Sharp Knife

MISS THEM YET?

Excerpted from Naval Aviation News 67 (March-April 1985) By JO2 Timothy J Christmann:

On that sunny morning of September, Bush woke aboard San Jacinto prepared to fly one of the 58 attack missions he would fly during the war. However, this particular mission would end a little differently than his other 57. The target was a Japanese radio station on ChiChi Jima, located about 600 miles southwest of Japan in the Bonin Islands. For a time, the enemy on that tiny island had been intercepting U.S. military radio transmissions and warning Japan and occupied enemy islands of impending American air strikes. It had to be destroyed.

Before 0900, Bush and two aircrewmen --his regular radioman, Radioman Second Class John Delaney, and substitute gunner Lieutenant Junior Grade William White-- strapped themselves inside an Avenger and catapulted off San Jacinto. Three other bomb-laden VT-51 aircraft, as well as a number of VF-51's F6F Hellcats, joined the mission.

"ChiChi was a real feisty place to fly into," Stanley Butchart, a former VT-51 pilot and friend of Bush, agreed. "As I remember, it had gun emplacements hidden in the mountain areas. In order to get down to the radio facility, you had to fly past the AA batteries, which was risky business." As expected, projectiles belched from the enemy's AA batteries as soon as Bush and his squadron mates were over the island. Tiny black puffs of smoke thickened around his plane as he approached the target and dove steeply -- so steeply that Bush felt like he was standing on his head. But before he reached the radio facility the plane was hit.

Ltjg. Bush, who felt the plane "lift" from the hit, continued his dive toward the target and dropped his payload. The four 500-pound bombs exploded, causing damaging hits. For his courage and disregard for his own safety in pressing home his attack, he was later awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross.

Bush maneuvered the Avenger over the ocean with the hope it would make the journey back to San Jacinto. But the plane began to blaze and clouds of smoke soon enveloped the cockpit. Choking and gasping for air, Bush and one of his aircrewmen wriggled out of the plane and leaped from about 1,500 feet. His other crewman, dead or seriously injured from the blast, went down with the Avenger. Bush parachuted safely into the water, dangerously close to the shore. Unfortunately, the aircrewman fell helplessly to his death because his parachute failed to open properly.

Vice-President Bush said that he chose to finish the bombing run rather than bail out early because as a Naval Aviator, he was disciplined to do that. "We were trained to complete our runs no matter what the obstacle," he remarked.

Once in the water, Bush unleashed his inflatable yellow lifeboat, crawled in, and paddled quickly out to sea. The Japanese sent out a boat to capture him. Luckily, Lieutenant Doug West, a fellow VT-51 Avenger pilot, strafed the boat. "He stopped it," said Bush. [he was blessed; other captured pilots were brutally tortured to death--you know, like we did to KSM--ed.]

Circling fighter planes transmitted Bush's plight and position to the U.S. submarine Finback (SS-230), patrolling 15 to 20 miles from the island. "This was 1944 and there were very few enemy targets left," said retired Capt. Robert R.Williams Jr., 73, who was Finback's commanding officer then. "So, the main reason for our being on patrol was to act as lifeguard and pick up aviators."

According to Lieutenant Commander Dean Spratlin, Finback's executive officer at the time, the submarine had an area of 200 to 300 square miles to cover, which included Iwo Jima, ChiChi Jima and HaHa Jima in the Bonin Islands. A few hours after transmitting Bush's position, Williams, then a commander, sighted him on the periscope about seven miles away from ChiChi. He ordered the submarine to the surface.

"I saw this thing coming out of the water and I said to myself, 'Jeez, I hope it's one of ours,'" Bush remarked. Spratlin, who is now in the real estate business in Atlanta, Ga., said he and Williams weren't worried about surfacing in daylight so close to an enemy island because they had several U.S. fighters flying cover.

"We had a big sub (312 feet long), so we rigged out the bowplanes which gave us a platform where we could step down and pull him aboard," added Spratlin. While several of Finback's crewmen were helping Bush aboard, Ensign Bill Edwards, the sub's first lieutenant and photographic officer, filmed the rescue. The 8mm film later was sent to Bush while he was a congressman from Texas and was shown recently as part of a biographical sketch during the Republican National Convention.

Bush was taken inside Finback and the sub submerged. "Once he was pulled aboard, he as taken to the wardroom," said Thomas R. Keene, a TBF Avenger pilot from USS Franklin, who was shot down the day before off Iwo Jima along with his two enlisted aircrewmen. "It must have seemed like a dream to him. One minute he was all alone on the ocean, and the next he was on board a submarine being served food in a red-lighted compartment that had music playing on a record player."

"I thought being rescued by the submarine was the end of my problem,"Bush said. "I didn't realize that I would have to spend the duration of the sub's 30 remaining days on board." The following day, Finback retrieved Lieutenant Junior Grade James Beckman, a fighter pilot on USS Enterprise who was shot down over HaHa Jima. "We put Bush and the other four men to work as lookouts," Spratlin said. "Four hours on, eight hours off.''

As lookouts, they helped make sure that enemy planes and submarines didn't sneak up on Finback during daylight or at night. The submarine did much of its patrolling on the surface in the daytime and always at night because that was when Finback recharged its batteries. "Bush and the other aviators really got into the submarine experience," Spratlin remarked. "Every time an enemy plane would force us down, they'd curse it just like we did."

Bush said that the most beautiful time for standing watch was between 2400 and 0400. "I'll never forget the beauty of the Pacific -- the flying fish, the stark wonder of the sea, the waves breaking across the bow," he remarked. The 30 days aboard Finback weren't all beautiful, however. Some of the more dramatic moments included being depth charged and bombed by enemy ships and planes.

"I thought I was scared at times flying into combat, but in a submarine you couldn't do anything, except sit there," he said. ''The submariners were saying that it must be scary to be shot at by antiaircraft fire and I was saying to myself, 'Listen brother, it is not really as bad as what you go through. The tension, adrenaline and the fear factor were about the same (getting shot at by antiaircraft fire as opposed to being depthcharged). When we were getting depth charged, the submariners did not seem overly concerned, but the other pilots and I didn't like it a bit. There was a certain helpless feeling when the depth charges went off that I didn't experience when flying my plane against AA.''

"I can't say anything but good things about him," remarked Jack Guy, who was one of Bush's closest friends in VT-51. "In WW II we all felt we could depend on George to do his job. We never had to say, 'Where's my wingman?' because he was always there."

I promise you President Bush's thoughts and prayers today are with his crewmen Radioman John Delaney and Lieutenant William White and all the others who gave everything, just as our thoughts and prayers should be.

Those generations came home from wars, built and bequeathed to us the greatest nation on earth, and now another generation defends it--defends us--anew.

And we'll remember them, too.

AND STILL FIGHT TODAY

...and will fight tomorrow.

How many times have I written "Doc Zero nails it"?:

America was born a land of liberty and responsibility, where citizens would own both their time and ideas. Her government was obliged to focus on its duties in the present, rather than designing the future. The future is the exclusive property of free men, not the State. The government does not have the right to decide when freedom has failed, and should be discarded. ... As this ideology reaches the ugly and bankrupt end of its century-long existence, its nervous acolytes are desperately in need of validation. That’s why they were so eager to hear a hostile foreigner describe their domestic enemies as hateful and greedy.

The passage of ObamaCare dispelled the myth of the moderate Democrat. The illusion of the patriotic Democrat died in their thunderous applause for Felipe Calderon. The Democrats obviously find more in common with this shadowy foreign ally than the people of Arizona… or the wider American population, which supports Arizona’s immigration law by lopsided majorities. Any sense of unconditional loyalty to the United States is obviously not distributed evenly across all fifty of them.

When we embrace liberty and responsibility, we see our countrymen as partners, employers, customers, and honorable competitors. It becomes easy to revere the great nation that sailed against the tides of history to destroy imperialism, fascism, and communism… as it will defeat the challenge of moral and intellectual exhaustion that swept the final generation of American socialists into power over the past decade. We can be at peace with those who disagree, because none of us has the power to compel submission.

Those who embrace collectivist economics, and political dominion over every aspect of our lives, will inevitably come to see the stubborn and disobedient conservators of the old America as enemies to be despised and defeated. Even their most high-minded and well-intentioned designs can only be fulfilled by forcing dissenters to participate. Barack Obama and his party have a lot of big plans that require the meek compliance of people who think like me… and we aim to misbehave. Small wonder the Democrats, and a sad number of Republican attendants, find themselves more comfortable in the company of foreign leaders who have already secured the abject submission of their impoverished subjects.

