Category ►►► Illiberal Liberalism

November 5, 2007

Dems On the Rampage, Dennis On a Tear

For this entire year, the Democrats have been stung by repeated legislative embarassments; they failed to:

• Force defeat in Iraq;
• Let the camel-nose of SCHIP into the tent (with the body, socialized medicine, to follow);
• Pass even one, single appropriations bill through Congress and to the president's desk;
• Follow through on their promise to make the 110th Congress "the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history" by passing meaningful ethical reform with either a ban on earmarks altogether, or at least complete transparency of the earmarking process -- shining a spotlight on the earmarking roaches in the system;
• Make a decision on the soon-to-expire Bush tax cuts for the middle class;
• Do anything at all about illegal immigration, and so on.

Their perennial, whiny complaint is that the Republicans in Congress keep filibustering Democrat-sponsored legislation, and that President Bush vetoes the trickle that does get through. But navigating that needle is part of the process of leadership.

Neither party has had anything like a veto-proof (or even unfilibusterable) majority in ages; neither has the luxury of completely dominating the legislative conversation and burying the other side's objections.

During the Republicans' tenure, they actually managed to pass significant pieces of legislation, from tax cuts, to allowing faith-based organizations to vie for charitable governmental spending, to beefing up the border with double fencing, to a couple of declarations of war, to easing environmental regulations, etc. The Republicans were largely successful at legislating because they found issues where even the bulk of work-a-day Democrats agreed with the GOP and disagreed with the Democratic leadership; thus conditions were ripe for Democrats to join with Republicans to provide enough votes to invoke cloture, thus preventing a filibuster.

But the Democrats of the 110th loudly announced, even before they assumed office, that they considered congressional Republicans to be mere speed bumps -- and the president an anachronistic irrelevancy. Their "negotiation" style consists of a lengthy series of take-it-or-leave-it ultimata... and evidently, the GOP's response has been not only to "leave it" but to show just how much power a unified minority party has. And of course, the president has the constitutional authority to veto legislation; it's not something dirty or underhanded, as the Democrats seem to believe.

Ergo, the Democrats find themselves at a crossroads. Two paths open before them:

1. They can change their tone and begin working with the Republicans to craft bipartisan legislation, supported at least by the GOP rank and file, if not necessarily by the GOP leadership;
2. Or they can retreat from the world of legislating into the comforting zone of endless investigations of the Bush administration, in order to create the illusion of progress when in fact all they're doing is loudly burning rubber at the starting line.

With all that as prologue, we come to a couple of articles. From the Associated Press...

House Democrats threatened Monday to hold President Bush's key confidants in contempt of Congress unless they comply with subpoenas for information on the Justice Department's purge of federal prosecutors last winter.

The White House shrugged off the ultimatum, saying the information is off-limits under executive privilege and that the aides in question - White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten and former presidential counselor Harriet Miers - are immune from prosecution.

"It won't go anywhere," predicted White House press secretary Dana Perino.

Congressional Democrats nonetheless submitted their 102-page report, and a Republican rebuttal, to the House clerk on Monday afternoon. The report accused Miers of contempt for failing to appear and testify as subpoenaed. She and Bolten were charged with failing to produce documents on whether the prosecutors were fired at the White House's behest.

The essential absurdity of this investigation is found in a couple of short, quiet sentences buried in the middle of the article:

If the report is passed, the House would forward the citation to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia for prosecution....

It's not clear that contempt of Congress citations must be prosecuted.

That's quite an understatement. In fact, the courts have made it very clear that they will not force the Executive branch to prosecute itself on orders from the Legislative branch. Thus, the most at Chairman John Conyers (D-MI, 100%) can do is shake his fist and demand that President Bush prosecute his own aides for carrying out his own policies... which seems implausible on its face. So beyond congressional self-abuse, what is the point?

The plain and simple fact is that the "fired" U.S. attorneys -- who were not fired, by the way, but mostly just not reappointed to another term -- were sent packing for purely performance-based reasons: They had their own private, political agendas, which they insisted upon following rather than following the agenda of the President of the United States. As they serve at the pleasure of the president, and the president was not pleased, they were gently encouraged to find employment elsewhere.

When next a Democrat is elected president, he will have the same authority: He need not keep reappointing U.S. attorneys, or any other appointed officials, who march to the sound of a different drum. It's as simple as that.

I don't think even the Democrats believe that once the president names someone to a position, he is obliged to retain that person forever, no matter what he does. I think this is just another way for Democrats to investigate -- which requires no negotiation whatsoever -- rather than legislate, which requires actually listening to the opposition and making some effort to accomodate their views in order to gain their support... an odious, Herculean labor that the Democrats simply cannot bear to undertake. (Actually, it's the Democrats, not the Republicans, who remind me of the Stymphalian birds.)

And while we're on the subject, we also have this: Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Venus, 100%) has decided to use some obscure House rule to force the entire House of Representatives to formally cast a roll-call vote on impeaching Vice President Dick Cheney...

"The momentum is building for impeachment," Kucinich said in a Nov. 2 news release. "Millions of citizens across the nation are demanding Congress rein in the Vice President's abuse of power."

