Of Course The Benghazi Inquiry is Partisan. It Should Be

By David Harsanyi

Thursday, October 01, 2015

Here’s a non sequitur for you: Kevin McCarthy said something blatantly political about Hillary Clinton the other day, therefore Hillary Clinton is innocent of all wrongdoing going back to 2010.

This logical fallacy also happens to be the Democratic Party’s positon on the Select Committee on Benghazi. As you may have heard, McCarthy, majority leader and probable future Speaker of the House, went on Sean Hannity’s television show and said this:

    Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought.

Set all press releases to outrage. And prepare to be subjected to one of the most annoying sub-genres of D.C. political theater—that thing where everyone pretends to be shocked when we learn that politicians care about politics.

McCarthy’s comments, we’re told, were a pristine example of a Kinsley gaffe. Republicans inadvertently slipped and let everyone know their true motivation: painting Hillary Clinton as “untrustable.” (As if this contention was somehow outlandish or hidden by anyone.) Vox contends McCarthy’s politicking corrodes the credibility of government—not Hillary’s private servers, not the access she may have traded while employed by the state, not the fact that two American diplomats and two CIA employees were murdered under her watch, or that as secretary of State she may have misled the country about that event, but that the investigating committee, like every committee before it, is helmed by partisans.

Anyway, “The Select Committee on Benghazi’s investigation has long appeared partisan,” Vox informs us.  Which is true.

For starters, it’s implausible that a majority of Democrats would ever investigate Hillary Clinton on their own, no matter what she’d done or hidden or lied about, because of the dominant incentive to defend their partisan interests. Republicans will scrutinize Hillary whenever they can because they have different incentives. Both postures are comparably partisan. Neither precludes the committee from finding out the truth—a goal both parties once claimed.

Not any more. “Dems accuse GOP Leader McCarthy of admitting Benghazi panel is political,” says a Fox News headline. So it’s time to end the investigation, says the unprejudiced Linda Sánchez and Elijah Cummings. So isn’t it just as explicitly “political” to demand an end to an investigation that’s already uncovered (and spurred media inquiries that have uncovered) all kinds of shadiness before even hearing the evidence or speaking with any witnesses? How could you possibly already know the entire committee is a sham when every day we learn something new through Hillary’s once-secret emails?

If the Republicans on the committee are going to look like they’re on a partisan witch hunt that exploits the deaths of four Americans for political gain, then it will almost surely backfire on them. But if this is true, isn’t it also true that those attempting to bury an investigation surrounding the very same tragedy in hopes of insulating a preordained presidential candidate are equally distasteful and partisan?

Question the motivation and honesty of your accusers and you might never have to answer a real question.

Rarely is this debate framed in that way. Writers at left-wing and mainstream publications often operate under the misconception that their interpretations are apolitical. So we can forgive them for periodically forgetting, even as evidence mounts (sometimes in their own publications) that Clinton was involved in shady activities, that partisanship originates from both sides.

Every reporter covering this story knows well that the indignation over McCarthy’s remarks is nothing more than dissembling. It reminds me of the Planned Parenthood video kerfuffle that’s going on with Carly Fiorina. The best way to evade an interrogation —whether we’re talking about videos or servers—is to divert attention and blow a piddling inconsistency out of proportion, or nitpick and parse a supposed gaffe enough to discredit the entire case. Question the motivation and honesty of your accusers and you might never have to answer a real question.

But watch the whole interview. McCarthy takes credit for the political upside of holding someone responsible for her actions. That is, by the way, very different than contending the committee exists solely for a political purposes. Some of Hillary’s deteriorating poll numbers were expected, attributable to the fact that she is actually running for office. But it is undeniable that committee’s work (as well as the investigations it has spurred in the media) have Hillary on the defensive. If she’s acted “untrustable”— and by any reasonable standard she has—it only reaffirms, partisan or not, that they need to dig.

It doesn’t really matter if party allegiance propels inquiry, as long as that inquiry is meaningful. In theory, one of the most valuable features of a two-party political system is that one will check the other—whether we’re talking about ideology or abuse of power.