I was at once reminded of this post by David Pryce-Jones, which is too compelling to just excerpt:

I spent the week-end celebrating a wedding. The bride and bridegroom made a fine couple. The church was very old, with a magnificent Norman arch and medieval wall decorations. Afterwards we repaired to a nearby great house built in the seventeenth century of beautiful grey stone, with a chapel of its own, mullion windows, statues, a vast lawn and gardens which I in my ignorance only then learnt are famous. Everything was perfect, in other words, here was a traditional moment of the kind that has made England what it is, and formed the loyalty of its daughters and sons.

In the course of his speech in her honour, the father of the bride then informed the audience that the European Union has passed a Gender Equality Bill. One provision of this preposterous and impudent measure is that fathers are no longer allowed to give away their daughters in the traditional church ceremony. Apparently that is to treat daughters as chattels. The whole European Union is on the point of breaking up, Greece is in flames and the Germans about to rebel, several countries in the eurozone are bankrupt beyond redemption, the euro itself has failed and soon there may be no currency for Europeans to trade in — and the giant statesmen of Brussels come up with a prohibition on fathers giving away their daughters in marriage as fathers have done in country after country, century after century.

All is not lost. Princess Victoria of Sweden is engaged to be married. I shall never forget the grace and elegance with which she escorted an aged prize-winner who could hardly walk to dinner at the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm in 2000. She has presence. Heir to the throne, she is insisting that her father, the King, give her away. The more the Swedish church says this can’t now be done, the more she protests that she will have her way. May she and the King remember their Vasa royal predecessors, Queen Christina, Charles XII, the days when Sweden was a great power, and may they help cover the great statesmen of Brussels with well-deserved ridicule.

What they deserve only begins with ridicule.

And Princess Victoria is a natural-born American.

Are we?

STUCK ON STALIN, STUPIDO

Via Citizen Feathers, this ABC "entertainment" report:

CARACAS (Reuters) - Film director Oliver Stone said on Friday Venezuela's Hugo Chavez was misunderstood by the Western media, but said the socialist president should consider cutting back on his hours-long television appearances.

Stone, in the Venezuelan capital Caracas for the local premiere of his documentary "South of the Border," which profiles Latin America's leftist leaders, told reporters he admired Chavez and his record since coming to power in 1999.

"He behaves well. I think he's compensating those businesses that he has nationalized. ... Most peoples' lives in this country have improved under Chavez," Stone said.

Oh, he's "compensating", alright...

Venezuela's president says he is reversing decades of exploitation in the OPEC member nation with policies for the poor including free clinics and schools.

His opponents say his administration is scaring away investors and wrecking the economy in a country that should be one of the continent's richest, given its huge oil wealth.

"There is no question that the American press, the Anglo press, does not understand the way he speaks," Stone said.

"I'm not an expert on the local day-to-day issues, but I admire Hugo. I like him very much as a person. If I can say one thing, he shouldn't be on TV all the time."

"Why not, Ollie? They're his TV stations now!

Meanwhile, on the other side of Caracas, far from the presidential palace, those pesky "local day-to-day issues" must be fed, watered and branded.

Publius Pundit:

Some Chavistas functionaries are angry at the market forces that drives these shortages and have decided to take control. That’s why they’ve decided to force poor people, like cattle, to submit to a sort of ink branding on their bellies, to control just how much chicken they purchase. It probably goes for other products, too.

What it really amounts to is the first steps toward rationing of food, the logical consequences of turning Venezuela’s once-abundant agricultural production (the Venezuelan Agriculture Department is now under the control of Cuban party hacks) into the same disaster Zimbabwe is.

But although this dynamic resembles the exact same failed socialist policies of old, there’s something new and unique about it, this branding policy is spectacularly degrading. Stalin never came up with this. Castro never did either. But the thuggish government of Hugo Chavez has. It’s like marking people as cattle. I’ve never seen anything so disgusting. Chavez is treating the poor he champions …. literally …. like animals.

If Hollywood ever did a spoof of "The Three Communist Stooges", Stone could play all three. And write and direct.

He's already pre-seduced himself on the Proletarian casting couch.

(Hat-tip: Legal Insurrection)

...BUT SHE LIVES IN HIS BRAIN RENT-FREE!

Peepin' Joe McGinniss is a victim. Just ask him. He's his own favorite subject. Wanker.

In this bizarre ramble, he claims he only moved in next door to protect Palin's children. Creepy.

Todd got in his face. Awesome. In part, for this.

His Portfolio piece starts dishonestly enough, with an editor's note hinting at dark ethics charges, rather than the truth: dozens of frivolous, malicious and dismissed ethics charges. And it goes downhill from there.

Accorning to Peepin’ Joe, Palin is stopping Alaskan energy production by being too mean to the nice oil companies.

The Obama fan's article goes on to accuse her of “magical thinking”, of using Alinsky-ite tactics and labels her a “f***ing psychopath”.

Peepin' Joe bewails “her ability to incite hatred” while bemoaning the fact that she hasn't brought him baked goods like Mommy used to.

Wait a minute--who's that knocking at the Freud door with the chocolate chip/caribou jerky cookies?

UPDATE: Didja' notice that it only took Todd one day to secure the border and build the fence?

TINDER IS THE NIGHT-SWIM IN THE GULF OF REALITY

“A single spark can start a prairie fire.”--Chairman Mao Tse-Dunn

Mark Twain-Steyn plumbs the depths:

The Vanity Of Big Government

One of the chief characteristics of Barack Obama's speechifying is its contempt for words as anything other than props of self-puffery. Consider, for example, his recent remarks to the graduating class of the United States Military Academy:

"America has not succeeded by stepping out of the currents of cooperation — we have succeeded by steering those currents in the direction of liberty and justice."

"Steering those currents"? How could even a member of the president's insulated, self-regarding speechwriting team be so tin-eared as to write that line? How could the president be so tone-deaf as to deliver it in May of 2010? Hey, genius, if you're so damn good at "steering currents," why not try doing it in the Gulf of Mexico?

The only reason Ulysses S. Blamebush went to West Point on Satyrday was so his media lackeys could burnish his military street-cred as CINC on Sunday, before springing his Don't Ask/Don't Tell-repeal effort on Monday.

Why didn't he discuss his DADT policy push with the graduating class; after all, aren't they the ones who would have to live with it? Instead, he just used them as props, patting them on the head and pardoning them from after-school detention. No wonder so many of them declined to shake his hand.

Or maybe it was just because Obama's "new international order" sounded a lot like "whatever dictators tell me to do".

Like those of many great "thinkers," words for Barack Obama and his coterie seem to exist mostly in the realm of metaphor rather than as descriptors of actual action actually occurring in anything so humdrum as reality.

And so it is that, even as his bungling administration flounders in the turbulent waters of the Gulf, on the speaker's podium the president still confidently sails forth deftly steering the ship through the narrow ribbon of sludge between the Scylla of sonorous banality and the Charybdis of gaseous uplift.

Two years ago this week, then Sen. Obama declared that his very nomination as Democratic Party presidential candidate (never mind his election, or inauguration) marked the moment when "our planet began to heal" and "the rise of the oceans began to slow."

I don't care what anyone says--that Billy Ayers can really turn a nautical phrase!

In fact, they say that Anita Dunn's husband Robert Bauer wrote the NavyGate Navigational Charts, but this kind of polished fiction reads like Ayers' best. And it doesn't take Billy three months to get all his lies straight, from Prairie Fire communism to the Pants Fire Chronicles.

Almost every problem we face today arises from the vanity of Big Government. Why has BP got oil wells 5,000 feet underwater in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico? Because government regulated them off-land, off-coast, and ever deeper into the briny.

The State-Run Media also "leaked" that the Top-Kill plan worked, just long enough for Ogabe to give his stenographer fan club press conference, even though it hasn't worked yet.

The UnterBus Regime bussed in--and out--400 worker-bee props, just in time for his Shoreline Showbiz Review. Bill Ayers, you magnificent bastard!

True, BP went along. Its initials stand for "British Petroleum". You may not be aware of that if you've seen any of their commercials in recent years: "BP — Beyond Petroleum." They were an oil company ashamed of their product, and advertising only how anxious they were to get with the environmental program. And a fat lot of good that did them.

Maybe they should have focused on getting petroleum right, before moving beyond it. Now the petroleum is moving beyond them.

But Democrats are also ashamed of their product, too. That's why they run as conservatives, like the Murtha-clone in PA. Didja' notice that liberals always run as conservatives...but conservatives never run as liberals?