House Resolution 333 says Cheney should be impeached for "high crimes and misdemeanors," because he "purposely manipulated the intelligence process to deceive the citizens and Congress of the United States by fabricating a threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to justify the use of the United States Armed Forces against the nation of Iraq in a manner damaging to our national security interests."

Kucinich insists that Vice President Cheney continues to violate the U.S. Constitution by insisting on the supremacy of the Executive Branch....

"Congress must hold the Vice President accountable," Kucinich said last week. He accused Cheney of using his office to advocate the "continued occupation of Iraq and prod our nation into a belligerent stance against Iran."

Which raises an interest question that itself demands an answer: Does Dennis Kucinich actually believe that opposing an Iraq pullout and advocating we be more "belligerent" towards Iran constitute "high crimes and misdemeanors?"

Meanwhile, Senate Democrats must now grapple with the confirmation vote for Attorney General designate Michael Mukasey; with several Democrats jumping ship and supporting Mukasey, including Dianne Feinstein (D-CA, 90%) and Charles Schumer (D-NY, 100%), while the bulk of the leadership still opposes him, the ironic possibility exists that the majority in the Senate, led by Majority Leader Harry "Pinky" Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 90%), may try to mount a filibuster!

As we close in on the end of the first session of the 110th Congress, the stunning paucity of legislation makes this not just the majority that couldn't shoot straight -- it's the majority than cannot even shoot crooked. Rather, the Democratic congressional leadership, at least so far, resembles Ralphie Parker in a Christmas Story -- daydreaming about shooting Black Bart and his gang with Ralphie's Official Red Ryder Carbine Action Two Hundred Shot Range Model Air Rifle, felling the the GOP gang left and left with unbelievable but wholly imaginary accuracy.

The Democrats had better be careful: They'll shoot their eye out!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 5, 2007, at the time of 5:07 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

September 24, 2007

Cindy Sheehan's Day of Out-of-Tunement Manifesto

I rarely do this, as you know: I rarely link to some piece and say simply "read this." (I'm too in love with the sound of my own fingers typing on a keyboard.)

But here's an exception. Read Cindy Sheehan's Yom Kippur "sermon," delivered at Michael Lerner's Beyt Tikkun "synogogue;" you will be -- if not exactly glad, then at least agape. (Rabbi Lerner is Hillary Clinton's mentor, author of the Politics of Meaning and other works of Socialist agit-prop masquerading as theology.)

My response (I love this) is entirely contained in the list of categories I had to attach to this post.

(Well, one more thing. It has always been my understanding that Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, is a day for each person to atone for what he, personally, has done wrong -- not "atone" for his enemies failing to live up to his own lofty standards, apologize for all the times America hasn't followed his lead, or wallow in self-righteous indignation that nobody listens to him. 'Nuff said; read the list of categories above.)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 24, 2007, at the time of 2:36 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

March 30, 2007

That Was Then, This Is Still Then. To Them. You Dig?

Just a few Spring mullings...

The more I ponder the Democrats, the more amazed am I at their anachronism. They insist upon living in the past. But unlike Civil War reenactors or the Society for Creative Anachronism, the Left also insists that the rest of us live in their past, as well.

Virtually every position they actually take -- and there aren't many -- is an attempt to relive the "good, old days" of the 1960s (actually, a fantasy 60s that's more like Tribes, Billy Jack, or Hair). In their own tepid way, they are as anxious to recreate a bygone era as are Islamic fundamentalists... which may be one reason they find it easier to understand our enemies than fellow Americans.

Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho

First and most obvious is the Democratic/liberal/New Left support for governance by protest. Back in the very late 60s and early 70s, "protest" was more than a means of political expression; it became, for the first time in American history, a lifestyle choice for a small but influential segment of the populace... a populace that has now grown old (if not up) and seized the levers of governmental power.

The 1960s saw the rise of the professional agitator in America; in this, they mimicked the professional rabble-rousers of Europe, starting in the late 19th century and through the early 20th. But as usual in America, nothing succeeds like excess: Our professional agitators became an entire "class."

Thousands of people decided to take Timothy Leary's advice to "turn on, tune in, drop out" without having the least idea what Leary was talking about: There was a chance to freeload in there somewhere, and by golly, they were going to grab it! Most of the hippies weren't particularly political; but when the Yippies took over the "movement," it became explicitly hard-left; in fact, the Youth International Party paved the way for the Symbionese Liberation Army, the ultimate expression of "action directe."

Action directe, besides being the actual name of an actual terrorist group in France, is the philosophy that rational discussion is no longer sufficient to change the direction of the country towards socialism (or more often, Stalinism). Rather, revolutionaries must take "direct action"... that is, protest, sabotage, and violence.

Political violence is like a drug that comes with a built-in higher rationale:

• It gives the user an amazing high;
• It's addictive;
• It becomes all-consuming, so that the addict must drop out of the normal world. Soon, it's the only thing that matters in the addict's life.

(Terrorism is the ultimate example of action directe, of course; but that takes more courage than is found in most American lefties... to our great good fortune.)

