment right is an individual right?”
“Yes, sir,” she replied.
Both Sotomayor and Leahy festooned their colloquies with plenty of lawyerly escape hatches. That’s why Leahy asked the questions the way he did, and that’s why Sotomayor answered them the way she did. It’s also why he spun her answers into more than they were: “I do not see how any fair observer could regard [Sotomayor’s] testimony as hostile to the Second Amendment personal right to bear arms, a right she has embraced and recognizes.” He made it sound as though she was open to an expansive reading of the Second Amendment when everyone knew she wasn’t. (As a judge, she was hardly a hero of the NRA.)
Here’s the point: Sotomayor wasn’t an exception to the rule; she was following it.
Although the Bork inquisition was a largely partisan affair, the consequences have yielded a bipartisan sham. Republican and Democratic nominees alike are trained to say as little as possible and to stay a razor’s width on the side of truthfulness. The point is not to give the best, most thoughtful, or most honest answer, but to give the answer that makes it the most difficult for senators to vote against you. It’s as if we expect nominees to demonstrate — one last time — everything we hate and distrust about lawyers before they don their priestly robes.
Nobody is shocked that Sotomayor has revealed herself to be the liberal everyone knew her to be. But the fact that everyone was in on the lie is just further evidence of the sham Supreme Court hearings have become. They are a nonviolent and fairly bloodless cousin to totalitarian show trials, where everyone follows a script and politicians pretend to be “gravely concerned” and “shocked” upon “discovering” things they already knew.
And that’s why Kagan should be the hero of this tale. She has vociferously argued that the “Bork hearings were great . . . the best thing that ever happened to constitutional democracy.” She has lamented how, ever since, the hearings process has become nothing more that “a repetition of platitudes.” Kagan once implored senators to dig deep into the nominee’s “constitutional views and commitments.”
Alas, it doesn’t look like Kagan will be following the Kagan standard. On Tuesday morning, she distanced herself as best she could from those views. And when asked by Sen. Jeff Sessions whether she is a “legal progressive” — something pretty much all objective observers and her own friends and former colleagues know her to be — the brilliant and scholarly Kagan claimed to have no idea what the term even means.
After his rejection by the Senate, Bork wrote a masterful book, The Tempting of America: The Political Seduction of the Law. The title of the book about Kagan might well be titled The Tempting of Kagan: The Political Seduction of the Process.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Alternatives to Surrender
Caroline Glick
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
To the roaring cheers of the local media, on Sunday the Schalit family embarked on a cross-country march to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's residence. They set out two days after the fourth anniversary of IDF Sgt. Gilad Schalit's captivity.
Outside their home in the North on Sunday, Gilad's father Noam Schalit pledged not to return home without his son. The Schalit family intends to camp out outside of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's home until the government reunites them with Gilad.
For weeks the local media - and especially Ma'ariv and Yediot Ahronot - have portrayed the Schalit family's trek to Netanyahu as a reenactment of Moses' journey to Pharaoh. Like Pharaoh, the media insinuates that Netanyahu is evil because he refuses to free Gilad from bondage.
The only drawback to this dramatic, newspaper-selling story is that it is wrong. Gilad Schalit is not a hostage in Jerusalem. He is a hostage in Gaza. His captor is not Netanyahu. His captor is Hamas.
And because the story is wrong, the media-organized cavalcade of ten thousand well intentioned Israelis is moving in the wrong direction. And not only is it going in the wrong direction, it is doing so at Gilad Schalit's expense.
The truth that Yediot and Ma'ariv's marketing departments ignore is that Schalit's continued captivity is a function of Hamas's growing strength. To bring him home, Israel shouldn't release a thousand terrorists from prison. It shouldn't strengthen Hamas.
To bring Gilad Schalit home a free man, Israel must weaken Hamas. And this is an eminently achievable goal. Gilad's father Noam knows it is an achievable goal. That is why last week Noam Schalit was the most outspoken critic of Netanyahu's decision to abandon Israel's economic sanctions against Hamas-controlled Gaza. That is why over the past four years the Schalit family has staged countless protests against Israel's massive and continuous assistance to Hamas-controlled Gaza.
If anything positive is to come from this march, then when the Schalit family arrives in Jerusalem they should abandon the newspapers' demand that Israel surrender to all of Hamas's demands. They should acknowledge that doing so will only guarantee that more Israelis will be kidnapped and murdered by Hamas and its allies.
If the Schalits wish to criticize the government, they should criticize Netanyahu and his government for the steps they have taken to strengthen Hamas. The Schalits should demand that the government reinstate and tighten Israel's economic sanctions against Gaza. They should demand that Israel end its supply of electricity and gasoline to Gaza and take more effective action to block smuggling into Gaza through the tunnels along the Gaza-Egypt border. All of these actions will weaken Hamas, and so contribute to the prospect of Hamas being forced by the Gazans themselves to release Schalit to his family.
ONE OF the important truths ignored by Israel's pathological media is that Hamas and its Iranian sponsor are not all powerful. They are vulnerable to criticism from their own publics. And Israel is capable of fomenting such criticism.
For example, the imprisoned terrorists whose release Hamas demands in exchange for releasing Schalit have consistently responded rationally to Israeli threats. The Knesset is slowly debating a bill that would worsen prison conditions of terrorists. And the terrorists are worried. Their worry provoked them to demand that Hamas be more forthcoming with Schalit.
By the same token, were Israel to cut off electricity to Gaza - an act that is not merely lawful, but arguably required by international law - we could expect residents of Gaza to express a similarly rational demand to Hamas. That is, were Israel to weaken public support for Hamas, Hamas would be more likely to bow to Israel's will.
And if Hamas is vulnerable to public criticism, the Iranian regime is downright terrified of public criticism. Take the regime's behavior in the wake of the Turkish-Hamas flotilla campaign. In the days that followed Israel's bungled May 31 takeover of the Mavi Marmara terror ship, Iran announced it was sending two of its own ships to Gaza. Israel responded rationally and forthrightly. The government warned that any Iranian ship would be viewed as an enemy ship and Israel would respond in accordance with the rules of war.
As Iran expert Michael Ledeen has argued repeatedly, the Iranian regime is terrified of getting the Iranian people angry over its radical foreign policy. In light of its precarious standing with its own public, Israel's forthright threat of war brought the regime to its knees.
Last Thursday Hossein Sheikholdslam, the Iranian regime functionary responsible for the Gaza-bound ships told the Iranian news service IRNA that plans to send the ships were scrapped because Israel "sent a letter to the United Nations saying that the presence of Iranian and Lebanese ships in the Gaza area will be considered a declaration of war on [Israel] and it will confront it."
During the war with Iran's Hizbullah proxy in 2006, thousands of Iranians demonstrated against Hizbullah. They demanded that the regime invest its money in the local economy and not in Hizbullah and the Palestinians. Were Israel to present Schalit as an Israeli victim of the Iranian regime, it could provoke a similar popular outcry against Iran's support for Hamas.
The media-manipulated Schalits are not the only ones acting precisely against their own interests. The government is acting with similar madness in its relations with the Obama administration. Indeed, Netanyahu ended Israel's lawful economic sanctions against Hamas-controlled Gaza, (sanctions that served, among other things as a bargaining chip for freeing Schalit), because the Obama administration placed overwhelming pressure on him to do so.
Not wishing to let the Mavi Marmara crisis go to waste, US President Barack Obama has used it as a means to weaken Israel against Hamas. Obama announced that he is giving Hamas-controlled Gaza $400 million in US aid. He forced Netanyahu to end Israel's economic sanctions against the illegal Hamas regime. And he continues to threaten to abandon US support for Israel at the UN. Moreover, according to remarks by a senior Hamas terrorist to the London-based al Quds al Arabi newspaper on Friday, the Obama administration maintains direct ties to the Hamas leadership in Syria.
When Netanyahu entered office last spring his desire to appease Obama was understandable. At the time, he was operating under the hope that perhaps Obama could be appeased into ending his onslaught against the Jewish state. But the events of the past year have made clear that Obama is unappeasable . Every concession Israel has made to Obama has merely whetted the US President's appetite for more.
The policy implications of this state of affairs are clear. First, Israel must strive to weaken Obama. Since Israeli concessions to Obama strengthen him, Israel must first and foremost stop giving him concessions.
Weakening Obama does not involve openly attacking him. It means Israel should act in a way that advances its interests and forces Obama to reconsider the desirability of his current foreign policy.
Regionally, Israel should make common cause with the Kurds of Iran, Iraq and Syria who are now being assaulted by Iran, Turkey and Syria. Doing so is not simply the moral thing to do. It weakens Iran, Syria and Turkey and demonstrates that Obama's appeasement policies are harming those who love freedom and empowering those who hate it.
By the same token, Israel should do everything it can to strengthen the Iranian Green movement. Every anti-regime action in Iran - regardless of its size - harms the regime and therefore helps Israel. And every anti-regime action in Iran exposes the moral depravity and strategic idiocy of Obama's policy of appeasing the mullocracy.
As for the US domestic political realm, in Ambassador Michael Oren's all but schizophrenic recent statements about the Obama administration's policy towards Israel we may at last be witnessing an embrace of political sanity on the part of the government. For the past several months, Oren has acted as the Obama administration's most energetic cheerleader to the US Jewish community. Oren has repeatedly and wrongly reassured US Jewish audiences that Obama is a great friend of Israel, that his Democratic Party remains loyal to the US-Israel alliance and that the Republicans are wrong to claim that there is a difference between the two major US political parties when it comes to supporting Israel.
The pinnacle of Oren's pro-Obama campaign came with his interview last week with the Jerusalem Post. There he brought all of these false and counter-productive claims into the public realm. Apparently Oren's decision to make his adulation of the Obama administration public finally forced his bosses in Jerusalem to order him to cease, desist and do an about face.
And so, last week, Oren told a closed audience of Israeli diplomats the truth. Under Obama, Oren whispered, there has been a "tectonic rift" in US relations with Israel. While some of Obama's advisors are sympathetic to Israel, these advisors have no influence on Obama's positions on Israel. No doubt recognizing how silly his about face made him look, Oren tried to deny his statements at the Foreign Ministry. But it is hard to imagine anyone will take him seriously.
During his visit to the White House next week, Netanyahu should follow the path set by Oren's quickly leaked remarks. Netanyahu should abstain from praising Obama for his friendship and speak instead about the fact that the US-Israel alliance is vital for both countries' national security.
NETANYAHU SHOULD insist on the right to call on questioners at his joint appearance with Obama. And he should use those questions and those appearances to discuss why Israel's actions are not only legal and necessary for Israel, but vital for US national security. During his stay in the US, Netanyahu should discuss the global jihad, Islamic terrorism, the freedom loving Kurds and the freedom loving Iranian people every chance he gets. Indeed, he should create opportunities to discuss them.
Here we see a crucial point of convergence between the Schalit family march to Jerusalem and Netanyahu's trip to Washington. To increase the effectiveness of their efforts on behalf of Gilad, ahead of Netanyahu's visit to Washington, the marchers should split into two groups.
The first group should continue to Jerusalem and demand that Israel take a firmer stand against Hamas. The second group should walk to Tel Aviv and camp out outside the US Embassy. There they should demand that the administration end its contacts with Hamas, end its pressure on the Israeli government to strengthen Hamas, cancel Obama's plan to give an additional $400 million dollars in aid to Hamas and use the US's position on the UN Security Council to condemn Turkey for its material support for Hamas.
For too long, by allowing themselves to be led by our deranged media, Israeli citizens and governments alike have ignored the basic fact that the answer to every question is not more Israeli concessions. Contrary to what our tabloids would have us believe, surrender is only one option among many. It is time we try out some alternatives.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
To the roaring cheers of the local media, on Sunday the Schalit family embarked on a cross-country march to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's residence. They set out two days after the fourth anniversary of IDF Sgt. Gilad Schalit's captivity.
Outside their home in the North on Sunday, Gilad's father Noam Schalit pledged not to return home without his son. The Schalit family intends to camp out outside of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's home until the government reunites them with Gilad.
For weeks the local media - and especially Ma'ariv and Yediot Ahronot - have portrayed the Schalit family's trek to Netanyahu as a reenactment of Moses' journey to Pharaoh. Like Pharaoh, the media insinuates that Netanyahu is evil because he refuses to free Gilad from bondage.
The only drawback to this dramatic, newspaper-selling story is that it is wrong. Gilad Schalit is not a hostage in Jerusalem. He is a hostage in Gaza. His captor is not Netanyahu. His captor is Hamas.
And because the story is wrong, the media-organized cavalcade of ten thousand well intentioned Israelis is moving in the wrong direction. And not only is it going in the wrong direction, it is doing so at Gilad Schalit's expense.
The truth that Yediot and Ma'ariv's marketing departments ignore is that Schalit's continued captivity is a function of Hamas's growing strength. To bring him home, Israel shouldn't release a thousand terrorists from prison. It shouldn't strengthen Hamas.
To bring Gilad Schalit home a free man, Israel must weaken Hamas. And this is an eminently achievable goal. Gilad's father Noam knows it is an achievable goal. That is why last week Noam Schalit was the most outspoken critic of Netanyahu's decision to abandon Israel's economic sanctions against Hamas-controlled Gaza. That is why over the past four years the Schalit family has staged countless protests against Israel's massive and continuous assistance to Hamas-controlled Gaza.
If anything positive is to come from this march, then when the Schalit family arrives in Jerusalem they should abandon the newspapers' demand that Israel surrender to all of Hamas's demands. They should acknowledge that doing so will only guarantee that more Israelis will be kidnapped and murdered by Hamas and its allies.
If the Schalits wish to criticize the government, they should criticize Netanyahu and his government for the steps they have taken to strengthen Hamas. The Schalits should demand that the government reinstate and tighten Israel's economic sanctions against Gaza. They should demand that Israel end its supply of electricity and gasoline to Gaza and take more effective action to block smuggling into Gaza through the tunnels along the Gaza-Egypt border. All of these actions will weaken Hamas, and so contribute to the prospect of Hamas being forced by the Gazans themselves to release Schalit to his family.
ONE OF the important truths ignored by Israel's pathological media is that Hamas and its Iranian sponsor are not all powerful. They are vulnerable to criticism from their own publics. And Israel is capable of fomenting such criticism.
For example, the imprisoned terrorists whose release Hamas demands in exchange for releasing Schalit have consistently responded rationally to Israeli threats. The Knesset is slowly debating a bill that would worsen prison conditions of terrorists. And the terrorists are worried. Their worry provoked them to demand that Hamas be more forthcoming with Schalit.
By the same token, were Israel to cut off electricity to Gaza - an act that is not merely lawful, but arguably required by international law - we could expect residents of Gaza to express a similarly rational demand to Hamas. That is, were Israel to weaken public support for Hamas, Hamas would be more likely to bow to Israel's will.
And if Hamas is vulnerable to public criticism, the Iranian regime is downright terrified of public criticism. Take the regime's behavior in the wake of the Turkish-Hamas flotilla campaign. In the days that followed Israel's bungled May 31 takeover of the Mavi Marmara terror ship, Iran announced it was sending two of its own ships to Gaza. Israel responded rationally and forthrightly. The government warned that any Iranian ship would be viewed as an enemy ship and Israel would respond in accordance with the rules of war.
As Iran expert Michael Ledeen has argued repeatedly, the Iranian regime is terrified of getting the Iranian people angry over its radical foreign policy. In light of its precarious standing with its own public, Israel's forthright threat of war brought the regime to its knees.
Last Thursday Hossein Sheikholdslam, the Iranian regime functionary responsible for the Gaza-bound ships told the Iranian news service IRNA that plans to send the ships were scrapped because Israel "sent a letter to the United Nations saying that the presence of Iranian and Lebanese ships in the Gaza area will be considered a declaration of war on [Israel] and it will confront it."
During the war with Iran's Hizbullah proxy in 2006, thousands of Iranians demonstrated against Hizbullah. They demanded that the regime invest its money in the local economy and not in Hizbullah and the Palestinians. Were Israel to present Schalit as an Israeli victim of the Iranian regime, it could provoke a similar popular outcry against Iran's support for Hamas.
The media-manipulated Schalits are not the only ones acting precisely against their own interests. The government is acting with similar madness in its relations with the Obama administration. Indeed, Netanyahu ended Israel's lawful economic sanctions against Hamas-controlled Gaza, (sanctions that served, among other things as a bargaining chip for freeing Schalit), because the Obama administration placed overwhelming pressure on him to do so.
Not wishing to let the Mavi Marmara crisis go to waste, US President Barack Obama has used it as a means to weaken Israel against Hamas. Obama announced that he is giving Hamas-controlled Gaza $400 million in US aid. He forced Netanyahu to end Israel's economic sanctions against the illegal Hamas regime. And he continues to threaten to abandon US support for Israel at the UN. Moreover, according to remarks by a senior Hamas terrorist to the London-based al Quds al Arabi newspaper on Friday, the Obama administration maintains direct ties to the Hamas leadership in Syria.
When Netanyahu entered office last spring his desire to appease Obama was understandable. At the time, he was operating under the hope that perhaps Obama could be appeased into ending his onslaught against the Jewish state. But the events of the past year have made clear that Obama is unappeasable . Every concession Israel has made to Obama has merely whetted the US President's appetite for more.
The policy implications of this state of affairs are clear. First, Israel must strive to weaken Obama. Since Israeli concessions to Obama strengthen him, Israel must first and foremost stop giving him concessions.
Weakening Obama does not involve openly attacking him. It means Israel should act in a way that advances its interests and forces Obama to reconsider the desirability of his current foreign policy.
Regionally, Israel should make common cause with the Kurds of Iran, Iraq and Syria who are now being assaulted by Iran, Turkey and Syria. Doing so is not simply the moral thing to do. It weakens Iran, Syria and Turkey and demonstrates that Obama's appeasement policies are harming those who love freedom and empowering those who hate it.
By the same token, Israel should do everything it can to strengthen the Iranian Green movement. Every anti-regime action in Iran - regardless of its size - harms the regime and therefore helps Israel. And every anti-regime action in Iran exposes the moral depravity and strategic idiocy of Obama's policy of appeasing the mullocracy.
As for the US domestic political realm, in Ambassador Michael Oren's all but schizophrenic recent statements about the Obama administration's policy towards Israel we may at last be witnessing an embrace of political sanity on the part of the government. For the past several months, Oren has acted as the Obama administration's most energetic cheerleader to the US Jewish community. Oren has repeatedly and wrongly reassured US Jewish audiences that Obama is a great friend of Israel, that his Democratic Party remains loyal to the US-Israel alliance and that the Republicans are wrong to claim that there is a difference between the two major US political parties when it comes to supporting Israel.
The pinnacle of Oren's pro-Obama campaign came with his interview last week with the Jerusalem Post. There he brought all of these false and counter-productive claims into the public realm. Apparently Oren's decision to make his adulation of the Obama administration public finally forced his bosses in Jerusalem to order him to cease, desist and do an about face.
And so, last week, Oren told a closed audience of Israeli diplomats the truth. Under Obama, Oren whispered, there has been a "tectonic rift" in US relations with Israel. While some of Obama's advisors are sympathetic to Israel, these advisors have no influence on Obama's positions on Israel. No doubt recognizing how silly his about face made him look, Oren tried to deny his statements at the Foreign Ministry. But it is hard to imagine anyone will take him seriously.