BP, not to mention its customers, would have been better to push back against government policies that drive energy suppliers into ever more unpredictable terrain in order to protect the Alaskan breeding grounds of the world's largest mosquito herd. Instead, we'll do the opposite. There'll be even more government protection of "the environment," and even more government regulation of the oil industry, and BP will be drilling for oil in that Icelandic volcano.

Does "BP" stand for "Boy President"? 'Cos I'm not sure America's golf courses can take the presidential pounding they've been getting if this crisis continues.

It's the same in Europe. Greece's problem isn't so very difficult to diagnose. Like many western nations, its government has spent tomorrow today. As in New York and California, public-sector unions have looted the future. This is the entirely foreseeable consequence of government policy.

Looting the Future is not the "consequence of government policy", Mark--it is the policy itself.

As Billy A. put it:

“This is why I chose teaching: to share my life with young people, to shape and loot touch the future.”

Like the man said, "This Wouldn't Be Happening If Obama Were President!"

The Smell Test Administration is failing, just as Rush predicted.

Must be something in the airs.

THE NEW TRANSPARENT LIES POLITICS

“Can I be one?” Elvis asks his new friend.

“Well, federal agents-at-large – we just don’t have those,” Nixon stammers.

“I’ll look into it,” Krogh promises.

Elvis is crestfallen, visibly wilted under the weight of all that gold, a man who could have anything – cars, women, houses – except the one thing he wants most.

Nixon takes one look at him and caves.

“Get him the badge.”--"When Elvis Met Nixon"

Newsbusters:

WASHINGTON — Not long after news leaked last month that [former Colorado House speaker] Andrew Romanoff was determined to make a Democratic primary run against Sen. Michael Bennet, Romanoff received an unexpected communication from one of the most powerful men in Washington.

Jim Messina, President Barack Obama's deputy chief of staff and a storied fixer in the White House political shop, suggested a place for Romanoff might be found in the administration and offered specific suggestions, according to several sources who described the communication to The Denver Post.

Romanoff turned down the overture, which included mention of a job at USAID, the foreign aid agency, sources said.

This election-tampering is habit-forming.

Meanwhile, Joe Sestak qualifies to become NavSec in just a few weeks, five years after leaving the Navy.

"What really hurts is if you try to cover it up.”--Richard Hussein Nixon


UPDATE: Sestak wastes no time learning his new tune. He's All Shook Up.

The Blue Hawaiian UPDATE:

“We’re looking to fundamentally change the status quo in Washington. It’s a status quo that extends beyond any particular party, and right now that status quo is fighting back with everything it’s got, with the same old tactics that divide and distract us from solving the problems people face…we’re up against the idea that it’s acceptable to say anything and do anything to win an election, such as trading pardons of Puerto Rican terrorists for ethnic votes in a Senate race.” – Candidate Obama, Night of the South Carolina Democratic Primary

I quote from Memories.

Jailhouse Rock UPDATE:

Obama finally saves or creates one job...and it's voluntary?

BEG YOUR PARDON SALESMAN

“If the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.”--Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama

Robert Costa:

An old Washington hand gives NRO his take:

Fox reports that the White House asked Bill Clinton to talk to Sestak about getting out of the race. Clinton had lunch with Obama yesterday, says Fox. The White House talks to Sestak's brother, a lawyer, about what they are going to say on the whole affair.

Do the words "obstruction of justice" ring a bell?

More:

Rahm Emanuel, via Bill Clinton, had offered Sestak some kind of unpaid advisory job in exchange for dropping out. We're really confused about the unpaid part, but the whole thing looks a tad [un]seemly.

Just a tad, Tad.

What's so "confusing"? The "unpaid" part means the lawyers told G. Rahm Emmanuel and the Big Pardon-Seller that offering Admiral Sestak a paid job was a felony--adjust your stories accordingly!

Hot Air:

Having someone outside of the administration as a buffer would be very convenient for Obama at this juncture. It allows Obama to offload the blame to someone other than a staffer. And like all buffers, it provides the President with plausible deniability for any legal problems that might ensue.

FREE SPEECH, NOT MUMIA!

Read this:

The words of Patrick Henry still ring true 235 years later, “Why stand we here idle?,” he said, “What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”

Secondly, We the People must not only inform ourselves on our Core Principles, must inform ourselves about Contrary Principles. If our core principles serve to secure and maintain the liberty we wish to enjoy, then it stands to reason that there are contrary principles that threaten that same liberty, and we must be able to identify these enemies of our liberty.

Sun Tzu says in his Art of War, “Know thine enemy as thyself.” We must always remember that our enemies are not people or parties, but the freedom-destroying principles that they espouse. We must inform ourselves on the principles of progressivism, socialism, communism; and the mechanisms these philosophies use such as redistribution of wealth, centralization of power, progressive taxation, and restrictions on free speech. Once we are informed on these principles we will then recognize them. And we must oppose them regardless of the party or personality attempting to employ them.

I say again, We must not give a free pass because of personality or party affiliation. It is ironic that Teddy Roosevelt is heralded as a great hero of the Republican Party, when in fact history testifies that he was the leader of the anti-constitutional progressives in 1912. It was also under the Republican Party that the refundable tax credit was enacted, allowing progressives to engage in redistribution of wealth and enslave citizens with the tax refund.

Am I anti-Republican? No; but these enemies of our liberty entered in because we put party over principle. The president recently suggested that his program of socialized medicine was okay because Republican Mitt Romney proposed the same program. It is not wrong because of who proposed it; it’s wrong because it is based on principles that are contrary to Liberty.

I have a better opinion of Teddy Roosevelt. He was for legal immigration and dead-set against Identity Group politics. He was for big strong families and a big strong military. And his progressivism at least contained some real progress, like building the Panama Canal.

And I've voted for Mitt Romney. I was trying to stop McCain--even though he admires TR, too. This was before he picked Palin. I sure wasn't going to vote for Huckabee, even though we share some views. I didn't like Huck's Mormon-bashing, since I regard Mormons as loyal conservatives. Even though I disagree with Mormonism vehemently.

Complicated, huh?

Well, so was that Glenn Beck-ish piece I quoted. It was written by KrisAnne Hall, a veteran, an assistant state attorney and a Tea Party activist in Florida. I don't agree with every last word, but I think as an American, especially as a vet, she has a right to say it. Right?

“You can’t take a job advocating for the state and go out and take a position against the state,” Jarvis said. “I advised her from my first learning of her activity that she was free to say and do whatever she desired within the law, but she could not do so while assistant counsel for the state.”

Hall, 40, said she spoke about the original intent of the U.S. Constitution, smaller government, budget deficits and Florida’s lawsuit against health care reform. Describing herself as a disabled Army veteran, she said all are federal issues she’s passionate about.

“I never said anything bad about the state. I never said anything bad about Mr. Jarvis,” said Hall. “I love being an assistant state attorney, [but] I’m not ready to give up on my constitutional rights.”

I won't give up on them if you won't, sister.

ROBERT GIBBS' 18 & 1/2 WEEK GAP

Doug Powers:

It was back in February that Joe Sestak told a Philadelphia radio station that the White House offered him a job [Sec.of Navy?] if he’d drop out of the House race — an offer which would be a felony and could come with all sorts of possible impeachment implications depending on what levels it reached.

Weekly Standard:

I don’t have anything to add to what I said in March.

I don’t have anything to add today.

I don’t have anything to add to that.

I gave that answer in March, and I don’t have anything to add to that.

Jake, I don’t have anything to add to what I said in March.

I don’t have anything to add to what Jake asked me.

I will just refer you to what I said in March."

Press Secretary Robert Gibbs has been doing his best "Groundhog Day"-impersonation for months, endlessly repeating himself, leaving reporters twisting slowly, slowly in the wind.

"I'm told that whatever conversationS have been had are not problematic. I think Congressman Sestak has discussed that this is — whatever happened is in the past, and he's focused on his primary election."

So was CREEP, the Committee to Re-Elect the President.

A White House investigates itself and finds nothing wrong. A press secretary stonewalls and stonewalls, hoping the questions will stop, yet they don't stop, even as the once-whispered word "impeachment" becomes a growing clamor.

Where have I heard all this before? It all seems so familiar...ah, yes--now I remember:

August 29, 1972: 'Internal Investigations Have Found No Wrongdoing in White House'

Nixon Speaks:

"...[W]ithin our own staff, under my direction, Counsel to the President, Mr. Dean, has conducted a complete investigation of all leads which might involve any present members of the White House Staff or anybody in the Government. I can say categorically that his investigation indicates that no one in the White House Staff, no one in this Administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident. ...