As anybody knows who has paid attention in the past few years, protest as a way of life, which had faded from view for decades, is back... big time. Cindy Sheehan may be the best exemplar. (Warning, harshness alert!) She appears to have filled the void left by her son Casey's heroic death in Iraq with perpetual protest against... well, virtually everything. It's hard to pin her down.

But she has abandoned her real family (including her other son) in favor of the permanent-protester acolytes, who call her "Mother Sheehan" and treat her like a visiting saint.

Sheehan is joined on the agitation circuit by virtually every major Democratic politician; they drift from protest to protest, delivering drive-by remarks on a variety of subject about which they are ignorant. At each venue, they lead the audience in some version of the "hey, hey, ho, ho" chant -- e.g., "Hey, hey, ho, ho, western civ has got to go!"

Puppets and pageantry fill the empty corners of their lives the way that family, friends, and civic activities fill the lives of real Americans. I mean literal puppets: Giant marionettes and Hindenburg-sized inflatable animals are perennials at every major protest, just like they are at every children's party.

Most of the perennial protesting politicians did at least go to university during the 60s; but curiously, many were not, in fact, hippies, Yippies, or protesters themselves (think Hillary Clinton). So it may not be nostalgia so much as a "mulligan." It's an attempt to go back in time and actually engage in the socially conscious behavior they always secretly admired, longed to join, but lacked the courage to do: They wish they could have been, if not Jerry Rubin or Abbie Hoffman, at least John Kerry or Jane Fonda.

And of course, given the age advantage of most Democratic party leaders and the fact that they have at least confabulated memories of the great protest "movement" of the 60s, they still receive the worshipful attention of the mass of today's 20-something protesters -- giving them a hit of a stronger and more addictive drug: guruhood.

For those who want a taste of action directe but aren't gutsy enough to go skinny dipping in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, the natural analog is governance by judicial fiat: They take their political theater into the courtroom, shop for a sympathetic judge, and parade a circus of pathetic victims whose woes can only be cured by the direct judicial imposition of socialism, atheism, infanticide, and euthanasia.

Hey, hey, LBJ...

The 60s protests had two distinct foci: the civil-rights movement and the anti-war movement. The latter is most obviously relevant today, with the Iraq war dominating the American consciousness like the Incredible Hulk.

It's one thing to protest the plight of the poor, American support for fascist dictators, genetically engineered corn, abortion rights, grapes, or trans-fats. It is an altogether finer thing to protest a war.

For one thing, wars are big, violent, and obvious; you don't need to enunciate a complex explanation of the evils of war -- as you do when protesting the evils of carbon dioxide, which everybody exhales and green plants love.

All you need do is show pictures of dead, bloody bodies, and you're in business. Who could possibly be in favor of dead and/or mulilated kids? The only trick is to make people believe that America is responsible whenever the enemy commits an atrocity... which is not a difficult task, as most people around the world believe that the American government is God and can do anything it wants. So if it's not preventing some catastrophe, the only explanation is -- they want it to happen!

Thus, President Bush wanted Hurricane Katrina to kill those hundreds of thousands of people in Louisiana, because the victims were all poor, black Democrats. He wanted the tsunami to wipe out large portions of the developing world. And he certainly wanted those 650,000 (or was that 650 million?) innocent civilians to die horribly in Iraq.

The first two are hard sells, because most Americans are somewhat skeptical of the ability of the President of the United States to prevent natural disasters by signing the Kyoto Protocol. But since we did, in fact, invade Iraq -- a peaceful country led by an enlightened leader who was keeping the Islamists at bay and bringing prosperity and love to his people -- that's an easy sell to anyone who doesn't like Bush. Or Republicans. Or Southerners. Or anyone who believes in the biblical God.

But being anti-war is more than just protesting; it too is a way of political life. Being anti-war means never having to say you're guilty: It provides absolution for any other sin you may commit. This time, think of the corrupt Rep. John Murtha (D-PA, 65%) -- or the ambulance-chasing, settlement-extorting John Edwards.

You don't even need to enunciate a coherent anti-war position, one that tackles the original danger that sparked the war in the first place. All you need do is intone the appropriate mantra -- "war is not the answer," "give peace a chance," "the survivors will envy the dead," "Bush lied, people died" -- and you never have to answer the question of what would have happened had we not gone to war.

War. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. So obviously, we must have peace at any price... even if the price is surrender to jihad.

No justice, no peace!

The original cause that spawned the protests of the 60s was civil rights; mass ant-war protest came later. There is a huge advantage to trying to recreate the civil rights era in today's political culture, but there is also a minor drawback:

• There really, truly was a nationwide culture of racism and bigotry that had to be overcome, not just in the South but everywhere: Consider the "zoot-suit riots" in Los Angeles, for only one example.

  Few people today could look back with equanimity at what ordinary Americans, just a few decades ago, could say and support without feeling shame. Segregation was not invented; and we really did have whites-only public facilities, government sponsored terrorism against Jews, blacks, Hispanics, and Chinese, and concentration camps for Americans of Japanese descent (Michelle Malkin notwithstanding).

• But on the other hand, no such climate exists today. Thus, effective protesters must invent one.