During his visit to the White House next week, Netanyahu should follow the path set by Oren's quickly leaked remarks. Netanyahu should abstain from praising Obama for his friendship and speak instead about the fact that the US-Israel alliance is vital for both countries' national security.
NETANYAHU SHOULD insist on the right to call on questioners at his joint appearance with Obama. And he should use those questions and those appearances to discuss why Israel's actions are not only legal and necessary for Israel, but vital for US national security. During his stay in the US, Netanyahu should discuss the global jihad, Islamic terrorism, the freedom loving Kurds and the freedom loving Iranian people every chance he gets. Indeed, he should create opportunities to discuss them.
Here we see a crucial point of convergence between the Schalit family march to Jerusalem and Netanyahu's trip to Washington. To increase the effectiveness of their efforts on behalf of Gilad, ahead of Netanyahu's visit to Washington, the marchers should split into two groups.
The first group should continue to Jerusalem and demand that Israel take a firmer stand against Hamas. The second group should walk to Tel Aviv and camp out outside the US Embassy. There they should demand that the administration end its contacts with Hamas, end its pressure on the Israeli government to strengthen Hamas, cancel Obama's plan to give an additional $400 million dollars in aid to Hamas and use the US's position on the UN Security Council to condemn Turkey for its material support for Hamas.
For too long, by allowing themselves to be led by our deranged media, Israeli citizens and governments alike have ignored the basic fact that the answer to every question is not more Israeli concessions. Contrary to what our tabloids would have us believe, surrender is only one option among many. It is time we try out some alternatives.
The Gun Rights Decision in McDonald v. Chicago
Ken Klukowski
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
On June 28, the Supreme Court handed down the most consequential decision of this term in the historic gun-rights case, McDonald v. Chicago. Now the Second Amendment right to own a gun extends against every level of government, in a complex 5-4 decision that shows President Obama is using the Supreme Court to push a gun-control agenda.
After the 2008 Heller case holding that the Second Amendment secures an individual right, the biggest question for anyone working in constitutional law was simple: Does the Second Amendment provide a right only against the federal government, or does it also provide a right against state and local governments?
When the Bill of Rights went into effect in 1791, it only secured rights against the federal government. When the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, it extended many federal rights—including most of the Bill of Rights—against the states and states’ subdivisions (counties and cities).
But the states are separate sovereigns. In the following decades, the Court held that only those rights that are fundamental rights can trump state sovereignty, limiting the power of state and local governments.
The city of Chicago has a gun ban as restrictive as the one the Court struck down in D.C. So in McDonald the Court was finally confronted with whether the right to keep and bear arms is one of these fundamental rights.
In a lengthy opinion (totaling over 200 pages), the Court held in a narrow 5-4 decision that the right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental right. As a result, the Chicago gun ban has suffered the same fate as D.C.’s, but that’s where agreement ends.
Contrary to many press reports, the Court could not agree on why the Second Amendment applies to the states. The Court agreed that the right to own a gun is fundamental, and so applies to the states. Because it applies to the states, the city law that bans all guns—such as the law in Chicago—cannot stand.
But that’s the end of the Court’s holding. In an opinion written by Justice Sam Alito, four justices went the straightforward route argued by the NRA that the Second Amendment is part of the Fourteenth Amendment Due Process Clause, which is the approach that the Court has used since 1897.
Justice Clarence Thomas, the most conservative justice on the Court, declined to go along with that approach. The Due Process Clause route, called substantive due process, is at root a liberal activist theory contradicted by the history and original meaning of the Constitution. Justice Thomas instead argued that the Court should apply the right to bear arms through the Fourteenth Amendment Privileges or Immunities Clause, which was the way the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment designed it.
The four liberal justices dissented in what should be a shocking move. Given how the Court extended First Amendment rights such a free speech and religious freedom, Fourth Amendment rights against search and seizures, and Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, the Second Amendment should have been a foregone conclusion.
The four liberal justices nonetheless set forth elaborate arguments as to how and why the right to own a gun is not fundamental, and therefore cities and states should be free to regulate them in any fashion, or even completely ban them. Justice Stevens wrote his own dissent for his last day on the bench. Justice Breyer wrote another dissent, which Justice Ginsburg and Justice Sotomayor joined in full.
What’s interesting about that is it contradicts what Sonia Sotomayor said during her confirmation hearings just last year. In response to the question of whether it is settled that the Second Amendment secures an individual rights, Sotomayor told Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy, “Yes, sir.”
Really? How does that square with the dissent? The one that said, “I can find nothing in the Second Amendment’s text, history, or underlying rationale … to protect the keeping and bearing arms for private self-defense purposes.” Although that statement only concerned whether the right to own a gun is fundamental, the dissent also said that the Court should consider overruling Heller altogether.
Those statements are consistent with the decisions Sonia Sotomayor joined when she was an appeals judge on the Second Circuit. Those were the decisions that led defenders of the Second Amendment to oppose her confirmation to the Supreme Court.
Heller and McDonald are only the beginning. There are many important questions remaining about the meaning of the Second Amendment. Those questions will be answered by whoever sits on the Supreme Court over the next thirty years. McDonald is a reminder that the biggest battles over the Second Amendment will now be won or lost in the courts.
That being the case, senators should ask some very serious questions about the Second Amendment during Elena Kagan’s confirmation hearings this week.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
On June 28, the Supreme Court handed down the most consequential decision of this term in the historic gun-rights case, McDonald v. Chicago. Now the Second Amendment right to own a gun extends against every level of government, in a complex 5-4 decision that shows President Obama is using the Supreme Court to push a gun-control agenda.
After the 2008 Heller case holding that the Second Amendment secures an individual right, the biggest question for anyone working in constitutional law was simple: Does the Second Amendment provide a right only against the federal government, or does it also provide a right against state and local governments?
When the Bill of Rights went into effect in 1791, it only secured rights against the federal government. When the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, it extended many federal rights—including most of the Bill of Rights—against the states and states’ subdivisions (counties and cities).
But the states are separate sovereigns. In the following decades, the Court held that only those rights that are fundamental rights can trump state sovereignty, limiting the power of state and local governments.
The city of Chicago has a gun ban as restrictive as the one the Court struck down in D.C. So in McDonald the Court was finally confronted with whether the right to keep and bear arms is one of these fundamental rights.
In a lengthy opinion (totaling over 200 pages), the Court held in a narrow 5-4 decision that the right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental right. As a result, the Chicago gun ban has suffered the same fate as D.C.’s, but that’s where agreement ends.
Contrary to many press reports, the Court could not agree on why the Second Amendment applies to the states. The Court agreed that the right to own a gun is fundamental, and so applies to the states. Because it applies to the states, the city law that bans all guns—such as the law in Chicago—cannot stand.
But that’s the end of the Court’s holding. In an opinion written by Justice Sam Alito, four justices went the straightforward route argued by the NRA that the Second Amendment is part of the Fourteenth Amendment Due Process Clause, which is the approach that the Court has used since 1897.
Justice Clarence Thomas, the most conservative justice on the Court, declined to go along with that approach. The Due Process Clause route, called substantive due process, is at root a liberal activist theory contradicted by the history and original meaning of the Constitution. Justice Thomas instead argued that the Court should apply the right to bear arms through the Fourteenth Amendment Privileges or Immunities Clause, which was the way the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment designed it.
The four liberal justices dissented in what should be a shocking move. Given how the Court extended First Amendment rights such a free speech and religious freedom, Fourth Amendment rights against search and seizures, and Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, the Second Amendment should have been a foregone conclusion.
The four liberal justices nonetheless set forth elaborate arguments as to how and why the right to own a gun is not fundamental, and therefore cities and states should be free to regulate them in any fashion, or even completely ban them. Justice Stevens wrote his own dissent for his last day on the bench. Justice Breyer wrote another dissent, which Justice Ginsburg and Justice Sotomayor joined in full.
What’s interesting about that is it contradicts what Sonia Sotomayor said during her confirmation hearings just last year. In response to the question of whether it is settled that the Second Amendment secures an individual rights, Sotomayor told Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy, “Yes, sir.”
Really? How does that square with the dissent? The one that said, “I can find nothing in the Second Amendment’s text, history, or underlying rationale … to protect the keeping and bearing arms for private self-defense purposes.” Although that statement only concerned whether the right to own a gun is fundamental, the dissent also said that the Court should consider overruling Heller altogether.
Those statements are consistent with the decisions Sonia Sotomayor joined when she was an appeals judge on the Second Circuit. Those were the decisions that led defenders of the Second Amendment to oppose her confirmation to the Supreme Court.
Heller and McDonald are only the beginning. There are many important questions remaining about the meaning of the Second Amendment. Those questions will be answered by whoever sits on the Supreme Court over the next thirty years. McDonald is a reminder that the biggest battles over the Second Amendment will now be won or lost in the courts.
That being the case, senators should ask some very serious questions about the Second Amendment during Elena Kagan’s confirmation hearings this week.
Gun Control Laws
Thomas Sowell
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Now that the Supreme Court of the United States has decided that the Second Amendment to the Constitution means that individual Americans have a right to bear arms, what can we expect?
Those who have no confidence in ordinary Americans may expect a bloodbath, as the benighted masses start shooting each other, now that they can no longer be denied guns by their betters. People who think we shouldn't be allowed to make our own medical decisions, or decisions about which schools our children attend, certainly are not likely to be happy with the idea that we can make our own decisions about how to defend ourselves.
When you stop and think about it, there is no obvious reason why issues like gun control should be ideological issues in the first place. It is ultimately an empirical question whether allowing ordinary citizens to have firearms will increase or decrease the amount of violence.
Many people who are opposed to gun laws which place severe restrictions on ordinary citizens owning firearms have based themselves on the Second Amendment to the Constitution. But, while the Supreme Court must make the Second Amendment the basis of its rulings on gun control laws, there is no reason why the Second Amendment should be the last word for the voting public.
If the end of gun control leads to a bloodbath of runaway shootings, then the Second Amendment can be repealed, just as other Constitutional Amendments have been repealed. Laws exist for people, not people for laws.
There is no point arguing, as many people do, that it is difficult to amend the Constitution. The fact that it doesn't happen very often doesn't mean that it is difficult. The people may not want it to happen, even if the intelligentsia are itching to change it.
When the people wanted it to happen, the Constitution was amended 4 times in 8 years, from 1913 through 1920.
What all this means is that judges and the voting public have different roles. There is no reason why judges should "consider the basic values that underlie a constitutional provision and their contemporary significance," as Justice Stephen Breyer said in his dissent against the Supreme Court's gun control decision.
But, as the great Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, his job was "to see that the game is played according to the rules whether I like them or not."
If the public doesn't like the rules, or the consequences to which the rules lead, then the public can change the rules via the ballot box. But that is very different from judges changing the rules by verbal sleight of hand, or by talking about "weighing of the constitutional right to bear arms" against other considerations, as Justice Breyer puts it. That's not his job. Not if "we the people" are to govern ourselves, as the Constitution says.
As for the merits or demerits of gun control laws themselves, a vast amount of evidence, both from the United States and from other countries, shows that keeping guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens does not keep guns out of the hands of criminals. It is not uncommon for a tightening of gun control laws to be followed by an increase-- not a decrease-- in gun crimes, including murder.
Conversely, there have been places and times where an increase in gun ownership has been followed by a reduction in crimes in general and murder in particular.
Unfortunately, the media intelligentsia tend to favor gun control laws, so a lot of hard facts about the futility, or the counterproductive consequences of such laws, never reach the public through the media.
We hear a lot about countries with stronger gun control laws than the United States that have lower murder rates. But we very seldom hear about countries with stronger gun control laws than the United States that have higher murder rates, such as Russia and Brazil.
The media, like Justice Breyer, might do well to reflect on what is their job and what is the voting public's job. The media's job should be to give us the information to make up our own minds, not slant and filter the news to fit the media's vision.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Now that the Supreme Court of the United States has decided that the Second Amendment to the Constitution means that individual Americans have a right to bear arms, what can we expect?
Those who have no confidence in ordinary Americans may expect a bloodbath, as the benighted masses start shooting each other, now that they can no longer be denied guns by their betters. People who think we shouldn't be allowed to make our own medical decisions, or decisions about which schools our children attend, certainly are not likely to be happy with the idea that we can make our own decisions about how to defend ourselves.
When you stop and think about it, there is no obvious reason why issues like gun control should be ideological issues in the first place. It is ultimately an empirical question whether allowing ordinary citizens to have firearms will increase or decrease the amount of violence.
Many people who are opposed to gun laws which place severe restrictions on ordinary citizens owning firearms have based themselves on the Second Amendment to the Constitution. But, while the Supreme Court must make the Second Amendment the basis of its rulings on gun control laws, there is no reason why the Second Amendment should be the last word for the voting public.
If the end of gun control leads to a bloodbath of runaway shootings, then the Second Amendment can be repealed, just as other Constitutional Amendments have been repealed. Laws exist for people, not people for laws.
There is no point arguing, as many people do, that it is difficult to amend the Constitution. The fact that it doesn't happen very often doesn't mean that it is difficult. The people may not want it to happen, even if the intelligentsia are itching to change it.
When the people wanted it to happen, the Constitution was amended 4 times in 8 years, from 1913 through 1920.
What all this means is that judges and the voting public have different roles. There is no reason why judges should "consider the basic values that underlie a constitutional provision and their contemporary significance," as Justice Stephen Breyer said in his dissent against the Supreme Court's gun control decision.
But, as the great Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, his job was "to see that the game is played according to the rules whether I like them or not."
If the public doesn't like the rules, or the consequences to which the rules lead, then the public can change the rules via the ballot box. But that is very different from judges changing the rules by verbal sleight of hand, or by talking about "weighing of the constitutional right to bear arms" against other considerations, as Justice Breyer puts it. That's not his job. Not if "we the people" are to govern ourselves, as the Constitution says.
As for the merits or demerits of gun control laws themselves, a vast amount of evidence, both from the United States and from other countries, shows that keeping guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens does not keep guns out of the hands of criminals. It is not uncommon for a tightening of gun control laws to be followed by an increase-- not a decrease-- in gun crimes, including murder.
Conversely, there have been places and times where an increase in gun ownership has been followed by a reduction in crimes in general and murder in particular.
Unfortunately, the media intelligentsia tend to favor gun control laws, so a lot of hard facts about the futility, or the counterproductive consequences of such laws, never reach the public through the media.
We hear a lot about countries with stronger gun control laws than the United States that have lower murder rates. But we very seldom hear about countries with stronger gun control laws than the United States that have higher murder rates, such as Russia and Brazil.
The media, like Justice Breyer, might do well to reflect on what is their job and what is the voting public's job. The media's job should be to give us the information to make up our own minds, not slant and filter the news to fit the media's vision.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
If You Believe America Has Lousy Health Care, Here’s Why
Dennis Prager
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
If you believe that Americans have lousy health care, it is probably not because you have experienced inferior heath care. It is probably because you were told America has lousy health care.
Last week, major news media featured these headlines:
Reuters: "U.S. scores dead last again in healthcare study"
Los Angeles Times: "U.S. is No. 1 in a key area of healthcare. Guess which one ..."
NPR: "US Spends The Most On Health Care, Yet Gets Least"
The Week: "US health care system: Worst in the world?"
Now let's delve into this widely reported headline as written by Reuters.
For those readers who rely on a headline to get news -- and we all do that sometimes -- the issue is clear: America is rated as having the worst health care "again."
For those who read the first sentence or two, an even more common practice, the Reuters report begins this way: "Americans spend twice as much as residents of other developed countries on healthcare, but get lower quality, less efficiency and have the least equitable system, according to a report released on Wednesday. The United States ranked last when compared to six other countries -- Britain, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand, the Commonwealth Fund report found."
For those reading further, the claim of the headline and of the first two sentences is reinforced. The third sentence offers commentary on the study by the head of the group that conducted it: "'As an American it just bothers me that with all of our know-how, all of our wealth, that we are not assuring that people who need healthcare can get it,' Commonwealth Fund president Karen Davis told reporters ..."
Only later in the report does the discerning reader have a clue as to how agenda-driven this report and this study are. The otherwise unidentified Karen Davis, president of the never-identified Commonwealth Fund, is quoted as saying how important it was that America pass President Obama's health care bill.
Could it be that Ms. Davis and the Commonwealth are leftwing?
They sure are, though Reuters, which is also on the Left, never lets you know.
Here's how the Commonwealth Fund's 2009 Report from the president begins: "The Commonwealth Fund marshaled its resources this year to produce timely and rigorous work that helped lay the groundwork for the historic Affordable Care Act, signed by President Obama in March 2010."
As for Davis, she served as deputy assistant secretary for health policy in the Department of Health and Human Services in the Jimmy Carter administration all four years of the Carter presidency. And in 1993, in speaking to new members of Congress, she advocated a single-payer approach to health care.
I could not find any mainstream news report about this story that identified the politics of Karen Davis or the Commonwealth Fund. If they had, the headlines would have looked something like this:
"Liberal think tank, headed by single-payer advocate, ObamaCare activist, and former Carter official, says America has worst health care"
Conversely, imagine if a conservative think tank had released a study showing that, in general, Americans had the best health care in the world. Two questions: Would the media have reported it? And if they did, would they have neglected to report that the think tank was conservative? The answer is no to both.
In microcosm, we have here four major developments of the last 50 years:
1. The Left dominates the news media in America; and around the world, leftwing media are almost the only news media.
2. The media report most news in the light of their Leftwing values (whether consciously or not).
3. Most people understandably believe what they read, watch or listen to.
4. This is a major reason most people on the Left are on the Left. They have been given a lifetime of leftist perceptions of the world (especially when one includes higher education) and therefore regard what they believe about the world as reality rather than as a leftwing perception of reality.
The same thing happened on a far larger scale in 2000 when the world press reported that the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) ranked America 37th in health care behind such countries as Morocco, Costa Rica, Colombia and Greece.
This WHO assessment was reported throughout the world and regularly cited by leftwing critics of American health care. Yet, to the best of my knowledge, no one other than a few conservatives noted that Cuba was ranked 39th, essentially tied with the United States.
Which means that the WHO report is essentially a fraud. Who in his right mind thinks Americans and Cubans have equivalent levels of health care? For that matter, how many world leaders travel to Greece or Morocco instead of to the United States for health care?
The answer is that WHO doesn't assess health care quality; it assesses health care equality, exactly the way any organization on the Left assesses it. And since the world's and America's news media are on the Left, they report a Leftist bogus assessment of American health care as true.
Imagine this headline around the world: "World Health Organization declares America and Cuba tied in health care."
Of course, only Leftists would believe that. But since non-Leftists would realize how absurd the claim was, that is not what anyone was told. Instead, the world and American media all announced "America rated 37th in health care by World Health Organization."
These two reports illustrate why so many people in America and around the world think America's health care is inferior and why they support movement toward nationalized health care.
But these two reports are only one example of the larger problem -- the world thinking is morally confused because it is informed by the morally confused. How else explain, for example, why America, the greatest force for good among nations, is hated, while China, never a force for good, isn't?