Before Mr. Mitchell left as campaign chairman he had employed a very good law firm with investigatory experience to look into the matter. Mr. MacGregor has continued that investigation and is continuing it now. ...

What really hurts in matters of this sort is not the fact that they occur, because overzealous people in campaigns do things that are wrong. What really hurts is if you try to cover it up."

The question remains:

What did the president know and when will he find a hole in his schedule between tee times to know it again?

UPDATE: "Obama's Watergate"

"Paging Fred Thompson, paging Fred Thompson..."

UP-UPDATE:

White House Calls Sestak's Brother

Sestak "answered honestly" when asked if asked if he's coordinating cover stories with the Regime's Dept. of Official Truths(tm).

'RATS

Fox News:

"As you probably know, some American politicians and American journalists refer to Washington, D.C. as the 'capital of the free world'. But it seems to me that in this great city, which boasts 1,000 years of history and which serves as the capital of Belgium, the home of the European Union, and the headquarters for NATO, this city has its own legitimate claim to that title."

Last week, Democrats thought it was Mexico City. This week, Brussels. Next week, Havana?

He's right about this, though; it sure ain't Ogabeville.

It's Jerusalem.

Or even Tehran. And Shanghaied Caracas.

UPDATE: Jonah G.:

Joe Biden’s Brussels Spout

Then there’s the fact that the EU has set up shop in Brussels. Surely this was really Biden’s only point. He was telling the unaccountable Lilliputians of the Eurocracy that Gulliver sees them as equals now.

We’ve gone through the looking glass. Brussels has no love for freedom as we define it in the American sense, and it has little to no power to promote it in any sense. The pencil pushers in Brussels have almost as much contempt for democratic sovereignty and free enterprise as they do for common sense. Indeed, in the endless quest to ratify the EU’s constitution, the leaders of the effort insisted that the voters’ opinion didn’t matter.

Brussels doesn’t stand for freedom, it sits for its own self-aggrandizement, social engineering, the tyranny of legalisms, and diplomatic argy-bargy.

It’s not just offensive that Biden thinks Brussels might deserve the title over Washington, it’s terrifying that he might actually think Brussels is in the freedom business at all.

HINT: IT'S NOT KANSAS ANYMORE!

"In all ex-Senator Specter's eighty years, he never learned that when you chase two rabbits, you don't catch either one."--Furious Nation

Dana Milbank:

He is ornery, vain, disloyal and a brazen opportunist. He lacks a discernible ideology, puts his finger to the political winds before casting a vote and in the end does what is good for Arlen Specter.

I will miss him.

You would.

Milbank goes on to decry The Polarization(TM) of Our Politics(TM), *sniff*(TM). Oddly, the "blame" for that polarization always seems to fall on one side of the island--even polarization is polarized! Europe has the Tweedle-Dee/ Tweedle-Dum political parties--I'd rather have a choice, myself, Dana.

Some people like power a little too much. In fact, almost all people can learn to. It's human nature. And exactly why our Founders gave us a Limited Government with checks and balances--the limited government Arlen Specter has worked so hard to delimit.

It seems to me Arlen Specter clung to power for a lifetime because he was afraid his life would dry up and blow away without it. But we created those positions as a way for free people to govern themselves, not as therapy for politicians; "The Jung-ian Gentleman yields to the Senator from Self-Discovery, Madame Power-Crazed President."

Was Arlen Specter an open-minded, independent voice for the nation...or a wishy-washy, mediocre self-centered power-broker? Did he vote his conscience so often that he finally ran out?

If your politics are big enough to encompass endorsing both a Constitutional giant like Clarence Thomas and a Constitutional midget like Barack Obama, maybe your "bigness" is really all about you. aka; "smallness".

His impeachment vote of "Scottish Law; Not Proven" is a pretty good summation of his philosophy; aconstitutional, neither this nor that, irrelevant, odd and mostly meant to benefit Arlen Specter.

Milbank praises him for trading his Stimulus vote for $10 billion in medical research funding for the NIH.

But shouldn't this be decided on the merits?
And is it really heroic to borrow another $10 billion from the Chinese and put somebody else on the hook to repay it?
Is the NIH the best way to accomplish this and could taxpayers create better health outcomes for themselves with their own money?
And what will be history's verdict on Arlen Specter?

"Not proven?"

"Men need myths -- and until capitalism can come up with a transformative myth of its own, it may well be that many men will prefer to find their myths in the same place they found them in the first part of the twentieth century -- the myth of revolutionary socialism.... Bad myths can only be driven out by better myths, and unless capitalism can provide a better myth than socialism, the latter will again prevail."--Lee Harris, "Why Isn't Socialism Dead?"

Van Helsing:

"Marxism has "the only economy system expressing concern of equal distribution (of wealth); that is moral ethics," the Tibetan Buddhist leader told a news conference at the start of a four-day New York visit. …

But in practice, he added, Marxism as applied by authoritarian governments, such as China's, is oppressive, because it lacks an independent judiciary, a free press and human rights for his fellow Buddhists in Chinese-governed Tibet."

How communism could possibly be imposed while preserving any meaningful human rights whatsoever was once again left unexplained.

Ronald Reagan: "The Idiocy of Karl Marx".

George Moneo:

Hello, Dalai…
You're so swell, Dalai
Now I know what I have known for all along
You're just a red, Dalai,
'nother red, Dalai,
I'm just wonderin'
What the hell your
Chicom bosses think of you!

The guy who never worked a day in his life thinks Marxism is "fair". And can be imposed fairly, "with a human face", if we'll only give it One More Chance(tm)!

The reason Marxism has never worked is because it is contrary to human nature, not to mention God's laws. Because it is contrary to human nature, it must always, in the end, be enforced at the point of a gun.

That's why the bumper stickers say "Free Tibet!", not "See Tibet!", Dalai.

"And Dalai can never go that way
The Commies won't let him home to stay
They won't let Dalai go that way
A--gaiiiiin!"

UPDATE: Doc Zero:

Virtually every subsidy is an expensive attempt to reverse market forces, and undo the will of the American consumer. A nation which pours its gross domestic product into entitlements and subsidies is essentially trying to short-circuit itself. It will eventually succeed.

It’s imperative for the American people to understand this is the inevitable result of collectivist economics. Political control of the marketplace always degenerates into the political class robbing independent citizens and unpopular industries, to maintain the support of indentured constituents. Packaged votes and bundled political donations, from loyal and motivated groups, are a far easier route to power than somehow keeping the majority of the country happy – a goal that always eludes socialism, because compulsion and ideology make poor substitutes for ambition and innovation.

That explains why socialism is miserable. It turns feral because it always makes promises it cannot keep, and the primary skill of a successful politician is the ability to avoid responsibility. As of this writing, it remains the official position of the Democrat Party that not a single one of its members bears any responsibility for the subprime mortgage crisis.

MISSION CREEPS

"In a sense, proponents of "social justice" are unduly modest. What they are seeking to correct are not merely the deficiencies of society, but of the cosmos. What they call social justice encompasses far more than any given society is causally responsible for. Crusaders for social justice seek to correct not merely the sins of man but the oversights of God or the accidents of history. What they are really seeking is a universe tailor-made to their vision of equality. They are seeking cosmic justice."--Dr. Thomas Sowell, "The Quest for Cosmic Justice"

David Harsanyi:

As there is no real problem with the Internet, it's not surprising that some of our top minds have been diligently working on a solution.

In a 2001 interview (one that's only recently gone viral and caused a brouhaha), Cass Sunstein, now the nation's regulatory czar, is overheard advocating for government to insist all websites offer opposing viewpoints — or, in other words, a Fairness Doctrine for the Web.

Cass Sunstein--I thought he choked on a ham sandwich with his band back in the Sixties...oh, wait--I must be thinking of Bruce Sunstein.

"If we could get voluntary arrangements in that direction it would be great," said Sunstein at the time, "and if we can't get voluntary arrangements maybe Congress should hold hearings about mandates." After all, Sunstein went on to say, "the word voluntary is a little complicated. And sometimes people don't do what's best for our society." Mandates, he said, were the "ultimate weapon designed to encourage people to do better."

Actually, the word "voluntary" isn't complicated at all. And mandates do not "encourage" people to do better; mandates "force" people to do what those writing regulations happen to think is better. ...

I know it sounds wonderfully fair. But the reality of net neutrality makes as much sense as mandating that tricycle riders have the same rights and privileges as cars and trucks on our roads — highway neutrality.

Actually, this administration has already done that.

Sec. of Tricycles Transportation Ray LaHood:

"Today, I want to announce a sea change. People across America who value bicycling should have a voice when it comes to transportation planning. This is the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized."

