Liberalism In Practice

The Patriotism Gap

Washington Times

A new survey shows that Americans, on average, are growing more patriotic. Among some predominantly liberal groups, however, patriotism is on the decline, and the gap between the left and the American public is widening. The two sides of the chasm reflect two distinct views of the United States.

The USA Today/Gallup poll conducted in mid-June shows that 32 percent of Americans describe themselves as "extremely patriotic," the highest number in the reported data, up from 19 percent in 1999. The 2010 total represents an 8 point increase since the January 2002 survey, which was the first after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The most patriotic groups of Americans are Republicans at 52 percent, conservatives at 48 percent and those over age 65 at 40 percent. The least patriotic are Democrats (20 percent), liberals (19 percent) and those aged 18 to 29 (22 percent).

The most patriotic groups have seen double-digit increases in "extremely" patriotic sentiment since 2005, while the least patriotic groups have flat-lined or declined. When it comes to those with less patriotic fervor, among Democrats the percentages in the "somewhat" or "not especially" patriotic categories rose from 33 percent in 2005 to 37 percent, while among Republicans the number declined from 15 percent to 9 percent, with the "not especially" group being less than 0.5 percent.

The study notes that it is "particularly intriguing" that 42 percent of Democrats are satisfied with the direction the country is heading while a mere 7 percent of the more patriotic Republicans agree. This 34 percent difference mirrors the 32 point patriotism gap between the two major parties. But feelings of patriotism should not be confused with a sense of complacency. Patriotism scores declined in the early 1990s after the end of the Cold War when the country seemed more secure and the future was less in doubt.

The recent resurgence of patriotic sentiment is better viewed as a measure of concern over the direction the country is taking. As with the Minutemen in 1775, today's patriots are responding to a call to action. Among some quarters on the left, the expression "patriot" is synonymous with the Tea Party movement, which they consider reactionary and racist. This may explain in part why liberals are less willing to describe themselves as patriotic.

The patriotism issue broadly parallels the battle lines of the culture war. Those brought up in an educational system in which the United States is portrayed negatively - as the country of slavery and segregation, of unjust wars, environmental pollution, evil capitalism and all manner of oppression - have no particular reason to be patriotic. To these people, Michelle Obama's position rang true when she said in February 2008 that, "for the first time in [her] adult lifetime" she was "really proud of [her] country." There was no reason to be proud of America before the Obama ascendance. Likewise, candidate Barack Obama's promise to "fundamentally transform" the United States was an exciting message to those who viewed America as a morally bankrupt, internationally despised country with a despicable history.

To those who hold a competing image of the United States - as a shining city on a hill, as the font of freedom, as a country of faith, hope and charity, as the product of a divine plan, as the defender of democracy and the last best hope of mankind - this vision needs no fundamental transformation. The rising tide of patriotism is a response to the assault on these American ideals, a defense of the dream of the first new nation founded in liberty. Patriotic Americans are not yet ready to give up the fight.

© Copyright 2010 The Washington Times, LLC

Robocop's Comment:

So what they are saying is that the Left is becoming more un-American?

'Liberal' Is Worse Than Any Curse Word Now

Fox News

Washington politicians, here's the message of semi-Super Tuesday: If you've embraced a liberal agenda of big government and huge spending -- you'll find yourself in trouble.

Yesterday's elections showed that there is only one real dirty word this campaign cycle: liberal -- not incumbent. The focus on incumbents is just a liberal media dodge to ignore the fact that it is their ideology is being repudiated. For the next five months you'll hear the leftist media and Democrats try to deflect the wins of conservatives and Tea Party candidates like Rand Paul as merely a vote against Washington. While that's partly true, it's the big Washington abuse of power -- the core of liberalism -- that's the problem, not just the fact that these candidates happen to be in office and reside in the Beltway.

Those in Washington who were fiscally reckless and supported the stimulus, TARP and the creation of a costly new entitlement with the healthcare bill are casualties of the wave. From Specter to Bob Bennett (the Republican who lost two weeks ago thanks to his support for TARP) we saw last night what we saw in the fall in New Jersey, Massachusetts and Virginia. If you've embraced a liberal agenda of big government and huge spending -- you'll find yourself in trouble.

That is why the Tea Party movement is successful and much more than the initial charges that it was merely "manufactured outrage." They could not flourish if it wasn't for the lurch to the left by Democrats, and to some degree George Bush and some Republicans. That's why President Obama was not and is not going to be helpful to candidates in his party going forward - because the backlash is against him.

Old Time Wisdom

Crash Dummies For "The Cause" 04.12.10

We keep hearing Libtards joking about Joe Sixpack, and Bubba. But here is a non-joking example of your typical Libtard at a protest...

Independent Voters Go From Hopeful to Angry at Dems

Washington Times

President Obama and congressional Democrats face an uphill climb to reclaim the support of independent voters who vaulted them to the White House and huge majorities in Congress in 2008.

At the end of the bitter, intensely partisan battle to pass Mr. Obama's health care overhaul plan, independent voters, once captivated by hopeful campaign promises, are feeling burned and appear eager to oust Democrats in November's midterm elections.

"There is an overall sense of frustration that no one is listening," pollster Scott Rasmussen said about a problem that has plagued the political party in power for decades.

Mr. Rasmussen said the more pressing issue for Democrats is that swing voters are not just anxious about health care; they're also angry about the stimulus package and auto industry bailouts.

"It is gathering steam in the sense that the longer the frustration goes unanswered, the more it grows," said the founder and president of Rasmussen Reports.

In 2008, Mr. Obama's hope and change messages seemed to win over independents, and he captured about 52 percent of the independent vote in the election that year.

Self-identified independents continued to back Mr. Obama through June, with about 60 percent saying they approved of his job performance. But as the year wore on and the health care battle gained steam, their approval of the president plummeted and hardened in the low 40s, according to Quinnipiac University polls.

The president's approval ratings have not rebounded since the health care vote, but the latest Quinnipiac poll shows some positive movement for Mr. Obama. The percentage of independents who disapprove of Mr. Obama's job performance has dropped nine points, from 53 percent to 44 percent.

"It may be that passage of health care eventually helps President Barack Obama's approval ratings, but at this point there's no sign of that," said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

"The White House believes that now that the legislation has been signed into law they can sell it to the American people. Approval of health care reform is growing - or disapproval is shrinking - but the president still has his work cut out for him."

Independents make for fickle voters. Two former political strategists for Bill Clinton said they've already seen independents begin to recoil from Republicans.

In February, Republicans held a 22-percentage-point advantage over Democrats among independents, according to the strategists' polling, but that had slid to just five percentage points by last month. The drop was attributed almost entirely to female independents, who went from favoring the GOP to favoring Democrats.

The strategists, James Carville and Stan Greenberg, who had front-row seats for Republicans' congressional victories in 1994 when Mr. Clinton was president, said they don't see a repeat this November - mainly because the GOP's high point has come and gone. That apex was in January, when Republican Scott Brown won the seat of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.

"When we look back on this, we're going to say Massachusetts is when 1994 happened," Mr. Greenberg said.

In state after state, unaffiliated voters now hold the key to elections. Mr. Brown capitalized on that momentum in Massachusetts by telling voters he would be an independent voice in the Senate.

Seeking to boost the numbers, Mr. Obama is traveling across the country to trumpet the short-term benefits of the new health care law.

On Thursday, he was in Portland, Maine, where he predicted voters will start to support health care reform, and ridiculed early polls suggesting that voters continue to be unimpressed with the changes.

"It's been a week, folks," Mr. Obama said. "Before we find out if people like health care reform, we should wait to see what happens when we actually put it into place. Just a thought."

For now, the health care debate's political effect on Republicans and Democrats is easy to spot: Both sides are more energized.

A CNN poll released Tuesday found that 56 percent of Republicans said they're extremely or very enthusiastic about voting in November, a six-point jump since January, while 36 percent of Democrats said they're similarly enthused, which marks a five-point increase.

That enthusiasm gap bodes well for Republicans heading into the elections, but Mr. Greenberg and Mr. Carville said the GOP's brand image is likely too tarnished for them to retake the House and Senate.

They said in 1994, Republicans emerged from every policy fight with a strengthened image, but this year the GOP is suffering from each policy fight.

Mr. Carville predicted that Republicans will net about 25 House seats and six or seven Senate seats - not enough to give them control of either chamber, but enough to drop Democrats' margins dramatically.

He said, though, that this will be the third election in a row in which a party has scored those big congressional wins, after Democrats' double-dip successes of 2006 and 2008, and said voters are profoundly unhappy.

• Stephen Dinan contributed to this report.

The 5 Craziest Attacks on Tea Parties

FoxNews

In case there are any residual doubts of how bad the tea partiers have been treated, here are the Top 5 ways the left and the media have abused a grassroots movement. The coverage has been so hateful and so biased, it was almost impossible to narrow the list.