The answer is, unfortunately, simple: Garbage in, garbage out.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
If you believe that Americans have lousy health care, it is probably not because you have experienced inferior heath care. It is probably because you were told America has lousy health care.
Last week, major news media featured these headlines:
Reuters: "U.S. scores dead last again in healthcare study"
Los Angeles Times: "U.S. is No. 1 in a key area of healthcare. Guess which one ..."
NPR: "US Spends The Most On Health Care, Yet Gets Least"
The Week: "US health care system: Worst in the world?"
Now let's delve into this widely reported headline as written by Reuters.
For those readers who rely on a headline to get news -- and we all do that sometimes -- the issue is clear: America is rated as having the worst health care "again."
For those who read the first sentence or two, an even more common practice, the Reuters report begins this way: "Americans spend twice as much as residents of other developed countries on healthcare, but get lower quality, less efficiency and have the least equitable system, according to a report released on Wednesday. The United States ranked last when compared to six other countries -- Britain, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand, the Commonwealth Fund report found."
For those reading further, the claim of the headline and of the first two sentences is reinforced. The third sentence offers commentary on the study by the head of the group that conducted it: "'As an American it just bothers me that with all of our know-how, all of our wealth, that we are not assuring that people who need healthcare can get it,' Commonwealth Fund president Karen Davis told reporters ..."
Only later in the report does the discerning reader have a clue as to how agenda-driven this report and this study are. The otherwise unidentified Karen Davis, president of the never-identified Commonwealth Fund, is quoted as saying how important it was that America pass President Obama's health care bill.
Could it be that Ms. Davis and the Commonwealth are leftwing?
They sure are, though Reuters, which is also on the Left, never lets you know.
Here's how the Commonwealth Fund's 2009 Report from the president begins: "The Commonwealth Fund marshaled its resources this year to produce timely and rigorous work that helped lay the groundwork for the historic Affordable Care Act, signed by President Obama in March 2010."
As for Davis, she served as deputy assistant secretary for health policy in the Department of Health and Human Services in the Jimmy Carter administration all four years of the Carter presidency. And in 1993, in speaking to new members of Congress, she advocated a single-payer approach to health care.
I could not find any mainstream news report about this story that identified the politics of Karen Davis or the Commonwealth Fund. If they had, the headlines would have looked something like this:
"Liberal think tank, headed by single-payer advocate, ObamaCare activist, and former Carter official, says America has worst health care"
Conversely, imagine if a conservative think tank had released a study showing that, in general, Americans had the best health care in the world. Two questions: Would the media have reported it? And if they did, would they have neglected to report that the think tank was conservative? The answer is no to both.
In microcosm, we have here four major developments of the last 50 years:
1. The Left dominates the news media in America; and around the world, leftwing media are almost the only news media.
2. The media report most news in the light of their Leftwing values (whether consciously or not).
3. Most people understandably believe what they read, watch or listen to.
4. This is a major reason most people on the Left are on the Left. They have been given a lifetime of leftist perceptions of the world (especially when one includes higher education) and therefore regard what they believe about the world as reality rather than as a leftwing perception of reality.
The same thing happened on a far larger scale in 2000 when the world press reported that the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) ranked America 37th in health care behind such countries as Morocco, Costa Rica, Colombia and Greece.
This WHO assessment was reported throughout the world and regularly cited by leftwing critics of American health care. Yet, to the best of my knowledge, no one other than a few conservatives noted that Cuba was ranked 39th, essentially tied with the United States.
Which means that the WHO report is essentially a fraud. Who in his right mind thinks Americans and Cubans have equivalent levels of health care? For that matter, how many world leaders travel to Greece or Morocco instead of to the United States for health care?
The answer is that WHO doesn't assess health care quality; it assesses health care equality, exactly the way any organization on the Left assesses it. And since the world's and America's news media are on the Left, they report a Leftist bogus assessment of American health care as true.
Imagine this headline around the world: "World Health Organization declares America and Cuba tied in health care."
Of course, only Leftists would believe that. But since non-Leftists would realize how absurd the claim was, that is not what anyone was told. Instead, the world and American media all announced "America rated 37th in health care by World Health Organization."
These two reports illustrate why so many people in America and around the world think America's health care is inferior and why they support movement toward nationalized health care.
But these two reports are only one example of the larger problem -- the world thinking is morally confused because it is informed by the morally confused. How else explain, for example, why America, the greatest force for good among nations, is hated, while China, never a force for good, isn't?
The answer is, unfortunately, simple: Garbage in, garbage out.
Obama Owes Bush An Apology
Mona Charen
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Had it not been for opposing war, President Obama might never have catapulted to the White House.
It was taken for granted in the run-up to the presidential campaign of 2008 that candidate Obama had principled objections to the war in Iraq. He was the left's champion against Sen. Hillary Clinton, who had, along with 29 of the then 50 Democratic senators, voted in favor of the Iraq War resolution. That vote was to dog her throughout the Democratic primaries.
Though Obama was only a state legislator in 2002, he gave a highly partisan anti-war speech that improved his standing with the left wing of the Democratic Party. "What I am opposed to," he declaimed, "is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression." When the war began to go badly in 2006 and 2007, Obama was hailed as prescient.
After winning the nomination, Obama reiterated his opposition to the war in Iraq, which he claimed had been poorly led, unnecessary, badly motivated, and doomed to failure.
In a March 2007 Senate floor speech, Sen. Obama recited the leftist litany about Iraq. It was folly, he argued, to "go it alone" -- overlooking the fact that 27 nations participated in the coalition to remove Saddam Hussein. Obama repeated the common liberal trope of the time that only a political settlement would end the violence. "There is no military solution to this war," he pronounced.
When President Bush announced the troop surge in January 2007, Obama opposed it, saying, "I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq are going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse." Even a year later, when evidence mounted that the surge was working, Obama continued to push for retreat ("phased redeployment") because "I don't think the president's strategy is going to work."
Only in mid-July of 2008 did the Obama campaign scrub criticism of the surge from its website.
By turning to the architect of the Iraq surge, Gen. David Petraeus, to save the war in Afghanistan, President Obama is acknowledging, if only implicitly, that he was quite wrong about the Iraq surge and that Bush was right.
But what remains of the rest of his critique about Bush's war in Iraq?
What distinguishes Obama's hopes for Afghanistan from Bush's much-despised aspirations for Iraq? At his press conference following the G-20 summit, Obama sounded like a neoconservative. "... I reject the notion that the Afghan people don't want some of the basic things that everybody wants -- basic rule of law, a voice in governance, economic opportunity, basic physical security, electricity, roads, an ability to get a harvest to market and get a fair price for it without having to pay too many bribes in between. And I think we can make a difference, and the coalition can make a difference, in them meeting those aspirations ..."
The "Come home, America" president is in full nation-building mode now. In that 2007 speech, he had predicted that only the removal of American troops would permit Iraq to thrive: "... it must begin soon. Letting the Iraqis know that we will not be there forever is our last, best hope to pressure the Iraqis to take ownership of their country and bring an end to their conflict. It is time for our troops to start coming home."
No more. Whereas candidate Obama was contemptuous of Bush's "open-ended" commitment in Iraq, President Obama is now walking back his promise to leave Afghanistan by July 2011. "There has been a lot of obsession around this whole issue of when do we leave," he said. "My focus right now is how to we make sure that what we're doing there is successful, given the incredible sacrifices that our young men and women are putting in." The July 2011 departure date is inoperative -- like the promise to close Guantanamo by January 2010.
I am not confident that the surge will work as well in Afghanistan as it did in Iraq. But I am sure that the president owes his predecessor an apology.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Had it not been for opposing war, President Obama might never have catapulted to the White House.
It was taken for granted in the run-up to the presidential campaign of 2008 that candidate Obama had principled objections to the war in Iraq. He was the left's champion against Sen. Hillary Clinton, who had, along with 29 of the then 50 Democratic senators, voted in favor of the Iraq War resolution. That vote was to dog her throughout the Democratic primaries.
Though Obama was only a state legislator in 2002, he gave a highly partisan anti-war speech that improved his standing with the left wing of the Democratic Party. "What I am opposed to," he declaimed, "is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression." When the war began to go badly in 2006 and 2007, Obama was hailed as prescient.
After winning the nomination, Obama reiterated his opposition to the war in Iraq, which he claimed had been poorly led, unnecessary, badly motivated, and doomed to failure.
In a March 2007 Senate floor speech, Sen. Obama recited the leftist litany about Iraq. It was folly, he argued, to "go it alone" -- overlooking the fact that 27 nations participated in the coalition to remove Saddam Hussein. Obama repeated the common liberal trope of the time that only a political settlement would end the violence. "There is no military solution to this war," he pronounced.
When President Bush announced the troop surge in January 2007, Obama opposed it, saying, "I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq are going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse." Even a year later, when evidence mounted that the surge was working, Obama continued to push for retreat ("phased redeployment") because "I don't think the president's strategy is going to work."
Only in mid-July of 2008 did the Obama campaign scrub criticism of the surge from its website.
By turning to the architect of the Iraq surge, Gen. David Petraeus, to save the war in Afghanistan, President Obama is acknowledging, if only implicitly, that he was quite wrong about the Iraq surge and that Bush was right.
But what remains of the rest of his critique about Bush's war in Iraq?
What distinguishes Obama's hopes for Afghanistan from Bush's much-despised aspirations for Iraq? At his press conference following the G-20 summit, Obama sounded like a neoconservative. "... I reject the notion that the Afghan people don't want some of the basic things that everybody wants -- basic rule of law, a voice in governance, economic opportunity, basic physical security, electricity, roads, an ability to get a harvest to market and get a fair price for it without having to pay too many bribes in between. And I think we can make a difference, and the coalition can make a difference, in them meeting those aspirations ..."
The "Come home, America" president is in full nation-building mode now. In that 2007 speech, he had predicted that only the removal of American troops would permit Iraq to thrive: "... it must begin soon. Letting the Iraqis know that we will not be there forever is our last, best hope to pressure the Iraqis to take ownership of their country and bring an end to their conflict. It is time for our troops to start coming home."
No more. Whereas candidate Obama was contemptuous of Bush's "open-ended" commitment in Iraq, President Obama is now walking back his promise to leave Afghanistan by July 2011. "There has been a lot of obsession around this whole issue of when do we leave," he said. "My focus right now is how to we make sure that what we're doing there is successful, given the incredible sacrifices that our young men and women are putting in." The July 2011 departure date is inoperative -- like the promise to close Guantanamo by January 2010.
I am not confident that the surge will work as well in Afghanistan as it did in Iraq. But I am sure that the president owes his predecessor an apology.
Americans Relate to Founders, Not Progressives
Michael Barone
Monday, June 28, 2010
Democrats are reportedly planning to raise $125 million for a campaign to sell Obamacare to the voting public. Apparently, the idea is that what 50-plus presidential speeches and statements and months of congressional debate could not do can be done by $125 million spent on everything from TV ads to community organizers.
Maybe. But there seems to be a more fundamental problem here. The Obama Democrats didn't set out to produce an unpopular stimulus package, an unpopular health care bill and an unpopular cap-and-trade scheme.
They thought these initiatives would be popular. In their view, history is a story of progress from small government to big government, and as historians of the New Deal wrote, that progress is especially welcome in times of economic distress.
The massive unpopularity of the Obama Democrats' programs suggests that view of history is defective. Let me propose another, starting with the Founding Fathers.
The Founders believed there was a tension between representative government and the right to life, liberty and property. So they wrote the Fifth Amendment to ensure that no citizen was deprived of those rights without due process of law.
In Britain, that tension had been limited by allowing only property-owners to vote. That way, those without property could not elect representatives who would steal from the rich and give to the poor.
In the early years of our republic, that precaution did not seem necessary. We were a nation of farmers, where land was plentiful and labor scarce. The large majority of citizens then considered relevant -- white adult males -- actually owned the land they farmed. There was no danger in allowing all of them to vote, as would become the general rule in the U.S. by the early 19th century, because the large majority owned property.
The definition of relevant citizens in time expanded to include blacks and women. But as Americans and immigrants increasingly clustered in enormous cities, and as large industrial factories employed thousands of low-skill workers, the percentage of property owners fell.
One hundred years ago, most urban Americans rented rather than owned their homes. Many had no bank accounts, and few had significant financial assets. Elites worried that this proletariat might rise in revolution.
In this America, the Progressives argued that the Founders' vision was obsolete. Property rights should be subordinate to human rights. Government should regulate economic activity and "spread the wealth around," as Barack Obama told Joe the Plumber.
This view animated the New Deal in the 1930s and appealed to the non-property-owning majority. Franklin Roosevelt sowed the idea, harvested by the New Deal historians, that an ever-expanding government was both good and necessary. Democrats were referencing this when they said they were "making history" by passing their health care bill.
Their problem is that the America of the Progressives and New Dealers no longer exists. Government home-finance programs helped make us a nation of homeowners. Technological progress and deregulation squeezed out transportation and communications, and made the necessities of life less costly, enabling citizens to accumulate significant wealth in their working years.
True, we carried some of these things too far. Efforts to raise homeownership over 65 percent resulted in a housing price crash. Poorly understood financial innovations resulted in the financial crisis of 2008.
But we still live in an America like the America of the Founders, and unlike the America of the Progressives and the New Dealers, in which a majority of citizens are or have every prospect of becoming property owners. And a nation of property owners is less willing to plunder the property of others in search of some promised gain than a nation where most people don't and will never own significant property.
So when Susan Roesgen, then of CNN, upbraided a Tea Party protester in 2009 by reminding him that he was getting a $400 tax rebate thanks to the Democrats' stimulus package, she was met with utter dismissal. You don't sell out your property rights for a mere $400.
The polls and the post-2008 election results show that the purported beneficiaries of the Obama Democrats' programs are unenthusiastic about voting and people with modest incomes are trending heavily Republican. The only enthusiasm for the Obama Democrats' policies comes from David Brooks' "educated class": people who are or identify with the centralized experts tasked by the Obama Democrats with making decisions for the rest of us.
Unfortunately for the Obama Democrats, they, unlike property owners, are not a majority in today's America.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Democrats are reportedly planning to raise $125 million for a campaign to sell Obamacare to the voting public. Apparently, the idea is that what 50-plus presidential speeches and statements and months of congressional debate could not do can be done by $125 million spent on everything from TV ads to community organizers.
Maybe. But there seems to be a more fundamental problem here. The Obama Democrats didn't set out to produce an unpopular stimulus package, an unpopular health care bill and an unpopular cap-and-trade scheme.
They thought these initiatives would be popular. In their view, history is a story of progress from small government to big government, and as historians of the New Deal wrote, that progress is especially welcome in times of economic distress.
The massive unpopularity of the Obama Democrats' programs suggests that view of history is defective. Let me propose another, starting with the Founding Fathers.
The Founders believed there was a tension between representative government and the right to life, liberty and property. So they wrote the Fifth Amendment to ensure that no citizen was deprived of those rights without due process of law.
In Britain, that tension had been limited by allowing only property-owners to vote. That way, those without property could not elect representatives who would steal from the rich and give to the poor.
In the early years of our republic, that precaution did not seem necessary. We were a nation of farmers, where land was plentiful and labor scarce. The large majority of citizens then considered relevant -- white adult males -- actually owned the land they farmed. There was no danger in allowing all of them to vote, as would become the general rule in the U.S. by the early 19th century, because the large majority owned property.
The definition of relevant citizens in time expanded to include blacks and women. But as Americans and immigrants increasingly clustered in enormous cities, and as large industrial factories employed thousands of low-skill workers, the percentage of property owners fell.
One hundred years ago, most urban Americans rented rather than owned their homes. Many had no bank accounts, and few had significant financial assets. Elites worried that this proletariat might rise in revolution.
In this America, the Progressives argued that the Founders' vision was obsolete. Property rights should be subordinate to human rights. Government should regulate economic activity and "spread the wealth around," as Barack Obama told Joe the Plumber.
This view animated the New Deal in the 1930s and appealed to the non-property-owning majority. Franklin Roosevelt sowed the idea, harvested by the New Deal historians, that an ever-expanding government was both good and necessary. Democrats were referencing this when they said they were "making history" by passing their health care bill.
Their problem is that the America of the Progressives and New Dealers no longer exists. Government home-finance programs helped make us a nation of homeowners. Technological progress and deregulation squeezed out transportation and communications, and made the necessities of life less costly, enabling citizens to accumulate significant wealth in their working years.
True, we carried some of these things too far. Efforts to raise homeownership over 65 percent resulted in a housing price crash. Poorly understood financial innovations resulted in the financial crisis of 2008.
But we still live in an America like the America of the Founders, and unlike the America of the Progressives and the New Dealers, in which a majority of citizens are or have every prospect of becoming property owners. And a nation of property owners is less willing to plunder the property of others in search of some promised gain than a nation where most people don't and will never own significant property.
So when Susan Roesgen, then of CNN, upbraided a Tea Party protester in 2009 by reminding him that he was getting a $400 tax rebate thanks to the Democrats' stimulus package, she was met with utter dismissal. You don't sell out your property rights for a mere $400.
The polls and the post-2008 election results show that the purported beneficiaries of the Obama Democrats' programs are unenthusiastic about voting and people with modest incomes are trending heavily Republican. The only enthusiasm for the Obama Democrats' policies comes from David Brooks' "educated class": people who are or identify with the centralized experts tasked by the Obama Democrats with making decisions for the rest of us.
Unfortunately for the Obama Democrats, they, unlike property owners, are not a majority in today's America.
Monday, June 28, 2010
KSM’s elliptical machine
Jay Nordlinger
Monday, June 28, 2010
Last week, I did a little blogpost about Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier who has been held hostage by Hamas for four years now. Ehud Barak, the defense minister of Israel, had made a pointed comment to Robert Gates, the U.S. defense chief: “A million and a half people are living in Gaza, but only one of them is really in need of humanitarian aid.” He meant Shalit, of course. The soldier is assumed alive, but has not been seen by the civilized world.
In that post, I said, “Hamas does not permit the Red Cross to see Shalit, of course. Neither does the Cuban dictatorship or Chinese dictatorship permit the Red Cross to see prisoners. May I remind you that the Red Cross visited inmates in Nazi concentration camps? One was Carl von Ossietzky, the pacifist journalist who won the Nobel Peace Prize for 1935. And may I remind you that Red Cross representatives were regular companions of Nelson Mandela, imprisoned on Robben Island?”
I concluded, “If Gilad Shalit were other than Israeli, there’d be mass demonstrations in his behalf all over Europe, and on American streets, too. But . . .”
But he is. Is Israeli. And that makes a great deal of difference in the world.
After I wrote that post, I got a stream of e-mails from people on the left, attacking me in the most venomous and obscene terms. I’ll translate what they wrote into ordinary, temperate English: “The United States refused to let the Red Cross see terror detainees. Aren’t you a hypocrite? Isn’t the United States as bad as Hamas, the Cuban dictatorship, the Chinese dictatorship, and so on?”
No. The United States has captured about 100,000 terror suspects, probably more. It has had fewer than a hundred terrorists in the “CIA program” — in CIA detention, at “black sites.” These were “high-value detainees,” being interrogated for what they knew. Why? Because the terrorists had promised to attack Americans again and again, just as they had on 9/11. Those attacks were not a one-time deal, they said; they were no anomaly. The jihad was going to hit us again and again, as often as it could.