The Cold Fury Corollary: "Don't Tell Jokes Around Liberals--They Legislate the Punchlines."

I see what's coming.

Net Neutrality is important to this administration, as are many other kinds of neutrality; for example, the strict neutrality between trucks and tricycles, and CIA interrogators and terrorists. Or between China and Arizona.

Here at Cold Fury, we represent conservative and libertarian viewpoints, and a few that are better left uncategorized.

But if we are to maintain our independence, we must cave in and present liberal points of view also. It's only mandated fair. As much as we dislike the Fairness Doctrine, we must try to see the other guy's point of view and walk a mile in his shoes, even if we have to tackle him and remove those shoes forcibly. And let me be the first to apologize to the Forcible Shoe Removal Community for that horribly, horribly insensitive joke.

And the toenail fungus.

You'd better put something on that.

Anyway, in the interest of Cosmic Fairness, Cold Fury proudly presents...

THE TOP TEN THINGS LIBERALS SECRETLY THINK!

10.) "How did we ever get our guy Shepard Smith on Fox?"

9.) "What 'Second Amendment'? Black people can't be trusted with guns!"

8.) "Hitler had some good ideas, but he went too far. Stalin had some good ideas, but he went too far. Mao had some good ideas, but he went too far. The Ayatollah had some good ideas, but he went too far. Reagan had some good ideas...My God, what am I thinking?"

7.) "I wish Hillary had won."

6.) "He knows so much...yet accomplishes so little."

5.) "Why would anybody want to lie about being in Vietnam?"

4.) "Obama is the best president his country ever produced. Whatever country that is."

3.) "The Dalai Lama is a Marxist? That’s an amazing coincidence, because Karl Marx was also a Dalai Lama! At the age of two the child Karl Marx was recognized as the reincarnation of the 1st Dalai Lama, Otto Roddum Klinton, East German border guard. The German Dalai Lamas are believed to be manifestations of Schnitztelhosen, the Bodhisattva of elaborate record-keeping and patron saint of work camps, bad haircuts and deeply confused undergraduates.”

2.) "Some days, I...I... I miss Dick Cheney! There--I've said it!"

And the Number One Thing Liberals Secretly Think:

1.) "This time, Socialism will be different!"

(Via Goldstein)

"Like the pine trees lining the winding road,
I got a name, I got a name;
Like the singing bird and the croaking toad,
I got a name, I got a name."--Jim Croce

* Item: Washington Independent:

[T]he Afghanistan war request contained a vague provision — indeed, not even carrying the words “Guantanamo Bay” — called a “transfer fund” to authorize the purchase of the Thomson Correction Center in Illinois. ...But buried at the bottom of an extensive summary the committee released last night is an express prohibition on the use of any Defense Department money to buy a new detention facility. ...“It doesn’t mean that the proposal is dead, but it’s hard to see how it makes a comeback after the House Armed Services Committee says there can’t be money spent on Thomson.”

That’s not all. While the bill doesn’t renew the current Congressional ban on transferring detainees from Guantanamo into the U.S. — set to expire in October — it requires President Obama to submit a “a comprehensive disposition plan and risk assessment” for any future detainee transfer. Congress would then get “120 days to review the disposition plan before it could be carried out.” Additionally, Congress would get a 30-day review period for the proposed transfer of any detainee from Guantanamo to a foreign country in order to check against a detainee inflicting violence against the U.S. or its interests.

* Item: Via Big Soccer:

"You won’t find any mention of the repeal of 'don’t ask, don’t tell,'" Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri said of the draft language for the bill, adding that he and the ranking Republican member of the committee had an agreement not to address the gay ban in committee. "Mr. [Buck] McKeon and I have spoken about this, we have agreed to support Admiral Mullen and Secretary Gates’s request for time to study the issue, and we do not support this issue being raised in this markup."

...Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, has said he will move forward with a repeal measure if he has the votes to pass it. According to repeal advocates, he is likely one or two votes short of having the necessary commitments from other senators on the committee.

* Item: Sister Toldjah:

Yesterday, President Obama – on the WH lawn – stood in solidarity with Mexico’s President Calderon against Arizona’s new immigration law. Today, it was Democrats who stood up and applauded Calderon’s remarks against the bill during a joint session of Congress...

Well, we’ve finally found something our President and the Democrats in Congress will stand up for: a foreign “leader” – one whose own country has tough immigration laws similar to our own federal laws on the issue – slamming and demagoguing a state law on immigration that … essentially mirrors our federal law, and has many similarities to Mexico’s laws as well.

What a despicable, disgraceful lot. All of them.

Gitmo remaining open, Don't Ask/Don't Tell and Federal Immigration Law--what do all three of these issues have in common?

a.) These are all issues used by Democrats to beat up on Republicans,
b.) Even though the laws were passed by Democrats
c.) And these are issues Democrats use to whip up Identity Groups, even though
d.) These are all issues Democrats could schedule a vote on tomorrow if they wanted to, and maybe even win,
e.) But they won't do it, because they lack the guts to stand up and honestly defend their extreme positions in front of voters because
f.) They simply won't put their names on the line if it might cost them anything.

The answer is, of course, g.) all of the above.

Don't get me wrong--I'm glad they lack the guts to bring Gitmo here, to impose a radical social agenda on the military and to openly advocate abolishing our borders.

It's just the gutlessness of it all.

UPDATE: Charlie Crist brings back McCain-Kennedy because he is your moral superior, and because it would pay for SoshSecurity.

Teddy Roosevelt strongly condemned looking at immigrants as mere economic units and not as future countrymen and brothers. Is it really the moral high ground to let people in because you want their money? This is like conceiving a child to use it for spare parts.

Indeed, the lack of children is part of the problem. Europe has already tried replacing their own children with Turks, Algerians and Pakistanis. Is it working for them?

People are generally assets, not liabilities. But liberalism screws up everything it touches. The incentives of the Multi-Cultural Welfare State turn assets into liabilities.

Any immigrant would have to generate an awful lot of income to cover the costs of the Earned Income Credit, food stamps, free Medicaid, hospitals, jails, schools and all the other programs, including his own Social Security--and he's going to pay for Charlie Crist's benefits too?

The Welfare State creates reasons not to welcome all those that we otherwise could.

And race preferences also drive a wedge between all of us; why would average Americans happily welcome people who will eventually be given preferences over them in private employment, government employment and school placement? Or if not against them, against their children or grandchildren? State-sponsored racialism is a divisive wedge used by liberals to claw their way into power and keep it.

We’re already down to three Social Security taxpayers for each recipient. If this keeps going, we’ll one day assign each taxpayer his own personal taxpayee!

“Here, Bob; here’s your cut of my paycheck.”
“Thanks, Steve. Keep up the good work! We're all depending on you--heh heh. I’m goin’ fishin’ now–I’ll see you next payday!”

The Social Security Trust Fund: Neither Society’s, nor Secure, nor Trust-worthy, nor a Fund.

It exists only in our elites’ imagination, like the Al Gore Presidential Library, Bait, Tackle & Lockbox Shop.

The problem isn’t that we need a brand new pool of Ponzi Scheme marks to scam; the problem is THE POLITICIANS ALREADY SPENT ALL THE MONEY!

And we let them.

ALL 57 OF THEM

"These are the boundaries by which you are to divide the land..."--Ezekiel 47

“We are defined not by our borders, but by our bonds.”--The President of the United States of America a very large parking lot

This president isn't defined by his iron grip on reality. Or realty either, for that matter.

However, his borderline border-talk reminded me of this Mark Steyn column from 2003:

Speaking as a foreigner myself, I've always found it one of the more charming features of the American scene that "progressives" are obliged to find justification for their radicalism in a piece of old parchment. In Europe, they can simply say: We need to get with the beat, daddy-o. But in the U.S. the Left at least observes the niceties and pretends that the powdered-wig guys had somehow ingeniously anticipated the need for a constitutional right to gay marriage or a partial-birth abortion. Perhaps recognizing that this particular penumbra is pretty well tapped out, Justice O'Connor is now saying that there's gold in them thar Scandinavian hills. ...In considering the pros and cons of sodomy in Texas, the Supreme Court did not rely on the large body of Nigerian sharia precedents and Taliban jurisprudence in this area. ...

Given that this is the Court that elevated "Celebrate Diversity" from a bumper sticker to a bedrock constitutional principle, it's a little bewildering to find that they cheerfully accord the white European a unique monopoly on the judicial consultancy positions. Heartening though it is to know the white man still has his uses, this privileged access is, alas, unwarranted. For one thing, the fact that the U.S. Constitution is older than the French, German, Italian, Greek, and Spanish constitutions combined suggests that this member of "the Western tradition" is more traditional than others. For another, can you imagine any judge in France, Denmark, or New Zealand taking U.S. court decisions into account when deliberating on, say, gun ownership or capital punishment?

