Despite Best Efforts . . .

“This is my town hall meeting for you. And you’re not going to tell me how to run my congressional office. Now, the reason why I don’t allow filming is that usually the films that are done end up on YouTube…” –Rep. Baron Hill (D-IN), displaying his disdain for representative government and, thus, his inability to uphold his oath of office

Rep. Baron Hill (D., Ind.) cannot possibly be this big a jerk all the time. At a recent town hall, a young woman raised her hand and identified herself as a journalism student working on a school project who was told she could not videotape the event.

Student: Why can’t I film this, isn’t this my right?

Baron Hill: This is my town hall meeting, and I set the rules, and I’ve had these rules . . . (jeering) Let me repeat that one more time. This is my town hall meeting for you. And you’re not going to tell me how to run my Congressional office. Now, the reason why I don’t allow filming is that usually the films that are done end up on YouTube in a compromising position.

Hey, guess what? He ended up on YouTube anyway:

No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy (by Fred Schwarz)

via: nationalreview

Here’s a fascinating transcript of a press conference with Larry Nicholson, the commanding general of the Marine Expeditionary Brigade–Afghanistan. His men have just kicked the Taliban out of the Helmand Valley, a poppy-growing stronghold; now they must continue to build trust among the locals while preparing to eventually hand over the region to Afghan troops. The general’s statements show how deeply the lessons of counterinsurgency from the surge in Iraq have been absorbed throughout the U.S. military. “Marine diplomacy” might sound like the punch line to a joke, but in Afghanistan today, it’s an indispensable part of America’s arsenal.

From the very beginning of the operation, the emphasis has been on winning over the locals:

Seven days ago tonight, we inserted — at 01:00 local, we inserted about 4,000 Marines and sailors into the Helmand River Valley, over a period of about seven hours. The intention was to go in big, strong, fast; overwhelm any opposition and frankly save lives on all sides but most specifically save civilian lives . . . these are areas that have been visited before by coalition forces and Special Operations forces. But they never stayed. It was always just passing through. The number-one question we’re getting across the board right now is, how long are you staying? And one of my requirements, to every one of our company commanders, was that within 24 hours of hitting the deck, you will have a shura [consultation] with the local elders. . . .

The focus of this operation from the very beginning has been on the people, not the enemy. And I know that may sound very strange, and I got some raised eyebrows even with talking to Marines, but our focus is to get to the people. So the — you know, on the way, we’ll take care of the Taliban. But get to the people. So the fact that the Taliban in large part have decided to flee the area, often leaving significant weapons caches and weapons and IED, you know, components behind is in our — I think in our great favor.

Integrating Afghan troops with U.S. units is a key part of the plan, and it has several benefits: taking advantage of the Afghans’ cultural knowledge, training them in counterinsurgency tactics, and reassuring local residents that it’s not just a foreign invasion:

I’m not going to sugarcoat it. The fact of the matter is, I — we don’t have enough Afghan forces, and I’d like more. You know, imagine right now I’ve got 4,000 Marines in Helmand with about 600 . . . 650 Afghan forces. Imagine if I had 4,000 Marines with 4,000 Afghan forces. . . . they are such force multipliers, because as you move through areas, they see things we’ll never see. They understand intuitively what’s going on in an area that we’ll just never get, no matter how much cultural training our guys get. So they are absolutely essential. And of course everything we do — everything we do — is with an eye towards turning over and transitioning to them . . .

One of my biggest fears — as we move into the Helmand River Valley, if I’m a local, and I just see a company of U.S. Marines come by with no Afghans, you know, how does that inspire confidence in my government? How does that make me believe in — that — in something — that something positive has happened? It doesn’t. And again, it’s just another bunch of foreign troops moving through the area. . . . So we have sort of subdivided and sliced and diced the existing Afghan forces that we have and moved them down into every formation we have, so that there are no Marines on the battlefield that don’t have Afghan forces with them.

Marines are learning to apply their superior force with a light touch:

One thing we learned in Iraq . . . the surge was great, the surge provided more troops and more equipment; but at the end of the day, you can’t surge trust, you can’t surge cooperation, you can’t surge personal relations. Those have to be built over a period of time. If we go into a town and it requires lots of damage to the town and we’re killing local people, even if we kill Taliban, those local fatalities and the damage we cause is going to resonate. And I think one of the things that the [provincial] governor has been so public about this week is that we don’t have one — as far as I know right now, we have not had one civilian casualty in the past seven days. Now, that’s — you think about 4,000 Marines, 600 Afghans, moving through an area, at least 20 engagements with the enemy, and to the best of our knowledge — and we stay very close to this — we’ve not had a civilian casualty.