5) Protesters are Anti-Government
The media and the left portray tea parties as “anti-government” because it undermines a patriotic grassroots movement. Tea partiers aren’t anti-government, they are anti-big government. That’s just not the story journalists tell. The “anti-government” theme is strong, cropping up in more than two dozen stories in The Washington Post and New York Times combined. Very few of them mentioned the word “big” in reference to government.

Instead, it’s NPR’s Liz Halloran claiming tea parties have been boosted by “restive Republicans who have found refuge in the year-old anti-tax, anti-government uprising.” Frank Rich of The New York Times compared tea partiers with Andrew Joseph Stack, the man who flew a plane into an IRS building. “Stack was a lone madman, and it would be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying Tea Partier or a ‘Tea Party terrorist.’ But he did leave behind a manifesto whose frothing anti-government, anti-tax rage overlaps with some of those marching under the Tea Party banner.”

Then there’s former CNN correspondent Susan Roesgen, who became the story when she reported from the Chicago Tea Party on April 15 last year. Roesgen rudely interrupted one of the protesters and slammed the event for being “anti-government.” After she bullied her interview subject, Roesgen concluded that “you get the general tenor of this” tea party. “Anti-government, anti-CNN since this is highly promoted by the right-wing conservative network Fox and since I can't really hear much more and I think this is not really family viewing.”

CNN is more family friendly now. Roesgen no longer works at the network.

4) Tea Partiers Are Stupid
Calling conservatives stupid is typical left-wing strategy. The left labeled Reagan stupid or senile. George W. Bush was consistently portrayed as stupid by detractors in the left and the media. It only makes sense that tea partiers get the same treatment.

In the case of the tea parties, some of the biggest offenders were also some of the biggest mouths on the left. Last August, former Air America host MSNBC regular Janeane Garofalo let the venom fly during an appearance at the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C. on Aug. 21. Garofalo called tea partiers “functionally retarded adults.”

Bill Maher deployed the same strategy in February of this year during HBO's “Real Time” calling tea partiers “cultists. “The teabaggers, they're not a movement. They're a cult, and I'm going to prove it. You know someone has fallen into a cult if you see these signs: One. Cults have their own vocabulary. Now, I don't speak sh**kicker, but I know that in their world, freedom means guns, diplomacy means weakness, elitist means reader, and socialist means black.” In Maher’s world, stupid means anyone who is conservative.

3) Protesters are Nazis
Nazis are the ultimate villains both for the horror they brought to the world through conquest and their use of industrialized genocide. But while the left went crazy when Lyndon LaRouche fans carried Obama/Hitler posters to protests, they were quick to use the slander for their own devices.

Take MSNBC’s relatively obscure host Dylan Ratigan. In February, the host of “The Dylan Ratigan Show” began the program by doing what his network always does – attacking conservatives. “The Tea Party has a bit of an integrity problem, as everybody from birthers, to open racists, to outright Nazis are actually on the team. And no one involved, including its leadership, seems to mind that fact.”

Ratigan learned from the best, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who called the tea parties “Astroturf” before she went on to link them to Nazis. “They're carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on healthcare.” Later she backed off her complete attack and tried to latch onto tea party popularity claiming, “but, you know, we share some of the views of the Tea Partiers.” Sure…

2) Homophobic Slurs
To most ordinary Americans in early 2009, the term “teabagging” meant using a tea bag to make actual tea. Then entire world learned the term had an overt, oral sex connotation, thanks to the media and left-wing pundits.

Nowhere was the use of the term more pronounced than MSNBC. The day before the big tea party event last April, MSNBC's David Shuster made numerous sexual puns during a “Countdown” appearance. “It's going to be teabagging day for the right-wing and they're going nuts for it. Thousands of them whipped out the festivities early this past weekend, and while the parties are officially toothless, the teabaggers are full-throated about their goals,” he told viewers. He later used his Twitter account to attack “teabaggers” and their “teabag leader.”
Shuster lost out to fellow MSNBC host Rachel Maddow for most adolescent behavior. Maddow’s and then Air America radio contributor Ana Marie Cox used the word “teabag” at least 51 times in a in a 13-minute long segment of bad “teabag” puns.

It wasn’t just MSNBC. Journalists at numerous outlets used the derisive term. But CNN anchor Anderson Cooper went even farther during the April 15 “Anderson Cooper 360” program. CNN’s senior political analyst David Gergen said Republicans were “searching for their voice” after two electoral losses, Cooper followed up by saying, “It’s hard to talk when you’re tea-bagging.” The irony of this attack is that it allows lefties and the media to feel smart and act juvenile at the same time.

1) Calling them “racist”
Playing the race card has become the left’s favorite move. It trumps everything else and is virtually impossible to defend against. Naturally, with an African-American president, crying “racism” has become a routine occurrence. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews is just one of the milder examples of someone who injects race into everything except commercials.

Whether it’s Colbert King of The Washington Post or loose cannon former comedienne Garofalo, racism is the left’s preference in attempts to undermine the tea parties.

Former funny lady Garofalo bashed the attendees at last year’s tax day tea parties by using several different attacks. The “Countdown” guest called party-goers “a bunch of teabagging rednecks,” adding “this is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up.”

At least she didn’t invoke the KKK, or talk about tea partiers wearing sheets. But she didn’t have to because Rep. James E. Clyburn, D-S.C., did it for her. Clyburn showed up in a column by The Post’s Colbert King that claimed “Today's Tea Party adherents are George Wallace legacies.” “It reminds me of that period in our history right after Reconstruction,” Clyburn said, “when South Carolina had a black governor and the political gains were lost because of vigilantism, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.”

He wasn’t alone. In February, “Countdown” host Keith Olbermann focused on suggestions there should be civics literacy testing for registered voters made at the recent Tea Party convention, which Olbermann referred to as the “Tea Klux Klan.”

Maddow had her own Klan spin. “And as you could hear, the tea party convention crowd erupted in cheers at the suggestion, although, to be fair, it was sort of hard to tell exactly what the sounds coming from the crowd meant. They were sort of a little bit muffled by, you know, the white hoods,” she mocked.

Dan Gainor is The Boone Pickens Fellow and the Media Research Center’s Vice President for Business and Culture. His column appears each week on The Fox Forum. He can also be contacted on Facebook and Twitter as dangainor.

5 Ways Liberals Misjudge the American People

by John Hawkins

One of the reasons liberals tend to do such an incredibly poor job of governing is that they fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the American people. Given that liberals also fundamentally misunderstand Christianity, the Constitution, economics, and human nature, I guess it's no big surprise that they don't get the American people either. Come to think of it, I guess it's pretty much par for the course. I mean, let's face it, without conservatives around to help keep them in check, liberals would utterly destroy everything that is good about America and most of them would be baffled about what they were doing wrong right up until the end. But enough about the Left's general lack of common sense -- let's talk about how they misjudge the American people.

They believe the American people want liberal policies. When you're a conservative, it's almost impossible to filter out liberal views. Your kids are exposed to liberalism at school, Hollywood forces liberal ideas down your throat when you watch TV, the local paper leans left -- you just can't get away from it. On the other hand, if you're a liberal, you really don't have to hear what conservatives think. This can lead to the sort of groupthink that once inspired film critic Pauline Kael to exclaim,

"I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where (Nixon voters) are I don't know. They're outside my ken."

Now, some liberals know better -- which is why every Democratic President runs as a centrist even though they immediately intend to veer way off to the left the moment they're elected.

However, the belief that liberalism is genuinely popular with the American people is still pervasive. For example, on a daily basis, you can hear the netroots claiming that Obama's approval rating is slipping because he's not getting enough of his legislation passed. This ignores the fact that Obama's legislative agenda is having trouble getting passed because it's about as popular as strychnine milkshakes in our center-right country.

Liberals believe that many Americans don't know what's in their own best interests. Liberals tend to falsely believe that they're better, smarter, and more caring than the average person. This often leads them to make rather glib and far reaching assumptions about the "best" way for OTHER people to live.

Why would anyone need a SUV or a gun? You don't REALLY need those things. Also, liberals know what your salary should be, how your children should be taught, and what words you should be allowed to use without hurting anyone else's feelings. Oh, you want to pick your own lightbulb? Nonsense: You might do it wrong! Let liberals tell you which one you need.

There's just something about liberalism that turns most of its practitioners, no matter how dumb or incompetent they may be, into finger wagging professors who want to lecture the rest of the country about how to live their lives. See the man running the show at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for a real world example of how that works.

Liberals believe that the American people want to be treated like children. Sure, there are always going to be losers who want the government to do everything for them, but bottom feeders who want to be taken care of by the government have never represented the majority of the American people. If they ever do, liberals will undoubtedly be happy about it, but the rest of us won't because it'll mean the end of America as a great nation.

However, for the moment at least, a large percentage of Americans not only don't want the government's help, we would be pleased if the government didn't even know we existed. In essence, we want the government to defend the country, maintain the roads, enforce the law and leave us alone as much as possible. This, by necessity, puts us at loggerheads with liberals who are obsessed with controlling as much of people's lives as possible.

