Tag: politics

Howard Dean is on drugs

How can anyone, including the Kool-Aid drinkers on the Left, honestly take Howard Dean seriously when he says tripe like this?

“The president and his right-wing Supreme Court think it is ‘okay’ to have the government take your house if they feel like putting a hotel where your house is,” Dean said…
First, the President has not, to my knowledge, commented publicly on the Kelo decision. The only thing I found at the White House site referring to Kelo was when someone asked Press Secretary Scott McClellan about the campaign by a California advertising magnate to acquire Justice Souter’s home in New Hampshire so he can build a hotel on it.
Second, how much dope does one have to grow and smoke in the hills of Vermont to say the current make-up of the Supreme Court is “right-wing”? The dissenters in Kelo were the Court’s acknowledged conservatives, Chief Justice Rehnquist, and Justices Scalia and Thomas. The left’s favorite swing-vote justice, O’Connor, was the fourth dissenter. The justices voting against property rights were all from the left, the same side of the political spectrum Dr. Dean-mento inhabits.
Why is no one in the mainstream media pointing this out? Sorry, sorry, rhetorical question, I realize…

Our modern hubris

Senator Rick Santorum, (R-PA):

A generation ago, liberals figured out something that most conservatives couldn’t have dreamed of in their worst nightmare. A few well-positioned autocrats can do what most Americans thought, and the Constitution says, takes two-thirds of the Congress and three-quarters of the state legislatures to do: namely, change the Constitution to mean whatever they want it to mean. The plan was simple. Put justices on the Supreme Court, backed up by lower court judges, to “modernize” our Constitution by fiat, with the claim that Supreme Court decisions, whether based on the words of the Constitution or not, have the same status as the Constitution itself.

How often do we hear that our founding compact needs to be a living, breathing document whose meaning changes with the times? Never mind what the words of our Constitution actually say; never mind the clear intent of the Constitution’s writers and signers; never mind two hundred years of judicial interpretation; never mind the centuries-old wisdom of the common law: We are much wiser today than our predecessors. Or so goes the liberal boast. In fact, it is said, we are now able to see just what they were “getting at” even better than they could — as if the U.S. Constitution were only a “nice try” at a plan of government.

Providing the tools for homeland defense

Yesterday’s Federalist Patriot (PDF file) contained part two of the series on U.S. National Security. Titled “Homeland Defense,” it discusses the steps taken since 9/11, including the Patriot Act, and looks forward. I’ve reprinted it below.

Continue reading “Providing the tools for homeland defense”

Who’s really driving the wedge

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., in today’s Political Diary:

Based on scanty headlines, today’s disruptions in London suggest somebody may be trying to demonstrate just how little it takes to shut down a modern city’s public transport network. Early reports indicate smoke bombs and the like, with few serious casualties. Who knows, but let’s riff anyway: Sooner or later, it was bound to develop that the target of Britain’s homegrown Muslim radicals isn’t British foreign policy or U.S. “imperialism.” The targets are British Muslims themselves and their peaceful relations with the rest of British society. The goal is to make all Muslims suspect in the eyes of their fellow Britons, to punish those Muslims who favor quiet assimilation, to make their lives impossible.

We’re talking about something quite different than the Osama bin Laden dream of mega attacks that unite the Muslim world in a showdown with Christendom. Today’s attacks seem more attuned to the Zarqawi playbook in Iraq — and, for that matter, Tamil tactics in Sri Lanka, IRA tactics in Northern Ireland, etc. Domestic terrorists are usually trying to drive a wedge of fear between one ethnic community and the larger society. Whatever the facts behind today’s incidents, British Muslims may have to get used to the idea that they are being deliberately placed in the line of fire by their radical fellow Muslims, with the hope of defeating their intent to live happily, successfully and peacefully amidst a larger, polyglot world. This is their fight too, and perhaps most of all.

Why we hate you

Mark Yost, St. Paul Pioneer Press:

I’m reminded of why I became a journalist by the horribly slanted reporting coming out of Iraq. Not much has changed since the mid-1980s. Substitute “insurgent” for “Sandinista,” “Iraq” for “Soviet Union,” “Bush” for “Reagan” and “war on terror” for “Cold War,” and the stories need little editing. The U.S. is “bad,” our enemies “understandable” if not downright “good.”

I know the reporting’s bad because I know people in Iraq. A Marine colonel buddy just finished a stint overseeing the power grid. When’s the last time you read a story about the progress being made on the power grid? Or the new desalination plant that just came on-line, or the school that just opened, or the Iraqi policeman who died doing something heroic? No, to judge by the dispatches, all the Iraqis do is stand outside markets and government buildings waiting to be blown up.