Remember when Americans were screaming at the Bush administration to “connect the dots”? And saying that the administration had failed to connect these dots? Well, that’s what the United States was trying to do in those interrogations: connect the dots. (And we did: The information we obtained prevented and foiled attacks.)
We certainly did not allow the Red Cross in — not while those terrorists were being interrogated, not at black sites. The public didn’t know about those sites. We (the U.S.) did not want the terrorists to reveal what we had learned, and what we were doing. We didn’t want them to communicate to the outside — we had (further) mass murder to prevent. We did not want the terrorists to use the Red Cross, or anyone else, as a megaphone — which, of course, is exactly what they did later.
When those detainees were transferred from the “CIA program” to more regular facilities, the Red Cross had access to them. And those detainees include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The Red Cross has the run of Guantanamo Bay, long has.
Michael Mukasey was attorney general from November 2007 to January 2009. He remembers visiting Guantanamo Bay in February 2008. He looked at many of the high-value detainees on video monitors. But he did not see Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; Mohammed wasn’t in his cell. He was off having a Red Cross visit.
Mukasey did see the exercise room, adjacent to Mohammed’s cell. And he noticed something interesting: Mohammed had the same elliptical machine that he, the attorney general, had back home in his Washington apartment building. Only there was this difference: Mukasey had to share his, with other residents; there was a mad scramble in the morning to get to it. Mohammed had his machine all to himself.
Bear in mind that he was the “mastermind” of the 9/11 attacks, which killed almost 3,000 people. That he was the beheader of Daniel Pearl. And so on. I wonder how much more tenderly America’s critics expect us to treat such people. “Abdominal massages,” of the type Al Gore apparently requests?
This is to say nothing of the fact that these terror detainees are not uniformed soldiers, have refused to obey the laws and customs of war, and are not entitled to Geneva Convention protection. The United States decided to treat these detainees as though they were ordinary POWs. The fact remains, however, that they are not. When you blow up the World Trade Center, when you slit stewardesses’ throats with boxcutters, you are outside the pale.
• Go back to that blogpost I did, and the anger that it elicited on the left. I was talking about Gilad Shalit, a corporal in uniform. And prisoners of conscience such as those held in Cuba and China: democrats, peace campaigners, intellectuals, artists, religious people, dissenters, and so on. People such as Oscar Biscet and Juan Carlos Herrera, Gao Zhisheng and Liu Xiaobo. What kinship do those men have with the terrorists at Guantanamo Bay — who blow up and behead innocent people? What? And how is the United States like Hamas, the Castro dictatorship, the PRC, etc.? How?
Donald Rumsfeld likes to say, “America is not what’s wrong with the world.” We can broaden that to, “The liberal democracies are not what’s wrong with the world.” You know what’s wrong with the world? Terror groups, dictatorships, totalitarian regimes, and the like. And yet so many people, and organizations, like to concentrate their fire on liberal democracies. This is a sickness. And it’s one that many people in unfree countries are sick over. (You should hear some of the Chinese I talk to.)
Reading some of the reaction to my blogpost, I was reminded why I left the Left, many years ago. Happened sometime during college. I was getting curious about the world: wondering about the Soviet Gulag, for example, and the boat people from Vietnam. I would try to raise those issues with those around me. I was immediately suspect as a fascist: “But what about capital punishment here in America? The death penalty, man. What about Agent Orange, man, and My Lai?”
Okay, okay, we could talk about those — we talked about them constantly. But couldn’t we talk about the Gulag and the boat people a bit, too? No, we couldn’t: because the United States was so sinful, we had to run it down full-time. We had no right to criticize other countries. (This did not apply, strangely, to South Africa, Chile, the Philippines . . .)
Some readers may recall a common line from the Soviet Union in the first years of the Cold War: “But what about the Negroes in the South?” That tended to shut down all conversation.
I don’t know about you, but I find it very hard to talk to people who, when you mention the extreme cruelty of Hamas, the Castros, and so on, go right to the United States and its own offenses, real or imagined. Very hard. We simply live on different moral planets.
I guess I spend most of my time, as a journalist, criticizing or bemoaning the United States. I have a complaint a second, it seems: our litigiousness, our racial screwiness, our political correctness, our violence, the grotesque nature of our popular culture. But, you know? The liberal democracies, including the United States, aren’t what’s wrong with the world.
• Regular readers may remember a journal I did from Iraq, two years ago. May I quote a relevant portion now? Just give it a scan, if you feel like it:
• The Red Cross has not been allowed in to see Corporal Shalit. A lot of us think that it hasn’t tried very hard — that, if it made a great, worldwide fuss, it would get results. The Red Cross can’t find out where Shalit is? Can’t tell his family or his government where he is? Really? The ICRC — the International Committee of the Red Cross — was made for cases like this. Read the history, from Dunant on, and you’ll see that this is so.
For a long time, the ICRC has had an Israel problem. (Hard to name a big international organization that hasn’t.) I studied this in detail at one time. For many, many years, there was just one Red Cross society that was kept out of the international movement — no prizes for guessing whose.
Israel’s Red Cross, the Magen David Adom, or the Red Star of David, was formed in 1930 (almost two decades before statehood). But the international movement refused to admit this group. It had a million Red Crescent societies, but could not countenance Israel’s. The United States, to its everlasting credit, decided to do something about this.
In 1991, the president of the American Red Cross, Dr. Bernadine Healy, gave a speech in Geneva appealing for the inclusion of the Red Star of David. Notoriously, the president of the ICRC, a man named Cornelio Sommaruga, asked whether, if the Star of David was acceptable, she was prepared to accept the swastika too.
That’s what I’m talking about. Very ICRC. Very European, in fact.
In a righteous application of pressure — the Americans really showed cojones — the American Red Cross started to withhold dues from the International Federation. That was in 2000. Finally, in 2006, the ICRC found a way to let the Israelis in. And the Americans paid accumulated dues, totaling $45 million.
Like many other international organizations — I’ll get to Amnesty International in a minute — the ICRC has an America problem, in addition to an Israel problem. One Red Cross-watcher told me recently, “The ICRC leaks reports against the United States. Funny, but you never see them leaking against, say, North Korea, do you?” No, not really.
And the American taxpayer is a handsome funder of the ICRC: We contribute between a quarter and a third of the organization’s budget. I, for one, would not weep if we taxpayers rethought that. What if Gilad Shalit were an American corporal? Do you think the ICRC would try a little harder, given all we pay? I just don’t know. I know that Israel doesn’t have much financial leverage. And I know that the Red Cross is not the neutral collection of saints many would like to think it is — and which it once was, long ago. (Very long ago.)
(Have a quick trivial fact: The Red Cross is the only organization to have won three Nobel Peace Prizes. They’ve won four, if you count the prize given to their founder, Dunant. That was in the very first year of the Noble prizes, 1901.)
• Amnesty International does what everyone else does: attacks liberal democracies, open societies. It’s so easy. And no harm comes to you! But why bother, when there are so many closed societies to worry about, help, and pry open?
Amnesty had a beautiful beginning. It’s a famous story, and I’ll recount it briefly. A British lawyer named Peter Benenson was riding on a train in London. This was in 1960. He read that two Portuguese students had been thrown in jail, for toasting freedom. Benenson decided he should do something about it: and the Appeal for Amnesty was born.
Its reason for being was to help prisoners of conscience — indeed, “prisoner of conscience” was an Amnesty coinage. Prisoners of conscience are those tossed in jail merely for expressing what they believe, or for harboring beliefs uncongenial to the ruling authorities. Prisoners of conscience are different from, for example, armed revolutionaries. They are certainly different from terrorists — from the beheading elliptical-machine users in Guantanamo Bay.
Do you know that our founder, Bill Buckley — our Dunant! — was on the board of Amnesty International USA? He was, for about ten years. But he left — this was in 1978 — because of what Amnesty had become.
What had it become? Well, it declared a pox on all our houses: you know, dictatorships, liberal democracies, whatever. It would release reports on the Soviet Gulag; and then on American prisons. And it would condemn both countries in equal tones. They were “moral equivalence” all the way. And that’s not what WFB signed up for.
Today, you’re as likely to find an Amnesty report against the use of Tasers by American police as you are to find a report against North Korean concentration camps. And Amnesty loves to savage Israel as well. The U.N. spirit lives within that organization, and that is a foul spirit indeed.
You may remember a foul incident from 2005: Amnesty’s secretary-general, Irene Khan, called Guantanamo Bay the “gulag of our times.” Bear in mind, we have real, actual gulags: in the Castros’ realm, in China, in North Korea. But, according to Amnesty, Gitmo is the “gulag of our times.” What are real gulags, then? Maybe not of “our times,” who knows?
Here is a further detail — something else to turn your stomach. We heard about this in an article by Pavel Litvinov, published in the Washington Post. He had been a resident of the Soviet Gulag. And here’s a fact for you: His grandfather, Maxim Litvinov, was one of Stalin’s foreign ministers. In any case, Pavel wrote,
That was too much for one Amnesty official, Gita Sahgal, who headed the “gender unit” (responsible for women’s rights). (Sahgal is a grand-niece of Nehru, incidentally.) In an internal memo, she wrote that the alliance between Amnesty and Begg “fundamentally damages Amnesty International’s integrity and, more importantly, constitutes a threat to human rights. To be appearing on platforms with Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban, whom we treat as a human-rights defender, is a gross error of judgment.”
And so on. Amnesty suspended Sahgal, because she went public with her criticisms; eventually, she and the organization parted ways altogether. Before she went, Salman Rushdie issued a statement in her behalf (and we can agree that he knows something about Islamism). He wrote,
“Amnesty International has done its reputation incalculable damage by allying itself with Moazzam Begg and his group Cageprisoners, and holding them up as human rights advocates. It looks very much as if Amnesty’s leadership is suffering from a kind of moral bankruptcy, and has lost the ability to distinguish right from wrong.”
• Too many people are suffering from moral bankruptcy, and cannot distinguish right from wrong. That number includes the people who pump poison into my inbox. But before I get (back) to them — how about one of Amnesty’s sister organizations, Human Rights Watch?
They go fundraising in Saudi Arabia, which is a perfectly natural thing for them to do. Why? Isn’t Saudi Arabia a nightmare for human rights? And isn’t the organization called “Human Rights Watch”? Yeah, yeah, but HRW makes a specialty of demonizing Israel. And a lot of Saudis like that — so they open their wallets for HRW. Simple.
Israel is a democracy fighting for its life, against those with no respect for democracy, human rights, or decency at all. But this means cruelly little to many people: including some who work for exalted organizations.
Okay, back to my e-mailers, just for a second. I don’t want to whine too much — more than I already have. All of us who write on the Internet get hostile mail, and we know it comes with the territory. But these items were really, really bad. I had lamented the treatment and neglect of Corporal Shalit and of prisoners of conscience. And one guy — I think guy — wrote, “Quit murdering Palestinians, scumbag.” That is not an atypical e-mail, I promise you.
And you know who’s very good at murdering Palestinians? Hamas, Fatah, and other Palestinians who lord it over the people. When Hamas is tossing people off rooftops, where is the “world community”? Blasting Israel and America — the “Little Satan” and the “Great Satan” — that’s where.
It wasn’t hard to figure out why I was getting these e-mails. The e-mailers weren’t reading National Review Online, of course. Left-wing bloggers had attacked my Shalit post in their usual vitriolic and personal terms; their readers were taking the ball from there. And, in their style, they were essentially aping the bloggers they admire.
• Back to my college days, one last time, please — and to the matter of why I left the Left. I concluded that I was on a side: on the side of the United States, of liberal democracy, of man (if you will pardon the grandiosity). I was not a neutralist. I was not a pox-on-both-your-houses guy. I was not a moral-equivalence guy. I knew that the United States and the West weren’t perfect, heaven knows. But I also knew that we weren’t what ailed the world — that we were, on balance, a force for good.
This was a less common view than you might expect — in my environment, at that time.
Recently, I was talking to a composer friend of mine, who made a journey from left to right (as I did, but later in his life). I asked him how it happened. He said he had gone to West Berlin in the 1980s, to study. And the people around him — West German lefties — said, “You know, there’s really no difference between our side and their side. It’s all the same, really. We’re no better than they are.”
But my friend had eyes to see — and he could see that it wasn’t true. He saw, starkly, the difference between a free and open society, and an unfree and closed one. That made all the difference.
I had eyes to see, too. There was a big, big difference between the democratic world and the anti-democratic world. The people around me weren’t Communists; they didn’t carry around copies of Das Kapital (some of them did); they didn’t believe in the “withering away of the state” and all that jazz. They just thought that America was just as bad as anyone else — and that, therefore, we had “no right to talk.” I disagreed.
To repeat what many of my fellow righties have said, there is no way — no way — that America’s enemies can defeat America. Only Americans can do that. How do you lose? For one thing, you lose moral reason. And here is one way of knowing if you’re having trouble in the moral-reason department: When you hear about Hamas — about something awful it has done — is your instinct to hate and condemn George Bush? The Patriot Act? Gitmo? That instinct is a crazy one. And destructive.
Ladies and gentlemen, I apologize for this long, long Impromptus — also for the sheer basicness of it. The A-B-C-ness of it. The sun rises in the east, and liberal democracies aren’t what’s wrong with the world. But sometimes it’s good to review the basics.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Last week, I did a little blogpost about Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier who has been held hostage by Hamas for four years now. Ehud Barak, the defense minister of Israel, had made a pointed comment to Robert Gates, the U.S. defense chief: “A million and a half people are living in Gaza, but only one of them is really in need of humanitarian aid.” He meant Shalit, of course. The soldier is assumed alive, but has not been seen by the civilized world.
In that post, I said, “Hamas does not permit the Red Cross to see Shalit, of course. Neither does the Cuban dictatorship or Chinese dictatorship permit the Red Cross to see prisoners. May I remind you that the Red Cross visited inmates in Nazi concentration camps? One was Carl von Ossietzky, the pacifist journalist who won the Nobel Peace Prize for 1935. And may I remind you that Red Cross representatives were regular companions of Nelson Mandela, imprisoned on Robben Island?”
I concluded, “If Gilad Shalit were other than Israeli, there’d be mass demonstrations in his behalf all over Europe, and on American streets, too. But . . .”
But he is. Is Israeli. And that makes a great deal of difference in the world.
After I wrote that post, I got a stream of e-mails from people on the left, attacking me in the most venomous and obscene terms. I’ll translate what they wrote into ordinary, temperate English: “The United States refused to let the Red Cross see terror detainees. Aren’t you a hypocrite? Isn’t the United States as bad as Hamas, the Cuban dictatorship, the Chinese dictatorship, and so on?”
No. The United States has captured about 100,000 terror suspects, probably more. It has had fewer than a hundred terrorists in the “CIA program” — in CIA detention, at “black sites.” These were “high-value detainees,” being interrogated for what they knew. Why? Because the terrorists had promised to attack Americans again and again, just as they had on 9/11. Those attacks were not a one-time deal, they said; they were no anomaly. The jihad was going to hit us again and again, as often as it could.
Remember when Americans were screaming at the Bush administration to “connect the dots”? And saying that the administration had failed to connect these dots? Well, that’s what the United States was trying to do in those interrogations: connect the dots. (And we did: The information we obtained prevented and foiled attacks.)
We certainly did not allow the Red Cross in — not while those terrorists were being interrogated, not at black sites. The public didn’t know about those sites. We (the U.S.) did not want the terrorists to reveal what we had learned, and what we were doing. We didn’t want them to communicate to the outside — we had (further) mass murder to prevent. We did not want the terrorists to use the Red Cross, or anyone else, as a megaphone — which, of course, is exactly what they did later.
When those detainees were transferred from the “CIA program” to more regular facilities, the Red Cross had access to them. And those detainees include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The Red Cross has the run of Guantanamo Bay, long has.
Michael Mukasey was attorney general from November 2007 to January 2009. He remembers visiting Guantanamo Bay in February 2008. He looked at many of the high-value detainees on video monitors. But he did not see Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; Mohammed wasn’t in his cell. He was off having a Red Cross visit.
Mukasey did see the exercise room, adjacent to Mohammed’s cell. And he noticed something interesting: Mohammed had the same elliptical machine that he, the attorney general, had back home in his Washington apartment building. Only there was this difference: Mukasey had to share his, with other residents; there was a mad scramble in the morning to get to it. Mohammed had his machine all to himself.
Bear in mind that he was the “mastermind” of the 9/11 attacks, which killed almost 3,000 people. That he was the beheader of Daniel Pearl. And so on. I wonder how much more tenderly America’s critics expect us to treat such people. “Abdominal massages,” of the type Al Gore apparently requests?
This is to say nothing of the fact that these terror detainees are not uniformed soldiers, have refused to obey the laws and customs of war, and are not entitled to Geneva Convention protection. The United States decided to treat these detainees as though they were ordinary POWs. The fact remains, however, that they are not. When you blow up the World Trade Center, when you slit stewardesses’ throats with boxcutters, you are outside the pale.
• Go back to that blogpost I did, and the anger that it elicited on the left. I was talking about Gilad Shalit, a corporal in uniform. And prisoners of conscience such as those held in Cuba and China: democrats, peace campaigners, intellectuals, artists, religious people, dissenters, and so on. People such as Oscar Biscet and Juan Carlos Herrera, Gao Zhisheng and Liu Xiaobo. What kinship do those men have with the terrorists at Guantanamo Bay — who blow up and behead innocent people? What? And how is the United States like Hamas, the Castro dictatorship, the PRC, etc.? How?
Donald Rumsfeld likes to say, “America is not what’s wrong with the world.” We can broaden that to, “The liberal democracies are not what’s wrong with the world.” You know what’s wrong with the world? Terror groups, dictatorships, totalitarian regimes, and the like. And yet so many people, and organizations, like to concentrate their fire on liberal democracies. This is a sickness. And it’s one that many people in unfree countries are sick over. (You should hear some of the Chinese I talk to.)
Reading some of the reaction to my blogpost, I was reminded why I left the Left, many years ago. Happened sometime during college. I was getting curious about the world: wondering about the Soviet Gulag, for example, and the boat people from Vietnam. I would try to raise those issues with those around me. I was immediately suspect as a fascist: “But what about capital punishment here in America? The death penalty, man. What about Agent Orange, man, and My Lai?”
Okay, okay, we could talk about those — we talked about them constantly. But couldn’t we talk about the Gulag and the boat people a bit, too? No, we couldn’t: because the United States was so sinful, we had to run it down full-time. We had no right to criticize other countries. (This did not apply, strangely, to South Africa, Chile, the Philippines . . .)
Some readers may recall a common line from the Soviet Union in the first years of the Cold War: “But what about the Negroes in the South?” That tended to shut down all conversation.
I don’t know about you, but I find it very hard to talk to people who, when you mention the extreme cruelty of Hamas, the Castros, and so on, go right to the United States and its own offenses, real or imagined. Very hard. We simply live on different moral planets.
I guess I spend most of my time, as a journalist, criticizing or bemoaning the United States. I have a complaint a second, it seems: our litigiousness, our racial screwiness, our political correctness, our violence, the grotesque nature of our popular culture. But, you know? The liberal democracies, including the United States, aren’t what’s wrong with the world.