Liberals believe that most conservatives are evil. The problem with pegging people who merely disagree with you as greedy, evil, malevolent racists is that it tends to lead to kneejerk disagreement with everything they believe. That's why people go to such great lengths to compare their political opposites to Nazis -- because the thinking goes, the Nazis are bad and if they're like Nazis, no matter what they're saying, then it must be bad. Incidentally, the Nazis were socialists, animal rights activists, advocates of bigger government, supporters of the social welfare state, and supporters of unions -- just like liberals -- but that's neither here nor there.

The problem with believing that conservatism is evil, besides the fact that it's not true, is that it leads even well-intentioned liberals to disregard conservative ideas. That's especially relevant because if you look through American history, you'll find ideologies are much more malleable than people might think. For example, at times in our history, liberalism has looked favorably upon tax cuts, Christianity, and patriotism as opposed to fighting against all those things while pretending to do otherwise. Put another way, if liberals were to examine conservative ideas with an open mind, they might learn something.

Liberals believe they can lie to the American people without consequence. Saying that politicians lie is like noting that rats like cheese. Without question, politicians from both parties are guilty of lying.

However, in the political realm, liberals lie much, much more often than conservatives. Why? There are two reasons for it. Conservatives tend to believe liberals are stupid, but liberals tend to think conservatives are evil. Is it wrong to lie about someone who's dumb? Yes. Ok, now would it be wrong to lie to stop Hitler? Ehr -- probably not. Because so many liberals view conservatives as evil, in their culture it's considered acceptable for them to lie about the Right. Very, very seldom will you ever hear a liberal criticize another liberal for lying about a conservative even though it's an every day thing in the liberal media.

Also, because the Left controls the mainstream media, they can often get away with lies no conservative ever could. Put another way, conservatives tend to be more honest because they have to be while liberals are used to having the mainstream media cover up, ignore, and explain away their lies.

The problem with that is that over time, the MSM has become less powerful and the new media has filled the gap. For example, when a cranky Harry Reid claimed at the health care summit that no one has talked about reconciliation, a video was quickly put out proving him wrong. Now that same video is in circulation, in the new media, proving that Harry Reid is a shameless liar with no personal integrity. The mainstream media is no longer the only gatekeeper for the news and it's allowing Americans to see through the lies of the Left faster than ever. That's why Barack Obama, who sometimes has trouble keeping his story straight from day-to-day, has dropped so far, so fast.



Copyright © 2010 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

We Were at War- The Legal Consequences of 9/11

by William J. Haynes II

Editor's Note: Even as Uighur detainees, once trained in al Qaeda camps, frolic in the Bermuda surf, enjoying their release from the U.S. detention camp in Guantánamo Bay, newly captured detainees in Afghanistan are being read their Miranda rights, as if they were common criminals. The legal framework under which the U.S. government prosecutes the war on terror remains as unstable and controversial as ever. The speech below, delivered in March 2008 by William J. Haynes II, who was just then stepping down from his position as general counsel at the Pentagon, thus remains highly topical. Rare in this debate, it is also eloquent and highly accessible to the non-specialist. We thus reprint it in full and commend it to our readers' attention.

In September 2005, I was sitting in a window seat on a commercial flight from Madrid to Philadelphia. It was mid-afternoon on a Tuesday. The plane was above the clouds in the sunshine, halfway across the Atlantic.

I was returning from a long trip in Europe. It was typically frenetic--six countries in five days, visit after visit with politicians and businessmen, diplomats and soldiers. I was tired, but marveling at what a great job I had. It's like being the chief legal officer of a medium size country. Any conceivable legal issue conjured up by the Department's more than ten thousand military and civilian lawyers could end up in my lap. I remember my head buzzing with those possibilities as I began to doze.

And then it hit me with
a jolt. I knew this flight. It was the same flight that we had tracked four years earlier on September 11, 2001.

You know the story: Nineteen hijackers on four planes murdered almost three thousand innocent people in an atrocity unlike any in American history. What you may not remember as well is that on that day the Department of Defense tracked two suspicious international flights--one over the Pacific, and this one over the Atlantic--suspecting they, too, were hijacked and heading towards an American skyline. And we steeled and readied ourselves to shoot them down.

All of us remember where we were that day. I was in my office on the phone with my wife, telling her to turn on the TV, when I saw the plane hit the second tower. I raced down to one of the Pentagon command centers with some others, to set up a crisis action cell. As the American Airlines plane hit the other side of our building, I felt only a shudder pulse the monstrous concrete structure. And then it was like I was in a movie playing fast forward. Smoke and confusion, multiple conversations between the President and the Secretary, sending my own deputy off with the Deputy Secretary to a survival site in the event that another plane came at our side of the Pentagon, hearing situation reports about dead and wounded being treated in the Pentagon courtyard.

I spent nineteen hours in the Pentagon that day, mostly at the elbow of then-Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld and then-Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dick Myers. Most of the time I was in two Pentagon command centers, reacting and contemplating possibilities I had never expected to face. These scenarios had nothing to do with corporate transactions, environmental cleanups, government contracts, class action litigation, or any of the other issues that had been on my mind when I first took the job, barely four months earlier.

That day, we considered whether to shoot civilian airliners from the sky, and we wondered what would come next. Were there more terrorists on the ground in America's cities? Did they have suitcase nukes? After New York and D.C., were Chicago, Atlanta, or Los Angeles next?

The legal questions were legion. What were the rules of engagement? How do the Fourth and Fifth Amendments apply to a decision to shoot down an American airliner en route to a U.S. city? Should any captured enemies be treated as criminal suspects or enemy combatants?

Smoke lingered in the Pentagon for days. We could not totally extinguish fires because the water itself threatened to shut down the electrical and information systems of the building. But as the smoke dissipated, some things soon became clearer. We were attacked by a non-state organization known as al Qaeda. The President decided that we would fight this enemy with all our national power, including the armed forces. We were at war.

At the time, this was widely accepted. In those weeks following 9/11, both the United Nations and NATO concluded we had suffered an "armed attack," thereby invoking the U.N. Charter and the NATO charter provisions for collective military action. The Congress on September 18, 2001, passed a breathtakingly broad Authorization for the Use of Military Force. The decision to go to war also followed recent precedent; President Clinton had ordered cruise missile strikes against al Qaeda in response to the 1998 bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Going to
war had many legal consequences.

It meant we could attack al Qaeda with deadly force. It meant we could detain captured fighters for the duration of hostilities. It meant we could ask questions without reading Miranda warnings. It meant we could seek to intercept their communications to learn their intentions and foil their future plots. It meant we could use military commissions to try them for war crimes.

I was tempted to give a detailed defense for these matters here today. Bob Fiske told me that you all have heard many speakers criticize the government's legal policies and that you'd give me a fair hearing for rebuttal.

But I decided against that. On Monday, I'm leaving this job, after almost seven years. Rather than justify the answers the President and Congress have come up with, I want to look to the future. As the national and global dialogue continues, as you all participate, and as our democracy considers new legal policies, I ask you to consider three questions important to all Americans and maybe particularly important to those of us in the legal profession.

First, how does the law affect the government's ability to fight and win wars?

The obvious approach to this question is to think about the rules we place on the government.

In the aftermath of 9/11, we've seen reforms in this mold. Removing the "wall" between law enforcement and intelligence. Creating the Department of Homeland Security. Creating the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. These legal reforms have been aimed at restructuring the government to be more effective.

I encourage you, however, to consider the law's impact on national security, from other perspectives, beyond just the rules we place on government.

Think about how the law sets incentives and disincentives for others besides the government.

What incentives does the law set for our enemies?

In a way, the threat of al Qaeda makes some applications of the law of war to this conflict unprecedented. On the other hand, the bedrock documents underlying the law of war had this conflict squarely in mind. The Geneva Conventions were consciously written with the purpose of encouraging combatants to follow certain basic rules, to place bounds on an inherently violent and barbaric enterprise--war.

The heart of this effort is to separate fighters from civilians. If the two are separated, civilian populations will be spared killing and destruction. So the law of war requires combatants to distinguish themselves from civilians--usually by wearing a uniform and carrying their weapons openly. In turn, fighters must also refrain from targeting civilians and may not use civilians as human shields.

The law of war attempts to encourage everyone to follow these rules through incentives. People who follow the rules receive a privileged status. Lawful fighters get combat immunity. Although they may kill and be killed on the battlefield, once removed from the fight, they may not be prosecuted for lawfully fighting. Lawful fighters, if captured, also get a special status called prisoner of war. This status comes with many privileges--access to athletic uniforms, musical instruments, access to a canteen where one can purchase tobacco and sundries, the right to whatever military justice system the enemy uses to try its own troops.