Codename: Liberal

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

New York’s city council has taken it upon itself to posthumously honor Ethel Rosenberg, a Soviet spy who helped, in her modest way, the worldwide Communist enterprise to murder some 100 million people.

Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer was joined by three city-council members earlier this week in issuing proclamations honoring Rosenberg for “demonstrating great bravery.” They also affirmed their belief — in spite of heavy evidence to the contrary — that she was wrongfully executed for her role in the Soviet spy ring dedicated to stealing information about the U.S. atomic-bomb program in order to give Stalin et al. another weapon in their battery of terror.

Daniel Dromm, who for his sins is a Democrat representing Queens on the city council, said: “A lot of hysteria was created around anti-Communism and how we had to defend our country, and these two” — note that two — people were traitors, and we rushed to judgment and they were executed.”

There is practically no one left defending the innocence of Julius Rosenberg — even his children have admitted that he was a traitor and a spy. The only people who doubt the guilt of his wife, Ethel, are those with a very strong ideological resistance to the facts of the case. Among other things, we have the word of Nikita Khrushchev, who writes in his memoirs of the help the Rosenbergs, plural, provided in the Soviet nuclear-weapons program; we have the communications of the Soviet spymaster to whom they answered, who in his missives to Moscow describes Ethel as an operative; we have the Venona papers, the declassified Soviet archives in which that same handler, Aleksandr Feklisov, writes of Ethel’s role in recommending new espionage recruits, etc. Yes, there are instances of conflicting testimony in the case, as there are in every mugging, and Ethel’s brother, who had originally omitted any mention of his sister’s role in the spy ring, changed his testimony when his wife told a different story. None of this is enough — not nearly — to outweigh the plain archival evidence in Soviet records.

There is some controversy, a matter of historical trivia, about whether the Rosenbergs were effective spies; some Soviet scientists involved in the nuclear-weapons program have dismissed the information they provided as useless. Being a bad spy, however, is not a defense against espionage charges. The record is clear that in the matter of the crimes with which they were charged — treason and conspiracy to commit espionage — the Rosenbergs, both of them, were guilty as charged.

The Communist movement worldwide murdered some 100 million people over the course of the 20th century. The Soviet enterprise specifically, to which the Rosenbergs were fiercely committed — they are described as “devoted” in the Soviet literature — had at the time of the Rosenbergs’ recruit already intentionally starved to death some 8 million people in Ukraine for the purposes of political terror. I do not wish to include them here, but put “Holodomor” into Google images if you want a visual indicator of this. And the many crimes against humanity committed by Joseph Stalin and his regime were no secret.

So, why the hesitation to admit plainly that these monsters were monsters and deserved what they got?

It is more than symbolic that Julius Rosenberg’s Soviet codename was: Liberal.

As in the case of Alger Hiss, the American liberal intellectual class simply cannot bring itself to believe that the villain of any story is one of their own. The villain has to be a figure from the outer darkness, some atavistic American throwback — a Nixon, a McCarthy, a J. Edgar Hoover — motivated by something sinister and occult. The facts of the case can never be the facts of the case. Hollywood screenwriters, State Department bosses, and Lower East Side radicals working for the Soviet Union? “No, no, they’re only being targeted because they’re homosexuals, or intellectuals, or Jews.” (The ironic contrast of these imaginary persecutions with the actual Soviet record on homosexuals, intellectuals, and Jews never occurs to them.) “It must be hatred, or bigotry, or self-interest, or political ambition, or something.” It may have been the case that Joe McCarthy was a bigot, that Hoover was a weirdo, that Richard Nixon and Bobby Kennedy were not averse to the prospect of political advancement; but it also was the case that there were Americans in influential and sensitive positions working as part of a criminal conspiracy to advance the interests of a homicidal, terroristic, mass-murdering, psychotic operator of gulags and death camps.

“But, McCarthy was mean!” Not mean enough. Not by half.