Let me come at it this way. I love borders, the more the merrier -- town lines, county, state, and, of course, national. Borders symbolize one of the few remaining constraints on government: You don't like the grade school here in town? Move ten miles up the road. You don't want to pay Vermont sales tax? Drive over the river and shop in New Hampshire. Arianna Huffington huffs against "tax loopholes for fat cats," but I'd say the ability to rent a post-office box in Bermuda or the Cayman Islands is a "loophole" in one of the original 16th-century senses -- an aperture to let in light and fresh air. The fact that there's somewhere else to go to is the ultimate limitation on government. Borders give people choices -- and, to put it in a bumper sticker, "I'm Pro-Choice and I Vote with My Feet." When starry-eyed utopians speak of a "world without borders," you can pretty much guess what kind of a place the one-world one-party state would be, with tax rates starting at more than 50 percent, where they are in Sweden right now.

That's why Justice O'Connor's indifference to jurisdictional integrity and partiality to foreigners is not just a kinky fetish but something philosophically incompatible with the job she's meant to be doing. If you wanted to construct the precise opposite of the U.S. Constitution, it would look an awful lot like "international law." The former is a document that limits the state's grip on the people, the latter is designed to ensure they can never wiggle free, no matter where they go. "International law" is the new colonialism, the imposition on the world's peoples of the moral certainties of a remote, unaccountable Western elite -- indeed, one far less tolerant of local customs and culture than the old-school imperialists. The Europeans haven't had much luck imposing their laws on Saudi Arabia and Sudan but, thanks to Justice O'Connor, other backward jurisdictions like Texas and Alabama are about to be whipped into line.

Are Texas and Alabama "defined by their borders"? Because if they're not, they don't have to obey any pesky Supreme Court rulings.

We tend to think of borders as limiting the movement of people, but as Steyn shows, borders also empower people and limit the Movement of the State, legally, literally and physically. In that context, then, Obama's statement is yet another power-grab by the power-grabbiest administration in history.

The illegal aliens in Arizona would probably be surprised to learn they are not "defined" by borders. They looked around and saw poverty, corruption and lack of opportunity on their side of the border. And lots of free stuff, an honest administrative system and opportunity on the other. They think they're very much defined by the border, even if Obama doesn't.

While the dream of One World Government Rule is a power grab, it is also an abdication of power.

When Our Down-Low Legislature was applauding a foreign president for bashing America, they were really saying: "Ignore us. We don't matter. We write reasonable laws in the daytime and put our name on them...but at night, we prowl the Mean Maquiladora streets, doing everything in our power to make sure those laws never get enforced." That's just another way to cheat you out of a voice in your own governance--which is pretty much a full-time job with these people.

When the ICE chief says he might not accept illegals turned over by Arizona, he's saying the president's Constitutional duty--"he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed"--is optional. And since presidents signed all the laws we already have, he's undermining his own authority, and by extension, ours.

Doctors Without Borders is good idea. Politicians Without Borders is a bad idea from which you can never escape.

Run for the border. It's running for you.

BACK AT CHA'!

Ace pens a minor novel Full-Frontal Fisking.
Instapunk contributes a Semi-Fisking.
Doc Zero even prescribes legibly.

They're talking about this:

My Country, Tis of Me: There’s nothing patriotic about the Tea Party Patriots. By Michael Kinsley

I guess it's okay to "question the Patriotism" again, kids!

Good--cos' I was getting a little tired of the old-"We'll bash America on foreign soil, undermine her economy, dissolve her borders and work ceaselessly to see her lose her wars--and then pretend we're just as patriotic as you!"-paradigm.

Do they know what they are supporting, or opposing?

Well, they're free to choose their foreign policy from among these options:

Republicans: "Confront the threat."
Libertarians: "There is no threat."
Democrats: "The threat is America."

Tea Party Patriots reveal a fondness for procedural gimmicks (like a ban on congressional earmarks), constitutional amendments (term limits, balanced budget), and similar magic tricks or shortcuts to salvation.

A constitutional amendment enacted by a vast supermajority is some kind of parlor trick...but one cooked up by five liberal justices is sacrosanct and inviolable!

Apart from a general funk, though, the one common theme espoused by TPPs is the monstrous danger of Big Government.

Except for Bootsy, I don't know a General Funk. But General Washington & Co. espoused common themes such as

* "Congress shall make no law"
* 'the right of the people shall not be infringed'
* rights are 'retained by the people'
* rights are 'reserved to the States or to the people'

In short, the Founders foresaw "the monstrous danger of Big Government", even if Kinsley's pet frogs are mindlessly enjoying a leisurely swim around his quickly-warming hot tub. That's why the Bill of Rights is a catalog of limitations on government power.

Second, although the 1960s ultimately spread their tentacles throughout the culture and around the world, politically there was just one big issue: ending the war in Vietnam for Hanoi.

Tea Partiers want to End the War, too...The War on Prosperity.

And Micheal Kinsley is AWOL--Absent While Obliviously Liberal.

OF COURSE, OF COURSE

In her 1983 Oxford thesis, Elena Kagan blasted the Warren Court...but not for liberal activism.

The precocious young student of Nanny State U. was mad because they were sloppy about it. Her message: 'If you're going to stand the Constitution on its head to coddle criminals, please dot all the "i"s and cross all the "t"s, so that criminal-coddling might endure for the Ages.'

Mary Poppins was right again: "If you say it loud enough, you'll always sound precocious."

Eva Rodriguez at The Compost:

As an example, Kagan analyzes the Warren Court’s opinions on the exclusionary rule, which prohibits law enforcement officers from using evidence obtained illegally. She notes that many of the court’s opinions were shabbily crafted, lacking clear and strong legal foundations. These failings made the decisions easy pickings for future, more conservative incarnations of the court.

“Future courts attempting to effect long-term change would do well not to repeat such a serious error,” Kagan wrote.

Except that "courts attempting to effect long-term change" is the serious error.

The Court has become a Super-Senate and Tony Blankley votes "Nay":

In life, generally, honorable people play by the rules. This is particularly true in the United States Senate, which has historically defined itself by its adherence to its unique rules...

The current rules are obsolete, having come into being at a time when the federal courts had not yet been consciously politicized. Today, liberal presidents attempt to use their appointments with the intent to systematically undermine -- not uphold -- the Constitution. And they do so because their vision of an ever-more-statist America is inconsistent with the Constitution's fundamental purpose: to limit the size and scope of government.

And note, this is not a case of "both sides do it," although it is true that conservative presidents look for nominees who will support original intent, strict construction or other methods of trying to adhere to the Constitution.

Both sides don't do it. That's the point. That is why you cannot name a famous recent case of conservative activism, but dozens and dozens of liberal cases spring to mind.

But -- and this is paramount -- because liberal justices tend to seek to undermine the clear intent of the Constitution while conservative justices try to hold the line: The result is an inexorable march toward undermining the Constitution, with conservative appointments functioning as mere temporary holding actions.

As a conservative, I respect Republican senators who wish to venerate well-established traditions. But now, in the fateful spring of 2010, those senators need to consider which of conflicting traditions they intend to venerate. They can either venerate the traditional rules of confirmation or they can venerate the United States Constitution -- but not both.

I introduce, as Exhibit A on behalf of this choice, the provision in Obamacare that requires every American citizen to buy a health insurance policy. When the case challenging the constitutionality of that provision reaches the Supreme Court (as about 20 state attorneys general are currently attempting to accomplish by litigation), the government will argue that it is permitted under the power of the federal government to regulate interstate commerce.

They will be forced to argue that the mere inaction of an individual American citizen is an act of interstate commerce worthy of regulation. If that proposition is upheld by the Supreme Court -- then we no longer have a limited government. The government would then have the power to outlaw and punish (by fine or prison term) any American's decision not to exercise, not to vote, not to eat four servings of vegetables a day -- any human inaction would be sanctionable under the Interstate Commerce Clause -- and then adios liberty.

Blankley ends with a warning:

If senators continue to honor the rules of confirmation, then they are choosing to continue the march toward the end of constitutional, limited government and will deserve whatever demise the people have in store for them. There's a doozy of a storm brewing -- and not only Democratic ships are vulnerable to sinking.

Perhaps the Righteous Brothers said it best; "You've lost that sinking feeling..." And that's the problem we must fix.