• Regular readers may remember a journal I did from Iraq, two years ago. May I quote a relevant portion now? Just give it a scan, if you feel like it:
Our group makes its way to Camp Cropper, to tour a detention center. Must be a hellhole, huh? A nightmare of torture and depravity. Not really. The people who are detained here are very, very lucky detainees indeed — very, very lucky jihadists, or former jihadists.With some people, I’m afraid it would make no difference. With my venom-spewing e-mailers? I can’t help doubting.
They have the best medical care, the best nutrition — professionals in white coats looking after them. Diabetes seems to be a problem, and that is treated.
An assortment of classes is held. The detainees learn “life skills.” As the general in charge, Robert Kenyon, says, “Everyone gets a skill set” — they’ll need it on the outside. There are “Islamic discussion” sessions, too.
For some of these people, getting detained is the best break they ever had. They’re not hardcore al-Qaeda: They were in the wrong place, or did a job for money, or were a little screwed up (or a lot). Some detainees don’t want to leave, and, in fact, fear doing so. Some mothers say: “Won’t you keep my son for longer?”
Camp Cropper is very, very different from being captured by al-Qaeda — very different indeed. And the coalition makes a point of telling the detainees so.
When they leave, they get to choose Western or Arab clothing. And they get $25 to put in their pocket. They also have the instruction and care they received.
I think — for the thousandth time during this trip — has there ever been so benign a major power as the United States? Some people would regard that as naïve. I regard them as confused.
About 25 prisoners come in a day, and about 50 are released. Recidivism, we’re told, is very, very low.
Foreigners — non-Iraqis — have their own zone. They are dangerous; they are hardcore al-Qaeda. General Kenyon hopes that they never again see the light of day — that the Iraqis, to whom they’ll be handed over, will keep them locked up. These are not the type to reform, or so it seems.
And they keep themselves in shape — in vicious fighting shape. For example, they’ll sprint around the yard, in the hottest, most hellish weather.
All prisoners have prayer rugs, Korans — the whole nine yards. No Westerner in the place touches a Koran, “out of respect.” One of our band — a fellow journo — says that this swallows the Wahhabist view of Islam and its rules. In any case, the coalition is very, very careful.
There are regular family visits — the detainees see their families. One of the American soldiers says, “That’s more than we get to do.”
There are art classes, and we see what the students — students! — have produced. Some paintings are very nice. An officer tells us that the detainees tend to start off painting guns and the like. Gradually, the paintings get less violent and bleak, and more beautiful. A civilizing effect is seen.
One of the art instructors is a former detainee — a former detainee now on the camp’s payroll. Imagine that.
There are sewing classes too, and the instructor shows us what he calls “the graduation piece” — a camel, known as the Cropper Camel.
I ask again: Has there ever — ever — been a power so benign? What’s al-Qaeda’s equivalent of the Cropper Camel for their detainees — if they had detainees? . . .
We tour the camp’s hospital, which is spick-and-span, and state-of-the-art — all the amenities at hand. I can’t help thinking of a point that the dreadful Michael Moore makes: Detainees such as those in Guantanamo get much, much better medical care than many ordinary Americans. True, true.
Of course, you are responsible for those you capture and hold, if you’re civilized. . . .
I wish Americans, and everyone else, could see the detention center at Camp Cropper — see what Americans and others are doing for those who, after all, were trying to kill them. Would it make any difference?
• The Red Cross has not been allowed in to see Corporal Shalit. A lot of us think that it hasn’t tried very hard — that, if it made a great, worldwide fuss, it would get results. The Red Cross can’t find out where Shalit is? Can’t tell his family or his government where he is? Really? The ICRC — the International Committee of the Red Cross — was made for cases like this. Read the history, from Dunant on, and you’ll see that this is so.
For a long time, the ICRC has had an Israel problem. (Hard to name a big international organization that hasn’t.) I studied this in detail at one time. For many, many years, there was just one Red Cross society that was kept out of the international movement — no prizes for guessing whose.
Israel’s Red Cross, the Magen David Adom, or the Red Star of David, was formed in 1930 (almost two decades before statehood). But the international movement refused to admit this group. It had a million Red Crescent societies, but could not countenance Israel’s. The United States, to its everlasting credit, decided to do something about this.
In 1991, the president of the American Red Cross, Dr. Bernadine Healy, gave a speech in Geneva appealing for the inclusion of the Red Star of David. Notoriously, the president of the ICRC, a man named Cornelio Sommaruga, asked whether, if the Star of David was acceptable, she was prepared to accept the swastika too.
That’s what I’m talking about. Very ICRC. Very European, in fact.
In a righteous application of pressure — the Americans really showed cojones — the American Red Cross started to withhold dues from the International Federation. That was in 2000. Finally, in 2006, the ICRC found a way to let the Israelis in. And the Americans paid accumulated dues, totaling $45 million.
Like many other international organizations — I’ll get to Amnesty International in a minute — the ICRC has an America problem, in addition to an Israel problem. One Red Cross-watcher told me recently, “The ICRC leaks reports against the United States. Funny, but you never see them leaking against, say, North Korea, do you?” No, not really.
And the American taxpayer is a handsome funder of the ICRC: We contribute between a quarter and a third of the organization’s budget. I, for one, would not weep if we taxpayers rethought that. What if Gilad Shalit were an American corporal? Do you think the ICRC would try a little harder, given all we pay? I just don’t know. I know that Israel doesn’t have much financial leverage. And I know that the Red Cross is not the neutral collection of saints many would like to think it is — and which it once was, long ago. (Very long ago.)
(Have a quick trivial fact: The Red Cross is the only organization to have won three Nobel Peace Prizes. They’ve won four, if you count the prize given to their founder, Dunant. That was in the very first year of the Noble prizes, 1901.)
• Amnesty International does what everyone else does: attacks liberal democracies, open societies. It’s so easy. And no harm comes to you! But why bother, when there are so many closed societies to worry about, help, and pry open?
Amnesty had a beautiful beginning. It’s a famous story, and I’ll recount it briefly. A British lawyer named Peter Benenson was riding on a train in London. This was in 1960. He read that two Portuguese students had been thrown in jail, for toasting freedom. Benenson decided he should do something about it: and the Appeal for Amnesty was born.
Its reason for being was to help prisoners of conscience — indeed, “prisoner of conscience” was an Amnesty coinage. Prisoners of conscience are those tossed in jail merely for expressing what they believe, or for harboring beliefs uncongenial to the ruling authorities. Prisoners of conscience are different from, for example, armed revolutionaries. They are certainly different from terrorists — from the beheading elliptical-machine users in Guantanamo Bay.
Do you know that our founder, Bill Buckley — our Dunant! — was on the board of Amnesty International USA? He was, for about ten years. But he left — this was in 1978 — because of what Amnesty had become.
What had it become? Well, it declared a pox on all our houses: you know, dictatorships, liberal democracies, whatever. It would release reports on the Soviet Gulag; and then on American prisons. And it would condemn both countries in equal tones. They were “moral equivalence” all the way. And that’s not what WFB signed up for.
Today, you’re as likely to find an Amnesty report against the use of Tasers by American police as you are to find a report against North Korean concentration camps. And Amnesty loves to savage Israel as well. The U.N. spirit lives within that organization, and that is a foul spirit indeed.
You may remember a foul incident from 2005: Amnesty’s secretary-general, Irene Khan, called Guantanamo Bay the “gulag of our times.” Bear in mind, we have real, actual gulags: in the Castros’ realm, in China, in North Korea. But, according to Amnesty, Gitmo is the “gulag of our times.” What are real gulags, then? Maybe not of “our times,” who knows?
Here is a further detail — something else to turn your stomach. We heard about this in an article by Pavel Litvinov, published in the Washington Post. He had been a resident of the Soviet Gulag. And here’s a fact for you: His grandfather, Maxim Litvinov, was one of Stalin’s foreign ministers. In any case, Pavel wrote,
Several days ago I received a telephone call from an old friend who is a longtime Amnesty International staffer. He asked me whether I, as a former Soviet “prisoner of conscience” adopted by Amnesty, would support the statement by Amnesty’s executive director, Irene Khan, that the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba is the “gulag of our time.”Flash forward to this year, when Amnesty linked arms with a man named Moazzam Begg, a British Islamist — a former Gitmo prisoner who had trained in al-Qaeda camps (Afghanistan). His shtick is to say that terror detainees are, in reality, human-rights victims.
“Don’t you think that there’s an enormous difference?” I asked him.
“Sure,” he said, “but after all, it attracts attention to the problem of Guantanamo detainees.”
That was too much for one Amnesty official, Gita Sahgal, who headed the “gender unit” (responsible for women’s rights). (Sahgal is a grand-niece of Nehru, incidentally.) In an internal memo, she wrote that the alliance between Amnesty and Begg “fundamentally damages Amnesty International’s integrity and, more importantly, constitutes a threat to human rights. To be appearing on platforms with Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban, whom we treat as a human-rights defender, is a gross error of judgment.”
And so on. Amnesty suspended Sahgal, because she went public with her criticisms; eventually, she and the organization parted ways altogether. Before she went, Salman Rushdie issued a statement in her behalf (and we can agree that he knows something about Islamism). He wrote,
“Amnesty International has done its reputation incalculable damage by allying itself with Moazzam Begg and his group Cageprisoners, and holding them up as human rights advocates. It looks very much as if Amnesty’s leadership is suffering from a kind of moral bankruptcy, and has lost the ability to distinguish right from wrong.”
• Too many people are suffering from moral bankruptcy, and cannot distinguish right from wrong. That number includes the people who pump poison into my inbox. But before I get (back) to them — how about one of Amnesty’s sister organizations, Human Rights Watch?
They go fundraising in Saudi Arabia, which is a perfectly natural thing for them to do. Why? Isn’t Saudi Arabia a nightmare for human rights? And isn’t the organization called “Human Rights Watch”? Yeah, yeah, but HRW makes a specialty of demonizing Israel. And a lot of Saudis like that — so they open their wallets for HRW. Simple.
Israel is a democracy fighting for its life, against those with no respect for democracy, human rights, or decency at all. But this means cruelly little to many people: including some who work for exalted organizations.
Okay, back to my e-mailers, just for a second. I don’t want to whine too much — more than I already have. All of us who write on the Internet get hostile mail, and we know it comes with the territory. But these items were really, really bad. I had lamented the treatment and neglect of Corporal Shalit and of prisoners of conscience. And one guy — I think guy — wrote, “Quit murdering Palestinians, scumbag.” That is not an atypical e-mail, I promise you.
And you know who’s very good at murdering Palestinians? Hamas, Fatah, and other Palestinians who lord it over the people. When Hamas is tossing people off rooftops, where is the “world community”? Blasting Israel and America — the “Little Satan” and the “Great Satan” — that’s where.
It wasn’t hard to figure out why I was getting these e-mails. The e-mailers weren’t reading National Review Online, of course. Left-wing bloggers had attacked my Shalit post in their usual vitriolic and personal terms; their readers were taking the ball from there. And, in their style, they were essentially aping the bloggers they admire.
• Back to my college days, one last time, please — and to the matter of why I left the Left. I concluded that I was on a side: on the side of the United States, of liberal democracy, of man (if you will pardon the grandiosity). I was not a neutralist. I was not a pox-on-both-your-houses guy. I was not a moral-equivalence guy. I knew that the United States and the West weren’t perfect, heaven knows. But I also knew that we weren’t what ailed the world — that we were, on balance, a force for good.
This was a less common view than you might expect — in my environment, at that time.
Recently, I was talking to a composer friend of mine, who made a journey from left to right (as I did, but later in his life). I asked him how it happened. He said he had gone to West Berlin in the 1980s, to study. And the people around him — West German lefties — said, “You know, there’s really no difference between our side and their side. It’s all the same, really. We’re no better than they are.”
But my friend had eyes to see — and he could see that it wasn’t true. He saw, starkly, the difference between a free and open society, and an unfree and closed one. That made all the difference.
I had eyes to see, too. There was a big, big difference between the democratic world and the anti-democratic world. The people around me weren’t Communists; they didn’t carry around copies of Das Kapital (some of them did); they didn’t believe in the “withering away of the state” and all that jazz. They just thought that America was just as bad as anyone else — and that, therefore, we had “no right to talk.” I disagreed.
To repeat what many of my fellow righties have said, there is no way — no way — that America’s enemies can defeat America. Only Americans can do that. How do you lose? For one thing, you lose moral reason. And here is one way of knowing if you’re having trouble in the moral-reason department: When you hear about Hamas — about something awful it has done — is your instinct to hate and condemn George Bush? The Patriot Act? Gitmo? That instinct is a crazy one. And destructive.
Ladies and gentlemen, I apologize for this long, long Impromptus — also for the sheer basicness of it. The A-B-C-ness of it. The sun rises in the east, and liberal democracies aren’t what’s wrong with the world. But sometimes it’s good to review the basics.
The Day Soccer Revived America’s Hope
Meredith Turney
Sunday, June 27, 2010
It was an ending so dramatic that even Hollywood’s best writers couldn’t have scripted it. After a courageous 90-minute fight against a defiant Algeria, it seemed that once again America’s World Cup dreams would end in disappointment. In just the first two weeks of the international competition, Team USA had been denied two game-changing goals and been on the losing end of questionable referring decisions, but had battled back.
As millions of soccer fans watched with bated breath, American soccer star Landon Donavan scored an amazing goal with just three minutes of play remaining, sending America to the elite round of 16. For a country that isn’t usually passionate about soccer, suddenly soccer was the center of every conversation. Outside of Saturday morning children tournaments, soccer has never enjoyed the same popularity, money or prestige of basketball and football, or even hockey. But, true to the American spirit, this country loves an underdog.
And when it comes to underdogs, America’s soccer team has seen its share of heartbreak and loss on the international level. All it took was one significant game in the biggest sporting event in the world to renew America’s interest in what is considered the world’s most popular sport. Before the start of the 2010 World Cup, most Americans probably didn’t know the name of even one member of the country’s representatives at the competition. But the team’s victory may have sparked a new interest in what was once considered the pastime sport of childhood. There was so much buzz about Landon Donavan’s miraculous soccer goal it set a new Internet record, with traffic reaching 11.2 million visitors per minute. Athletic events have the ability to renew our patriotic passion and pride.
Sports—especially international events—are supposed to transcend politics. But in a way, it is the very venue where one expresses nationalistic pride the most. If internationalists truly understood the patriotism inspired by sports, they would end what they consider xenophobic-inducing competitions. In 1980, the Olympic Miracle on Ice was such a miracle not only because the underdog American hockey team was unlikely to beat the steely Communist Soviet Union team, but because it served as a metaphor for the Cold War. When America bested the Soviets, the country was downtrodden. An inept Jimmy Carter had allowed the country to slip into a recession, which Carter blamed upon a “crisis of confidence.” In that infamous “Malaise” speech, Carter recognized the mood of the country, by observing, “It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.” But instead of cheering America on to greatness, he called upon Americans, for the “nation’s security,” to limit travel and use more public transportation. How inspiring: don’t expect to overcome current problems, just acclimate.
Just like thirty years ago, America is once again experiencing a crisis of confidence. According to a recent Rasmussen poll, an astonishing 67% of Americans think the country is going in the wrong direction. And in an eerily similar manner, just last week Barack Obama, who is increasingly compared to Carter, took the opportunity of a national crisis to chide Americans about their “addictive” use of energy. This week Vice President Joe Biden channeled Carter and once again preached the gospel of concession and acclimation by pronouncing, “there's no possibility to restore 8 million jobs lost in the Great Recession.”
Has Biden forgotten that Americans don’t know the meaning of impossible? The 1980 Miracle on Ice triggered a renewed sense of patriotism and that indomitable can-do attitude that is the hallmark of American exceptionalism. Months later, Ronald Reagan was elected president and through his eloquent reminding, the country rediscovered its purpose.
America is in the doldrums. Patriotism is considered passé. The man inhabiting the White House won’t even acknowledge American exceptionalism, betraying an elitist attitude towards such small-minded nationalism. Obama seems too concerned with impressing the international community.
Like the Miracle on Ice, Team USA’s exciting victory on Wednesday could be the latest example of a sporting event reinvigorating the country’s patriotic spirit. In the hours following the soccer match, videos popped up all over YouTube showing Americans’ reactions to the unbelievable goal seen ’round the world. Spontaneous outbursts of The Star Spangled Banner were heard in the streets. And the one remarkable consistency among all the videos from every corner of the nation showed an instantaneous chanting of “USA, USA, USA!”
Sadly, just four days after America’s euphoric win over Algeria, America’s dream of reaching the World Cup finals were ended in an overtime loss to Ghana—the same country that beat America at the last World Cup. But regardless of how far they ultimately advanced in the competition, when Landon Donavan kicked that now legendary goal with seconds left on the game clock, Team USA kick-started a renewed sense of patriotism. Let’s channel that patriotism. That indomitable spirit exemplified by Team USA can overcome our current problems. Many in this country feel that we are in the last few minutes of our nation’s greatness. But as America’s soccer team showed us, even when all seems lost, we can turn things around and be victorious. That’s the story of America.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
It was an ending so dramatic that even Hollywood’s best writers couldn’t have scripted it. After a courageous 90-minute fight against a defiant Algeria, it seemed that once again America’s World Cup dreams would end in disappointment. In just the first two weeks of the international competition, Team USA had been denied two game-changing goals and been on the losing end of questionable referring decisions, but had battled back.
As millions of soccer fans watched with bated breath, American soccer star Landon Donavan scored an amazing goal with just three minutes of play remaining, sending America to the elite round of 16. For a country that isn’t usually passionate about soccer, suddenly soccer was the center of every conversation. Outside of Saturday morning children tournaments, soccer has never enjoyed the same popularity, money or prestige of basketball and football, or even hockey. But, true to the American spirit, this country loves an underdog.
And when it comes to underdogs, America’s soccer team has seen its share of heartbreak and loss on the international level. All it took was one significant game in the biggest sporting event in the world to renew America’s interest in what is considered the world’s most popular sport. Before the start of the 2010 World Cup, most Americans probably didn’t know the name of even one member of the country’s representatives at the competition. But the team’s victory may have sparked a new interest in what was once considered the pastime sport of childhood. There was so much buzz about Landon Donavan’s miraculous soccer goal it set a new Internet record, with traffic reaching 11.2 million visitors per minute. Athletic events have the ability to renew our patriotic passion and pride.
Sports—especially international events—are supposed to transcend politics. But in a way, it is the very venue where one expresses nationalistic pride the most. If internationalists truly understood the patriotism inspired by sports, they would end what they consider xenophobic-inducing competitions. In 1980, the Olympic Miracle on Ice was such a miracle not only because the underdog American hockey team was unlikely to beat the steely Communist Soviet Union team, but because it served as a metaphor for the Cold War. When America bested the Soviets, the country was downtrodden. An inept Jimmy Carter had allowed the country to slip into a recession, which Carter blamed upon a “crisis of confidence.” In that infamous “Malaise” speech, Carter recognized the mood of the country, by observing, “It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.” But instead of cheering America on to greatness, he called upon Americans, for the “nation’s security,” to limit travel and use more public transportation. How inspiring: don’t expect to overcome current problems, just acclimate.