That challenge means the agitator must identify all three elements: the victim, the perp, and the crime. But this can actually be a strategic advantage (when life gives you lemons, squirt lemon juice in people's eyes). During the actual civil-rights era, it was easy for people to ensure they were on the right side: just oppose racial discrimination (Jim Crow laws) while supporting racial discrimination (affirmative action), and you were home free!

But when the Left gets to indentify not only the actors but even the crime itself, then everyone is potentially guilty... so no one is secure.

• Yesterday, the victims were oppressed atheists, the bigots were those who believe in the Judeo-Christian God, and the crime was allowing any cross to be visible anywhere in the United States, rather than hidden decently behind closed church doors. (And sometimes not even there; I cite the College of William & Mary.)
• Today, the victims du jour are radical Moslems, the bigots are those who support the war on global jihad, and the crime is failing to respect the jihadists' religion, which requires them to throw the Jew down the well.
• In early 2001, the victims were Afghan women, the bigots were freshman President George W. Bush and his administration, and the crime was doing absolutely nothing to boot the Taliban out of Afghanistan. See how adaptable the game is?

Maybe tomorrow, the victims will be religious Christian leftists who believe in liberation theology, the bigots will be secular Americans, and the crime will be refusing to vote for socialized medicine and same-sex marriage. We shall overcome!

Where have all the flowers gone?

The Democratic Party has three core crusades, in order of increasing abstraction:

1. End the Iraq war at any price: So they agitate for withdrawal, release of political prisoners such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh, and reinstating the draft, Rep. Charles Rangel's (D-Harlem, 95%) favorite hobby horse: Terror of the draft spawns million-mom anti-war rallies.
2. Eliminate the Jim-Crow laws that elevate Judeo-Christian culture and oppress other religions, such as Islam, Wicca, and Santeria: So they agitate for polygamy, gay marriage, and animal sacrifice.
3. Suppress democracy -- legislative action -- in favor of judicial decree and action directe: So they support activist judges and nominate politicians who cater to protest groups, from CAIR, to Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, to NOW, to NARAL, to International ANSWER, to NAMBLA.

Each affords the opportunity for Democrats to revel in a past that never was -- or at least never was for them; to riot and agitate and feel the joy of bluster and bravado without the actual risk of combat; to fulfill every libertine fantasy they ever dreamt while toiling away in college; to feel self-righteous and wash away the sins that bedevil them; and simply to indulge the childish desire to run off and join the carnival (complete with a Washington freak show that dims the luster of the geek, the fat lady, and the half-man, half-woman).

Nostalgic for yesterday, frightened by tomorrow, and befuddled by today, the Democrats drive pedal to the metal, while staring fixedly in the rear-view mirror. I hope the American people prefer to watch where we're going.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 30, 2007, at the time of 3:59 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

March 29, 2007

Still the Fever

So the fever continues to rage; the entire Left (and elements of the Right) continue to demand that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales resign for... well, for some nameless offense to be filled in later.

Despite the scary lede in the AP story (and in the New York Times, as well), there is actually nothing new in Kyle Sampson's testimony about Gonzales' involvement in discussions about firing eight U.S. Attorneys who flagrantly ignored the administration's prosecutorial priorities:

Contrary to his public statements, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was deeply involved in the firing of eight federal prosecutors, his former top aide said Thursday, adding that the final decision on who was to be dismissed was made by Gonzales and President Bush's former counsel.

"I don't think the attorney general's statement that he was not involved in any discussions of U.S. attorney removals was accurate," Kyle Sampson, who quit this month as Gonzales' chief of staff, told the Senate Judiciary Committee. "I remember discussing with him this process of asking certain U.S. attorneys to resign."

Get it? Sampson says Gonzales discussed the process, not the specifics of who would go and who would stay. The state of play is unchanged from our earlier post last Saturday, What the Meaning of "Fizz" Is. We wrote then:

Any ordinary person, when asked if he was involved in discussions about firing the attorneys, would understand the question to mean, "Did you participate in discussions about which attorneys -- if any -- to fire?" And he would honestly say "No, I did not."

Nobody but a Democrat in full cry, anxious to find something, anything, to justify more scandalmongering, would imagine that the original question would also include any ancillary discussions about the best way to break the news to the press!

And we're sticking by it... no matter how gravely Blake Dvorak over on Real Clear Politics shakes his hoary locks... more in sorrow than in anger, you understand.