CRYIN' ALL THE TIME

Marcus Steynius:

Provocation for its own sake is one of the dreariest features of contemporary culture, but that's not what this is about. Nick Gillespie's post reminds us that the three most offensive of the "Danish cartoons" - including the one showing Mohammed as a pig - were not by any Jyllands-Posten cartoonists but were actually faked by Scandinavian imams for the purposes of stirring up outrage among Muslims.

[T]he clerics' action underlines what's going on: the real provocateurs are the perpetually aggrieved and ever more aggressive Islamic bullies - emboldened by the silence of "moderate Muslims" and the pre-emptive capitulation of western media. I was among a small group of columnists in the Oval Office when President Bush, after running through selected highlights from a long list of Islamic discontents, concluded with an exasperated: "If it's not the Crusades, it's the cartoons."...

I'm bored with death threats. And, as far as I'm concerned, if that's your opening conversational gambit, then any obligation on my part to "cultural sensitivity" and "mutual respect" is over. The only way to stop this madness destroying our liberties is (as Ayaan Hirsi Ali puts it) to spread the risk. Everybody Draws Mohammed Day does just that.

Let me offer a word-picture today, drawn from Chesteron's "Lepanto".

Joseph E. Rendini:

In language for which our bloodless leaders would apologize today, Chesterton describes “Mahound” - that is, Mohammed - in his “paradise,” summoning up dark angels, genii and giants to the aid of the Turk. For Mohammed knows what is coming out of the West:

But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know
The voice that shook our palaces - four hundred years ago:
It is he that saith not ‘Kismet’; it is he that knows not Fate;
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey in the gate!
It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager worth,
Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth.

Here, Chesterton anticipates those who translate “Islam” as “peace” by equating “peace” with “submission,” which is the literal meaning of “Islam.” But Chesterton submits that the submission required by Islam is not submission to the will of God, but submission to the conqueror’s foot. The “peace” his Mohammed offers is that of the down-trodden.

That is, the peace of the conquered, the peace of the slave.

Screw that.

Joe Palmer:

The [naval] battle of Lepanto remains a moment in Western history when great powers in Christendom - Spain, Genoa, Venice, and several Papal states - gained victory over Islam. ...The battle was a turning point in early modern history. The merchants of the West in 1571 made the world safer for trade, just as the merchants of the West are making the world safer for trade [today]. ...

Chesterton was a Christian apologist who held that "nonsense and faith are the two supreme symbolic assertions of truth." He tells us in the verses that Muhammad in his paradise remembered the earlier Crusades of long ago before the battle of Lepanto took place:

"...a noise is in the mountains... and I know the voice that shook our palaces four hundred years ago: it is he that saith not ‘Kismet;' it is he that knows not Fate: It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey at the gate."

Richard I, the Lion-Hearted (1157-1199), Raymond IV, Count of Toulouse (1038-1105), and Godfrey of Bouillon, Duke of Lower Lorraine (1058-1100), King of Jerusalem in 1099, were not given to believe that everything that happens is foreordained. They didn't say "Kismet" to explain away what happened to them, like the Moslems. They didn't believe in "fate." Things that happened were not written, not foreordained.

The Crusaders tried to stop the Saracens, the Moslems, from encroaching on what was left of Roman Mediterranean civilization in feudal days. Then the Turks took over the Byzantine Empire of Greek-speaking Christians who controlled Asia Minor, the Balkans, most of the Near East, and the Mediterranean Coast of Africa.

The great sea had been a Roman lake, with North Africa a verdant, productive bread basket. There were farms in those days all along the coast of North Africa, from the Levant to Morocco. Roman civilization persisted there, as it does today in the West.

Pushed by the tribes from the steppes of Asia, the tribes of Northern Europe mixed with the Romans, creating powerful kingdoms where Roman ways were perpetuated. Their galleys were rowed by eunuchs provided by Viking, and Syrian Jewish, slave dealers, who got their slaves among the Slavs, hence the word slave. Eunuch in Arabic is sakáliba, the same root as slave.

The Prophet Muhammad is called "Mahound" in Chesterton's ballad, an insult that goes back to a Beaumont and Fletcher play written around 1600. Salman Rushdie in his immensely popular recent novel The Satanic Verses used the name Mahound, thereby earning himself a famous Moslem fatwa, or condemnation, of the sort that could be dangerous to one's health. "Mahound" is a contemptuous name for Muhammad that means devil or evil spirit. Dogs are taboo in Islam.

"Whores, writers, Mahound, we are the people you can't forgive," Rushdie observed.

In the poem 'Lepanto', Mahound is taller than the trees; his voice is thunder, commanding the angel of death Azrael and the pagan spirits Ariel and Ammon. He has godly powers and uses the Seal of Solomon, the magic ring with the magen Dawid, Sulayman's Seal, the cachet used on Moroccan coins, to crush the infidel Christians, to root out their hermits and ascetics, to rob and pillage, to raid towns on the Adriatic coast and build fortresses...

...and build mosques among the ruins.

UPDATE: Cap'n Ed:

A “hearts and minds” campaign, as we discovered in Vietnam, requires some sympathy and understanding of the entire community. If we’re insulting a broad class of Muslims by celebrating what appears to be a heresy in their eyes, we’re pushing them closer to the radicals and not isolating the terrorists. Given the images being celebrated on Facebook’s EDMD page, it won’t be too difficult to see this as an attack on their religion altogether.

On the other hand — and this is where my sympathies lie — a free society has to have the ability to offend as part and parcel of the freedom of expression. To acquiesce to the pressure that cowed Comedy Central is to surrender that freedom and to make terrorism a successful strategy, and not just for radical Islam. A nation of laws provides its citizens freedom from vendettas, and where vendettas succeed, freedom is diminished or lost altogether. That is why it is always un-American to seek political change through violence and terrorism, because it cuts against the fabric of what makes us Americans. In order to stand against the vendetta mentality, we need to make a statement that we will not be cowed into silence and surrender, whether that’s defined as dhimmitude, omerta, or whatever.

My good friend Chris Muir has what I believe may be the most thoughtful entry for EDMD. It’s a good theme for EDMD as a sort of Rohrshach test. What you read into it depends entirely on you.

Have a look.

SEIG, HELL

Town Crier:

In the report presented to the Police Services Board on April 22, Nazi is listed as one of the 27 identified victim groups targeted in hate-motivated criminal acts in 2009.

Under the breakdown of occurrences by police division, “Nazi” is listed as the victim group for one mischief offence that was reported in 13 Division. The west-end division polices parts of Forest Hill, Davenport, Cedarvale and Dovercourt.

In the report’s executive summary, Nazi also appears under the listing of “new victim group” for 2009; these are the identifiable groups that have not appeared in the previous hate/bias crime reports.

Herr Steyn:

I personally am indifferent as to whether Nazis get beaten up on the streets of Toronto. But I don't think the law should be. And that's why Mr Farber's soundbite is so revealing. Two years ago, when the cases against Maclean's got underway, I wrote:

Justice is supposed to be, like Dean Steacy, blind. If you run a red light and you hit a pedestrian, it makes no difference in law whether the pedestrian's Marc Lemire or Nelson Mandela. Or at least it shouldn't.

This is one of the most repellent aspects of Canada's "human rights" regime: Its contempt for one of the most basic principles of justice - equality before the law. At the "human rights" tribunal, your roles as victim or victimizer come pre-assigned: By definition, a woman is a victim of a man; a gay is a victim of a Christian; a Jew is a victim of a Nazi. This is mostly for the purposes of prosecuting "offensive" speech. My traffic accident comparison was intended to point out the difference between real law and "human rights" law. But, as Ezra says, Bernie Farber's moral compass has been so corroded by the whole ugly "human rights" racket he now apparently thinks that its affronts to justice should be extended to real crimes, including crimes of violence. If you get beaten up, all that counts is what identity group you belong to.

And, of course, he's too dull-witted to think that fashions in victim groups might change - indeed, are already changing. As I put it two years ago:

It's foolish to assume the abuses of the CHRC will always be confined to folks you dislike.

Look at Farber's line again:

'A Nazi can never be a victim but only a victimizer.'

Doesn't that sound awfully like the reductive claptrap you hear on any old campus during Israeli Apartheid Week (Canada's gift to the world - thank you, Bernie Farber)? When it comes to "Palestinian occupation", "an Israeli can never be a victim but only a victimizer." At the University of Calgary, a prolifer can never be a victim but only a victimizer. This is where the kind of thought-crime regime promoted by Farber's CJC always leads.

Mel Brooks had better think twice before opening his new play "Springtime for Hitler: Can't We All Just Get Along?" in Toronto.