Just like thirty years ago, America is once again experiencing a crisis of confidence. According to a recent Rasmussen poll, an astonishing 67% of Americans think the country is going in the wrong direction. And in an eerily similar manner, just last week Barack Obama, who is increasingly compared to Carter, took the opportunity of a national crisis to chide Americans about their “addictive” use of energy. This week Vice President Joe Biden channeled Carter and once again preached the gospel of concession and acclimation by pronouncing, “there's no possibility to restore 8 million jobs lost in the Great Recession.”
Has Biden forgotten that Americans don’t know the meaning of impossible? The 1980 Miracle on Ice triggered a renewed sense of patriotism and that indomitable can-do attitude that is the hallmark of American exceptionalism. Months later, Ronald Reagan was elected president and through his eloquent reminding, the country rediscovered its purpose.
America is in the doldrums. Patriotism is considered passé. The man inhabiting the White House won’t even acknowledge American exceptionalism, betraying an elitist attitude towards such small-minded nationalism. Obama seems too concerned with impressing the international community.
Like the Miracle on Ice, Team USA’s exciting victory on Wednesday could be the latest example of a sporting event reinvigorating the country’s patriotic spirit. In the hours following the soccer match, videos popped up all over YouTube showing Americans’ reactions to the unbelievable goal seen ’round the world. Spontaneous outbursts of The Star Spangled Banner were heard in the streets. And the one remarkable consistency among all the videos from every corner of the nation showed an instantaneous chanting of “USA, USA, USA!”
Sadly, just four days after America’s euphoric win over Algeria, America’s dream of reaching the World Cup finals were ended in an overtime loss to Ghana—the same country that beat America at the last World Cup. But regardless of how far they ultimately advanced in the competition, when Landon Donavan kicked that now legendary goal with seconds left on the game clock, Team USA kick-started a renewed sense of patriotism. Let’s channel that patriotism. That indomitable spirit exemplified by Team USA can overcome our current problems. Many in this country feel that we are in the last few minutes of our nation’s greatness. But as America’s soccer team showed us, even when all seems lost, we can turn things around and be victorious. That’s the story of America.
The Western Way Of War
Caroline Glick
Monday, June 28, 2010
General Stanley McChrystal has paid a huge price for his decision to give Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings free access to himself and his staff. But he performed a great service for the rest of us. US President Barack Obama fired McChrystal -- his hand-picked choice to command NATO forces in Afghanistan -- for the things that he and his aides told Hastings about the problematic nature of the US-led war effort in Afghanistan. But by acting as he did, McChrystal forced the rest of us to contend with the unpleasant truth not only about the US-led campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan. He told us the unpleasant truth about the problematic nature of the Western way of war at the outset of the 21st century.
Hastings' now famous article, "The Runaway General," told the story of an argument. On the one hand, there are people who want to fight to win in Afghanistan. On the other hand, there are people who are not interested in fighting to win in Afghanistan. Obama - and McChrystal as his general - occupy the untenable middle ground. There they try to split the difference between the two irreconcilable camps. The inevitable end is preordained.
The US and its NATO allies first deployed in Afghanistan in October 2001 with the aim of toppling the Taliban regime and destroying Al Qaida's infrastructure in the country. They have remained in the country ever since with the goal of preventing the Taliban from returning to power.
After McChrystal took command a year ago, he conducted a review of the allied strategy. His revised strategy was based on counter-insurgency methods developed in Iraq. It called for a surge of 40,000 US forces in Afghanistan. It also recommended that NATO train 400,000 Afghan forces who, in the long term, would replace NATO forces once the Taliban was defeated.
McChrystal's strategy was greeted with moans by leading members of Obama's leftist base in the administration and outside it. Led by Vice President Joseph Biden, they offered a counter-strategy. As Biden has explained it, the alternative would involve deploying special forces units and airpower to target the Taliban as it becomes necessary, and otherwise disengage from the country at quickly as possible.
McChrystal and his allies dismissed Biden's strategy as a recipe for disaster. Without a sufficient number of forces on the ground, the US would lose its ability to gather intelligence and so know what targets to attack. Recent reports that the US drone attacks in Pakistan are killing civilians rather than al Qaida and Taliban members indicate just how difficult it is to gather credible, actionable intelligence from a distance.
Presented with the two opposing strategies, Obama decided to split the difference. He ordered 30 thousand troops to Afghanistan. He refused to increase the target number of Afghan security forces from its previous 230,000. And he announced that US forces would begin to withdraw from Afghanistan in July 2011.
Citing administration officials, last December the Washington Post explained Obama's goal as follows, "The White House's desired end state in Afghanistan... envisions more informal local security arrangements than in Iraq, a less-capable national government and a greater tolerance of insurgent violence."
So too, an administration official stated, "The guidance they [the military] have is that we're not doing everything, and we're not doing it forever. ... The hardest intellectual exercise will be settling on how much is enough."
As J.E. Dyer noted at the time and reasserted this week at Commentary's Contentions blog, "this was not executable guidance." Or more to the point, as the Rolling Stone article illustrated, when executed, this guidance brings not victory nor even stability.
The White House's guidance, as extrapolated from Obama's chosen strategy for Afghanistan endangers NATO forces. It empowers the Taliban. It demoralizes Afghans who would potentially stand with NATO against the Taliban. And in the end, it ensures that as NATO forces depart, the Taliban will return to power in a blaze of glory marching hand in hand with al Qaida.
In recent months Obama and his advisors have repeatedly attacked Afghan President Hamid Karzai for his problematic positions on the Taliban. But their criticism is unfair. They cannot expect loyalty from a man America is set to abandon in a year. It is up to Karzai and his fellow Afghans to cut deals with the Taliban while they still have something to bargain with.
By all accounts, until he was fired Wednesday, McChrystal had a better relationship with Karzai than anyone else in the US government. And this is not surprising. As White House and State Department officials signaled their willingness to cut deals with the Taliban, McChrystal and his forces have fought the Taliban.
Hastings devoted a great deal of attention to the deleterious impact US rules of engagement are having both on the war effort and on troop morale. Due to the administration's aversion to civilian casualties, preventing civilian casualties has become a chief fighting aim for the US military. Yet since the Taliban war effort relies on civilian infrastructures and human shields, the strategic significance of preventing civilian casualties is that US forces' ability to fight the Taliban is dramatically circumscribed.
For instance, Hastings reports on the death of Corporal Michael Ingram. Ingram was killed last month by an explosive device hidden in a house that had been used as a Taliban position.
Ingram's commanders had repeatedly requested permission to destroy the house and had repeatedly been denied permission. Destroying the house, they were told would have run counter to the aim of not upsetting civilians.
Since Obama is commander in chief, it is reasonable for criticism of this losing strategy to be directed towards him. But the truth is that for the better part of the last several decades, with occasional important exceptions, this sort of "half pregnant" strategy for war fighting has been the template for Western armies.
Today US forces in Afghanistan are fighting in a manner that is depressingly similar to that forced upon IDF forces in Lebanon in the 1990s. Like the US forces in Afghanistan today, during the 1990s, concerns about civilian casualties caused Israel's political leadership to constrain IDF actions in southern Lebanon in a manner that effectively transformed soldiers into sitting ducks. Israel's finest were reduced to fighting from fortified positions and Hizbullah was given a free hand to intimidate Lebanese civilians, commandeer private homes and schools to use as firing positions and forward bases, and generally maintain the initiative in the fighting.
As he withdrew IDF forces from south Lebanon ten years ago - like Biden today - then prime minister Ehud Barak claimed that Israel didn't need boots on the ground to fight Hizbullah. If we needed to go in to fight, we would send in commando squads or fighter jets to do the job. Of course, as US drone operations in Pakistan again demonstrate, without a presence on the ground, you cannot have any certainty that you are attacking real targets.
The important story this week was not about a US general with abysmal judgment about the media. Rather the story is that in Afghanistan, the US is repeating a sorry pattern of Western nations of not understanding - or perhaps not caring -- that if you are not willing to fight a war to victory, you will lose it.
The stakes in Afghanistan are clear. NATO forces can defeat the Taliban, or the Taliban can defeat them. To win, all the Taliban needs to do is survive. Once NATO is gone, like Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, the Taliban will be crowned the victors and from their failed state, they will be able to again attack the US and its allies.
There were only two instances in the last ten years where Western forces fought to victory. Israel defeated the Palestinians when in the wake of Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, it retained security control over Judea and Samaria. The US defeated al Qaida and Muqtada el-Sadr's Mahdi Army in Iraq in 2007 and 2008 by taking and retaining security control over Iraq.
Both countries' victories have been eroded in recent years as they have removed their forces from population centers and restricted them to more static positions. In both cases, the erosion of the Israeli and American achievements is due to waning political will to maintain military control.
It is hard to imagine that McChrystal's decision to open his doors to Rolling Stone was a calculated move to blow the lid off of the mirage of strategic competence surrounding the "good war" in Afghanistan. This is not the first time that the US military has mistakenly given access to hostile Rolling Stone reporters. And of course, the US military - not unlike the IDF and the British military - has a long history of giving undeserved access to its media foes and paying the price for its mistakes.
But still, the truth remains that by effectively committing career suicide, McChrystal has posed a challenge to his country - and to the Western world as a whole. Now that you know the truth, what is it going to be? Are you willing to lose this war? Are you willing to see the Taliban restored to power in Afghanistan?
This week Haaretz reported on a new hit children's song that is making waves throughout the Arab world. Called, "When we die as martyrs," the song is sung by a children's choir called "Birds of Paradise." In a YouTube video of the song, children between the ages of two and six sing sweetly of their desire to die for Palestine and are shown triumphantly killing kippa-wearing Jews.
The Taliban's perspective on the value of human life is similarly grotesque.
For years, citizens of free nations have willfully ignored or dismissed the significance their enemies' gruesome goals and ideology. They have claimed that what these people stand for is insignificant. At the end of the day, they say, the only reason there are wars is because the nations of the West provoke them by being strong. And so, when they have fought wars, they have fought them with strategies that can bring them nothing but defeat.
McChrystal's final act as US commander in Afghanistan was to show us where this leads. But it also reminds us that there is another choice that can be made. The Western way of war needn't remain the path of defeat. That still is for the people of the West to decide.
Monday, June 28, 2010
General Stanley McChrystal has paid a huge price for his decision to give Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings free access to himself and his staff. But he performed a great service for the rest of us. US President Barack Obama fired McChrystal -- his hand-picked choice to command NATO forces in Afghanistan -- for the things that he and his aides told Hastings about the problematic nature of the US-led war effort in Afghanistan. But by acting as he did, McChrystal forced the rest of us to contend with the unpleasant truth not only about the US-led campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan. He told us the unpleasant truth about the problematic nature of the Western way of war at the outset of the 21st century.
Hastings' now famous article, "The Runaway General," told the story of an argument. On the one hand, there are people who want to fight to win in Afghanistan. On the other hand, there are people who are not interested in fighting to win in Afghanistan. Obama - and McChrystal as his general - occupy the untenable middle ground. There they try to split the difference between the two irreconcilable camps. The inevitable end is preordained.
The US and its NATO allies first deployed in Afghanistan in October 2001 with the aim of toppling the Taliban regime and destroying Al Qaida's infrastructure in the country. They have remained in the country ever since with the goal of preventing the Taliban from returning to power.
After McChrystal took command a year ago, he conducted a review of the allied strategy. His revised strategy was based on counter-insurgency methods developed in Iraq. It called for a surge of 40,000 US forces in Afghanistan. It also recommended that NATO train 400,000 Afghan forces who, in the long term, would replace NATO forces once the Taliban was defeated.
McChrystal's strategy was greeted with moans by leading members of Obama's leftist base in the administration and outside it. Led by Vice President Joseph Biden, they offered a counter-strategy. As Biden has explained it, the alternative would involve deploying special forces units and airpower to target the Taliban as it becomes necessary, and otherwise disengage from the country at quickly as possible.
McChrystal and his allies dismissed Biden's strategy as a recipe for disaster. Without a sufficient number of forces on the ground, the US would lose its ability to gather intelligence and so know what targets to attack. Recent reports that the US drone attacks in Pakistan are killing civilians rather than al Qaida and Taliban members indicate just how difficult it is to gather credible, actionable intelligence from a distance.
Presented with the two opposing strategies, Obama decided to split the difference. He ordered 30 thousand troops to Afghanistan. He refused to increase the target number of Afghan security forces from its previous 230,000. And he announced that US forces would begin to withdraw from Afghanistan in July 2011.
Citing administration officials, last December the Washington Post explained Obama's goal as follows, "The White House's desired end state in Afghanistan... envisions more informal local security arrangements than in Iraq, a less-capable national government and a greater tolerance of insurgent violence."
So too, an administration official stated, "The guidance they [the military] have is that we're not doing everything, and we're not doing it forever. ... The hardest intellectual exercise will be settling on how much is enough."
As J.E. Dyer noted at the time and reasserted this week at Commentary's Contentions blog, "this was not executable guidance." Or more to the point, as the Rolling Stone article illustrated, when executed, this guidance brings not victory nor even stability.
The White House's guidance, as extrapolated from Obama's chosen strategy for Afghanistan endangers NATO forces. It empowers the Taliban. It demoralizes Afghans who would potentially stand with NATO against the Taliban. And in the end, it ensures that as NATO forces depart, the Taliban will return to power in a blaze of glory marching hand in hand with al Qaida.
In recent months Obama and his advisors have repeatedly attacked Afghan President Hamid Karzai for his problematic positions on the Taliban. But their criticism is unfair. They cannot expect loyalty from a man America is set to abandon in a year. It is up to Karzai and his fellow Afghans to cut deals with the Taliban while they still have something to bargain with.
By all accounts, until he was fired Wednesday, McChrystal had a better relationship with Karzai than anyone else in the US government. And this is not surprising. As White House and State Department officials signaled their willingness to cut deals with the Taliban, McChrystal and his forces have fought the Taliban.
Hastings devoted a great deal of attention to the deleterious impact US rules of engagement are having both on the war effort and on troop morale. Due to the administration's aversion to civilian casualties, preventing civilian casualties has become a chief fighting aim for the US military. Yet since the Taliban war effort relies on civilian infrastructures and human shields, the strategic significance of preventing civilian casualties is that US forces' ability to fight the Taliban is dramatically circumscribed.
For instance, Hastings reports on the death of Corporal Michael Ingram. Ingram was killed last month by an explosive device hidden in a house that had been used as a Taliban position.
Ingram's commanders had repeatedly requested permission to destroy the house and had repeatedly been denied permission. Destroying the house, they were told would have run counter to the aim of not upsetting civilians.
Since Obama is commander in chief, it is reasonable for criticism of this losing strategy to be directed towards him. But the truth is that for the better part of the last several decades, with occasional important exceptions, this sort of "half pregnant" strategy for war fighting has been the template for Western armies.
Today US forces in Afghanistan are fighting in a manner that is depressingly similar to that forced upon IDF forces in Lebanon in the 1990s. Like the US forces in Afghanistan today, during the 1990s, concerns about civilian casualties caused Israel's political leadership to constrain IDF actions in southern Lebanon in a manner that effectively transformed soldiers into sitting ducks. Israel's finest were reduced to fighting from fortified positions and Hizbullah was given a free hand to intimidate Lebanese civilians, commandeer private homes and schools to use as firing positions and forward bases, and generally maintain the initiative in the fighting.
As he withdrew IDF forces from south Lebanon ten years ago - like Biden today - then prime minister Ehud Barak claimed that Israel didn't need boots on the ground to fight Hizbullah. If we needed to go in to fight, we would send in commando squads or fighter jets to do the job. Of course, as US drone operations in Pakistan again demonstrate, without a presence on the ground, you cannot have any certainty that you are attacking real targets.
The important story this week was not about a US general with abysmal judgment about the media. Rather the story is that in Afghanistan, the US is repeating a sorry pattern of Western nations of not understanding - or perhaps not caring -- that if you are not willing to fight a war to victory, you will lose it.
The stakes in Afghanistan are clear. NATO forces can defeat the Taliban, or the Taliban can defeat them. To win, all the Taliban needs to do is survive. Once NATO is gone, like Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, the Taliban will be crowned the victors and from their failed state, they will be able to again attack the US and its allies.
There were only two instances in the last ten years where Western forces fought to victory. Israel defeated the Palestinians when in the wake of Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, it retained security control over Judea and Samaria. The US defeated al Qaida and Muqtada el-Sadr's Mahdi Army in Iraq in 2007 and 2008 by taking and retaining security control over Iraq.
Both countries' victories have been eroded in recent years as they have removed their forces from population centers and restricted them to more static positions. In both cases, the erosion of the Israeli and American achievements is due to waning political will to maintain military control.
It is hard to imagine that McChrystal's decision to open his doors to Rolling Stone was a calculated move to blow the lid off of the mirage of strategic competence surrounding the "good war" in Afghanistan. This is not the first time that the US military has mistakenly given access to hostile Rolling Stone reporters. And of course, the US military - not unlike the IDF and the British military - has a long history of giving undeserved access to its media foes and paying the price for its mistakes.
But still, the truth remains that by effectively committing career suicide, McChrystal has posed a challenge to his country - and to the Western world as a whole. Now that you know the truth, what is it going to be? Are you willing to lose this war? Are you willing to see the Taliban restored to power in Afghanistan?
This week Haaretz reported on a new hit children's song that is making waves throughout the Arab world. Called, "When we die as martyrs," the song is sung by a children's choir called "Birds of Paradise." In a YouTube video of the song, children between the ages of two and six sing sweetly of their desire to die for Palestine and are shown triumphantly killing kippa-wearing Jews.
The Taliban's perspective on the value of human life is similarly grotesque.
For years, citizens of free nations have willfully ignored or dismissed the significance their enemies' gruesome goals and ideology. They have claimed that what these people stand for is insignificant. At the end of the day, they say, the only reason there are wars is because the nations of the West provoke them by being strong. And so, when they have fought wars, they have fought them with strategies that can bring them nothing but defeat.
McChrystal's final act as US commander in Afghanistan was to show us where this leads. But it also reminds us that there is another choice that can be made. The Western way of war needn't remain the path of defeat. That still is for the people of the West to decide.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Collateral Damage in Obama’s War on Arizona
Austin Hill
Sunday, June 27, 2010
It wasn’t all that long ago when they fawned over him.
But now, three congressional Democrats from Arizona are twisting in the wind, as their beloved party leader President Barack Obama continues to punish their cash-strapped state with a costly and unpopular law suit to prevent the implementation of Arizona’s new illegal immigration law. It’s Obama versus the people – with congressional Democrats caught in the middle.
But things were different on February 17, 2009.
The delegation standing on the tarmac was electrified with excitement, as Air Force One taxied to a stop at Phoenix, Arizona’s Sky Harbor Airport. The man who was the embodiment of all their dreams – the man who would give everyone a job, apologize to the world for President Bush, punish the “rich people” who “earned too much” over the previous eight years, give everyone in the U.S.” free” healthcare, make the world love America again, and ensure a Democrat majority in the Congress for years to come - President Barack Obama was visiting their state, and this was their very special moment in time.