Karl Marx, in whatever spectral afterlife the old monster is enjoying, must be smiling as American history repeats itself, moving on from tragedy to farce. Just as denunciations of the “Red Scare” were used to draw attention away from the crimes of American individuals and institutions undertaken in service of the Soviet Union, now cries of “Islamophobia!” are being used to muddy the waters in the matter of the participation of American and Western people and institutions in the worldwide Islamic jihad against the West. From the New York Times, we learn: “More British Muslim men have joined ISIS and the Nusra Front than are serving in the British armed forces.” Here in the United States, the Council on American Islamic Relations operates openly and with the full protection of the law, in spite of its being identified by the Department of Justice as an unindicted coconspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case, in which a phony charity was used to channel money to Hamas. (My colleague Andrew C. McCarthy, who knows a little something about Islamic terrorism, has done a great deal of work on CAIR, e.g., here.) Another group with Saudi and Muslim Brotherhood links holds the titles to hundreds of American mosques. Odd? Worrisome? “Islamophobia!”

Prediction: In 30 years, when they’re renaming Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan “Osama bin Laden Plaza,” some jackass from Queens will deliver a homily: “A lot of hysteria was created around Islamic terrorism and how we had to defend our country . . . ”

The Unilateral War on College Men

By Glenn Reynolds

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

It appears to many — including me — as if the Obama administration is engaged in a war on college men. Using debunked statistics, the president, the vice president and various other political officials have falsely claimed that there’s an epidemic of rape on college campuses, even though campus rape is, in fact, falling, just as off-campus rape is. (And, in fact, rape is less common on campus than off).

And, ever since the Department of Education issued a ”Dear Colleague" letter to universities in 2011, in essence ordering them to adopt new and draconian campus “sexual assault” rules that treat accusations as presumptively true and force the accused — almost always men — to prove their innocence, sometimes even very strong evidence of innocence is ignored.

Spearheading this effort has been Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights Catherine Lhamon, who has characterized the letter as binding on colleges and universities even though it is not a law, was not adopted as a formal or informal rule making after notice and comment under any law, and appears to have very little to do with the federal anti-discrimination law Title IX, which says only that “no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”

Title IX was supposed to force colleges to admit women to programs formerly reserved for men. The law says nothing about sexual assault, sexual harassment, or the duty of universities to investigate criminal behavior on their own instead of referring crimes to law enforcement. But through a period of interpretation and reinterpretation, that simple statutory language has produced reams of federal paperwork that, in effect, turn a simple academic non-discrimination rule into a rape law that lacks the due process protections and evidentiary standards of actual rape law.

Now it appears that Congress has noticed. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., crashed a Senate hearing last week to grill Deputy Assistant Secretary of Education Amy McIntosh about past statements by Lhamon that purported to establish the “guidance” letter as binding law. How could this be binding, asked Sen. Alexander, when it’s simply a letter issued without any of the procedures required for administrative rule making?

McIntosh didn’t offer much of an answer, and that’s because there isn’t one. As some, including Ari Cohn, have argued for a while, the Department of Education is acting unlawfully here.

A law, to be binding, must pass both houses of Congress and be presented to the president's desk, where it must either pass into law or be vetoed and then overridden by a two-thirds vote of each house. Because this procedure, which the framers of our Constitution designed in order to make lawmaking difficult, turns out to make it difficult to pass laws, we also allow administrative agencies to issue regulations that are binding as law. But those regulations can be issued only after a draft is published and the public has a chance to comment, via either formal or informal rule making.

A mere letter from a bureaucrat, which is all the “Dear Colleague” letter is, has no binding authority. At most, it suggests that the bureaucrats might be willing to go to court to try to convince a judge that their interpretation of the statute is correct.

So why did colleges  roll over? Law blogger Scott Greenfield suggests that it’s because the colleges are also warring against college men: “After all, why should a college risk the loss of its lifeblood (federal money) for the sake of protecting a few guys, particularly when the colleges pretty much agree with Lhamon’s progressive ideals?”