We agree with Paul Mirengoff: So far, there is no "there" there, no evidence of any lying to or misleading Congress, the American people, or anybody else. Here is the sequence of events, best as I can suss it out:

• Around the time of the 2004 election and for some time afterwards, President Bush, Alberto Gonzales, and others receive complaints about some U.S. Attorneys: They've got a different set of prosecutorial priorities than does the administration; they're bad managers; they're unresponsive.
• Bush tells Gonzales to do something about it. Such appointments aren't eternal; some people should go, others should stay.
• Gonzales considers this a completely non-controversial issue (as it was and always had been), so he dumps it in the lap of his assisstant, Kyle Sampson.
• Sampson proposes firing them all, but Gonzales rejects that idea. It's positively Clintonian.
• Sampson has some discussions with Gonzales about what process to use to figure out who to sack, how to select replacements, how to go about getting the new attorneys confirmed (or whether to use the USA Patriot Act to bypass Senate confirmation), and finally how to announce the sackings.
• Sampson and others in the Justice Department hold discussions, meetings, send e-mails back and forth, talk on the phone, pore over records, all about which attorneys stay and which are asked to leave. There is at this time no evidence that Gonzales was any part of this process.
• The Justice Department group draws up a final list of people they want to replace. The list is sent to the AG.
• Gonzales signs off on the final list and gets the president's approval. He is still unaware that, notwithstanding all the other times U.S. Attorneys have been fired for similar reasons -- and notwithstanding President Bill Clinton's firing of all 93 U.S. Attorneys when he first took office in 1993 (one, Michael Chertoff, slopped over to 1994) -- this time, it will be played by the press as a horrific and unprecedented abuse of power.
• Democrats get hold of the list and gin up a fake controversy by falsely alleging that U.S. Attorneys were fired to stop prosecutions of Republicans. There is no evidence of this, but the Democratic Party's media wing promotes it as inarguable.
• Gonzales is asked whether he participated in discussions about the fired attorneys. He evidently interprets the question as asking whether he participated in the discussions about which attorneys, in particular, to fire; he says no, he left that to Sampson.
• Gonzales subsequently pours gasoline on the fire; when he is assailed in the press by nasty sound-bites from Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, Gonzales apologizes, clarifies, offers to testify, and showing other signs of weakness. Democrats scent blood in the water.

• Democrats threaten to subpoena top presidential advisors, including Karl Rove and Harriet Miers, for political show trials -- which would likely violate the constitutional separation of powers doctrine. Nevertheless, Sen. Pat "Leaky" Leahy (D-VT, 95%) obtains the authority to issue those subpoenas... on a party-line vote in the J-Com. But he seems to have quietly dropped the idea of issuing them.

  (Was it all a bluff, just blustering to make Leahy look stronger than he really is? We'll know after a couple more weeks, I think.)

• Democrats release documents showing that Gonzales participated in some process meetings; the elite media takes the cue, running the story as if this "contradicts" Gonzales' earlier statement.
• Numerous members of Congress -- mostly Democrats but a few rancid Republicans, such as Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA, 43%) -- accuse Gonzales of "lying" and "misleading" Congress when he said he wasn't involved in the attorney-firing discussions. Again, Democrats cast disagreement about the scope of the question as a federal felony, hoping to send the Attorney General of the United States to prison over political differences.
• (Not so) shockingly, several conservative commentators and bloggers ("I name no names..."), who never liked Gonzales in the first place, seize upon these accusations to join with Democrats in calling for Gonzales' ouster... hoping, evidently, to ensure he won't be named to the Supreme Court.
• Kyle Sampson voluntarily testifies before the J-Com, saying pretty much all of the above. The Democrats leap upon the table and perform the Grand Triumphal March from Aida, acting as if this proves everything they had alleged. (Academy awards are seriously being considered.)

The same conservatives noted above previously demanded and received Harriet Miers' withdrawal as Supreme Court nominee and Don Rumsfeld's resignation as Secretary of Defense.

Many of them currently also demand the resignation of Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State, Michael Chertoff as Secretary of Homeland Security and the dismantling of that department. And they have complained bitterly about Gen. Michael Hayden as CIA Director, John Negroponte as the first Director of National Intelligence, and Mike McConnell as current Director of National Security. (I'm not sure what they do during the brief moments when they're not attacking the Bush administration.)

To some, this event-line provokes a non-stop threnody of the horrific "incompetence" and "dishonesty" of Alberto Gonzales. To me, it provokes nothing but annoyance that the traditional reactions and responses of bureaucrats must always be cast as demanding humiliation, dismissal, and incarceration for everyone even remotely connected... but only when the bureaucrats in question are Republicans.

Oh dear, have I discovered another Democratic double-standard... complete with conservatives eager to accept, in order it to trash their hated neocon rivals? Never mind!

Here, feast on this delicious irony instead. From the AP article linked above:

Democrats rejected the concept of mixing politics with federal law enforcement. They accused the Bush administration of cronyism and trying to circumvent the Senate confirmation process by installing favored GOP allies in plum jobs as U.S. attorneys.

"We have a situation that's highly improper. It corrodes the public's trust in our system of Justice," said Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy. "It's wrong."

Yeah. And Webb Hubbell was appointed Associate Attorney General in 1993 solely because of his stellar record of legal achievement... and not at all because he was Hillary Clinton's partner at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Arkansas. And of course, those 93 U.S. Attorneys that Clinton fired (that would be all of them) were fired strictly for job-performance issues: Each and every one of them was a lousy lawyer. No politics there!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 29, 2007, at the time of 7:38 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

March 8, 2007

Democratic President Will Only Talk to Fellow Liberals

Presidential candidate John Edwards became the first Democrat to withdraw from a debate because it will be hosted by Fox Network -- which liberals equate with Fox News Chanel, which liberals equate with Julius Streicher and Der Stürmer:

Former Sen. John Edwards campaign announced that he will skip the Nevada Democratic Party's planned August presidential debate, the latest fallout from the party's decision to have the Fox Network host the event.