And there was the congenial, grand-fatherly-looking Harry Mitchell, giddy with excitement as he stood with a camera strap draped over his neck, snapping photos by the second as the President stepped down from the aircraft. It was cute to see an older gentleman so caught-up in the victorious moment of a much younger man, like a dad on the sidelines at his son’s big game.
But Harry Mitchell is an elected member of the United States Congress. He represents hundreds of thousands of people in the House of Representatives, and those people expect more from him than mere cheerleading, more than merely being an adoring father-figure.
And today, Congressman Harry Mitchell appears to be on a path to electoral defeat, because of eighteen months of cheerleading and adoration of a President with a very self-serving agenda. Things have become so bad for Congressman Mitchell that he had to publicly chastise the “Dear Leader,” and suggest that President Obama might spend tax payers in some more productive fashion than suing Arizona. Worse still, Mr. Mitchell has had to – gasp!- publicly call for securing the U.S. / Mexico border , an idea that has been championed by Arizona Republicans for decades, and by Tea Partiers and Minutemen enthusiasts for at least the past six years.
In the southern Arizona city of Tucson, Congresswoman Gabriella Giffords is in a similar struggle. For her part, Giffords learned much earlier than Mitchell that her constituents were not as infatuated with President Obama as she was. After voting in favor of the President’s $800 billion so-called “economic stimulus bill,” Giffords was met with outcries of “government waste” and quickly issued press statements assuring constituents that she was in Washington to serve them, and not merely to “rubber stamp” the President’s agenda.
Yet Giffords is still being damaged by the President’s thrashing of Arizona, as well as the behavior of her fellow Southern Arizona Democrat, Congressman Raul Grijalva. While Giffords’ appears very vulnerable in her re-election bid, Grijalva’s seat is believed to be “safe,” so Grijalva has been encouraging the President to sue Arizona, while he encourages businesses around the world to boycott (note the caliber of congressional leadership that has emerged in the era of Obama – we’re talking here about a sitting U.S. Congressman who is openly encouraging people to economically damage his community).
In Central Arizona, Congresswoman Ann Kirkpatrick is also paying the price for playing “follow the leader.” Hopelessly enamored with President Obama’s every thought, Ms. Kirkpatrick was the first member of Congress to issue press releases claiming that she personally wanted to enroll in the proposed “Obamacare health plan,” rather than continue with the exclusive, more lavish health plan granted to members of Congress.
But today it’s a different, as Kirkpatrick has joined Mitchell and Giffords in chastising their community-organizer-in-chief. She has also adopted the long-standing cry of Republicans to “secure the border first,” telling the President that “the time for talk is over, and the time for action is here.”
So, what happened? What has changed in the past eighteen months to force these Obama partisans to now disagree with him? And how could these elected members of the United States Congress have so horribly miscalculated the true sentiments of their constituents?
Their biggest problem is that they – along with the majority of the Congress itself – made the horrible mistake of finding their hopes and aspirations in the embodiment of one man, one personality, one persona. As constitutionally and historically illiterate as many members of Congress may be, there are still millions of us who understand that the United States is a nation resting on the foundation of specific principles and ideals, and not on the whims and charm of any individual personality.
Congressional Democrats are now in the painful process of discovering that Barack Obama’s agenda was never about them, never about “the party,” and never about the United States. They have been slavishly empowering a man who is committed to his own raw pursuit of power, and they are now finding themselves to be victims of his agenda.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
It wasn’t all that long ago when they fawned over him.
But now, three congressional Democrats from Arizona are twisting in the wind, as their beloved party leader President Barack Obama continues to punish their cash-strapped state with a costly and unpopular law suit to prevent the implementation of Arizona’s new illegal immigration law. It’s Obama versus the people – with congressional Democrats caught in the middle.
But things were different on February 17, 2009.
The delegation standing on the tarmac was electrified with excitement, as Air Force One taxied to a stop at Phoenix, Arizona’s Sky Harbor Airport. The man who was the embodiment of all their dreams – the man who would give everyone a job, apologize to the world for President Bush, punish the “rich people” who “earned too much” over the previous eight years, give everyone in the U.S.” free” healthcare, make the world love America again, and ensure a Democrat majority in the Congress for years to come - President Barack Obama was visiting their state, and this was their very special moment in time.
And there was the congenial, grand-fatherly-looking Harry Mitchell, giddy with excitement as he stood with a camera strap draped over his neck, snapping photos by the second as the President stepped down from the aircraft. It was cute to see an older gentleman so caught-up in the victorious moment of a much younger man, like a dad on the sidelines at his son’s big game.
But Harry Mitchell is an elected member of the United States Congress. He represents hundreds of thousands of people in the House of Representatives, and those people expect more from him than mere cheerleading, more than merely being an adoring father-figure.
And today, Congressman Harry Mitchell appears to be on a path to electoral defeat, because of eighteen months of cheerleading and adoration of a President with a very self-serving agenda. Things have become so bad for Congressman Mitchell that he had to publicly chastise the “Dear Leader,” and suggest that President Obama might spend tax payers in some more productive fashion than suing Arizona. Worse still, Mr. Mitchell has had to – gasp!- publicly call for securing the U.S. / Mexico border , an idea that has been championed by Arizona Republicans for decades, and by Tea Partiers and Minutemen enthusiasts for at least the past six years.
In the southern Arizona city of Tucson, Congresswoman Gabriella Giffords is in a similar struggle. For her part, Giffords learned much earlier than Mitchell that her constituents were not as infatuated with President Obama as she was. After voting in favor of the President’s $800 billion so-called “economic stimulus bill,” Giffords was met with outcries of “government waste” and quickly issued press statements assuring constituents that she was in Washington to serve them, and not merely to “rubber stamp” the President’s agenda.
Yet Giffords is still being damaged by the President’s thrashing of Arizona, as well as the behavior of her fellow Southern Arizona Democrat, Congressman Raul Grijalva. While Giffords’ appears very vulnerable in her re-election bid, Grijalva’s seat is believed to be “safe,” so Grijalva has been encouraging the President to sue Arizona, while he encourages businesses around the world to boycott (note the caliber of congressional leadership that has emerged in the era of Obama – we’re talking here about a sitting U.S. Congressman who is openly encouraging people to economically damage his community).
In Central Arizona, Congresswoman Ann Kirkpatrick is also paying the price for playing “follow the leader.” Hopelessly enamored with President Obama’s every thought, Ms. Kirkpatrick was the first member of Congress to issue press releases claiming that she personally wanted to enroll in the proposed “Obamacare health plan,” rather than continue with the exclusive, more lavish health plan granted to members of Congress.
But today it’s a different, as Kirkpatrick has joined Mitchell and Giffords in chastising their community-organizer-in-chief. She has also adopted the long-standing cry of Republicans to “secure the border first,” telling the President that “the time for talk is over, and the time for action is here.”
So, what happened? What has changed in the past eighteen months to force these Obama partisans to now disagree with him? And how could these elected members of the United States Congress have so horribly miscalculated the true sentiments of their constituents?
Their biggest problem is that they – along with the majority of the Congress itself – made the horrible mistake of finding their hopes and aspirations in the embodiment of one man, one personality, one persona. As constitutionally and historically illiterate as many members of Congress may be, there are still millions of us who understand that the United States is a nation resting on the foundation of specific principles and ideals, and not on the whims and charm of any individual personality.
Congressional Democrats are now in the painful process of discovering that Barack Obama’s agenda was never about them, never about “the party,” and never about the United States. They have been slavishly empowering a man who is committed to his own raw pursuit of power, and they are now finding themselves to be victims of his agenda.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Reuters Reveals Sleaze is Essential To Its Bottom Line
Dan Gainor
Saturday, June 26, 2010
A picture is worth 1,000 words or so we’re told. Here are a few: despicable, appalling, predatory and unprofessional.
That barely hints at the disgusting behavior Reuters is displaying in its quest to use a crotch photo of a 17-year-old girl to make money.
We thought we had seen it all, so to speak. Perez Hilton, who has turned all things sleazy into a business model, was smacked down by society for posting a revealing photo of singer/actress Miley Cyrus. After Hilton’s lame defense of showing an up-skirt photo of the girl who he has previously called a “Disney Whore" and “Disney Slut,” Disney pulled ads for ABC’s “The View” from his site.
Perez has always been the troll the media love, but even he went too far here. His indefensible actions generated the attention his little, er, ego required and he got to move on and slime someone else.
Surprisingly, Hilton has been outdone by a larger, more experienced bunch of scumbags – the folks at Reuters, once thought of as a professional news agency.
Cyrus, who is having her teen misadventures broadcast globally, got photographed in a compromising way during the Much Music Awards in Toronto on Sunday. The photo shows her dancing in a white body suit with ribbons. However, the photo caught her just as the body suit moved, revealing all too much of her crotch.
Like the previous Disney pop tarts – Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera – embarrassing moments go with the territory. Reuters enshrined this one in the marketing hall of fame as a way to destroy credibility. The company is now selling the photo.
That’s right, a news agency is selling dirty pictures of a 17-year-old girl. It’s doing a lot more. Its disreputable photo department sent the photo out to Reuters print clients for use – although what use they would make of such a picture one can only imagine.
Disbelief and outrage are barely a starting point for this one. Dictionary.com lists 50 synonyms for disgusting from “abominable” to “yucky” and not one does this justice.
For any news organization to do this, is outlandish. But Reuters has fallen on difficult times and it is no longer deserving of much respect. These actions raise true legal issues – such as whether pornographic or questionably pornographic images of underage girls are protected by the First Amendment. Even if some lawyers say they are, I disagree.
In words so simple even Reuters might understand – no #%@&ing way.
Either way, they violate journalist practice and they violate Reuters voluminous guidelines to proper journalism. Here is an organization that vows everything it does is done “with the utmost integrity.” It lies.
Check out the integrity section of their Handbook of Journalism. Under the “dealing with people” section it says “When covering people in the news, Reuters journalists:
• Avoid needless pain and offense
• Treat victims with sensitivity
• Eschew gossip about the private lives of public figures
• Avoid sensationalism and hype
Running this photo runs afoul of every one of those standards. Reuters staff aren’t commenting.
Perhaps they are contacting Hustler’s Larry Flynt for lawyer referrals.
This isn’t the first instance of insanity from the Reuters photo department. In the Mideast, Reuters photographers might as well say they represent Hamas or Hezbollah and not any viable news organization. In the past few years, their photographers have been involved in multiple instances of unethical behavior where they manipulate photos to make Israel look bad.
When the Israelis stopped the bogus aid flotilla to Gaza and so-called activists attacked the soldiers, Reuters photographers were there to spin things toward the pro-terror crowd. One photo showed an Israeli commando surrounded by attackers including one with a knife. The Reuters photo edited out the knife.
The fight at the flotilla caused an international crisis and Reuters tried to make Israel look guilty. That’s not the work of a news organization. It’s the effort of a propaganda arm.
In another case, the agency had to withdraw a photo of Israeli bombing of Lebanon to make the results look far worse. Ynetnews.com quoted Reuters' head of P.R. Moira Whittle admitting it:
"Reuters has suspended a photographer until investigations are completed into changes made to a photograph showing smoke billowing from buildings following an air strike on Beirut.”
But four years later the same lies are repeated.
There’s more. Want to find a photo of Obama looking messianic complete with halo? Start with Reuters.
Want to find a news organization claiming there was no media bias in the 2008 election, again start with Reuters. That time they claimed the bias was “largely unseen in presidential race.” Obviously, they didn’t look at their own reporting. But who can blame them?
Still, that’s a far cry from running dirty pictures of a 17-year-old girl to make money. That’s usually reserved for sleazy old men you wouldn’t want near your children. -- In other words, the Reuters photo staff.
And they wonder why the news industry is losing credibility. Credibility, much like the innocence they help destroy, is difficult to regain.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
A picture is worth 1,000 words or so we’re told. Here are a few: despicable, appalling, predatory and unprofessional.
That barely hints at the disgusting behavior Reuters is displaying in its quest to use a crotch photo of a 17-year-old girl to make money.
We thought we had seen it all, so to speak. Perez Hilton, who has turned all things sleazy into a business model, was smacked down by society for posting a revealing photo of singer/actress Miley Cyrus. After Hilton’s lame defense of showing an up-skirt photo of the girl who he has previously called a “Disney Whore" and “Disney Slut,” Disney pulled ads for ABC’s “The View” from his site.
Perez has always been the troll the media love, but even he went too far here. His indefensible actions generated the attention his little, er, ego required and he got to move on and slime someone else.
Surprisingly, Hilton has been outdone by a larger, more experienced bunch of scumbags – the folks at Reuters, once thought of as a professional news agency.
Cyrus, who is having her teen misadventures broadcast globally, got photographed in a compromising way during the Much Music Awards in Toronto on Sunday. The photo shows her dancing in a white body suit with ribbons. However, the photo caught her just as the body suit moved, revealing all too much of her crotch.
Like the previous Disney pop tarts – Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera – embarrassing moments go with the territory. Reuters enshrined this one in the marketing hall of fame as a way to destroy credibility. The company is now selling the photo.
That’s right, a news agency is selling dirty pictures of a 17-year-old girl. It’s doing a lot more. Its disreputable photo department sent the photo out to Reuters print clients for use – although what use they would make of such a picture one can only imagine.
Disbelief and outrage are barely a starting point for this one. Dictionary.com lists 50 synonyms for disgusting from “abominable” to “yucky” and not one does this justice.
For any news organization to do this, is outlandish. But Reuters has fallen on difficult times and it is no longer deserving of much respect. These actions raise true legal issues – such as whether pornographic or questionably pornographic images of underage girls are protected by the First Amendment. Even if some lawyers say they are, I disagree.
In words so simple even Reuters might understand – no #%@&ing way.
Either way, they violate journalist practice and they violate Reuters voluminous guidelines to proper journalism. Here is an organization that vows everything it does is done “with the utmost integrity.” It lies.
Check out the integrity section of their Handbook of Journalism. Under the “dealing with people” section it says “When covering people in the news, Reuters journalists:
• Avoid needless pain and offense
• Treat victims with sensitivity
• Eschew gossip about the private lives of public figures
• Avoid sensationalism and hype
Running this photo runs afoul of every one of those standards. Reuters staff aren’t commenting.
Perhaps they are contacting Hustler’s Larry Flynt for lawyer referrals.
This isn’t the first instance of insanity from the Reuters photo department. In the Mideast, Reuters photographers might as well say they represent Hamas or Hezbollah and not any viable news organization. In the past few years, their photographers have been involved in multiple instances of unethical behavior where they manipulate photos to make Israel look bad.
When the Israelis stopped the bogus aid flotilla to Gaza and so-called activists attacked the soldiers, Reuters photographers were there to spin things toward the pro-terror crowd. One photo showed an Israeli commando surrounded by attackers including one with a knife. The Reuters photo edited out the knife.
The fight at the flotilla caused an international crisis and Reuters tried to make Israel look guilty. That’s not the work of a news organization. It’s the effort of a propaganda arm.
In another case, the agency had to withdraw a photo of Israeli bombing of Lebanon to make the results look far worse. Ynetnews.com quoted Reuters' head of P.R. Moira Whittle admitting it:
"Reuters has suspended a photographer until investigations are completed into changes made to a photograph showing smoke billowing from buildings following an air strike on Beirut.”
But four years later the same lies are repeated.
There’s more. Want to find a photo of Obama looking messianic complete with halo? Start with Reuters.
Want to find a news organization claiming there was no media bias in the 2008 election, again start with Reuters. That time they claimed the bias was “largely unseen in presidential race.” Obviously, they didn’t look at their own reporting. But who can blame them?
Still, that’s a far cry from running dirty pictures of a 17-year-old girl to make money. That’s usually reserved for sleazy old men you wouldn’t want near your children. -- In other words, the Reuters photo staff.
And they wonder why the news industry is losing credibility. Credibility, much like the innocence they help destroy, is difficult to regain.
Republican Stirrings in Liberal Heartland
Kathryn Lopez
Saturday, June 26, 2010
It's a wild political climate out there. In keeping with the blistering heat afflicting previously ultra-safe incumbents, a happily, comfortably retired Queens businessman by the name of Bob Turner thinks he can unseat his Democratic congressman, six-term Rep. Anthony Weiner, in November. It's a long shot, but crazier things have happened. Just ask Sen. Scott Brown.
Running for office was the furthest thing from Turner's mind when he was watching Weiner on Bill O'Reilly's Fox News show one March night. But, as Democrats were forcing their unpopular health-care revolution through the legislation machine, Weiner didn't even have the decency to answer his interviewer's questions. Weiner's "dodging" made Turner "hostile." So he went to his neighbor, Michael Long, who happens to be chairman of the Conservative party in New York, and asked, "To whom do I send a check?" No one, was the answer. There was no one challenging Weiner. So Turner pressed on, asking what could be done about that. Long, sketched-out prerequisites -- "Someone who isn't working," "Someone who has enough coin to start the ball rolling," and so forth.
Thus Turner asked his wife of 46 years, Peggy, what she'd think of his running for Congress. A talk-radio junkie, the special-needs nurse immediately became his biggest cheerleader: She was in a state of outrage about the undemocratic transformation going on before her eyes. And so "Bob Turner for Congress" was born.
Turner, who spent 40 years in media and business, is determined: writing his own policy statements, doing his own media, not shying away from the hard work of the campaign trail. The "business background helps," he says, of his effort to get voters to know someone is running against Weiner at all. His campaign "is not a gesture," he insists. He's in it to serve as congressman. "Plan A is to win. Plan B is to team up with likeminded people once I get to Washington." Deeply worried about the unsustainable nature of current federal spending, as well as the vital national-security and moral threats to our future, he wants Washington to make sense.
Turner is convinced that his zeal is shared in the Ninth District of New York (and around the country). Brooklyn and Queens may not seem like prime Tea Party territory, but their residents are living in the same country and feeling the same economic and other frustrations as the most pro-Palin gladiator. It's a concern about America's future and very identity that Turner hopes he can latch onto for the heart of his campaign. He has outdoor advertising and mailings planned, but he insists that the core of the campaign is going to focus on getting a "buzz" started at kitchen tables around the district, phone calls, knocking on doors and new media.
Turner says he's hearing his own frustration with Weiner echoed in the voices of volunteers in the campaign's humble Glendale, Queens, headquarters. He's hearing it from lifelong Democrats. And he's hearing it from Jewish voters: Have you seen the Obama administration's Israel policy lately?
Of course, in 2008, President Obama took nearly 80 percent of the Jewish vote. But an April poll from McLaughlin & Associates found the president's Jewish support eroding. Could Anthony Weiner be a casualty? Turner's run, pollster John McLaughlin says, is "interesting timing as Jewish voters are very upset with the Obama administration's antagonism to Israel." While Weiner is seen as staunchly pro-Israel -- even defending it in the recent flotilla incident -- Turner accuses Weiner of "talking out of both sides of his mouth" and uses the flotilla incident as a conspicuous example of Weiner's lack of leadership: "He condemned Turkey, not our policies toward Turkey. Turkey is a pretty easy target." While attacking Turkey "may seem the pro-Israeli position," Turner says, Weiner "leaves the administration alone, in an attempt to keep the political heat off himself."