Al Qaeda's reason for being, its method of operation, strikes at the core of the law of war. Al Qaeda does not want to be distinguished from the civilians that surround them. The September 11 hijackers did not wear uniforms or carry weapons openly. They posed as businessmen and students. They did not distinguish between combatants and civilians. They attacked civilian aircraft and used those aircraft to attack civilian targets.

Should we afford prisoner of war status to al Qaeda fighters, notwithstanding their conduct? Amplifying that, should they get more than what POWs get? Here, you have to think about the incentives going forward. If you give more protections and privileges to al Qaeda fighters than to lawful fighters, then you will strip away any legal incentives for people to fight according to the rules. Countries and groups will have strategic incentives to enjoy the benefits for clandestine warfare without bearing any of the consequences of doing so. Ultimately, you increase the savagery of future conflicts.

This new series of rights affects the incentives of those on the front line combating terrorist organizations. In fighting, our military personnel may be buying a long series of civilian judicial proceedings, trials, accusations, and the prospect that our opponents will be released before the war is over. These were never prospects that military personnel faced in prior conflicts against conventional enemies. One must ask, what effect will this new web of legal requirements have on battlefield decisionmaking?

And consider this: We have hundreds of habeas cases from persons the United States holds at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and I'm concerned about the impact these cases might have on the incentives provided by the law of war.

During World War II, the United States detained more than 400,000 German and Italian prisoners of war in camps sprinkled around the United States, and had zero successful habeas petitions.

Today, we have less than 300 unlawful enemy combatants detained at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and 246 ongoing habeas cases in the federal courts to go with them. These cases are in addition to the administrative processes the Executive Branch has developed on its own to review the detention of enemy combatants. And those administrative processes have been endorsed by Congress.

The legal process afforded these detainees far exceeds anything that German or Italian soldiers enjoyed at any time during their captivity within our borders.

Think beyond our naval base in Cuba.

Coalition forces hold tens of thousands of detainees in Iraq and over a thousand Afghanistan. If the detainees in Cuba receive habeas, should those detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan receive it as well? Instead of hundreds, why not tens of thousands of military detainee habeas cases in federal courts?

This is an incentive to violate the law of war. As some have said, what's in it for any foe of the United States to abide by those rules if one gets better treatment upon capture by violating them?

Another example of an area where it's important to consider the incentives the law creates for national security is FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The FISA statute, written in 1978, must be updated to account for remarkable advances in communications technology since then. That is one challenge before Congress now.

But another issue in FISA reform is whether private companies can be sued for cooperating with a Government request for information--for information on suspected al Qaeda operatives. When it comes to private corporations, even the prospect of liability--the very existence of litigation--is enough to cause them to turn the Government down. Allowing private lawsuits to go forward is a consequence of the political branches not making tough policy decisions. They deprive our political process of a real chance to consider what surveillance against our enemies should be permitted. Faced with the prospect of lawsuits, private entities will say "no" in the first instance, and there will be no decision for Congress and the President to make.

The prospect of litigation against individuals--our troops and government officials--also affects the decisions we make. When it comes to foreign lawsuits, the prospect of an adverse reaction--not by our Executive Branch, by our Congress, or by our courts, but by a foreign tribunal or prosecutor, is affecting the decisions military personnel and civilian leaders make.

We've had cases against individual servicemembers in foreign courts.

For example, in April 2003, in Baghdad, a U.S. tank under enemy fire returned fire and killed a Spanish cameraman. More than four years later thousands of miles away, a Spanish judge indicted three U.S. soldiers for violating a Spanish law.

Another case. In March 2005, soldiers at a U.S. checkpoint in Iraq killed an Italian intelligence agent after his speeding vehicle ignored multiple warnings and failed to stop. Almost two years later, an Italian judge indicted a U.S. soldier on homicide charges.

In Great Britain, U.S. Air Force pilots involved in tragic "friendly fire" incidents in Iraq--pilots whose conduct was investigated and cleared by U.S. and UK military investigators--are the subject of multiple county coroner inquests that have accused our pilots of negligent homicide.

Each of these cases proceeds notwithstanding that the U.S. government thoroughly investigated and determined that no administrative or judicial action was warranted.

But litigation isn't just a problem for troops at checkpoints, policy-makers have also been targets.

Lawsuits have been filed against senior military and civilian officials alleging human rights violations. One advocacy group has repeatedly filed complaints with German, Belgian, and French prosecutors requesting that senior civilian and military officials be prosecuted for conduct associated with the defense of our country.

The relationship between law and national security is complicated. It isn't just the rules we place on the government. It's the incentives we set for our enemies and for our own citizens. It's the rules others might try to place on us.

The second question, I'd pose is, 'Can we preserve the American legal system?'

We have a remarkable criminal justice system.

It's an adversarial system. It seeks to restrain government power and to preserve space for individual freedoms, and it's the most solicitous of individual rights of any in the world.

Our criminal law system is remarkable because of how much it is not focused on putting criminals behind bars.

It's a system where it's more important that innocents be found innocent than that the guilty be punished. Therefore, the standard of proof is very high--beyond a reasonable doubt. As Blackstone formulated--"Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."

It's a system where it's more important to keep the government playing by the rules, than to punish the guilty. We have the exclusionary rule, where, as Judge Cardozo put it, "The criminal is to go free because the constable has blundered."

How would we adapt this gold standard of criminal law to deal with al Qaeda?

Is it better that ten al Qaeda operatives escape, than that one innocent be wrongly detained? Should al Qaeda members go free if the government blunders?

Many might answer, 'Yes!' But remember what only nineteen people were able to do nearly seven years ago. Some believe such doctrinaire logic applied without reflection is unwise. It could, as Justice Robert Jackson once warned, "convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact." Indeed, nearly all who seriously consider the question view criminal prosecution in the federal courts, under rules currently in place as a viable option for only a handful of al Qaeda members.

Adapting our domestic criminal justice system to 9/11-type terrorists could entail a compromise between our long tradition of individual rights and the new public need to thwart mass murder and destruction.

Academics and pundits have proposed such compromises--special terrorism courts. These courts might detain individuals for long periods of time, in spite of reasonable doubts. They might overlook blunders by constables, if those blunders found credible evidence. They might consider secret evidence, ex parte.

Do we want to inject those practices into our domestic legal system?

Consider Justice Jackson's dissent in the World War II case of Korematsu v. United States. There, he argued that the courts should abstain from judging the military's claim that it was necessary to exclude Fred Korematsu from the West Coast on the basis of his race. Justice Jackson thought that judges should not review claims of military necessity, because doing so would import unwanted doctrines into our jurisprudence. Once a practice like racial discrimination is imported and validated by a judge, then it:

lies about like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of urgent need. Every repetition embeds that principle more deeply in our law and thinking and expands it to new purposes.

Justice Jackson went on to contrast the ephemeral nature of military orders with the enduring work of the court.

A military commander may overstep the bounds of constitutionality, and it is an incident. But if we review and approve, that passing incident becomes the doctrine of the Constitution. There it has a generative power of its own, and all that it creates will be in its own image.

Adapting our civilian legal system to cover al Qaeda has its perils. If we choose this path, we must take care that we do not endanger our long-held principles and values.

Once we add special, relaxed procedures in the criminal justice system for al Qaeda, can we keep those procedures confined to the hardest cases? How will we prevent those who follow from using them as convenient ways to bypass the rigors of the criminal justice system?

We must be mindful of these matters as we begin to change the law.

My third question is, 'Can we preserve our adherence to the rule of law?'

Today, the threat of terrorism seems distant to many Americans. Polls show that people are more concerned with the economy and health care than terrorism. And, for many of the military and civilian personnel in government, this is our proudest achievement. By preventing attacks, the government has returned to the people a sense of safety.

But, as we continue to refine the laws, we should not just assume today's sense of security and safety. We should also ask ourselves how people will think, feel, and act when the next attack comes?

And it will come!

We can be sure that when the next attack comes, the American people will rally to the government and demand that it take action to protect the nation.

Writing the laws today, how do we write them so the government has enough flexibility to deal with tomorrow's crises? But what if we err? What if a future President is put in the position where he must choose between following the law and doing what he or she believes is necessary to protect the nation?

This is an awful choice.

The founding fathers recognized this when drafting our constitution. I quote from Madison in Federalist 41.

It is in vain to oppose Constitutional barriers to the impulse of self-preservation. It is worse than in vain; because it plants in the Constitution itself necessary usurpations of power, every precedent of which is a germ of unnecessary and multiplied repetitions.

We must be careful that the country can act lawfully in self-defense.

I've shared with you some of my perspective on law and national security. In a word, my perspective is conservative. I mean that literally. There is so much in our country worth conserving, worth preserving, worth protecting. The lives of our citizens, the liberties we enjoy, our legal traditions, our belief in government under law.

As enemies threaten us, as the world changes, how do we best preserve all of that?

