letter to David Ignatius (on Obama’s foreign policy)…

OK. Confession up front:

I was hoping your bottom line was going to be It Sucks!

Not to put too fine a point on it, but you managed to include every Democratic Party foreign policy, bash-Bush talking point of this decade.

David, just as one example…do I need to point you to the dictionary definition of unilateral? You referred to “the Bush administration’s arrogance and unilateralism.” You know better than that. The accurate (and honest) descriptor would be non-U.N. sanctioned.

Here’s another, contained within the same phrase: arrogance.You are not amazed at the arrogance of a president with no foreign policy experience at all (zero, nada) thrusting himself onto the world stage filled to the brim and overflowing with the (apparently sincere) belief that his words alone could make all America’s enemies turn their swords into plowshares and we could all be friends? And the thought that, by turning his back on Bush administration agreements with Israel—agreements that Israel acted on in good faith—and by adopting the intellectually-bankrupt moral equivalence line of every Israel-basher from the U.N. to Ron Paul in telling Israel to engage in some “serious self-reflection”… This doesn’t look like arrogance to you?

The one redeeming quality I find in your well-crafted, elegantly-worded, and completely misguided column, is the opportunity it provides to write an incisive (and better-informed) retort. I’ll just publish this letter on my blog. Hey, if you’re lucky, I’ll even publish your response!

another letter to John Cornyn, this time on Sotomayor…

I am alarmed by this quote from you, provided by the AP in a story titled “GOP senators weigh options for Sotomayor”:

“Your judicial record strikes me as pretty much in the mainstream of judicial decision-making.”

The issue for me is that, in evaluating Judge Sotomayor’s judicial philosophy, are we to give more weight to what she says—on multiple occasions—are her priorities and principles, or to her judicial record, which—until this point—has been constrained by precedent and by rulings of higher courts?

I think we should judge her by her repeated statements and be cautious about giving her a lifetime appointment on a Court where there are no constraints. Yes, during the hearings, she did her best John Roberts imitation, but it was obvious, to me at least (and to some of her liberal brethren) that she was speaking words that did not reflect her own convictions.

She is clearly out of the mainstream of judicial philosophy.

Judge Sotomayor also lacks Roberts’s intellectual depth. She is clearly in over her head intellectually, as the liberal Jeffrey Rosen predicted. (And while my long-time, half-kidding wish to appoint at least one grammarian to SCOTUS will undoubtedly remain unfulfilled, wouldn’t it be helpful if our justices had a better mastery of syntax and grammar than that offered by the oft-stumbling Judge Sotomayor?)

I was shocked, reading the also-liberal Georgetown Law Professor Mike Seidman say he was “completely disgusted” by her testimony:

“If she was not perjuring herself, she is intellectually unqualified to be on the Supreme Court.”

I often look to Ed Whelan for insight into judicial nominations. Over the years I have found him to be a calm, knowledgeable, and plain-spoken champion for a Constitutionally-centered judiciary. This is what he says about Judge Sotomayor’s testimony. I hope you’ll take his wisdom seriously:

Judge Sotomayor deserves an A+ for brazen doublespeak. She emphatically rejected the lawless “empathy” standard for judging that President Obama used to select her, but she denied the plain import of her many statements contesting the possibility and desirability of judicial impartiality. She hid behind a ridiculously simplistic caricature of judging that embarrassed and disgusted her most vociferous backers, but she never recognized any meaningful bounds on the role of a Supreme Court justice. She gave a series of confused statements about the use of foreign law that are inconsistent with each other and that contradict a speech that she gave just three months ago.

The primary question that Judge Sotomayor’s testimony raises is whether her thinking is really so muddled or whether she was being savvily deceptive—or both.

In this difficult time for our Nation, we cannot afford to unleash a person who is either willing to lie in order to be confirmed or simply not intelligent enough to know the difference between her most-cherished beliefs and the hastily-memorized bullet copy the administration gave her before the hearings.

We also cannot afford to continue our long practice of blind deference to the President while the other side does everything it can to destroy our best judicial nominees.