Greenfield notes that once Columbia University was sued by a male student claiming that his Title IX rights were violated because of the university’s response to a false accusation, it changed its mind and decided that Title IX didn’t create much in the way of student rights after all. Greenfield concludes: “Regardless of whether one embraces the policy choice embodied in Lhamon’s ‘Dear Colleague’ letters or not, there is no doubt but that it was imposed without lawful authority and adopted by schools who chose to sacrifice one segment of their student population to appease another segment. This is not the law. This is not what Title IX mandates. And they know it, even if you don’t.”

Greenfield is right. It’s nice that members of Congress are taking notice. But male college students and their parents, as well as alumni and trustees — and those women noticing that there’s a shortage of college-educated men all of a sudden — need to ask why there’s a war on college men, and why colleges, seemingly, are on the other side.

Pope Francis’s Hypocritical Politicking

By Victor Davis Hanson

Thursday, October 01, 2015

Unpopular though it may be to say so, I, for one, grew exhausted by the non-stop pronouncements/commentaries of Pope Francis. The spiritual leader of 1 billion Catholics — roughly half of the world’s Christians — Francis just completed a high-profile, endlessly publicized visit to the United States.

But unlike past visiting pontiffs, the Argentine-born Francis weighed in on a number of hot-button U.S. social, domestic, and foreign-policy issues during a heated presidential-election cycle.

Francis, in characteristic cryptic language, pontificated about climate change. He lectured on illegal immigration. He harped on the harshness of capitalism, as well as abortion and capital punishment.

A fair-minded person might infer from his advice that capitalism is more prone to impoverish than to create enough wealth to bring the underclass out of poverty. Yet the poor in the free-market United States are mostly better off than the middle classes in Pope Francis’ homeland. Argentina’s statism has transformed one of the most resource-rich countries in the world into an impoverished nation. Are the wages of socialism therefore less than Christian?

Authoritarian regimes such as the Castro dynasty in Cuba or Iran’s theocracy do not receive much criticism from the pope for their administration of state justice. Yet Francis blasted capital punishment, which in America is mostly reserved for first-degree murderers, not the perpetrators of thought crimes as in Cuba and Iran.

Francis believes — and ipso facto puts the church behind the creed — that global warming is man-caused. It is supposedly ongoing and can be addressed only though radical state intervention.

Francis, who arrived in the U.S. in a carbon-spewing jet, seems to leave no room for other views. If the climate really is becoming warmer, it cannot be because of naturally occurring cycles of long duration.

Hundreds of thousands of migrants are now swarming illegally into the West, whether into Europe mostly from the Middle East, or into America from Latin America. They arrive in numbers that make them difficult to assimilate and integrate, with radical repercussions on the host country’s ability to serve the social needs of its own poorer citizens.

Yet Francis reserves most of his advice for host countries to ensure that they treat the often-impoverished and mostly young male newcomers with Christian humanity. That advice is admirable. But the pope might have likewise lectured the leaders of countries such as Syria and Mexico to stop whatever they are doing to heartlessly drive out millions of their own citizens from their homes.

Or he might have suggested that migrants seek lawful immigration and thereby more charitably not harm the interests of immigrants who wait patiently until they can resettle lawfully.

Or he might have praised the West for uniquely creating conditions that draw in, rather than repel, the world’s migrants.

In sum, Francis did not fully understand a country founded on the principle of separation of church and state. And he has tragically harmed that delicate American equilibrium.

If a Christian truly believes that capitalism is the world’s only hope, that illegal immigration is detrimental to all involved, or that the Iranian nuke deal is a prelude to either war or nuclear proliferation, is he thereby somewhat less Christian or Catholic?

Is Francis aware of age-old hospitality adages about guests and hosts, or warnings about those who live in glass houses?

Would an American president dare to visit the Vatican to lecture the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church about their blatant sex and age discrimination, and to advise Francis that his successor should be female or under 50?

Should Americans urge the pope to adopt the supposedly enlightened Western doctrine of disparate impact, which might fault senior Vatican clergymen for failing to promote diversity in matters of sex, race, or age?