My first job out of law school was as a clerk to Judge James B. McMillan, in the Western District of North Carolina. I learned a lot from the judge, including: "never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity"; and "your job as my clerk is to keep me from making unintended errors"; and, "the government has no rights, only responsibilities." While I didn't always agree with the judge, I have always carried his lesson that the awesome powers of the government exist only to fulfill its responsibilities to the people.

Throughout my time as General Counsel of the Department, I've seen the Department's actions not so much as an exercise of lawful executive power or government rights, but as an appropriate discharge of a difficult executive responsibility. The Constitution confers upon the President the ultimate responsibility of ensuring that the American people are safe and secure, especially in wartime, and the Constitution gives the President the power to fulfill that responsibility. Exercising this power is discharging the most basic of all presidential duties.

Of course, the other branches have Constitutional duties as well. And we've seen the dialogue between the Congress, the Courts, and the President on these national security issues. This dialogue is how our constitution is supposed to work.

Without presuming to speak for anyone other than myself, allow me to speculate a bit in closing.

I think history will be kinder to the decisions this administration has made than current accounts might indicate. This country has not--and I knock on wood as I say this--suffered another devastating domestic attack from al Qaeda since 9/11. And most of the stories told thus far have been by outside critics, people who do not know the whole story.

I'm reminded of the late '40s and early '50s. It took those years and new leadership from another party before the country as a whole adopted the containment strategy that ultimately--40 years later--toppled the Soviet Union.

I believe our challenge as citizens now is to find ways to deal with this deadly and likely enduring threat that we can agree to sustain over time and across party lines. Ways that protect the ability of our country to win wars, to protect our systems, and to abide by the law.

How do we manage to live in a long period under threat, when we're fighting people somewhere in between criminals and combatants? When we're in a state somewhere in between war and peace, what will be the balance between security and liberty?

Justice Jackson, speaking in 1951 at the beginning of the Cold War, offered his thoughts on "wartime security and liberty under law." After discussing our Constitutional history, including the arguments between President Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney, Justice Jackson concluded with the following:

The problem of liberty and authority ahead are slight in comparison with those of the 1770s or 1860s. We shall blunder and dispute, and decide and overrule decisions. And the common sense of the American people will preserve us from all extremes which would destroy our heritage.

At first, this seems almost clichéd. "Common sense"? Surely the great expositor of the Steel Seizure case had something more satisfying? But I think what Justice Jackson meant was this. The logic of liberty and the logic of security, if blindly followed, each leads to impractical regimes. Carried to its extreme, the logic of liberty is a suicide pact. Patrick Henry's famous cry. Carried to its extreme, the logic of security is a government which can bend every law with a claim of urgent necessity. A government by fiat, not law.

Between these two extremes, we must chart a middle course. Since ideology and dogmatic logic lead us to crash at either end, then I suppose we must rely on common sense to point the way. As I leave government, as you all take up these challenges, may it guide you as well.

The Honorable William J. Haynes II served as General Counsel of the Department of Defense from May 2001 until February 2008. This speech was delivered as the Lewis Powell Lecture to the American College of Trial Lawyers in Tucson, Arizona, on March 8, 2008.

Rewriting History: Lies that Hurt Us All

by William Wilson.

As Congress and the Administration work to prevent the crisis in the financial sector from spilling over into the larger economy, the vultures are swarming. In an Associated Press article yesterday, the following quote is made by Barney Frank, ultra-liberal Democrat of Massachusetts:

“The private sector got us into this mess…The government has to get us out of it. We do want to do it carefully.”

This is obscene. This “mess”, as Congressman Frank so eloquently put it, is the fault of government pure and simple. And, it is the personal fault of Barney Frank. For him to now hide his near-criminal behavior by pointing a finger at the entire private sector is the height of arrogance.

Consider the facts.

Under rules implemented by the Clinton Administration in 1995, banks and mortgage companies were required to give loans to people who could not afford them. This scheme was welfare pure and simple—hand over money to people everyone knew would not be able to pay it back. The banks and mortgage companies did as required. Otherwise they would face stiff penalties and possibly lose their license to operate. So, they gave out the money to put people in homes they could not afford.

But the banks had to get the money from somewhere. They got it from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two failed quasi-government organizations. Fannie and Freddie urged, encouraged and bullied banks to give out more and more high-risk loans. They then bought these bogus mortgages and sold them to investors, again with the implied backing of the U.S. Government.

So, why wouldn’t an investment firm not buy these securities? After all, they were marketed as having the backing of the U.S. taxpayers.

The Wall Street Journal detailed Barney Frank’s sorted history of defending the scammers:

• In 2000, then-Rep. Richard Baker proposed a bill to reform Fannie and Freddie's oversight. Mr. Frank dismissed the idea, saying concerns about the two were "overblown" and that there was "no federal liability there whatsoever."

• Two years later, Mr. Frank was at it again. "I do not regard Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as problems," he said in response to another reform push. And then: "I regard them as great assets."

• Again in June 2003, the favorite of the Beltway press corps assured the public that "there is no federal guarantee" of Fan and Fred obligations.

• A month later, Freddie Mac's multibillion-dollar accounting scandal broke into the open. But Mr. Frank was sanguine. "I do not think we are facing any kind of a crisis," he said at the time.

Three months later he repeated the claim that Fannie and Freddie posed no "threat to the Treasury." Even suggesting that heresy, he added, could become "a self-fulfilling prophecy."

• In April 2004, Fannie announced a multibillion-dollar financial "misstatement" of its own. Mr. Frank was back for the defense. Fannie and Freddie posed no risk to taxpayers, he said, adding that "I think Wall Street will get over it" if the two collapsed.

Pretty clear. It was not the “private sector” failing as Congressman Frank declared. It was government that failed. Specifically, it was people like Barney Frank that failed the American people. Moreover, he committed these acts for a pure ideological reason—to advance his warped left-wing vision.

But it goes deeper still. By attacking the entire “private sector”, Frank is declaring his opposition to small business and to tens of millions of people who labor for the betterment of their families by saving and investing.

The central issue of the proposed bailout proposed by the Bush Administration—the issue that prompted Barney Frank’s childish and insulting remark—is how to get billions of dollars securities based on the mortgages held by people who cannot afford them out of the system. You can argue over whether to do it or how to do it—but that is the aim of the proposal.

And what does Comrade Frank now insist is a deal-breaker? More money has to be made available to keep these people in the homes they couldn’t afford in the first place! Oh, and of course, many on his side are demanding that state and local governments who have been spending at double-digit increases every year for a decade be bailed out as well. No, they shouldn’t have to cut the feather-bedding or cut back on the silly-expensive union contracts. Barney Frank wants the American taxpayers to bail them out too.

Taking the global view, here is what happened and this is where we are. Knowing the American people were sick and tired of the welfare handouts, the liberals devised a backdoor way to funnel billions of dollars to their welfare clients. It was based on a Ponzi scheme that finally went broke. A lot of people made money along the way but the central rationale was always to transfer hundreds of billions of dollars in welfare to low income citizens.

And now that the game is exposed, the first thing these thieves do is blame the “private sector.” They are using the destruction they have caused to justify giving them more power to do even more damage.

That is what is at stake. Will we hand our country over to a group of devious, venal socialists who hate private enterprise, individual responsibility and personal freedom? Or, will we step back from the abyss, clean up the mess and set our house in order?

If he has done nothing else, Barney Frank has at least clarified the issues and made the choice clear for all willing to observe the facts. As valuable a service as this is, it should not be enough to keep him out of a well-deserved jail cell.

Media Bias Backlash

Editorial from the Washington Times.

It seems that a majority of voters perceive the media is slanted in favor of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party. As a result, we are in the midst of a voter backlash against the media.

The issue has come to the fore over the selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate. In a Rasmussen poll published Sept. 4, 51 percent of respondents said that reporters are trying to damage Mrs. Palin's reputation with their news coverage. Twenty-four percent said that negative stories about Mrs. Palin made them more likely to vote for John McCain in November.

Us Weekly magazine came under scrutiny for their latest cover story "Babies, Lies and Scandal," as critics argue it is a gross mischaracterization of Mrs. Palin. This, in contrast to a June 17 cover story headlined "Michelle Obama: Why Barack Loves Her." Even Oprah Winfrey has been accused of bias for not interviewing Mrs. Palin on her show, even though she has had Mr. Obama on as a guest - prior to his official campaign for the presidency - in 2005 and 2006. Mrs. Winfrey has also campaigned for Mr. Obama.

The national news networks have also come under fire repeatedly for biased reporting with a liberal slant. In June, the former anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News Tom Brokaw chastised the press for insisting that Hillary Clinton exit from the Democratic primary. He referred to the news coverage as "inappropriate" and "commentary disguised as reporting." At a panel in Denver, sponsored by the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy, Mr. Brokaw said that MSNBC hosts Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann demonstrated bias in their election reporting: "I think Keith has gone too far. I think Chris has gone too far."