I urge you, Senator Cornyn, to use every tool available to you to keep this radical off the Supreme Court, up to and including a filibuster. Don’t be afraid that, by doing this, you will offend Latinos. Bring to their attention the treatment given to another Latino who was a genuine legal intellectual—also an immigrant whose native language was not English—the brilliant Miguel Estrada.

Texas and the country are depending on you to be our voice and to do the right thing.

Thank you.

“apologist” in chief?

Over on Contentions, John Steele Gordon is searching for the right word. I don’t think he found it:

As far as I know, there is no word in English for the opposite of jingoist. But if there were, its entry in the dictionary would belong next to Barack Obama’s photograph. It seems he can’t set foot on foreign soil without apologizing for this country’s past sins and promising that it will sin no more under his leadership. In doing so, of course, he both disses his own country and praises himself by implication.

Judging by the title of his post, Mr. Gordon evidently thinks apologist is the word he’s looking for. How do we break it to him that an apologist is someone who explains and defends something (or someone)—not someone who apologizes for it?

Barack Obama as Apologist in Chief?

Would that he were . . .

Edward Schumacher-Matos on Honduras…

Edward Schumacher-Matos has a fairly good piece on Honduras in tomorrow’s Washington Post. Even with its weaknesses (a few contradictions and one simple verbal misunderstanding), the article clarifies some important issues.

You wouldn’t necessarily know that, though, from the way it begins:

President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are on the verge of achieving their own coup in Honduras and advancing American interests with a deftness not seen from Washington in many years.

This is pretty embarrassing, but Schumacher-Matos goes on to outline some potentially good outcomes from what the president (and secretary of state) have said and done. Still . . .

He goes on to make some very good points:

The bigger question will be: What have the rest of us learned? We have all been pushing Latin Americans to uphold the rule of law, but beyond simply insisting that Zelaya was elected, few in the OAS, the European Union or other critics have been willing to give much credence to Hondurans for trying to do just that.

This is very good and others have been saying this as well (most powerfully, Miguel Estrada, both a brilliant lawyer and a Honduran native).

This is also very good:

The Honduran Supreme Court, as it is empowered to do under the constitution, ordered the army to arrest Zelaya after he began to carry out a referendum for a constitutional convention that the court, Congress and his own attorney general said was illegal. Yet, many Latin American and European governments still call it a “military coup” or, as the Associated Press called it several days afterward, a “military power grab.” Clinton and Obama dropped calling it a coup.

In the next paragraph Schumacher-Matos brings out a point I’ve been screaming to my friends about, but which even Estrada missed:

There are gray areas having to do with presidential powers and the fact that the Honduran constitution prohibits extradition of citizens. The army exiled Zelaya in consultation with civilian leaders to avoid precisely the sort of violence seen when Zelaya tried to return. He forced the country and its institutions against the wall, and for that he should take his medicine.

This is a crucial point which the legacy media has totally missed. Zelaya’s attempt to return in some sort of triumphal procession set off the very violent mob action his exile was intended to prevent (or at least minimize). Keep in mind his earlier attempt to lead a mob in storming the place where the ballots were being stored.

What mars the paragraph, though, is a misunderstanding between extradition and exile. I don’t have any familiarity with the Honduran constitution beyond what Schumacher-Matos and others say about it (Estrada and Octavio Sánchez in particular), and therefore don’t know which word is used in the passage he cites. Whichever one it is, there is a functional difference between the two terms. If the ban refers to extradition (and not exile), then the only criticism Schumacher-Matos has of the army’s actions falls away. And, as we’ve seen, the justification for the action is extremely compelling.

The mystery in the paragraph is exactly what Schumacher-Matos means by “take his medicine.” How is Zelaya’s returning to the presidency taking his medicine? And what is to keep him from, once again, organizing mobs?

And what of this claim by Sánchez?

Our Constitution takes such intent seriously. According to Article 239: “No citizen who has already served as head of the Executive Branch can be President or Vice-President. Whoever violates this law or proposes its reform [emphasis added], as well as those that support such violation directly or indirectly, will immediately cease in their functions and will be unable to hold any public office for a period of 10 years.”

Notice that the article speaks about intent and that it also says “immediately” – as in “instant,” as in “no trial required,” as in “no impeachment needed.”