They use a variety of weapons to achieve their goals:

I made sure my guys understood that stability ops started the day we hit the deck — the day we hit the deck, when we see our first locals. Because again, we choreographed this very closely with the governor, and . . . the governor through his networks got the word out: When the Marines land, stay. Don’t leave. The Marines are coming in, but stay there. And furthermore, approach the Marines, go up to the Marines. . . .

Clearing for us, as I’ve told our guys a hundred times, can be moving into an area, handing out Jolly Ranchers and drinking tea, or it can be a very kinetic, house-to-house fight. And I’ve told our guys: You should expect some of both. And you’d better be able to hand out Jolly Ranchers and 5.56 ammunition with equal enthusiasm and accuracy.

And so I really think that our guys have taken this to heart. They feel like they’re part of something special, because they are. We’ve taken a hell of a large swath of Taliban heartland away from them. And again, our job now is to inspire the people, inspire confidence in the people that we’re going to stay and that their government is there to take care of them. And that’s — the heavy lifting is just ahead. That’s going to be the really hard part.

And amid all the friendship-building, basic logistics are not being neglected:

The number one threat here right now today is not the Taliban, it’s the heat. And as I said, it is hot as fire. Every day we’ve got helicopters, day and night, pushing all manner of logistics, but especially pallets of water to the Marines. I am more than confident — and I stay in touch with my commanders down there — I am more than confident that we’re getting the amount of water they need in a timely manner. No one is going without water.

My problem, and what I’m fussing about with my staff, is that the water’s not cold. We need to freeze that water. We need to deliver water that’s pretty well frozen. It will thaw out very quickly. So we’re working on that. Also trying to get them a special meal this weekend, get some steaks down there. And these guys sure as hell have earned it. So we will have some helicopters this weekend flying in a special meal to the guys.

‘The Muslim World’ One-way multiculturalism

via: nationalreview

President Obama’s speech in Cairo last week generated an enormous amount of “buzz” in the print, television and online media. Yesterday Brigitte Gabriel shared her reactions in “An Open Letter to President Obama.”

Today, we thought we would share with you the biting analysis and sardonic wit of author and columnist Mark Steyn, published in the National Review Online.

As recently as last summer, General Motors filing for bankruptcy would have been the biggest news story of the week. But it’s not such a very great step from the unthinkable to the inevitable, and by the time it actually happened the market barely noticed and the media were focused on the president’s “address to the Muslim world.” As it happens, these two stories are the same story: snapshots, at home and abroad, of the hyperpower in eclipse. It’s a long time since anyone touted GM as the emblematic brand of America — What’s good for GM is good for America, etc. In fact, it’s more emblematic than ever: Like General Motors, the U.S. government spends more than it makes, and has airily committed itself to ever more unsustainable levels of benefits. GM has about 95,000 workers but provides health benefits to a million people: It’s not a business enterprise, but a vast welfare plan with a tiny loss-making commercial sector. As GM goes, so goes America?

But who cares? Overseas, the coolest president in history was giving a speech. Or, as the official press release headlined it on the State Department website, “President Obama Speaks to the Muslim World from Cairo.”

Let’s pause right there: It’s interesting how easily the words “the Muslim world” roll off the tongues of liberal secular progressives who’d choke on any equivalent reference to “the Christian world.” When such hyper-alert policemen of the perimeter between church and state endorse the former but not the latter, they’re implicitly acknowledging that Islam is not merely a faith but a political project, too. There is an “Organization of the Islamic Conference,” which is already the largest single voting bloc at the U.N. and is still adding new members. Imagine if someone proposed an “Organization of the Christian Conference” that would hold summits attended by prime ministers and presidents, and vote as a bloc in transnational bodies. But, of course, there is no “Christian world”: Europe is largely post-Christian and, as President Obama bizarrely asserted to a European interviewer last week, America is “one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.” Perhaps we’re eligible for membership in the OIC.