MSNBC network executives at last responded to the drumbeat of criticism they have received. This week, the network announced that Messrs. Olbermann and Matthews will no longer be co-anchors of political-night coverage; they will be replaced by NBC News correspondent David Gregory. Messrs. Olbermann and Matthews will remain commentators.

The McCain campaign has long criticized media bias. In June, a New York Times report alleging Mr. McCain's ties with lobbyists was denounced as a hit piece. There was also outrage among McCain supporters when the New York Times published a July 14 op-ed on Iraq written by Mr. Obama but disqualified Mr. McCain's op-ed for failing to meet its standards. The public was not amused.

One upshot to all this is that many Americans are turning to "new media" - the Internet - for more information without the bias. Once the subject of debate and inquiry: Does liberal media bias really exist? It is now recognized by a majority of Americans as an established fact.

Robocop's Comment:

Media bias? No shit. I am glad the general public is starting to realize this. That gives more people a reason to visit blogs like this one. Thank you left wing media.

Crash Dummies For "The Cause" 09.08.08

This entertainment discovered at Alamo Nation. This environmental group called "Earth First" tried recruiting me from campus back in 1988.

A-Holes Of The World

Robocop's Comment:

I could not resist!

Crash Dummies For "The Cause"

Another Look Into The Other Side:



Robocop's Comment:

Bongo drums,and poor hygiene ,oh my!

False Messiah

Article by Christopher Orlet.

I hadn't heard gushing like this since the Flood of '92 was lapping at my second-story windows. Only this time the gusher was not the Mighty Mississippi, but someone nearly as wide, i.e., the film director Rob Reiner (Misery, When Harry Met Sally, A Few Good Men) in an interview with the Politico. Asked how things might be different when Obama wins the presidency, Reiner gushed:

There'd be love and respect, but I think you'd have it even bigger than Clinton. With someone like Obama, I think the whole country, the whole world will coalesce. Every election is about change, and change takes a long time because there are big issues that can't be changed overnight. But the one thing that will change dramatically is how we're viewed around the world. Once Obama is in there, the world will view us in an entirely different light. And that, to me, is a good thing...


Conservative pundits have noted the Biblical, even apocalyptic imagery employed by Barack's supporters (which include the mainstream media). But their hyperbole is no mere literary device. They are true believers. "Once Barack is in" a Golden Age of Peace and Prosperity will descend upon the Earth, a period not unlike the Millennium when the messiah returns to rule for a thousand years, only Barack is supposed to step aside after eight. With Barack in charge the Earth will be transformed miraculously into a giant diversity job fair with above-minimum wage jobs a-plenty and free health care for all. What's more, war will cease. Conservatives will lie down with liberals. Muslims and Jews will spoon and pitch woo.

The language of the Obama cultist is even more over-the-top than anything the millenarians could conjure up. I mean, that bit about love and respect. Maybe the proper analogy is not to the Millennium, but to a rave where Barack is the new Ecstasy. Take him and you'll want to dance, hug total strangers and suck on little raspberry pacifiers. And it's not just America that will be saved by the coming of Barack. The whole "international community" can be -- no, make that will be born again. Indeed the entire "international community will "coalesce" and become one. Who needs multiculturalism and diversity anyway? Think of it, Pakistani and Indian, Palestinian and Israeli, Sudanese Arab and Darfuri will lay aside their differences. The scales will fall from their eyes. What were we ever fighting about? I don't remember! Silly! Have some pork? An Obamaburger? Don't mind if I do...


THAT'S ABOUT THE BEST we can expect from the 60s Generation, a cohort that preached -- and I do mean preached -- the gospel of no heaven, no borders, no possessions, and all the nonsense a former Beatle catalogued in that puerile and vacuous Hippie anthem "Imagine." Of course, not one of the boomers really believed that twaddle, but it was cool to pretend. Some are pretending still; to do otherwise would be to admit that your whole life was a sham.

Aging boomers, like Rob Reiner, must have been terribly disappointed when finally they got an authentic liberal, pot-smoking, sax-playing, Yale lawyer in the White House and, instead of changing the world, or the country, or even the federal government, he spent his term chasing interns around the Oval Office and hiding from his wife.

Meanwhile Reiner -- one of that wife's biggest supporters in the primaries -- insists that during an Obama administration America will be the beloved of all the world. Maybe not respected, but loved. No sooner than Barack takes the oath than the U.S. will transform from Great Satan, Imperial Bully, and Destroyer of the Planet to Big Lovable Lug. French shopkeepers will stop being rude to us. Venezuelans will pump us full of free oil, which, of course, we will not accept, since it is a non-renewable resource, and the Taliban will lay down their surface-to-air missiles and go home to their half dozen wives and two dozen children and tell wondrous tales of Obama.

If that were indeed the case I would be the first in line November 4 to rock the vote for Barack, even if it meant socialized medicine and an activist Supreme Court. You think I don't get tired of being snubbed by Frogs? Think I don't grow weary of seeing Old Glory burned and trampled in the dirt streets of Palestine? Then again, Mr. Reiner might consider actually talking to a foreigner or two. At the very least he could read David Aaronovitch in the Times of London, who acknowledges that Obama -- sweetness and light though he is -- is still an American, therefore eventually the rest of the world will hate him too:

[T]here isn't an American president since Eisenhower who hasn't ended up, at some point or other, being depicted by the world's cartoonists as a cowboy astride a phallic missile. It happened to Bill Clinton when he bombed Iraq; it will happen to Mr Obama when his reinforced forces in Afghanistan or Pakistan mistake a meeting of tribal elders for an unwise gathering of Taleban and al-Qaeda. Then the new president...will be the target of that mandarin Anglo-French conceit that our superior colonialism somehow gives us the standing to critique the Yank's naive and inferior imperialism.


Maybe it's time Meathead took that long overdue trip outside of the Never-Neverland of Tinseltown. He seems unable to differentiate between actors and real people, fictional tales and actual human behavior. If Obama wins in November it will be by the narrowest of margins. The nation will remain split down the middle. The new president's attempts to socialize large swaths of society will not generate love and respect, but an outraged backlash from conservatives and libertarians. Still, it is always great fun to read interviews with Hollywood leftists. For some unfathomable reason Americans like to hear what they have to say. And as entertainment it is certainly preferable to their films.


Christopher Orlet is a freelance writer based in St. Louis, MO.

Robocop's Comment:

Makes me want to hold hands with a Libtard,and sing kumbaya.

Reparations for Al Qaeda

Editorial by Jeffrey Lord of The American Spectator.

Reparations for Al Qaeda
By Jeffrey Lord
Published 7/29/2008 12:08:14 AM


Does Barack Obama believe it's time for America to apologize to al Qaeda?

Does he share the increasingly vocal calls of his fellow liberals that Americans should not just apologize to Osama and his followers but pay reparations as well? Having cited the U.S. treatment of Nazis, does he now believe the U.S. government should be subjected to a class action suit by his trial lawyer allies on behalf of any surviving Nazi soldiers or their descendants?

You think I'm joking, right? Wrong.

The push has begun among Obama's fellow-liberals for reparations to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda warriors. Look no further than the Los Angeles Times review of the new book by liberal journalist Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals. Mayer's indictment of the Bush administration's fight against terrorism has predictably received glowing reviews from the gatekeepers of liberalism, including a July 15th review from Times staff writer Tim Rutten.

In wonderfully liberal style that is beyond parody, Rutten uses a book review to endorse the idea of paying money to Osama's fighters who, in the eyes of liberals, have been denied their "right" of habeas corpus at Guantanamo. The denial of habeas to non-Americans captured on foreign battlefields is, of course, also a major campaign point for Senator Obama. Obama, restating his long-held position about captured al Qaeda fighters having the right of habeas corpus, was prompted by the recent 5-4 Supreme Court decision in Boumediene v. Bush. The liberals on the Court, with the mind-boggling addition of Reagan appointee Anthony Kennedy, held that contrary to Bush administration and congressional policy, not to mention all of American history, the prisoners of war or "detainees" picked up off the battlefields (in this case Afghanistan and Iraq) are in fact entitled to the same constitutional rights as American citizens.

Within weeks of this Obama-approved decision, his allies in liberalism have now started lobbying not simply for habeas corpus rights for al Qaeda but reparations as well. They believe American taxpayers should pay monetary damages to bin Laden terrorists, with Mr. Rutten of the Times approvingly citing the liberal editors of the Jesuit magazine America: The National Catholic Weekly. In their July 21st issue these presumed Obama supporters say this:

Finally, in the years ahead our country must still come to grips with our national acquiescence to the politics of fear, which has led to the detention and abuse of hundreds of individuals. Among the necessary steps will be restoration of freedom to innocent detainees, accompanied by public apology and some monetary restitution for the years they lost to incarceration. Furthermore, Congress needs to accept responsibility for its complicity with the executive in laws that denied suspects rightful appeal. A national truth commission should be instituted to establish political accountability for the decisions, policies and statutes that placed suspects outside the protection of the law.