I also get unfiltered news from Iraq through an e-mail network of military friends who aren’t so blinded by their own politics that they can’t see the real good we’re doing there. More important, they can see beyond their own navel and see the real good we’re doing to promote peace and prosperity in the world. What makes this all the more ironic is the fact that the people who are fighting and dying want to stay and the people who are merely observers want to cut and run.

Throwing down the gauntlet

Despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Democrats and the rest of the Left, the President stuck to his guns and nominated John Roberts to the Supreme Court. The not-so-loyal opposition has already begun to put its foot in its mouth, as the President dares them to raise a ruckus over a nominee they unanimously confirmed two years ago to the appellate bench.
Hinderaker’s take on Leahy/Schumer:

[I]t was fun to see Pat Leahy and Chuck Schumer on television tonight; they looked just awful. After President Bush’s terrific, upbeat presentation of Roberts, and Roberts’ graceful, brief talk, Leahy and Schumer sounded like they had just dropped in from another planet. They were dour, hateful, and came across as sad and pathetic minions who have been sent on a hopeless mission by their bosses at “People for the American Way.”
Hugh thinks the Roberts’ nomination is a “home run,” and from what I’ve read, it sounds that way. Let’s just hope and pray fifteen to twenty years from now, he’s still in the Rehnquist-Scalia-Thomas mold, and not drifting aimlessly as O’Connor ended.

Where’s the ACLU when you need them?

Reader Reply, The Federalist Patriot, Monday, 18 July 2005, No. 05-29 Brief:

“Not only are we feeding these Jihadis well, but the U.S. is currently providing the terrorists residing at Club Gitmo, with prayer beads, Qurans, prayer rugs, muslim ‘kosher’ food, and calls to prayer five times a day over loud speaker. Can someone tell me why the ACLU is not filing a lawsuit against Donald Rumsfeld for using taxpayers dollars to promote a specific religion at government expense on government property?? Oh, pardon me…I forgot about ‘double standard’ trademark of left wing liberals!!!” –reader in Yuma, Arizona

Teaching the Constitution

Cal Thomas:

The president and those who wish to see the Constitution restored to its “original intent” need to reteach it if they are to overcome the liberal orthodoxy expressed by the late Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes and echoed recently by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales that “the Constitution is what the judges say it is.”

Try that at the supermarket. Is a pound what the shopper says it is, or do scales, which rely on a standard, determine a pound’s true weight? Would we get away with telling a police officer who pulls us over for speeding, “I decided that 70 miles per hour is 55 for me”?

Why, then, this constantly changing Constitution that is in the minds of liberals to be altered like a suit of clothes to fit the wearer, rather than a document to which all must conform if the general welfare is to be promoted?

It is because those revisionists know they can’t use the legislative process to ram through any of their social engineering ideas. … They know the people (with the possible exception of a majority in Massachusetts) would vote them out of office and so they turn to unelected judges, appointed for life, to do their ideological dirty work for them.

If the Constitution is to again be seen as a finished document that has been refinished in recent years, the president must foreswear any talk of “moderation” and “conciliation” in his choice of court nominees. Truth cannot be moderated.

[…]

The president owes the country an ideological battle, which he can win if he is willing to fight it. By virtue of his office, he commands attention unavailable to anyone else. He should not only campaign for his nominee(s), he should act like a teacher, quoting the Federalist Papers and the Constitution and making his case that this great document served America well until some judges began tampering with it.

Policies toward terrorism

Rich Tucker:

So what’s amazing isn’t the number of attacks we’ve lived through — it’s the lack of attacks. September, 2001. Bali, Indonesia, October 2002. Madrid, Spain, March 2004. Now London, July 2005. On average the terrorists seem able only to strike once a year. And note the death tolls: U.S., some 3,000. Bali, 202. Madrid, 191. London, about 50.

Now, if terrorists could strike more often, of course they would. If they could kill more people in each strike, of course they would. So it’s reasonable to conclude that, since so much time goes by between attacks and since fewer people are killed in each attack, our policies toward terrorism are working.

What are those policies? Well, fighting back, for one.

Jihadists-R-Us

Doug Giles:

As eight of the most powerful world leaders were convening in Gleneagles, Scotland for the G8 Summit trying to figure out how to battle poverty, salvage human lives, stop the AIDS epidemic in Africa and keep our globe from warming … what does militant Islam do to help? Well, they set off four bombs in the heart of London killing 50+ people and seriously injuring over 700.