The move sparked an outcry, particularly among liberals and activist bloggers, who accused Fox of being too sympathetic to Republicans and demanded that the Democratic candidates boycott the forum.

MoveOn.org, one of the nation's leading progressive organizations, gathered more than 250,000 signatures asking the Nevada Democratic Party to drop Fox as a debate sponsor....

"We wanted to send a clear message to voters, the media and the presidential candidates that Fox is part of the right-wing smear machine, not a legitimate source of news," said MoveOn civic communications director Adam Green.

Hillary Clinton declined to state whether she also would boycott, and the Washington Post declined to permit Fox News to confuse matters by denying it was "part of the right-wing smear machine."

This brings up an interesting point: it is becoming increasingly clear that Democrats simply refuse to talk to Fox News, to come onto center-right radio shows, to campaign in Republican areas, or to communicate in any way with anyone who is not a liberal.

If a Democrat should win the 2008 election, the best guess is that he or she would continue the practice: For four or eight years, the President of the United States would refuse to allow anyone but the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, CBS, and whatever remains of Air America to attend White House press briefings.

Mr. or Ms. President will initiate a formal policy of only talking to the Left; the sub-cabinet level position of Speaker to Smearers will be created for any unfortunately necessary interaction with right-wingers, which by law will be conducted while the Speaker wears a clothespin on his nose.

Townhall meetings will be restricted to card-carrying members of the ACLU (literally carrying their cards). Markos Moulitsas Zúniga will be named chairman of the FCC; and Helen Thomas, doyenne of the White House press corps, will be named Secretary of State (hoping to restore the glory days of Madeleine Albright).

The NRA will be declared a terrorist organization, Gavin Newsom will be the new Secretary of GLBT Issues, and the Boy Sprouts will be forced to accept gay scouts and gay scoutmasters -- then will promptly be sued out of existence by the former alleging inappropriate (but fun!) contact with the latter.

And all for the want of a unified Republican Party.

So unless you want to regress back to the day when the president could call up a studio head and order him to make a hagiographic movie about Josef Stalin, perhaps you should consider ceasing to attack every conservative who gets uppity (or gets on your nerves), and instead focus your energy on the people who actually want to transform the United States of America into the United Counties of Sweden.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 8, 2007, at the time of 6:09 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

October 2, 2006

Bearing False Witness

Of all the kinds of lying, the most damaging and most despicable, practiced by only the most coldblooded and spiritually empty human vessels, is "bearing false witness." BFW is not a typical lie to duck accountability for something you did wrong, nor even a lie to get some undeserved reward. BFW consists of deliberately and with malice aforethought testifying falsely -- in court or elsewhere in public -- in order to "convict" an innocent of some heinous crime or moral turpitude.

It's not merely saying "I had nothing to do with raping that woman," when the speaker was the one who held her down. It's saying "I saw John Smith rape that woman," when in fact the speaker knows that Smith is completely innocent.

Or trying to mislead people into believing that various Republican members of Congress were accomplices after the fact in a case of attempted statutory homosexual rape -- when the Democratic liars know that those they accuse are in fact innocent.

New York Democrats trying to hang the albatross of disgraced former-Rep. Mark Foley around the neck of Rep. Thomas Reynolds (R-N.Y., 83%) and Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-IL, 100%) have deliberately confused two "threads" of e-mails and text messages that Foley wrote. And the elite media is playing along, equally knowingly, with this deception.

The first thread comprised e-mails that were peculiar but not sexual: for example, Foley asking one former page how he had "weathered" Hurricane Katrina; from the New York Times:

“How are you weathering the hurricane. . .are you safe. . .send me a pic of you as well."

This is what those Republicans who investigated these e-mails refer to as "over-friendly." There is nothing inherently wrong or sexual with asking how the kid did during the hurricane -- or even for asking for a picture. I can imagine a congressman having a bulletin board in the front office with innocuous pictures of all the pages who worked in his office.

But there was a darker, more sinister thread, consisting of much more explicit text messages that Foley sent to other pages; for example, one session was all about masturbation and read like two adolescents talking. Of course one was not only an adult (chronologically) but a member of Congress. Honestly, it's more juvenile than anything Bill Clinton ever did.

Well call these two threads the "over-friendly" thread and the "explicit" thread. The point is that the Republicans who were told about these e-mails either saw none of them at all, or else they only saw the "over-friendly" thread; nobody says he saw the "explicit" thread until ABC published them and they were on the internet... and no Democrat actually claims to have any evidence that any Republican knew about the "explicit" thread. This is important: they don't even pretend to have evidence that anyone actually knew that Foley was into twinks.

Yet even so, the Democrats are trying to make it appear as though Reynolds knew Foley was sending explicitly sexual correspondence to a minor -- when in fact, the Democrats are well aware that Reynolds knew only about non-sexual e-mails that were oddball but not threatening.