In this new freewheeling climate of frank exchange, should Protestant friends now advise Catholic dioceses to open their aggregate 200 million acres of global church lands to help house current migrants? Or should Francis first deplore the capitalist business practices in the administration of the so-called Vatican Bank?

Should the Church turn over to prosecuting attorneys all the names of past and present clergy accused of criminal sexual abuse, and cede all investigation and punishment entirely to the state?

Lots of hypocrisy inevitably follows when churches and their leaders politick.

Conservatives who object to Francis’s sermonizing often enjoy it when the moral majority and born-again Evangelicals stamp their own social agendas with Protestant piety.

Liberals might applaud the pope when he weighs in on global warming and cutthroat capitalism but perhaps want him to stick to religion when he frowns on abortions or female priests.

Because Pope Francis has shed the Catholic Church’s historic immunity from American politics, for good or bad, he and the church are fair game for political pushback.

But do we really want a priest in the role of Bernie Sanders or Ted Cruz, dressed in ancient Roman miter and vestments, addressing hot-button issues with divine sanction?

Getting Rich off Climate Extremism

By Ian Tuttle

Thursday, October 01, 2015

It would seem to go without saying, but: Before accusing myriad individuals and organizations of defrauding the American people, it’s advisable to make sure you are not currently doing the same.

With that in mind, meet Jagadish Shukla, professor of climate dynamics at George Mason University. On September 1, Dr. Shukla and 19 other climate scientists sent a letter to President Obama, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and White House Office of Science and Technology policy director John Holdren calling for “a RICO investigation of corporations and other organizations that have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change,” a (criminally irresponsible) tactic initially proposed by Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse in a Washington Post op-ed in May. The letter could be found on the website of the Institute of Global Environment and Society (IGES) — the “non-profit, tax-exempt research institute” founded and headed by Dr. Shukla.

​And then it couldn’t. In late September, the “RICO20” letter vanished from the IGES website; in its place is a message explaining that “the letter was inadvertently posted on this web site [and] has been removed.” (It is still visible here.)

The curious disappearance set several people inquiring. It turns out that heading up IGES is nice work if you can get it. The Washington Free Beacon reports that since 2001 the organization has received more than $63 million — 98 percent of its total revenue — from taxpayers, mainly in the form of grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. And an astonishing amount of that money has ended up in Dr. Shukla’s pocket.

That’s largely because the IGES has a tight-knit staff — very tight. The “business manager” is Jagadish Shukla’s wife, Anastasia, and the “assistant business manager”/”assistant to the president” is their daughter, Sonia. According to the Shuklas’ tax filings, they have pocketed $5.6 million in compensation from IGES since 2001 (not including Sonia’s earnings, which have gone unreported). That is on top of Jagadish’s salary from George Mason — a public university, by the way — which paid him $314,000 in 2014.

This “double-dipping” — receiving compensation from a research organization on top of academic compensation — is prohibited by the federal agencies from which IGES receives money, as well as by George Mason University, as detailed by Climate Audit’s Steve McIntyre. Yet IGES officially joined the university, as part of the College of Science, in 2013.

Unsurprisingly, the only other member of the IGES staff is a longtime associate of Shukla: George Mason University professor James Kinter, who runs the Institute’s Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies (COLA). The pair have worked together since 1984. Kinter, too, appears to have double-dipped, adding $180,038 from IGES to his $171,320 salary in 2014. (Kinter did not sign the RICO20 letter.)

​And such episodes hardly exhaust IGES’s questionable financial activities. According to McIntyre, Shukla also shifted $100,000 in IGES grant money to his “Institute for Global Education, Equality of Opportunity, and Prosperity,” which then funneled $100,000 to an educational charity in Shukla’s hometown in India. (To be fair, that was probably a more productive use of those funds.)

One month ago, Jagadish Shukla was encouraging the federal government to treat skeptics of anthropogenic climate change like the Gambinos. Now it turns out that the biggest crime syndicate in this affair is the Shukla family.