In this climate, the result of "Congressman Bob Turner" is, the Conservative Party's Long insists, "not impossible." "If you called me a year ago I would have told you no way Chris Christie could win," he humbly recalls. Christie, the Republican governor of New Jersey, is now being celebrated, even talked up for higher office.
Bob Turner, mind you, has no such aspirations, or delusions. He looks ahead and says that as a potential congressman, "I will have a job to do. I want to do it and get the hell out."
"My jaw a little bit dropped," Long tells me, when Turner told him he'd be the guy the voter who is frustrated with Weiner could send a check to." He's "the last guy I would have suspected was going to run for Congress." But he's got "passion about what's going wrong in the country. He's not doing it for himself. He clearly is a citizen candidate."
Turner would be quite a change for his district. The 2010 edition of The Almanac of American Politics describes Weiner's "lust for the media limelight," likening his eagerness "to appear on cable talk shows" to that of his mentor, Sen. Charles Schumer. That Weiner is more interested in responding to his former boss than to his constituents, is one of the commonplace complaints Turner says he's hearing from voters.
Turner, Long says, is "standing up to one of the giants." He confidently predicts: "I think the giant is going to be taken down to size."
Saturday, June 26, 2010
It's a wild political climate out there. In keeping with the blistering heat afflicting previously ultra-safe incumbents, a happily, comfortably retired Queens businessman by the name of Bob Turner thinks he can unseat his Democratic congressman, six-term Rep. Anthony Weiner, in November. It's a long shot, but crazier things have happened. Just ask Sen. Scott Brown.
Running for office was the furthest thing from Turner's mind when he was watching Weiner on Bill O'Reilly's Fox News show one March night. But, as Democrats were forcing their unpopular health-care revolution through the legislation machine, Weiner didn't even have the decency to answer his interviewer's questions. Weiner's "dodging" made Turner "hostile." So he went to his neighbor, Michael Long, who happens to be chairman of the Conservative party in New York, and asked, "To whom do I send a check?" No one, was the answer. There was no one challenging Weiner. So Turner pressed on, asking what could be done about that. Long, sketched-out prerequisites -- "Someone who isn't working," "Someone who has enough coin to start the ball rolling," and so forth.
Thus Turner asked his wife of 46 years, Peggy, what she'd think of his running for Congress. A talk-radio junkie, the special-needs nurse immediately became his biggest cheerleader: She was in a state of outrage about the undemocratic transformation going on before her eyes. And so "Bob Turner for Congress" was born.
Turner, who spent 40 years in media and business, is determined: writing his own policy statements, doing his own media, not shying away from the hard work of the campaign trail. The "business background helps," he says, of his effort to get voters to know someone is running against Weiner at all. His campaign "is not a gesture," he insists. He's in it to serve as congressman. "Plan A is to win. Plan B is to team up with likeminded people once I get to Washington." Deeply worried about the unsustainable nature of current federal spending, as well as the vital national-security and moral threats to our future, he wants Washington to make sense.
Turner is convinced that his zeal is shared in the Ninth District of New York (and around the country). Brooklyn and Queens may not seem like prime Tea Party territory, but their residents are living in the same country and feeling the same economic and other frustrations as the most pro-Palin gladiator. It's a concern about America's future and very identity that Turner hopes he can latch onto for the heart of his campaign. He has outdoor advertising and mailings planned, but he insists that the core of the campaign is going to focus on getting a "buzz" started at kitchen tables around the district, phone calls, knocking on doors and new media.
Turner says he's hearing his own frustration with Weiner echoed in the voices of volunteers in the campaign's humble Glendale, Queens, headquarters. He's hearing it from lifelong Democrats. And he's hearing it from Jewish voters: Have you seen the Obama administration's Israel policy lately?
Of course, in 2008, President Obama took nearly 80 percent of the Jewish vote. But an April poll from McLaughlin & Associates found the president's Jewish support eroding. Could Anthony Weiner be a casualty? Turner's run, pollster John McLaughlin says, is "interesting timing as Jewish voters are very upset with the Obama administration's antagonism to Israel." While Weiner is seen as staunchly pro-Israel -- even defending it in the recent flotilla incident -- Turner accuses Weiner of "talking out of both sides of his mouth" and uses the flotilla incident as a conspicuous example of Weiner's lack of leadership: "He condemned Turkey, not our policies toward Turkey. Turkey is a pretty easy target." While attacking Turkey "may seem the pro-Israeli position," Turner says, Weiner "leaves the administration alone, in an attempt to keep the political heat off himself."
In this climate, the result of "Congressman Bob Turner" is, the Conservative Party's Long insists, "not impossible." "If you called me a year ago I would have told you no way Chris Christie could win," he humbly recalls. Christie, the Republican governor of New Jersey, is now being celebrated, even talked up for higher office.
Bob Turner, mind you, has no such aspirations, or delusions. He looks ahead and says that as a potential congressman, "I will have a job to do. I want to do it and get the hell out."
"My jaw a little bit dropped," Long tells me, when Turner told him he'd be the guy the voter who is frustrated with Weiner could send a check to." He's "the last guy I would have suspected was going to run for Congress." But he's got "passion about what's going wrong in the country. He's not doing it for himself. He clearly is a citizen candidate."
Turner would be quite a change for his district. The 2010 edition of The Almanac of American Politics describes Weiner's "lust for the media limelight," likening his eagerness "to appear on cable talk shows" to that of his mentor, Sen. Charles Schumer. That Weiner is more interested in responding to his former boss than to his constituents, is one of the commonplace complaints Turner says he's hearing from voters.
Turner, Long says, is "standing up to one of the giants." He confidently predicts: "I think the giant is going to be taken down to size."
Friday, June 25, 2010
The Law? How Quaint!
“Change you can believe in” is working out in practice to mean: If you don’t like the Constitution’s separation of powers — ignore it.
Victor Davis Hanson
Friday, June 25, 2010
We are well into revolutionary times, but perhaps not in the way we traditionally think of political upheaval. Instead, insidiously, the law itself is becoming negotiable — or rather, it is becoming subservient to what elite overseers at any given time determine is a higher calling of social change.
Of course, progressive federal judges have been creating, rather than interpreting, law for decades. Yet seldom in memory have we seen such a systematic attack on our framework of laws as the present assault from the executive branch.
Federal immigration statutes mandate a clearly defined American border, which aliens may not cross without authorization. Yet the Obama administration not only does not fully enforce those statutes (in this regard, it is not behaving much differently from the prior administration), but also is preparing to sue the state of Arizona for implementing enforcement that follows the intent of neglected federal laws on the books. Apparently, the president believes that enforcement of existing law is a bargaining chip that can be used to obtain “comprehensive immigration reform” — a euphemism for blanket amnesty.
Other states and even cities are now marching in lockstep to boycott Arizona. Meanwhile, the president of Mexico recently blasted Arizonans from the White House Rose Garden, no less, apparently counting on the president of the United States to go along with this demonization of one of his own states. All this is eerie; it has a whiff of the climate of the late 1850s, when the federal government was in perpetual conflict with the states, which in turn were in conflict with one another, and which often appealed to foreign nations for support.
Recently, as if on cue, the secretary of labor, Hilda Solis, produced a video advising workers to contact her office should they feel that they have been shorted wages by their employers. Fair enough. But then she goes on to explicitly include workers who are not documented and to promise them confidentiality, i.e., de facto federal protection for their illegality: “Every worker has a right to be paid fairly, whether documented or not.”
“Undocumented” is part of the current circumlocution for breaking federal law and residing here illegally. In short, although Solis is a federal executive sworn to uphold existing federal law, she has decided which laws suit her and which do not. She rightly promises to pursue lawbreaking employers, but quite wrongly not to pursue lawbreaking employees.
Yet when we become unequal before the law, the entire notion of a lawful society starts to erode. If Secretary Solis has decided that lawbreaking aliens can in confidence count on her protection, then can those who don’t pay their taxes (perhaps citing some sort of prejudice) likewise find exemption from Treasury Secretary Geithner? Can citizens pick and chose their particular compliances — run red lights, but still want shoplifters arrested? Break the speed limit, but insist that cars stop at crosswalks? Do questions of race, class, and gender determine the degree to which the federal government considers enforcing existing law?
Recently in Port Chester, N.Y., a federal judge made a mockery of the concept of one man, one vote. Apparently the magistrate felt that Hispanics in Port Chester needed help to elect someone with whom they can identify along racial lines. So, to ensure the election of an Hispanic to the village Board of Trustees, the judge created a system of cumulative voting. Each voter was given six votes, and the explicit hope was that Hispanics would give all their votes to Hispanic candidates, voting on the basis of race rather than policy. Now we hear this may well become a precedent that the federal government will use to ensure diversity elsewhere.
When an “Hispanic” was duly elected as one of the six trustees, the judge and other observers were pleased that Hispanic voters had achieved the intended result. There was no thought, of course, about what constituted “Hispanic.” Does it require three-quarters Hispanic blood? One-half? One-quarter? One-eighth? Does Puerto Rican count, but not Spanish? Mexican, but not Portuguese or Basque? There was also no thought about whether such racial pigeonholing was good for the country. After all, focusing on race, while violating the cherished notion of each citizen enjoying one — and only one — vote, might also conjure up some disturbing memories from our not-too-distant past.
BP has acted in derelict fashion in the Gulf. But that does not justify the Obama administration’s decision — without a court order and without legislation passed by Congress — to ignore past legal precedent capping oil-company liability. Instead, this administration promises to “kick ass” and put a “boot on their necks” until BP coughs up, say, $20 billion in reparations. If a president by fiat can demand $20 billion from a corporation to create a payout fund, why not $30 or perhaps $100 billion? Or better yet, in South American style, why not simply nationalize BP altogether?
We saw something like this before from the Obama administration, when it bailed out the bankrupt Chrysler Corporation and by executive order overturned the legally determined order of creditors. “Senior” creditors were to have been, by contract, the first paid, while junior creditors waited in line. But the latter group included union workers. So Obama derided the senior lenders as “speculators” and simply put his own constituents and campaign donors in front of them. The first sign of a debauched society is that it does not honor contracts, but reinterprets them according to perceived political advantage.
Now there is talk of an executive decree from the Environmental Protection Agency to implement provisions of cap-and-trade legislation that Congress will not pass. Republican senators are already worried that the administration will likewise simply begin to grant amnesty to illegal aliens en masse, without introducing such a proposal to Congress, which alone has the right and responsibility to make our laws. And the recent executive order to ban all offshore drilling in the Gulf clearly circumvented the legal process. (Does the government have the right to shut down every flight if one airplane crashes, or to mothball all nuclear plants should one leak?) Instead of putting a moratorium on the sort of deep-drilling procedure and pipe fittings that BP used, the Obama administration simply issued a blanket ban on all offshore drilling — as if the real intent was not to allow the crisis of an oil spill to go to waste in the larger environmental effort to reduce carbon emissions.
What do all these ends-justify-the-means examples portend? Mostly, they reflect an effort by a technocratic class to implement social change through extralegal means if it finds that its agenda does not meet with public approval. In some sense, the Obamians have lost all faith that our democracy shares their vision, and so they seek to impose their exalted will by proclamation — as if they are the new Jacobins and America is revolutionary France throwing off the old order.
In late 2008, the liberal hope was that an elected President Obama, with large Democratic majorities in both the Senate and the House, could do just about whatever he wanted. But then a number of obstacles arose, from occasionally recalcitrant Democratic legislators to bothersome things like filibusters. In response, Obama was not content with achieving his liberal ends, but sought to change the very means of obtaining them; even New York Times columnists suddenly resented the calcification of American politics, and pointed to the ease with which dictatorial China can simply impose green change.
Note the logic of all this. Federal officials determine a supposed good and then find the necessary way to achieve it. The law be damned. “Diversity,” unions, environmentalism — any of these anointed causes trumps the staid idea of simply following the letter of the law.
The final irony? It was law professor Obama who campaigned on respect for the rule of law as he serially trashed elements of the Bush administration’s war on terror — almost all of which he subsequently kept or expanded. Note how what was deemed illegal before 2009 has suddenly become quite legal and worthy of emulation and indeed expansion.
As Obama’s polls continue to erode and congressional support for his agenda further dwindles, expect his cabinet to continue to seek ways around the enforcement of existing law. You see, in the current climate, the law is seen as retrograde, an obstacle to the advancement of long-overdue social change — which is to be implemented by a law professor and a past fierce critic of George Bush’s supposed constitutional transgressions.
While the media still rail about fanciful threats to constitutional stability from right-wing Tea Party types, we are getting real usurpation — but with a hope-and-change smile.
Victor Davis Hanson
Friday, June 25, 2010
We are well into revolutionary times, but perhaps not in the way we traditionally think of political upheaval. Instead, insidiously, the law itself is becoming negotiable — or rather, it is becoming subservient to what elite overseers at any given time determine is a higher calling of social change.
Of course, progressive federal judges have been creating, rather than interpreting, law for decades. Yet seldom in memory have we seen such a systematic attack on our framework of laws as the present assault from the executive branch.
Federal immigration statutes mandate a clearly defined American border, which aliens may not cross without authorization. Yet the Obama administration not only does not fully enforce those statutes (in this regard, it is not behaving much differently from the prior administration), but also is preparing to sue the state of Arizona for implementing enforcement that follows the intent of neglected federal laws on the books. Apparently, the president believes that enforcement of existing law is a bargaining chip that can be used to obtain “comprehensive immigration reform” — a euphemism for blanket amnesty.
Other states and even cities are now marching in lockstep to boycott Arizona. Meanwhile, the president of Mexico recently blasted Arizonans from the White House Rose Garden, no less, apparently counting on the president of the United States to go along with this demonization of one of his own states. All this is eerie; it has a whiff of the climate of the late 1850s, when the federal government was in perpetual conflict with the states, which in turn were in conflict with one another, and which often appealed to foreign nations for support.
Recently, as if on cue, the secretary of labor, Hilda Solis, produced a video advising workers to contact her office should they feel that they have been shorted wages by their employers. Fair enough. But then she goes on to explicitly include workers who are not documented and to promise them confidentiality, i.e., de facto federal protection for their illegality: “Every worker has a right to be paid fairly, whether documented or not.”
“Undocumented” is part of the current circumlocution for breaking federal law and residing here illegally. In short, although Solis is a federal executive sworn to uphold existing federal law, she has decided which laws suit her and which do not. She rightly promises to pursue lawbreaking employers, but quite wrongly not to pursue lawbreaking employees.
Yet when we become unequal before the law, the entire notion of a lawful society starts to erode. If Secretary Solis has decided that lawbreaking aliens can in confidence count on her protection, then can those who don’t pay their taxes (perhaps citing some sort of prejudice) likewise find exemption from Treasury Secretary Geithner? Can citizens pick and chose their particular compliances — run red lights, but still want shoplifters arrested? Break the speed limit, but insist that cars stop at crosswalks? Do questions of race, class, and gender determine the degree to which the federal government considers enforcing existing law?
Recently in Port Chester, N.Y., a federal judge made a mockery of the concept of one man, one vote. Apparently the magistrate felt that Hispanics in Port Chester needed help to elect someone with whom they can identify along racial lines. So, to ensure the election of an Hispanic to the village Board of Trustees, the judge created a system of cumulative voting. Each voter was given six votes, and the explicit hope was that Hispanics would give all their votes to Hispanic candidates, voting on the basis of race rather than policy. Now we hear this may well become a precedent that the federal government will use to ensure diversity elsewhere.
When an “Hispanic” was duly elected as one of the six trustees, the judge and other observers were pleased that Hispanic voters had achieved the intended result. There was no thought, of course, about what constituted “Hispanic.” Does it require three-quarters Hispanic blood? One-half? One-quarter? One-eighth? Does Puerto Rican count, but not Spanish? Mexican, but not Portuguese or Basque? There was also no thought about whether such racial pigeonholing was good for the country. After all, focusing on race, while violating the cherished notion of each citizen enjoying one — and only one — vote, might also conjure up some disturbing memories from our not-too-distant past.
BP has acted in derelict fashion in the Gulf. But that does not justify the Obama administration’s decision — without a court order and without legislation passed by Congress — to ignore past legal precedent capping oil-company liability. Instead, this administration promises to “kick ass” and put a “boot on their necks” until BP coughs up, say, $20 billion in reparations. If a president by fiat can demand $20 billion from a corporation to create a payout fund, why not $30 or perhaps $100 billion? Or better yet, in South American style, why not simply nationalize BP altogether?
We saw something like this before from the Obama administration, when it bailed out the bankrupt Chrysler Corporation and by executive order overturned the legally determined order of creditors. “Senior” creditors were to have been, by contract, the first paid, while junior creditors waited in line. But the latter group included union workers. So Obama derided the senior lenders as “speculators” and simply put his own constituents and campaign donors in front of them. The first sign of a debauched society is that it does not honor contracts, but reinterprets them according to perceived political advantage.
Now there is talk of an executive decree from the Environmental Protection Agency to implement provisions of cap-and-trade legislation that Congress will not pass. Republican senators are already worried that the administration will likewise simply begin to grant amnesty to illegal aliens en masse, without introducing such a proposal to Congress, which alone has the right and responsibility to make our laws. And the recent executive order to ban all offshore drilling in the Gulf clearly circumvented the legal process. (Does the government have the right to shut down every flight if one airplane crashes, or to mothball all nuclear plants should one leak?) Instead of putting a moratorium on the sort of deep-drilling procedure and pipe fittings that BP used, the Obama administration simply issued a blanket ban on all offshore drilling — as if the real intent was not to allow the crisis of an oil spill to go to waste in the larger environmental effort to reduce carbon emissions.
What do all these ends-justify-the-means examples portend? Mostly, they reflect an effort by a technocratic class to implement social change through extralegal means if it finds that its agenda does not meet with public approval. In some sense, the Obamians have lost all faith that our democracy shares their vision, and so they seek to impose their exalted will by proclamation — as if they are the new Jacobins and America is revolutionary France throwing off the old order.
In late 2008, the liberal hope was that an elected President Obama, with large Democratic majorities in both the Senate and the House, could do just about whatever he wanted. But then a number of obstacles arose, from occasionally recalcitrant Democratic legislators to bothersome things like filibusters. In response, Obama was not content with achieving his liberal ends, but sought to change the very means of obtaining them; even New York Times columnists suddenly resented the calcification of American politics, and pointed to the ease with which dictatorial China can simply impose green change.
Note the logic of all this. Federal officials determine a supposed good and then find the necessary way to achieve it. The law be damned. “Diversity,” unions, environmentalism — any of these anointed causes trumps the staid idea of simply following the letter of the law.
The final irony? It was law professor Obama who campaigned on respect for the rule of law as he serially trashed elements of the Bush administration’s war on terror — almost all of which he subsequently kept or expanded. Note how what was deemed illegal before 2009 has suddenly become quite legal and worthy of emulation and indeed expansion.
As Obama’s polls continue to erode and congressional support for his agenda further dwindles, expect his cabinet to continue to seek ways around the enforcement of existing law. You see, in the current climate, the law is seen as retrograde, an obstacle to the advancement of long-overdue social change — which is to be implemented by a law professor and a past fierce critic of George Bush’s supposed constitutional transgressions.
While the media still rail about fanciful threats to constitutional stability from right-wing Tea Party types, we are getting real usurpation — but with a hope-and-change smile.
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