Does this mean we can have Nancy Pelosi and all those Democrats arrested for calling Tea Partiers 'Nazis"? And are all those "Arizona=The Third Reich" "Papers, Please"-protestors now human rights abusers themselves? Maybe we could set up an international tribunal for them...in Nuremberg.

This is what happens when we abandon true Constitutional equality before the law in favor of identity politics, multiculturalism, professional victimhood, ThoughtCrime and state-sponsored pigment preferences. This is the logical outcome.

I often say "Don't joke around liberals--they legislate the punch lines."

Damn, Mel--it really is Springtime for Hitler.

(A big tip of Helmut's helmet: Reason)

BEWARE THE MEDICO-POLITICAL COMPLEX

Mark Steyn:

She brought it up among a group of her girlfriends – seven of them. Six had not received the Labour election card. The seventh had – and, by a remarkable coincidence, Shirley Foreman had had surgery for breast cancer. So in a group of eight women the only ones to receive the government’s breast-cancer warning were the two breast-cancer patients themselves. When I received the breast cancer card at first I thought it was from the hospital,” said another Sherwood resident, Janet Arslan. “I did not think Labour would be that crass to deliberately target a terminal cancer patient like me.” ...

In this case, however, everybody who’s come forward to say she received the card has been either diagnosed with, treated for, survived or, in at least one case, died of breast cancer (it was her widower who came forward). A 44-year old TV producer in Poplar and Limehouse, a marginal constituency in East London, canvassed 50 of her neighbors and discovered that she was the only to get the card. Like all the others, it was personally addressed to her. She’d recently been told she had a lump in her breast.

So a quantum leap in targeted marketing has just been made: The governing party of a free society was able to identify women with breast cancer in swing constituencies and send them a postcard warning that if you vote for the opposition they’ll cut off your chemo and kill you. ...

Labour denies that it somehow accessed confidential medical records, while declining to offer an alternative explanation as to how it was able to alert sick women that the opposition is planning on killing them.

Britain today is a land in which the citizen takes for granted that he will be photographed by closed-circuit TV multiple times in the course of his day, and in which roadside cameras can zoom into your car and detect whether you’re illegally eating a sandwich while operating a motor vehicle. In some municipalities, cameras in trash cans record your garbage. These are only the most obvious signs of an omnipresent state which maintains hundreds of different databases tracking the activities of the citizenry in every sphere of life. In theory, these databases are entirely separate: The National Health Service bureaucrats cannot access your tax records; the tax collector cannot access your medical records. But in practice who knows? You’ll recall that, when Joe the Plumber’s appearance on the scene proved unhelpful to Barack Obama, it was the work of moments for “public servants” to leak his confidential information.

Obama says you can keep your doctor, but you'll be lucky if you can keep your plumber.

Phoenix Business Journal:

The Seattle City Council doesn’t like Arizona’s new immigration law and passed a boycott measure Monday telling city agencies to refrain from traveling to Arizona or awarding contracts to companies based here.

But the measure does not apply to existing contracts. That allows ATS to avert the Seattle boycott, said Janet Dewey Kollen, spokeswoman for the Scottsdale company. ...

ATS has 106 red-light cameras installed in the state of Washington, including 29 in Seattle, said company spokeswoman Kate Coulson. She said ATS also has one mobile speeding camera in Seattle.

Wait a minute--asking a foreigner for ID in Phoenix is a Human Rights violation...but spying on American citizens for the purpose of extracting cash from them in Seattle isn't?

Ah; these electronic highwaymen pay their way:

In the first year alone there were 16,539 citations issued, with more than 70 percent of violators paying fines of $1.07 million.

By the way, Seattle has a $72.5 million shortfall this year. Why are they sending city employees to expensive conferences to learn how to run a city when sending city employees to expensive conferences to learn how to run a city is part of their problem?

Not that I want Arizona to lose any business--I don't. In fact, Buy Arizona!

But almost all of the localities that have announced boycotts are zillions of dollars in the hole already. Maybe because they put playing politics before sound management. Good for the 60% majority of Seattle citizens who oppose this divisive lunacy. And smile--you're on Candid Camera, Seattle.

"Your license plate, please. Und bring your wallet."

UPDATE: "Your Report Card, Please!"

Doug Powers:

"Seniors are being asked to provide their birthdates, Social Security numbers and citizen status to the Secret Service so background checks could be performed. Such a check is required for anyone who gets within an arm’s length of the president, students were told at their senior breakfast Friday."

It’s too bad somebody can’t convince these guys to at least pretend that the borders are simply one big entrance to meet the president. The Obama administration is so against checking papers that they’re even refusing to check the paper upon which Arizona’s immigration law is written, but K’zoo Central grads will have to present their papers nonetheless.

They don't read the ten thousand-page laws they pass, or the ten-page laws they oppose. Or the Constitution, except to look for loopholes.

Yet Katy Couric never asks them what they read.

"Which is the first commandment of all? And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, 'Hear, O Israel...'"--Mark 12

Thomas Joscelyn:

Who Killed Daniel Pearl? Barack Obama won't say.

...President Barack Obama did not identify who killed Daniel Pearl at a signing ceremony for a bill that bears Pearl’s name – the Daniel Pearl Freedom of the Press Act.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed killed Daniel Pearl.

You may have heard of him.

He flattened the World Trade Center, where a mosque is now scheduled to be built.
He bombed the Pentagon like Bill Ayers only hoped to, where a Muslim Brotherhood adviser recently held sway.
KSM killed Americans in Shanksville, Pa., where a crescent-shaped memorial now faces Mecca.
But he was really aiming for the White House, where dwells a president who kneels before Saud monarchy, or perhaps Capitol Hill, where the Congressional Muslim Staffers Association works daily to impose sharia on America.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed killed Daniel Pearl, by his own admission, on what he understood to be orders from Mohammed:

Tabari VIII:38 "The Messenger of Allah commanded that all of the Jewish men and boys who had reached puberty should be beheaded. Then the Prophet divided the wealth, wives, and children of the Qurayza Jews among the Muslims."

Obama: "All around the world there are enormously courageous journalists and bloggers who, at great risk to themselves, are trying to shine a light on the critical issues that the people of their country face; who are the frontlines against tyranny and oppression. And obviously the loss of Daniel Pearl was one of those moments that captured the world’s imagination because it reminded us of how valuable a free press is, and it reminded us that there are those who would go to any length in order to silence journalists around the world."

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed did not murder Daniel Pearl because he was a journalist. He murdered Daniel Pearl because he was a Jew. An infidel, like you and me:

On March 10, 2007, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, an alleged Al Qaeda operative reported to be third in command under Osama Bin Laden, claimed responsibility, before his Combatant Status Review Tribunal, for the murder of Daniel Pearl. He claimed to have beheaded him. In a confession read during his Tribunal hearing, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is on record repeating:

"I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew Daniel Pearl, in the City of Karachi, Pakistan."

KSM said that by our waterboarding him, that released him from his religious obligation, allowing him to open up and tell us about all his other previous and pending plots.

In December 2008, he and his gangsters told the military tribunal judge at Guantanamo they wanted to plead guilty. The Obama Administration then shut the proceedings down.

In hopes of putting Bush on trial, they insanely tried to move KSM's trial to New York until the public outcry forced them to back down. Even Obama seems to sense he's one successful fuse away from impeachment hearings, although Holder and the al Qaeda Bar Association still hold out hope.

Just as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was about to decapitate him, Daniel Pearl invoked the prayer of Deuteronomy before the death blow rained down: "Shema Israel"; "Hear, O Israel".

The murder--not "loss"--of Daniel Pearl and his brave last words in the very face of evil don't remind me that "there are those who would go to any length in order to silence journalists around the world."

It reminds me to "Hear, O Israel"; God is one, Love the Lord with all your heart. And love your neighbor as yourself.

Like this:

When the police found Pearl's remains, Abdul Sattar Edhi, one of the most active philanthropists in Pakistan, arrived promptly on the scene, personally collected all ten body parts, and took them to the morgue. Pearl's body was returned to the U.S., and was interred in the Mount Sinai Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, California.

But it does reminds us there are those who would go to any length in order to silence themselves.

Even as the president rightly decried press censorship, he was self-censoring; he will not say "radical Islam". Perhaps he fears Islamist demagogues who would twist his words, just as he demagogues Arizonans.

But this failure to name names has consequences, as we've seen at Ft. Hood and many other times. Yes, it's easier to Blame Bush yet again *yawwn* or pick a media fight with Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, but the truth is this:

"You can avoid evil, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding evil."

Or avoiding evil's name.

Hear, O, bama.