If Sánchez is right, that means that Honduras cannot restore Zelaya to office—even if it wants to—without violating its own constitution.

Schumacher-Matos has made a compelling case here for something I’ve believed for some time now: There was, indeed, a coup in Honduras, and the proper constitutionally-empowered authorities defeated it.

As for the first part of the piece, I don’t think  Schumacher-Matos has identified “deftness” on the part of the president or his secretary of state so much as he’s found a kind of silver lining. The dark cloud is the rashness they showed when they condemned a sovereign country before becoming aware of the actual facts.

in the executive branch, conservatives are never really in power…

Hans A. von Spakovsky on the false idea of Executive “control” of the Executive branch:

With the end of the Bush administration, and the beginning of the most liberal administration in American history, it is a good time to take stock of what happened over the past eight years.

Conservatives get very frustrated over the failure of Republican administrations in general to change the course of the federal government. They do not understand why an executive branch “controlled” by a Republican president continued to implement liberal policies and regulations. Examples abound over the past eight years — from the Department of Justice’s all-out enforcement of foreign language ballots, to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s refusal to act against companies that engage in reverse racial discrimination on the basis of “diversity,” to the discriminatory awarding of federal contracts on the basis of race that continued in every federal department from Transportation to Commerce.

However, Republicans (much less conservatives) are not really in control of the executive branch even when they occupy the White House, something that most people (especially conservatives outside of Washington) do not fully understand.

Important insights we need to be aware of.

David Kahane: “Seven Days in June”…

I confess I don’t know who David Kahane is, but I love his brilliant takedown of Obama’s, um, priorities, in embracing America’s enemies and punching our friends in the mouth…

When the Dear Reader parroted the words “fundamental change” last fall — written for him by his triumvirate of advisers, the former Chicago Tribune reporter, David Axelrod; the former ballerina, Rahm Emanuel; and the current felon, George Soros, convicted of insider trading in France — he wasn’t kidding. In my Classic Comics edition of Webster’s Dictionary, “fundamental change,” oddly enough, means “fundamental change.” Not just no more Bush. Not just no more Abu Ghraib. Not just no more Denny Hastert and John McCain.

In this brave new world that’s a’borning, everything will change. Your money will be worth nothing. Your houses will be worth nothing. You won’t be able to afford even an energy-saving light bulb, much less turn it on. The jobs you’ll get — if you can get jobs — will be the modern equivalent of the Irish and African-American tarriers who dug the IRT subway lines in Manhattan around the turn of the last century for ten cents an hour, if they didn’t die first. Luckily for us, you’re too busy with Michael Jackson grief, Ed McMahon grief, Farrah Fawcett grief, Gale Storm grief, David Carradine grief, and Billy Mays grief to pay the slightest bit of attention to what is really going on.

And so you persist in thinking that nothing’s really changed. John Boehner and the rest of the clueless Rotary Club members that make up the Republican congressional delegation continue to play by the old rules, blissfully unaware that “fundamental change” has already taken place, and now the only thing we’re arguing about is how fast to turn up the heat on the boiling frogs, whether they’re wearing pajamas or not.

Brilliant.

Buchanan: he’s going to have to choose…

Wow.

One of those rare moments I agree totally with Pat Buchanan:

Will someone please explain why this less transfer of power to the civilian legislator first in line for the presidency, in a sovereign nation, is any business of the United Nations, the Organization of American States, Hugo Chavez, the Castro brothers or Barack Obama? For all have denounced the “coup” and demanded Zelaya’s immediate return.

Don’t hold your breath on that explanation, Pat. This administration and its enablers don’t explain things—they reiterate.

I love his bottom line:

One day, Obama is going to have to decide whether he wishes to be the darling of the international left or the unapologetic leader of the nation that is most resented and reviled by the international left.

It would be great if editorial writers and politicians across America could wake up to this fact.

Not to mention the administration.

Roger Kimball on the WP scandal (and the “legacy media”)…

There is nothing better than snark that explodes its target:

What can I say? That Katharine Weymouth, publisher and CEO of the Washington Post, was shocked, shocked to discover that her marketing department was selling places to a series of “intimate and exclusive” political salons at her house? Or, rather, was she shocked and dismayed to discover that her marketing department had been discovered selling the spots?