I suppose the benign interpretation is that, as head of state of the last superpower, Obama is indulging in a little harmless condescension. In his Cairo speech, he congratulated Muslims on inventing algebra and quoted approvingly one of the less bloodcurdling sections of the Koran. As socio-historical scholarship goes, I found myself recalling that moment in the long twilight of the Habsburg Empire when Crown Prince Rudolph and his mistress were found dead at the royal hunting lodge at Mayerling — either a double suicide, or something even more sinister. Happily, in the Broadway musical version, instead of being found dead, the star-crossed lovers emigrate to America and settle down on a farm in Pennsylvania. Recently, my old comrade Stephen Fry gave an amusing lecture at the Royal Geographical Society in London on the popular Americanism “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade” — or, if something’s bitter and hard to swallow, add sugar and sell it. That’s what the president did with Islam: He added sugar and sold it.

The speech nevertheless impressed many conservatives, including Rich Lowry, my esteemed editor at National Review, “esteemed editor” being the sort of thing one says before booting the boss in the crotch. Rich thought that the president succeeded in his principal task: “Fundamentally, Obama’s goal was to tell the Muslim world, ‘We respect and value you, your religion and your civilization, and only ask that you don’t hate us and murder us in return.’” But those terms are too narrow. You don’t have to murder a guy if he preemptively surrenders. And you don’t even have to hate him if you’re too busy despising him. The savvier Muslim potentates have no desire to be sitting in a smelly cave in the Hindu Kush sharing a latrine with a dozen halfwitted goatherds while plotting how to blow up the Empire State Building. Nevertheless, they share key goals with the cave dwellers — including the wish to expand the boundaries of “the Muslim world” and (as in the anti-blasphemy push at the U.N.) to place Islam, globally, beyond criticism. The non-terrorist advance of Islam is a significant challenge to western notions of liberty and pluralism.

Once Obama moved on from the more generalized Islamoschmoozing to the details, the subtext — the absence of American will — became explicit. He used the cover of multilateralism and moral equivalence to communicate, consistently, American weakness: “No single nation should pick and choose which nations hold nuclear weapons.” Perhaps by “no single nation” he means the “global community” should pick and choose, which means the U.N. Security Council, which means the Big Five, which means that Russia and China will pursue their own murky interests and that, in the absence of American leadership, Britain and France will reach their accommodations with a nuclear Iran, a nuclear North Korea, and any other psycho-state minded to join them.

On the other hand, a “single nation” certainly has the right to tell another nation anything it wants if that nation happens to be the Zionist Entity: As Hillary Clinton just instructed Israel re its West Bank communities, there has to be “a stop to settlements — not some settlements, not outposts, not natural-growth exceptions.” No “natural growth”? You mean, if you and the missus have a kid, you’ve got to talk gran’ma into moving out? To Tel Aviv, or Brooklyn, or wherever? At a stroke, the administration has endorsed “the Muslim world”’s view of those non-Muslims who happen to find themselves within what it regards as lands belonging to Islam: The Jewish and Christian communities are free to stand still or shrink, but not to grow. Would Obama be comfortable mandating “no natural growth” to Israel’s million-and-a-half Muslims? No. But the administration has embraced the “the Muslim world”’s commitment to one-way multiculturalism, whereby Islam expands in the west but Christianity and Judaism shrivel remorselessly in the Middle East.

And so it goes. Like General Motors, America is “too big to fail.” So it won’t, not immediately. It will linger on in a twilight existence sclerotic and ineffectual, declining unto a kind of societal dementia, unable to keep pace with what’s happening and with an ever more tenuous grip on its own past, but able on occasion to throw out impressive words albeit strung together without much meaning: empower, peace, justice, prosperity — just to take one windy gust from the president’s Cairo speech.

There’s better phrase-making in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, in a coinage of Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Committee on Foreign Relations. The president emeritus is a sober, judicious paragon of torpidly conventional wisdom. Nevertheless, musing on American decline, he writes, “The country’s economy, infrastructure, public schools, and political system have been allowed to deteriorate. The result has been diminished economic strength, a less vital democracy, and a mediocrity of spirit.” That last is the one to watch: A great power can survive a lot of things, but not “a mediocrity of spirit.” A wealthy nation living on the accumulated cultural capital of a glorious past can dodge its rendezvous with fate, but only for a while. That sound you heard in Cairo is the tingy ping of a hollow superpower.

‘Empathy’ Versus Law: Part II

via: nationalreview

The great Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. is not the kind of justice who would have been appointed under Pres. Barack Obama’s criterion of “empathy” for certain groups.

Like most people, Justice Holmes had empathy for some and antipathy for others, but his votes on the Supreme Court often went against those for whom he had empathy and in favor of those for whom he had antipathy. As Holmes himself put it: “I loathed most of the things in favor of which I decided.”