In other words, if you have been captured on the field of battle fighting the U.S. military on behalf of the global jihad and, as a result, are now on an extended stay at Gitmo, liberals feel the appropriate policy of the United States government is to 1) apologize for capturing you and 2) pay you some cold American cash to ease your pain and humiliation.

This sentiment is the obvious next step behind the Obama contention that foreign enemies are deserving of the same constitutional rights as American citizens. To the extensive applause of liberals like Ms. Mayer and Mr. Rutten, Obama has insisted that the "principle of habeas corpus, that a state can't just hold you for any reason without charging you and without giving you any kind of due process -- that's the essence of who we are." Exhibiting a considerable ignorance of American history, he went on by saying:

"I mean, you remember during the Nuremberg trials, part of what made us different was even after these Nazis had performed atrocities that no one had ever seen before, we still gave them a day in court and that taught the entire world about who we are but also the basic principles of rule of law. Now the Supreme Court upheld that principle...."


Unsurprisingly Obama's rehash of American treatment of German POWs is flatly wrong. Around 200 German war crimes defendants went on trial in what most people commonly refer to as the "Nuremberg Trials," with another 1,600 tried under the laws governing military justice. All these trials, of course, took place after the German surrender in May of 1945. None occurred during the war itself. The trials ran from 1945 until 1949.

The obvious question never seems to occur to Obama. If America's only problem was with a sum total of about 1,800 German soldiers, why all that disturbing fuss known as World War II? What happened to all the Germans who weren't killed outright when they were captured on the battlefields of Europe and North Africa as al Qaeda fighters are being captured now in Afghanistan or Iraq? And what about all the captured Italians and Japanese who were busily fighting America in the 1940s?


TO BE SPECIFIC, almost a half million of them were brought to America. Once here they were stashed in 511 internment camps sprinkled all around the good old USA from North Carolina to Iowa to California. And no, I'm not talking about or including here FDR's infamous internment camps for 120,000 Japanese-American citizens, who did indeed have their constitutional rights violated. We're talking about captured Nazis, Italians and Japanese -- warriors on the battlefield for Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini, the bin Laden's of their day. From the viewpoint of the L.A. Times' Rutten and Jane Mayer, that would mean these people were imprisoned in 511 "American gulags," not just one measly Gitmo. Not a single one of these men were given their habeas corpus rights. They were not tried. Not one. They were held as prisoners, forced to do whatever labor their American captors thought suitable until America had won the war.

Forced labor was their lot. Like the case of a German POW known to history only as "Hans" who was made to load and unload trucks at the E.G. Morse Poultry house in Mason City, Iowa. Hour after hour, day after day, with no lawyer from the ACLU to come to his rescue and no Jane Mayer to write him up sympathetically, young Hans was forced to do the backbreaking labor American men weren't around to do because they were overseas fighting Germans. Then there was the young German who signed himself in a note to an American girl only as "R." "R" was frustrated that his status "thwarts all my plans" and described what he called his "instantaneous dead life here." "R" was in this vicious state of affairs because the Roosevelt administration had him doing his forced labor at a cannery in Owatonna, Minnesota.

Then there was "Jerry." Whether that was really his name or he identified himself as such because it was the American slang for Germans is not known. How did "Jerry" find himself in the wilds of Fairmont, Minnesota? He was captured in North Africa where he was trying to kill Americans as a member of Nazi General Erwin Rommel's murderous Afrika Corps. Did I mention that "Jerry" was crying at his sad state one particular day that he was standing in downtown Fairmont during a momentary pause in his labors? It seems the day in question was June 6, 1944. Minnesotans in Fairmont were listening to radio accounts of D-Day and the fierce fighting that was in progress as American soldiers sought to break the iron grip "Jerry's" fellow countrymen had imposed on all of Europe. Jerry's tears, of course, were not being shed for the Americans charging those beaches. Beaches where, according to the D-Day Museum, almost 7,000 Americans were lost that June 6th as they fought the followers of a zealot obsessed with mass murdering Jews and establishing a thousand year Reich.

Quite aside from these "American gulags" in America were the American gulags in Europe and North Africa. The number of prisoners, according to General Dwight Eisenhower, was almost overwhelming. There were a quarter million Axis prisoners that had to be dealt with in Tunisia alone. The Battle of the Bulge all by itself produced German prisoners at the rate of 10,000 a day. Here's this from the late historian Stephen Ambrose, an Eisenhower biographer, in a 1991 article in the New York Times:

There was widespread mistreatment of German prisoners in the spring and summer of 1945. Men were beaten, denied water, forced to live in open camps without shelter, given inadequate food rations and inadequate medical care. Their mail was withheld. In some cases prisoners made a "soup" of water and grass in order to deal with their hunger. Men did die needlessly and inexcusably.


This, of course, on top of the fact that none of these hundreds of thousands of Nazi "detainees" were told of their habeas corpus rights by Allied troops.

So now what? Sixty-three years have passed. Isn't it time make amends to the Nazis?


WILL OBAMA, MAYER and Rutten have the courage to follow their arguments to their logical conclusions? If the idea is to have American taxpayers fork over damages to Osama's men, why not Hitler's? Where are the trial lawyers who have been flocking to Guantanamo? The size of the damage pot in a suit against the U.S. government for the treatment of Nazis would, one suspects, be considerable. Not to mention that many of the men in these "American gulags" doubtless have descendants who should, according to this line of thought, be recompensed for the horrors visited upon their families by America and the "men of zeal" (Mayer's favorite phrase for the Bush-Cheney administration) led by Franklin Roosevelt.

Amazingly, Mayer isn't satisfied with just ensuring that al Qaeda fighters get their day in court. Doubtless uncomprehendingly (one would hope) she chastises Abraham Lincoln for his "infamous" decision to suspend the right of habeas corpus during the Civil War. One can only be stunned at the use of the word "infamous" here. As written, she leaves the impression she would just as soon, with a sigh of resignation, accept the existence of slavery rather than impose on the rights of white Confederate sympathizers Lincoln saw as a serious impediment to his objectives of preserving the Union and ending slavery. Her sentiments, while startling 143 years after the war ended, are a reminder of the "dark side" exhibited by the Democrats of the day. Not only did they violently object to Lincoln's actions, in 1864 they ran on a platform that proclaimed the war a failure. In short, supporters of slavery before the war (and instigators of the Ku Klux Klan and segregation after the war) were prepared to accept slavery for blacks as long as the white folks had their habeas. Is this the logic Mayer, Rutten -- and more to the point Obama -- are endorsing?

To be blunt, yes.

What is the difference between, say, German detainees Hans, "R," and Jerry and an al Qaeda Gitmo resident named Abdullah Salih al Ajmi? The first three remained lawyerless while they waited out World War II in Iowa and Minnesota. The last, Abdullah, went through Gitmo's thoroughly lawyered process and was released. On March 23, 2008, he showed up in Mosul, Iraq, when he drove a truck packed with 5,000 to 10,000 pounds of explosives into an Iraqi Army base. He killed 13 Iraqi soldiers and wounded 42 on his last mission, a mission that would never have occurred were he still in Gitmo.

Are mistakes made in war? Obviously, yes. No one would ever be foolish enough to deny it -- whether in this war or any other. It is, as history sadly says, the nature of the beast. Should the now out-in-the open liberal demand for reparations to al Qaeda be an issue in this campaign? Should the thinking behind it be exposed and understood? One would hope that Senator McCain, the only man in this race who actually has seen war close up, would raise the subject.

Is it really okay with Obama that Americans pay damages to Osama?


Jeffrey Lord is the creator, co-founder and CEO of QubeTV, a conservative online video site. A Reagan White House political director and author, he writes from Pennsylvania.

A Few Questions for Barack Obama

Editorial by Fox News' Radley Balko.

In my last column, I posed questions to GOP presidential hopeful John McCain. This week, it's Democrat Barack Obama's turn.

— In February, you said you might support vouchers and charter schools if empirical data showed that they improve education (some studies show that they do). Admirably, your position was, "I will not allow my predispositions to stand in the way of making sure that our kids can learn." After pressure from the teachers unions, you quickly backed off from that position, stating that your campaign doesn't support vouchers "in any shape or form." What prompted that change? And if it's important that we not "throw up our hands" and "walk away from the public schools," why do you send your own kids to private schools?

— Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton intends to terminate D.C.'s federal school voucher program, even though those vouchers are paid through a separate fund that takes no money at all from D.C.'s public schools (which already spend $10,000 more per pupil per year than the city's private schools). Del. Holmes Norton says the program undermines the public schools. You've signed on to the plan to eliminate the program. But given that the program takes no money from the city's already bloated public schools, isn't it only "undermining" the public school system by exposing how unhappy D.C. parents really are with the schools' performance? Isn't that a good thing?