Read the rest…

a spirit of humility and not of judgement…

We and our families need to begin and continue earnest, daily prayer for our country’s leaders, their spouses, and their children. That our leaders (and future leaders) will remain always faithful, vigilant, successfully resistant to temptation.

Above all, we ourselves must resist temptations, including the temptation to judge others’ failures in these areas.

This generation needs to discover a deeply genuine spirit of humility and repentance.

Most of all, we need to pray.

For each other and our leaders.

May we begin today?

are we about to descend into chaos?

I’ll go ahead and say it:

I’ve become gradually more and more frightened at the prospect of America being overtaken by  violent anarchy.

There is a brand of hyper-libertarianism whose approach to politics and political evangelism I’ve never quite grasped until now. Actually, I’m not completely sure I’ve grasped it. Or rather, I hope I haven’t grasped it.

The question keeps popping in my mind: Why do these people seem (at least to me) to actually prefer someone like Obama to win elections than they do any Republican not named Ron Paul?

And why are they more hostile to Republicans, Reagan conservatives, and neocons than they are to progressive Democrats? Much more hostile.

The other day on Facebook, someone unfriended me with these words:

You’re a warmonger, a fraud, and you are horribly deceived by a bunch of criminal bastards that claim to be “conservative Christians”. You really should stop fooling yourself and others. The only thing that you’re “fanatical” about is your fake religion that claims to be about love, but it’s really about attacking and destroying anyone that doesn’t agree with your religion of hate. Maybe you can join up with George Bushie and his other New World Order cronies like Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger when they go participate in pagan rituals and homosexual orgies at Bohemian Grove. I bet you’d love that. Don’t worry, your wife doesn’t have to know. Or who knows, maybe she would know about it and support it like the wives of the criminals in our government do. They love their power, and they love (and depend on) sheep like yourself who go along with their arrogance, their deception, their warmongering, and their war on the third world that you support wholeheartedly. You are guilty of murder, Charles. Hope that makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside that you support such wickedness. There’s a nice place in hell for hypocrites like you and those that you support with your vote and words.

Odd thing is, a month ago, when this gentleman—a Ron Paul acolyte—invited me to be his “friend,” I sent him a message.

______, I’m going to affirm friendship, and I appreciate the invite.

I do have to warn you that I am far from being a Ron Paul follower, as Steve Gresh can affirm.

I am a conservative with a strong libertarian streak, but I’m very much in favor of a strong—and large—military. And I don’t believe defending just America’s own yard will succeed.

With all that, I’ll confirm.

Thanks again.

His reply?

Thank you, sir. I look forward to communicating with you.

My, how things change in a month.

I wish I could tell you that the things this man believes—the all-encompassing power of organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations, The Bilderberg Group, The Bohemian Grove (even the Skull & Crossbones!), and AIPAC; the plot to form a North American Union; 9/11 as an inside job; really, the list goes on on…—were outside the “mainstream” of the movement to which belongs. But it’s not. Almost everyone I’ve encountered online who supports Ron Paul also believes in these conspiracies, and many more besides.

Admittedly, none of the other Paulites with whom I’ve conversed have ever been this rude to me, or this unhinged in condemnation of me in such a personal way. But the “facts” of the case on which this young man hangs his violent words are identical to those of all the hundreds of Ron Paul followers I’ve encountered online.

Not all, but a great many of them have posted and commented on the most outlandish theories of taxation, for instance. Some of them labeling all taxes as “theft.” Finding supposed loopholes in the 16th Amendment (an amendment, by the way, I would like to see repealed) or in the Tax Code itself. There is a huge network of hyper-libertarians and anarchists “educating” as many as they can on how to avoid tax liability and basically stick it to the revenooers. One Facebook friend of mine even posted a link to a booklet claiming that Christ himself was a tax-dodger!

Then there are the seemingly inevitable Jewish bankers conspiracies, which, when combined with a virulent (and willfully inaccurate) anti-Israel mindset, seems to me to look suspiciously like anti-semitism. The kind of anti-semitism—and the kind of lies—that historically have resulted in great violence against Jews.