After voting in favor of Benjamin Gitlow in the 1925 case of Gitlow v. People of New York, Holmes said in a letter to a friend that he had just voted for “the right of an ass to drool about proletarian dictatorship.”

Similarly, in the case of Abrams v. United States, Holmes’s dissenting opinion in favor of the appellants characterized the views of those appellants as “a creed which I believe to be the creed of ignorance and immaturity.”

By the same token, Justice Holmes did not let his sympathies with some people determine his votes on the High Court. As a young man, Holmes had dropped out of Harvard to go fight in the Civil War because he opposed slavery. In later years, he expressed his dislike of the minstrel shows that were popular at the time “because they seem to belittle the race.”

When there were outcries against the prosecution of Sacco and Vanzetti in the 1920s, Holmes said in a letter, “I cannot but ask myself why this so much greater interest in red than black. A thousand-fold worse cases of negroes come up from time to time, but the world does not worry over them.”

Yet when two black attorneys appeared before the Supreme Court, Holmes wrote in another letter to a friend that he had to “write a decision against a very thorough and really well expressed argument by two colored men” — an argument “that even in intonation was better than, I should say, the majority of white discourses that we hear.”

Holmes understood that a Supreme Court justice was not there to favor some people or even to prescribe what was best for society. He had a very clear sense of what the role of a judge was — and wasn’t.

Justice Holmes saw his job to be “to see that the game is played according to the rules whether I like them or not.“

That was because the law existed for the citizens, not for lawyers or judges, and the citizens had to know what the rules were in order to obey them.

He said: “Men should know the rules by which the game is played. Doubt as to the value of some of those rules is no sufficient reason why they should not be followed by the courts.”

Legislators existed to change the law.

After a lunch with Judge Learned Hand, as Holmes was departing in a carriage to return to work, Judge Hand said to him: “Do justice, sir. Do justice.”

Holmes had the carriage stopped. “That is not my job,” he said. “My job is to apply the law.”

Holmes wrote that he did not “think it desirable that the judges should undertake to renovate the law.” If the law needed changing, that was what the democratic process was for. Indeed, that was what the separation of powers in legislative, executive, and judicial branches by the Constitution of the United States was for.

“The criterion of constitutionality,” he said, “is not whether we believe the law to be for the public good.” That was for other people to decide. For judges, he said: “When we know what the source of the law has said it shall be, our authority is at an end.”

One of Holmes’s judicial opinions ended: “I am not at liberty to consider the justice of the Act.”

Some have tried to depict Justice Holmes as someone who saw no need for morality in the law. On the contrary, he said: “The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life.” But a society’s need to put moral content into its laws did not mean that it was the judge’s job to second-guess the moral choices made by others who were authorized to make such choices.

Justice Holmes understood the difference between the rule of law and the rule of lawyers and judges

‘Empathy’ vs. Law: When you buy words, you had better know what you are buying

via: nationalreview

Justice David Souter’s retirement from the Supreme Court presents Pres. Barack Obama with his first opportunity to appoint someone to the High Court. People who are speculating about whether the next nominee will be a woman, a Hispanic, or whatever, are missing the point.

That we are discussing the next Supreme Court justice in terms of group “representation” is a sign of how far we have already strayed from the purpose of law and the weighty responsibility of appointing someone to sit for life on the highest court in the land.

That President Obama has made “empathy” with certain groups one of his criteria for choosing a Supreme Court nominee is a dangerous sign of how much farther the Supreme Court may be pushed away from the rule of law and toward even more arbitrary judicial edicts to advance the agenda of the Left and set it in legal concrete, immune from the democratic process.

Would you want to go into court to appear before a judge with “empathy” for groups A, B, and C, if you were a member of groups X, Y, or Z? Nothing could be farther from the rule of law. That would be bad news, even in a traffic court, much less in a court that has the last word on your rights under the Constitution of the United States.

Appoint enough Supreme Court justices with “empathy” for particular groups and you would have, for all practical purposes, repealed the 14th Amendment, which guarantees “equal protection of the laws” for all Americans.

We would have entered a strange new world, where everybody is equal but some are more equal than others. The very idea of the rule of law becomes meaningless when it is replaced by the empathies of judges.

Barack Obama solves this contradiction, as he solves so many other problems, with rhetoric. If you believe in the rule of law, he will say the words “rule of law.” And if you are willing to buy it, he will keep on selling it.

Those people who just accept soothing words from politicians they like are gambling with the future of a nation. If you were German, would you be in favor of a law “to relieve the distress of the German people and nation”? That was the law that gave Hitler dictatorial power.