— You've expressed support for the idea of a "no fly" zone over Darfur because of human rights abuses. What's happening in Sudan is certainly tragic and abhorrent. But what is our national security interest there? Should we send the U.S. military every time there are wide-scale human rights abuses happening anywhere on the globe? Should we send troops to Myanmar? Uzbekistan? Turkmenistan? Iran? Saudi Arabia?

— You not only supported the latest federal farm bill, you commended it, stating that it "will provide America's hard-working farmers and ranchers with more support and more predictability." Critics have called that $307 billion monstrosity an orgy of earmarks, corporate welfare, and protectionism. It actually increases subsidies to huge agribusinesses in an era of record grain prices — subsidies that are already crushing farmers in the developing world. The New York Times called it "disgraceful." The Wall Street Journal called it a "scam." How does the "change" candidate justify supporting a bill larded with sweetheart deals for big agribusiness when just about everyone not getting a check from the bill opposed it?

— You continue to support ethanol subsidies despite the fact that corn-based ethanol is inefficient, environmentally unfriendly, and part of the cause of rising food prices. Even liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman calls ethanol "[b]ad for the economy, bad for consumers, bad for the planet." Perhaps your support stems from you representing a corn producing state. But is supporting a wasteful policy to win votes "change we can believe in," or is it a good sign that you're just another politician?

— In your autobiography, you admit to using marijuana and cocaine in high school and college. Yet you largely support the federal drug war — a change from several years ago when you said you'd be open to decriminalizing marijuana. Would Barack Obama be where he is today if he had been arrested in college for using drugs? Doesn't the fact that you and our current president (who has all but admitted to prior drug use) have risen to such high stature suggest that the worst thing about illicit drugs is not the drugs themselves, but what the government will do to you if you're caught?

— In a speech to Cuban-Americans in Miami, you called the Cuban trade embargo "an important inducement for change," a 180-degree shift from your prior position. The trade embargo has been in place for 46 years. Did denying an entire generation of Cubans access to American goods, culture, and ideas induce any actual change? Wasn't the real effect just to keep Cubans poor and isolated? In communist countries like Vietnam and China, trade with the U.S. has ushered in economic reform, and vastly improved the standard of living. Why wouldn't it be the same if we were to start trading with Cuba?

— In addition to the drugs, Cuba, and school voucher issues, you have also changed or revised your position in recent months on the war in Iraq, government eavesdropping and immunity for the telecom companies, and holding employers accountable for hiring illegal immigrants. Under some circumstances, changing or revising one's position can show admirable introspection — the ability to revise prior conceptions with new information. Some of your new positions are more conservative. Some are more liberal. But they do seem to have one thing in common: Should we be concerned that your shifts have been to those positions that give more power and influence to government? Are there any areas where you'd actually roll back the federal government?

— In October you asked a congregation in South Carolina to help you become "an instrument of God," and to join you in building a "Kingdom, right here on Earth." Is such lofty, sanctimonious rhetoric really appropriate from a would-be president? Why shouldn't we be suspicious of a man who believes politics — indeed, his politics — are God's politics? Isn't using the political process to build a "Kingdom on earth" the sort of thing we're used to hearing from the religious right? Should we be cautious of political leaders who believe they're agents of the Divinity?

— You have called for a "civilian national security force," essentially a non-military public service corps that in your words is "just as powerful, just as strong," and "just as well-funded" as the military. Northwestern University law professor James Lindgren has estimated that your proposal would cost somewhere between $100 and $500 billion—or between 10 and 50 percent of all federal income tax revenues. How do you plan to pay for this program?

— Your wife said that as president, "Barack Obama will . . . demand that you shed your cynicism . . . That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual . . ." How is any of this remotely the responsibility of the president? Where in the Constitution does it say that the president should be our personal motivator and spiritual leader? Will you help us lose weight and eat our vegetables, too?

Robocop's Comment:

Damn good questions. I suspect they will be both unanswered and ignored by the Libtard media.

Democratic Party Unity

Warning: Contains some implied sexual content.

Welcome Pedo Supporters

I would like to welcome the visitors from the Something Awful Forums for visiting this blog in support for baby rapers. Your "Anonymous" attempts to rescue the reputation and well being of pedophiles provides a look into the other side. I especially like the thread titled: "hope after all: supreme court rejects "megan's law"". Too bad for them it was not the Supreme Court. Please welcome these NAMBLA groupies.

In The Name Of Peace?

Military Apparent Target of Times Square Blast

NEW YORK —
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said a blast that shook Times Square and disrupted transit Thursday appears to have deliberately targeted the military recruiting center where it went off.

Bloomberg lambasted the perpetrator for apparently going after the armed forces.

"The fact that this appears deliberately directed at the recruiting station insults every one of our brave men and women around the world," the mayor said in a news conference in Times Square on Thursday.

Authorities in New York City are looking for the culprit who set off the rudimentary explosive device in Times Square early Thursday, with one witness describing a hooded man on a bicycle wearing a backpack and acting suspiciously just before the blast at the recruiting station.

New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said an ammunition box was found at the scene.

"This was not a particularly sophisticated device," he said during the Thursday press conference.

Kelly said police were talking to a witness who was in the area shortly before the 3:45 a.m. explosion. The witness described a male bicyclist wearing a hood, dark clothing and a backpack and acting strangely — but said didn't see the man's face, according to Kelly.

Bloomberg said no one has come forward to report seeing a suspect plant a bomb, and no one so far has spoken of witnessing the device going off. Authorities were in the process of reviewing all the security camera footage.

The blast occurred when an explosive device detonated, causing minor damage to an empty recruiting station in Times Square — an area that is heavily populated with New York City tourists. Hotel guests were shaken by the force in their rooms high above the scene. No one was injured, but the station's glass entryway was shattered.

The Homeland Security department said there was no sign of an "imminent threat" to the United States in the blast, according to Reuters.

The agency also announced Thursday that the FBI would be joining the probe into what caused the explosion.

In October, two small explosive devices were tossed over a fence at the Mexican Consulate on Manhattan's East Side, shattering some windows; police said they believed someone on a bicycle threw the devices. At the time, police said they were investigating whether it was connected to a similar incident at the British consulate on May 5, 2005.

Bloomberg had harsh words for the person or people who planted the explosives.

"Whoever the coward was that committed this disgraceful act on our city will be found and prosecuted to the full extent of the law," he said. "We will not tolerate such attacks. .... People are going about their business. They are not intimidated."

Army Capt. Charlie Jaquillard, who is the commander of Army recruiting in Manhattan, said no one was inside the station at the time — where the Marines, Air Force and Navy also recruit.

"If it is something that's directed toward American troops than it's something that's taken very seriously and is pretty unfortunate," he said.

The explosion prompted a huge police response that disrupted transit at the "crossroads of the world."

It left a gaping hole in the front window and shattered a glass door, twisting and blackening the metal frame of the building, which is on a traffic island.

Police said investigators would have to examine the evidence to determine exactly what kind of device was used.

The recruiting center has drawn sporadic protests for many years, including in October 2005, when a group who call themselves the Granny Peace Brigade rallied there against the Iraq war. Eighteen activists, most of them grandmothers in their 80s and 90s, were later acquitted of disorderly conduct.

Police cars and yellow tape initially blocked drivers from entering one of the world's busiest crossroads, though some traffic was allowed through around the start of rush hour.

Witnesses staying at a Marriott hotel four blocks away said they could feel the building shake with the blast.

"I was up on the 44th floor and I could feel it. It was a big bang," said Darla Peck, 25, of Portland, Oregon.

"It shook the building. I thought it could have been thunder, but I looked down and there was a massive plume of smoke so I knew it was an explosion," said Terry Leighton, 48, of London, who was staying on the 21st floor of the Marriot.

Members of the police department's bomb squad and fire officials gathered outside the station in the early morning darkness, and police cars and yellow tape blocked drivers — most of them behind the wheels of taxicabs — from entering one of the world's busiest crossroads.

Though subway cars passed through the Times Square station without stopping in the early hours of the investigation, normal service was soon restored, with some delays.

The recruiting station was renovated in 1999 to better fit into the flashy ambiance of Times Square, using neon tubing to give the glass and steel office a patriotic American flag motif. For a half century, the station was the armed forces' busiest recruiting center. It has set national records for enlistment, averaging about 10,000 volunteers a year.

Police said it was too early to say if the blast may have been related to the two other minor explosions in the city.

In October, two small explosive devices were tossed over a fence at the Mexican consulate, shattering three windows but causing no injuries. No threats had been made against the consulate, and no one took responsibility for the explosion, police said.

Aside from the attack on the Mexican consulate, another happened on May 5, 2005, at the British consulate. In that incident, the explosions took place in the early morning hours, when Britons were going to the polls in an election that returned Prime Minister Tony Blair to power.

In both cases, the instruments were fake grenades sometimes sold as novelty items. They were packed with black power and detonated with fuses, but incapable of causing serious harm, police said.

Robocop's Comment:

This proves an important point. These anti-war hypocrites are not "anti-war" as much as they are ANTI-AMERICAN.