Even that, though, is not what worries me most at the moment.

What worries most is what seems, in my mind, anyway, to be an accelerating trend of posting links to articles and YouTube videos purporting to show examples of police brutality.

Let me say right off the bat that I believe there is both genuine police brutality and breathtaking examples of stupidity on the part of individual police while performing their duties. No doubt about it. And when that occurs—and it occurs far more often than I can understand—I am glad there are dashcams and camera-wielding citizens nearby to document it.

What I don’t understand, though, are three things that always seem to accompany these revelations.

First of all, there is a growing assumption (how sincere I can’t always tell) that, no matter what the actual situation is, the cop is always as fault. Always. Which would be fine in those cases where the fault is obvious. But that isn’t always the case.

Take this video, for example, posted by the guy who “unfriended” me on Facebook:

72-year-old woman Tasered by a deputy constable after speeding and resisting. Nobody outside of the police have seen the dashcam video. And yet the vast majority of YouTube and Facebook comments might lead you to believe their writers were present and saw the whole thing.

Some of the comments:

The government is training the police to be good little nazi’s.

America is the new communism

I just have 1 word for the whole police department:

FAIL!

They do .. each and every day ..

Put on our thinking caps people, how do we deal with psycho cops? Had grandma pulled out a gauge from between her lovely thighs and blown that blue boy to hell, she may have been sparred a tasering but would now have to face a jury Had two nut bag cops banging on our front door the other day for what they claimed was a “911 assault in progress” kicked the door (as that’s what they were threatening to do), it would have gotten ugly. Chill out already cops!

well she could of over powered the cop and beat him to a pulp. He was well witin his rights, and it was neccessary to condition the rest of you that old days of USA are over, and that you better get in line for your Russian Style ID. Because a small handful of criminal trash have taken control of some offices of power, and you’re too doped on Fluoride to just kick their ass.

Police the world and terrorize everyone for the elite, I hope she sues the hell out of thses pathetic police

americans are such suckers and sheeple!

So are Canadians…it’s all the way from Texas to Alaka and all points in between that they’ve let things get to this point.

HOPEFULLY hen the people in the US finally start fighting back against this sort of things, Canadians will, in their typical “monkey see, monkey do” manner, finally start following ome POSITIVE leads for a change.

We’ll be having ANOTHER federal election by fall if things keep on the way they are, too!!! That’ll be 4 elections in 4 years! 1.2 BILLION wasted!!!

he makes it easy to hate cops .he is one useless fat piglet too ,how can a fat cop chase anyone ,how can the cop taze a 72 year old women,it is the blue wall of silence that has destroyed every country in the world ,i am very ashamed to be a american

Fact is, once she accepts an ATTORNEY, she admits to the STATUS of “Ward” of the STATE, & is then subject to the Jurisdiction thereof. ALL CRIMES ARE COMMERCIAL hence GOLD TRIMMED Admiralty.

Speeding is CODE breaking ONLY, NOT law breaking. CODE & ACTS are ONLY enforcible by your consent. Did she consent YES with her D/L “DRIVER” denotes a commercial action. At this time she was Traveling. a Right.

You are born w/ Rights! you CONTRACT w/ the STATE, this subjugates constitutional protections!

]

Anybody understand where that last guy’s coming from? Where do we even begin? Apparently, assuming—as every one of our posters above does—that the cop is guilty, it’s not just him. It’s the whole system. It deliberately builds compliant rogue cops who beat the “sheeple” into submission so the big wigs can keep running their nice little oppressive, make buckets of money from fomenting wars and controlling everything scams.

Do you see the danger here?

People are stoking each other up, ratcheting their rhetoric and their emotions—toward what? They’re finding release in describing vengeance fantasies, “our day will come and we’ll make you pay” scenarios.

It’s this that makes me worry that a large of number of Paulites aren’t actually interested in winning the argument (and elections) and rolling things back to their constitutional moorings.

No, what they want is for things to get so bad, so repressive, that there will be a huge—and violent—blowback.

They’re working toward chaos.