In so doing, they are attempting to destroy not just the career but the life of Congressman Reynolds -- trying to get him not only thrown out of the House, but also trying to get his wife to divorce him, his children to disown him, and everyone he knows to shun him... just so that his Democratic opponent might have a better shot at beating him in the November election.

I do not believe I have ever seen a more reptillian, repulsive smear job in my adult lifetime. What's next? Will they fly in the Green-Helmet Guy to plant dead children in Reynolds' home?

Note that Patterico discusses a related but distinct point on Patterico's Pontifications: that numerous well-known leftist bloggers are seizing upon the horrid false meme; combined with the news sources that are making the same error -- purposefully, in my opinion -- this looks less and less like an honest mistake; in fact, it reeks of the sociopathic tactics of Stalinists.

In a story datelined late last night (that is, very early on the morning of October 1st), AP gave this explanation of what the Republicans knew about Foley's inappropriate communications and what they did about it:

On Friday night, Hastert spokesman Ron Bonjean said the top House Republican had not known about the allegations.

Saturday's report includes a lengthy timeline detailing when they first learned of the worrisome e-mail in the fall of 2005, after a staffer for Alexander told Hastert's office the family wanted Foley to stop contacting their son. Alexander's staffer did not share the contents of the e-mail, saying it was not sexual but "over-friendly," the report says.

[That is, it was the first thread of e-mails, those that were non-sexual but somewhat strange.]

Hastert's aides referred the matter to the Clerk of the House, and "mindful of the sensitivity of the parent's wishes to protect their child's privacy and believing that they had promptly reported what they knew to the proper authorities," they did not discuss it with others in Hastert's office - including, apparently, their boss.

After the issue was referred to the clerk, it was passed along to the congressman who oversees the page program, Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill.

Shimkus has said he learned about the e-mail exchange in late 2005 and took immediate action to investigate.

He said Foley told him it was an innocent exchange. Shimkus said he warned Foley not to have any more contact with the teenager and to respect other pages.

As of 4:45 am October 1st, that is what the Associated Press knew. But just a few hours later, at 8:00 am, AP "shortened" the story -- by clipping out the entire explanation that made it clear GOP leaders had never seen any sexually explicit e-mails or IMs from Foley. The entire defense is reduced to this one paragraph:

The office of House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who earlier said he'd learned about the e-mails only last week, acknowledged that aides referred the matter to the authorities last fall. They said they were only told the messages were "over-friendly."

It would be easy to miss. (John Hinderaker at Power Line also noticed that the AP changed their story to remove exonerating facts.)

Seven hours pass; and now, at 2:50 pm, another AP version of the story introduces a whole new charge out of the blue... not merely that the Republicans knew about the "explicit" thread of IMs, but that they actively tried to cover them up:

Dems Slap GOP for Keeping E-Mails Secret

Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said it was outrageous the House GOP leadership had not acted sooner. "It really makes me nervous that they might have tried to cover this up," he said.

Murtha said the House ethics committee should conclude its work on the Foley case before the November elections, so that voters can "hold people accountable." Doing so, he said, might help restore public confidence, since already "the reputation of Congress under the Republican leadership is lower than used car salesmen."

Here, one of the clumsiest of the Democratic character assassins lets slip his mask. Who cares about the teens? What's really important here is how it will affect the November vote!

But the conspiracy theory makes no political sense. It would have been fairly painless (politically) had this broken in 2005, because Foley would not even have been the Republican nominee. It makes no sense to sit on something this volatile, knowing that lots of others knew about it -- including the St. Petersburg Times -- and could release it at the worst moment... such as right now.

The separately written New York Times story (see above for link) plays along, adding its own misinformation:

Top House Republicans knew for months about e-mail traffic between Representative Mark Foley and a former teenage page, but kept the matter secret and allowed Mr. Foley to remain head of a Congressional caucus on children’s issues, Republican lawmakers said Saturday.

House Republicans said they kept it "secret?" There are no quotations to that effect in the story; this is a term made up by the Times and falsely attributed to the Republicans themselves, to make them look like accomplices.

So the "elite" media chops a hole in the basement and falls through to an even lower level than they were before: now they're not only pretending that the GOP knew about the "explicit" thread; they've added out of whole cloth the unsourced claim that Republicans were accessories after the fact by deliberately concealing this specific knowledge they supposedly had about Foley's sexal proclivities.

Finally, Reuters joins the fun by adding a very ambiguous term that means something very different, as Reuters uses it, than the normal meaning:

The Republican leader of the U.S. House of Representatives said his office knew a year ago about inappropriate contact between a former intern and newly resigned Rep. Mark Foley and called on Saturday for a criminal probe of the matter.

Do they mean readers to wrongly infer inappropriate physical contact? That is what "inappropricate contact" usually means. Though they're using "contact" as in correspondence, that's not how most people will read it.

Newspaper stories (and news broadcasts) do not exist in a vacuum: they feed off of each other; and the weight of them combines self-referentially, like a monkey-puzzle tree, to levitate raw allegation, rumor, or even deliberate lying into well-sourced fact. A becomes the source for B, which becomes the source for C -- which is then used as the source of A. Like a game of "telephone," a factoid circles round and round, becoming a "fact," and then a "well-known fact," merely through repetition.