He was just another German chancellor at the time. He was not elected on a platform of war, dictatorship, or genocide. He got the power to do those things because of a law “to relieve the distress of the German people.”

When you buy words, you had better know what you are buying.

In the American system of government, presidential term limits restrict how long any given resident of the White House can damage this country directly. But that does not limit how long, or how much, the people he appoints to the Supreme Court can continue to damage this country, for decades after the president who appointed them is long gone.

Justice John Paul Stevens virtually destroyed the Constitution’s restrictions on government officials’ ability to confiscate private property in his 2005 decision in the case of Kelo v. New London — 30 years after President Ford appointed him.

The biggest danger in appointing the wrong people to the Supreme Court is not just in how they might vote on some particular issues — whether private property, abortion, or whatever. The biggest danger is that they will undermine or destroy the very concept of the rule of law — what has been called “a government of laws and not of men.”

Under the American system of government, this cannot be done overnight, or perhaps even during the terms in office of one president — but it can be done. And it can be done over time by the appointees of just one president, if he gets enough appointees.

Some people say that whomever Barack Obama appoints to replace Justice Souter doesn’t really matter, because Souter is a liberal who will probably be replaced by another liberal. But if no one sounds the alarm now, we can end up with a series of appointees with “empathy”— which is to say, with justices who think their job is to “relieve the distress” of particular groups, rather than to uphold the Constitution of the United States.

Can’t Be Serious: What Republicans do doesn’t matter to the headline writers.

via: nationalreview

That the Republican party has been flailing since the 2006 midterm elections is pretty hard to deny. At this point, sorting out what is wrong with the GOP is the political equivalent of cleaning out the Augean Stables, and there’s no shortage of people willing to grab a shovel.

But of all the horse, er, puckey that’s been flung, perhaps the most baffling is the narrative that the GOP is so bereft of ideas it is not to be taken seriously. The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder, who’s not known for being a partisan bomb thrower, appeared to be vying for the David Broder Award for Lazy Conventional Wisdom when he recently wrote, “My Republican friends keep asking me when I’ll take the GOP seriously again and why I’ve stopped writing about ticky-tak political gamesmanship and GOP consultant tricks. When they’re a serious party with serious ideas, then we can talk.” Snap! Well, thank goodness Ambinder will presumably keep us abreast of the latest Democratic ticky-tak political gamesmanship and consultant tricks. Surely those are still worth covering.

To support his decision to ignore Republican politics, Ambinder cited poll numbers straight from a liberal blog that supposedly demonstrate that Venezuela — not specifically the country’s socialist government, but the country as a whole — has a higher approval rating than the Republican party. Of course, the same meaningless CNN polling data also show that Americans have a higher opinion of Turkey than of the Democratic party. Maybe Ambinder can explain what that means — perhaps Armenians and Kurds are underrepresented in the polling sample?

A tax-day editorial from the Austin American-Statesmen seemed to echo the same talking point: “Instead of presenting ideas for lifting the economy, Republicans again are engaged in attention-getting gimmickry. This time they are backing a ‘Tax Day Tea Party’ to denounce President Barack Obama’s budget and initiatives to stimulate the economy. . . . The tea parties, scheduled today in Austin and across the country, are stunts — the kind associated more with high school or college students than serious-minded politicians confronting an economic crisis.”

First, the tea parties were a grassroots effort not associated with the GOP, even if the party is largely simpatico with the effort. Second, there are polling data that say a majority of Americans have a favorable view of the tea-party effort — so it seems the GOP has to choose between popularity and being called “serious-minded” in the press. It can’t win.

Of course, it’s not news that political popularity isn’t always readily explainable, especially as it relates to “serious ideas.” In 2004, the Democrats had been largely out of power in Congress for a decade and had lost two presidential elections in a row. Two elections later, they are firmly ensconced in the White House and in the congressional leadership. What brilliant new policies did Democrats come up with that captivated the public?

In fact, since time immemorial, the policy rap on the Democratic party has been that their solutions amount to stuffing cannons with money and aiming them at amorphous, and occasionally invented, societal ills. Since Obama entered the White House in January, the cannonades have been nearly unending. The government has spent money at astonishing rates with little assurance that the efforts will pay off.