It's the Snark syllogism: "What I tell you three times is true."

When this is used to destroy careers and lives by tricking readers into believing a lie, it becomes the dirtiest and most cowardly attack on the media's political opponents (Republicans) one can imagine. It's on the same moral level as Arabs fabricating evidence to make it appear that Israelis murdered 12 year old Mohammed al-Dura.

If we let them get away with this blood libel, believe me... we'll see worse. Pathological liars are emboldened, not chastened, whenever a lie works. Putting all politics aside, it's vital that we rise up and make those who bear false witness pay a terrible price, unless we want to see Pravda open branch offices in every major newsroom in the country.

Everybody who reads this post should send a letter to the editor of his hometown newspaper if it prints any story that claims, without actual evidence, that any Republican other than Mark Foley knew what Mark Foley was really doing. Tell the editor what you think of those who falsely accuse the innocent.

Then cancel your subscription. Believe me, it will be no loss.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 2, 2006, at the time of 6:57 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

September 9, 2006

Bill Clinton: Pull The Path to 9/11!

So now it's come to this: former President Bill Clinton has formally demanded, through his attorneys, that ABC simply shelve its 5-hour, $40 million docudrama, the Path to 9/11.

Well... maybe; I'm a little suspicious, given that the source for this claim is a blog that was linked on Drudge. None of the elite media is carrying this story, though all of them carried many other stories about the Democrat protest against the flick... and many others have demanded that it be pulled and not aired.

While I have no reason to doubt the accuracy (or veracity) of Greg Sargent, the author, I'm still skeptical about this. Sargent appears to be a sincere liberal who has posted many similar letters on his TPMCafe blog (some of which were straight from his host, Joshua Michah Marshall of Talking Points Memo) as well as other anti-Bush, anti-GOP posts; and this letter would certainly be in keeping with Clinton's personal attack on the movie yesterday.

So it's probably true and accurate; but bear in mind that this letter is not yet well sourced.

But what the heck... let's run with it anyway!

No reason is given to pull the movie other than the lawyers' claim that the movie departs from the partisan Democratic version of recent history. (Oddly, I don't recall them having any particular problem with Erin Brockovich or All the President's Men.)

The idea that a Hollywood movie, even one touted as being a "true story," must be held to rigorous historical standards is flatly comical. The Amityville Horror was promoted as a "true, factual story;" and what about Schindler's List? The real Oskar Schindler gave his Jewish workers guns, telling them that if they were discovered, it would be better to die in combat than be sent back to the death camps. Did we see that in the Steven Spielberg movie?

More recently, we have the movie Munich. Several of the Mossad agents -- who are still alive -- stepped forward to say that the movie was totally wrong in many respects... the most important of which was portraying them as tortured souls who doubted the morality of what they were doing (executing, one by one, the architects of the 1972 massacre of eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, committed by Black September -- a front group for the PLO). To a man, they said they never had any such qualms about their mission.

Where were these finicky Democrats back then? I'm straining my brain to the white meat, but I can't think of even one who stepped forward to chastise Spielberg for either of those two a-historical "historical" docudramas.

The question is never whether a movie must be a strictly factual account; that would be a "documentary." By definition, a docudrama makes some stuff up, rewrites events, and combines characters, all for dramatic purposes. The question should be, how close to reality is the movie?

And from everything I've read about the antiterrorism history of the past few decades -- which is probably considerably more than Bill Clinton or his lawyers have read -- the Path to 9/11 is about as close to reality as Hollywood is ever likely to get. Live with it.

I have to wonder: suppose, as a thought experiment, a movie were made that simply blamed everything on President Bush, instead of insisting that Bill "Party Time" Clinton shoulder his much larger fair share for eight years of malign neglect. Suppose a movie were made that falsely claimed that Clinton was a dynamo of antiterrorist fervor, a zealous GWOT warrior who went to bed every night angry at the terrorists and woke up even angrier.

Suppose this movie also portrayed Bush as a dunce, controlled by vast, shadowy puppeteers -- multinational corporations (Halliburton, the oil barons, Coors), the neocons (but only the Jewish ones), and the military industrial complex. Suppose the movie portrayed Bush as callous and uncaring, eager to send young Americans to die just to line his own pockets. Suppose it even hinted darkly that Bush was somehow complicit in, or at least had foreknowledge of the pending 9/11 attack, but let it go forward anyway because it furthered the Blofeldian schemes of this feeble-minded evil genius.

If such a version of the attacks were presented in movie form, would these Democratic voices, so solicitous today of the "historical record" and the 9/11 Commission report, be as quick to leap forward, insist upon changes, and finally demand that the movie be yanked from distribution and never shown?

Somehow, in this purely hypothetical example, I doubt it. I suspect instead that they would honor and fête the filmmaker, call him one of the most important political voices of the twenty-first century, and maybe even give him a box seat at the next Democratic National Convention.

Sitting right next to Jimmy Carter, perhaps. You think?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 9, 2006, at the time of 4:00 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

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