Asserting that there was a dire fiscal emergency, Obama and a Democratic Congress railroaded a nearly $1 trillion stimulus bill of dubious efficacy. The stimulus, combined with the Democrats’ bloated wish list of a budget, will nearly triple the Bush deficit ten years out, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Obama’s sop to fiscal responsibility is to call for a $100 million budget cut among all federal agencies — an amount equal to 0.0029 percent of the annual federal budget. Even liberal economist and Obama supporter Paul Krugman thought this was utterly inconsequential.

This stand is in marked contrast to that of the Democratic congressional leaders who seized control in 2006 and hammered the GOP for its fiscal incontinence, as well as to that of Obama himself, who campaigned to reform earmarks and go “line by line” through the federal budget eliminating waste. Democrats seized power by promising to move beyond taxing-and-spending, then proceeded to tax-and-spend at unprecedented rates. Now, is this a serious response to America’s faltering economy?

Further, when Republicans put together a detailed, not inconsequential $478 billion stimulus alternative, the president attacked it thus: “[The GOP stimulus plan] is rooted in the idea that tax cuts alone can solve all our problems, that government doesn’t have a role to play, that half measures and tinkering are somehow enough, that we can afford to ignore our most fundamental economic challenges. . . . Those ideas have been tested, and they have failed.”

So Obama explictly argued that anyone who suggests that tax cuts are more efficient than government spending at stimulating the economy is peddling failed ideas. And yet for all the talk of “shovel ready” projects, two months after the $787 billion stimulus bill was rushed to passage with the justification that we were in a national emergency, only $13 billion in funds have been allocated, according to no less an authoritative source than the administration’s own Recovery.gov. Meanwhile, California’s unemployment rate just hit 11.2 percent. Stimulative.

In addition, Democrats have gone out of their way to kill popular and successful Republican and bipartisan policy initiatives for no apparent reason other than to appeal to key special interests. First, the Democrats placed provisions in the stimulus package that killed Clinton-era welfare reform — a successful and very popular policy originally passed with bipartisan support. Then, the Obama administration killed off the D.C. school district’s voucher program, which primarily benefited inner-city black students — and to cover the Democrats’ tracks, the Department of Education tried to bury a study showing that the program was working. Why would a serious political party roll back vital reforms and reject innovative policies like this?

Now, one may conclude that the GOP is unpopular on the merits. But that’s no excuse for the media’s refusal to measure the relative worth of Republican ideas against Democratic ones. When a respected journalist such as Ambinder makes sweeping generalizations about the GOP instead of actually reporting on Republicans, it is certainly telling. Maybe Ambinder deserves some credit for so brazenly advertising the specious indicators he uses to explain away his bizarre decision not to take the Republican party seriously. The GOP would be lucky if the rest of the press were so honest, unintentionally or not.

— Mark Hemingway is an NRO staff reporter.

The Senator and the Unicorn

via: nationalreview

How Arlen Specter helped a murderer skip bail

Long before he became one of the most liberal Republicans in the Senate — and the target of Congressman Pat Toomey’s GOP primary challenge — Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania demonstrated a knack for notoriety. In 1964, as a member of the Warren Commission, he invented the “single-bullet theory” to explain how Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy. Conspiracy junkies have obsessed over him ever since. (In Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, Kevin Costner’s character labels Specter “an ambitious junior counselor” behind “one of the grossest lies ever forced on the American people.”)

Between serving on the Warren Commission and becoming a senator, Specter was twice elected district attorney in Philadelphia, where he earned a tough-on-crime reputation. His most famous case, however, came in 1979, when he was in private practice and thinking about running for the Senate. A man named Ira Einhorn, better known as the “Unicorn,” had been arrested for the murder of his girlfriend; she had been missing for a year and a half when police found her mummified corpse squeezed into a trunk hidden in Einhorn’s closet.

Einhorn was a celebrated leftist and is credited with helping found Earth Day. He also had strong ties to Philadelphia elites — a group of people Specter was cultivating for his prospective Senate campaign when he agreed to become Einhorn’s lawyer.

At an arraignment, the government demanded a $100,000 bail for Einhorn. Before Judge William Marutani, Specter called this “excessively excessive” and insisted on a reduced figure. Marutani wondered if Einhorn might “split for parts unknown.” He mentioned Norway as a possible destination. “I have to disagree with your last statement,” replied Specter. “Anybody is as likely to go to Norway as anybody else.” Through the future senator’s efforts, Einhorn’s bail was dropped to $40,000. The accused man only had to put out ten percent of it in cash to secure his release.

As things turned out, Specter was proven correct: Einhorn didn’t flee for Norway. He went to Sweden instead, slipping out of the United States shortly before his murder trial was scheduled to begin. Einhorn remained a fugitive until 1997, when police found him living in France under a phony name with his Swedish wife. He was eventually extradited to the United States. In 2002, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Specter, who quit the case soon after the bail hearing and rarely has spoken about it since, says he has no regrets about representing Einhorn or demanding the reduced bail. “If I had been D.A., I would have had him detained — there would have been no bail at all,” he told me in an interview last year.

But by 1979, the tough-on-crime prosecutor had become a tough-on-prosecutor criminal defender. Perhaps he was just doing his job. It must be remembered, however, that his job, for which he volunteered possibly to curry favor with potential political supporters, involved reducing bail for a murderer who fled from justice.

The Case for the ‘Torture Memos’

via: nationalreview

“The debate over the just-released Justice Department memorandums on interrogation techniques ended as soon as they were dubbed the ‘torture memos.’ … Rightly considered, the memos should be a source of pride. They represent a nation of laws struggling to defend itself against a savage, lawless enemy while adhering to its legal commitments and norms. Most societies throughout human history wouldn’t have bothered. … If we had a more mature political culture, this and other questions could be examined thoroughly by a special congressional committee. (As it happens, the CIA produced a memo on the benefits of the interrogation program that has never been released.) But such an inquiry inevitably would descend into a hyperpoliticized takedown of the CIA and the Bush Justice Department for ‘war crimes.’ The frenzied reception of the ‘torture memos’ is just a preview.” –National Review editor Rich Lowry Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.

Obama, the Other Huey Long

The president is more like the Depression era’s populist Louisiana governor than like FDR.

By Michael G. Franc

The “Obama as FDR” meme emerged immediately after the elections. The November 20 issue of The Economist noted, in an article critical of the comparison:

Washington is currently buzzing with talk of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Members of Mr. Obama’s inner circle are reading up on FDR’s first 100 days. No political conversation is complete without a knowing reference to the squire of Hyde Park. Both Time (on the cover) and the New Yorker (on an inside page) feature pictures of Mr. Obama as FDR, smoking a cigarette, driving an open-top car and looking very much as though he has nothing to fear but fear itself.

The legislative rush in these first 100 days of Barack Obama’s presidency — complete with dramatic federal intervention in the financial sector and unprecedented spending — likewise prompts comparisons with FDR’s New Deal.

But in one policy area, Obama most resembles not FDR, but another charismatic political figure of the Depression era. In his bid to redistribute the income and accumulated wealth of the “rich” to those lower on the socio-economic scale, President Obama most resembles the colorful Louisiana populist Huey Long. Continue reading . . .

CAIR’s Well-Deserved Expulsion

via: nationalreview

Terrorism is only one expression of jihad — there are others as dangerous.

A week ago, the FBI officially announced that it has cut ties with the Council on American-Islamic Relations. The self-styled civil rights organization is characteristically squawking, but the FBI’s move was patently overdue — so much so that we ought to be asking: Why on earth did the FBI have ties with CAIR in the first place?

While we should applaud the government for finally doing the right thing, we also must seize this moment to consider why this action was necessary, and what it says about the threat we are up against.

That threat is not, essentially, about terrorism. Given the life-and-death stakes involved, it is understandable that government is preoccupied by terrorism (or what Obama’s homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, absurdly calls “man-caused disasters”). But jihadist terror is merely the means to a specific end: the installation of sharia, the Islamic legal code, which Muslim fundamentalists regard as the necessary precondition for the achievement of Islam’s universalist ambitions.

Sharia should be of grave concern to us because it is antithetical to the U.S. Constitution and to our way of life. It rejects several core American propositions: that liberty cannot co-exist with an established state religion, that free people have a right to govern themselves irrespective of any religious code’s dictates, that there should be freedom of conscience (sharia holds that apostasy from Islam is not merely a crime but a capital offense), sexual liberty (homosexuality is also a death-penalty offense), and equal protection under the law (sharia privileges Muslims over non-Muslims and men over women). Sharia, furthermore, is the rationale commonly trotted out by militants to justify the use of force (whether we call it “terrorism” or employ such sophistries as “resistance” or “man-caused disasters”) for resolving policy disputes — under the rationale that policies that do not privilege Islam constitute an attack on Islam and therefore justify jihadist violence.

Incrementally establishing sharia is the central imperative of CAIR and several other organizations to which our government has recklessly been reaching out for years, since long before the 9/11 attacks. In sum, administrations of both parties, and executive branch agencies including the FBI, have taken the position that government’s only legitimate concern is the comparatively tiny cohort of terrorists who construe Islamic scriptures to command mass-murder attacks.

Not only have we averted our eyes from the ideology that motivates jihadism. We have affirmatively anointed as Muslim “moderates” the purveyors of this ideology, who are anything but moderate. Worse, the effect has been to empower anti-American elements at the expense of authentic Muslim moderates and reformers who crave liberty.

CAIR is an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian organization founded in 1928 that today boasts divisions throughout the world. The Brotherhood has been operating in the United States since the 1960s in a manner fully consistent with its motto: “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Quran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” Its website makes no bones about the fact that it seeks “the introduction of the Islamic Shariah as the basis for controlling the affairs of state and society.”

Last year, the government won convictions in a terrorism-financing trial that targeted an ostensible Islamic charity, the Holy Land Foundation, along with several of its top operatives. CAIR has complained long and loud because prosecutors identified it as an unindicted co-conspirator in the case. Its argument that this was a smear is specious. The issue is not whether the government named CAIR on a list disseminated pretrial; what’s germane is the basis for that listing. The government richly supported its assertion with evidence, and no citizen or organization has a right to expunge that which is proved in the public’s courts.

At trial, the jury was treated to a 1991 Brotherhood memorandum that described the organization’s “work in America” as “a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers, so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” CAIR has been the linchpin of that strategy.

Some history is in order. In 1987, the Brotherhood had established Hamas (or “the Islamic Resistance Movement,” as it describes itself). As its charter professes, Hamas

is one of the wings of Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine. Muslim Brotherhood Movement is a universal organization which constitutes the largest Islamic movement in modern times. It is characterized by its deep understanding, accurate comprehension and its complete embrace of all Islamic concepts of all aspects of life, culture, creed, politics, economics, education, society, justice and judgment, the spreading of Islam, education, art, information, science of the occult and conversion to Islam.

In a memorandum filed in a Texas federal court, prosecutors further elaborated that, through the early 1990s, “the Muslim Brotherhood was controlled by Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood members, and the leader of the U.S.-Muslim Brotherhood was Mousa Abu Marzook, who in 1989 was selected to be the leader of HAMAS, a position that he held while residing in the United States and controlling the U.S.-Muslim Brotherhood.” To support Hamas, the Brotherhood established a “Palestine Committee” in the United States.

Marzook (deported in 1995, he is currently wanted on a U.S. terrorism indictment in Chicago) led the Palestine Committee. One of its most important members was Omar Ahmad, who became president of the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), which Marzook had formed years earlier. In 1993, the Palestine Committee convened a meeting in Philadelphia to plot a strategy for destroying the Oslo Accords’ vision of a two-state solution — Palestine peacefully co-existing with Israel, which Hamas is pledged to destroy. The meeting was secretly surveilled by the FBI, which caught Ahmad conversing with Nihad Awad, the IAP’s public-relations director, about strategies for deceiving Americans about their true intentions.

Less than a year later, Ahmad and Awad formed CAIR. The Holy Land Foundation, which was ultimately shuttered by the government and finally convicted for providing millions of dollars to Hamas, contributed part of the seed money. To serve as CAIR’s communications director, Ahmad and Awad tapped Ibrahim Hooper, another IAP veteran who has publicly acknowledged that his purpose is to establish sharia as the law of the United States.

Since its founding, several CAIR officials have been convicted or deported for terrorism-related activities and for other criminal offenses. CAIR, meanwhile, has sought to undermine national security — and the FBI specifically — at every turn: frequently mounting public-relations campaigns for indicted terror suspects, vigorously opposing the Patriot Act and the surveillance of suspected al-Qaeda communications, and even distributing a “Muslim community safety kit” that discourages cooperation with the FBI.

Despite that sordid record, government officials regarded CAIR as a representative and leader of American Muslims. Our law-enforcement and national-security agencies consulted with it closely and even permitted it to indoctrinate our agents during compulsory “sensitivity training” lectures. Doing so, they raised its profile, facilitated its radical, anti-American agenda, and dispirited our allies in the Muslim community, many of whom are in the United States precisely because they don’t want to live in the totalitarian misery the Muslim Brotherhood and its satellites would impose.

The major threat we face today is not what al-Qaeda may do to the grand structures that house our government and our institutions. It is what radical Islam is accomplishing inside those structures. Thankfully, the FBI has shown CAIR the door. But that only begins to address the problem.