Right Wing Nut House

This article originally appears in The American Thinker

To hear many on the left tell us, our republic is held in thrall by a mass murdering dictator. He regularly tramples on our constitutional guarantees of privacy. He flouts the law at his leisure. With a crack of his whip, he bids his minions in Congress to slavishly pass enabling legislation that dirties our water and air, makes rich his cronies, clandestinely establishes a Christian caliphate right here in America, and secretly plots with corporations to steal elections.

And to make matters worse, this tyrant of a man is able to do all this by hoodwinking vast swaths of America’s electorate; that is, of course, unless you’ve been given God’s good grace to glean the truth from a “lapdog” press who have been hypnotized by their corporate masters to under report, misreport, and simply ignore all these horrific doings in our nation’s capitol. For in the end, it is those that prove themselves immune from this Napoleon’s magic spells who will save our republic and bring peace, freedom, and justice back to the galaxy.

Happy Birthday, Mr. President.

The left’s “riot of conceits” as R. Emmett Tyrell puts it, have never been more pronounced than when they raise the specter of Bush as dictator. It is not a new charge levelled against American Presidents. Even legends like Jackson and Lincoln had detractors who accused them of ruling with the iron fist of tyranny. And while both of those worthies defied the Supreme Court for one reason or another, in retrospect we can see that their actions fell far short of even the dictionary definition of dictator which defines the word as “one holding complete autocratic control” or “one ruling absolutely and often oppressively.”

But the actual definition of words has never stopped the left when it comes to erecting politically correct strawmen. “Racism,” sexism,” homophobia,” and “dictator” have meaning beyond the common usage of those terms that the rest of us, bound by tradition and respect for the English language, are constrained from following. In short, if the left wants to define dictatorship down, who’s going to stop them?

Certainly not Philip Slater, former chairman of the Brandeis University Sociology department, who wrote in The Huffington Post:

“Why are some patriotic Americans supporting a president who seems so bent on destroying America–America’s constitution, America’s democracy, America’s good name, America’s credibility, America’s land, air, and water, America’s solvency, America’s educational system, America’s security, America’s children, and America’s future…”

(HT: The New Editor)

Slater doesn’t use the word “dictator” in his article, but I daresay if he actually believes George Bush is destroying “America’s constitution” and “America’s democracy,” the implication can’t be anything less than his belief in Bush as tyrant. This from a man who advocates constitutionally destroying the presidency by separating the functions of Head of State from Chief Executive - an interesting construct in that the good professor nominates the actor Morgan Freeman to fill the same symbolic role played by Queen Elizabeth II in the British system. Perhaps someone should get in touch with Mr. Freeman’s agent and see if he’s available for a long running government gig. Since I haven’t seen him much in the movies lately, I’m sure he’d jump at the chance.

And who can forget CNN’s curmudgeonly host Jack Cafferty opining on air following the revelation back in May that NSA computers were gathering vast numbers of telephone records looking for patterns that would lead the machines to reveal terrorists and their sympathizers here in the United States. With flashing eyes and jutted chin, Cafferty thanked God that Senator Arlen Specter was asking questions about the program because “He might be all that’s standing between us and a full-blown dictatorship in this country.”

Leave aside for a moment the comical idea of Arlen Specter as democracy’s White Knight and examine Cafferty’s contention that Specter was alone in standing against the Administration in their march toward gathering absolute power unto themselves. The program had been vetted by lawyers from both the Justice Department and the NSA and appropriate Members of Congress informed. For the latter, the President can, in special circumstances, inform only the “Big Eight” in sensitive matters of national security which include the majority and minority leaders in the House and Senate as well as the Chair and Vice Chair of the Intelligence Committees of both houses. This was done as it also had been done with the NSA intercept program revealed last December by the New York Times.

One can argue whether or not this consultation was enough in light of the invasive nature of both of those programs. This is legitimate debate - one that we will be having for as long as there is a war against Islamism. The tension between civil liberties and national security in a free society is inevitable, especially in time of war. But in case the left hasn’t noticed, dictators don’t “consult” anyone about anything. Just ask Hugo Chavez.

The Venezuelan tyrant recently received a boost in this country from that Icon of the Anti-Establishment Left, the Rosa Parks of the Anti War Movement, Cindy Sheehan who said yesterday that she would rather live in Chavez-led Venezuela than George Bush’s America. While Sheehan’s anti-war, anti-Semitic, and anti-American rants have been well documented, it is her obscenity laced descriptions of George Bush as Tyrant in Chief that the press has tip-toed around in a rather gingerly fashion:

The US government is now ruled by murderous hypocrites…criminals who should be arrested, charged appropriately, confined behind bars.”

“Our country has been overtaken by murderous thugs…gangsters who lust after fortunes and power; never caring that their addictions are at the expense of our loved ones, and the blood of innocent people near and far.”

“The biggest terrorist is George W. Bush.”

The press aren’t the only ones trying to disengage from Mrs. Sheehan’s unbalanced diatribes against the President. Democratic politicians who once fawned and feted the Goddess of Peace have turned their backs on this mother of all whackos. But her support remains strong among the netnuts on the internet who still believe, as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd once said, that Sheehan has “absolute moral authority” when talking about George Bush and the war.

And that is the nub of the left’s argument; that George Bush is either an aspiring dictator or already a de-facto member of that exclusive club. In order to see Bush as unprincipled tyrant, one must be wearing the special glasses that allow the viewer to see the unseen, to read between the lines of stories from a press too frightened and cowed to tell the truth of what is really going on in the Administration.

The fact that some fairly intelligent people actually believe this would be shocking except for the fact that we live in extraordinary times that have caused us to degenerate into a society where it is perfectly reasonable to think the absolute worst of your political or ideological opponent. Both right and left are guilty of this myopia, although the liberal left has taken political opposition and ascribed actual evil to their nemesis.

Jeff Jacoby’s article yesterday in the Boston Globe made the point that the Administration’s reaction to the Hamdan decision should, in normal times, put to rest any idea that George Bush was seeking to rule by dictatorial fiat:

President Bush learns the court’s ruling in Hamdan has gone against him. A five-justice majority held the military commissions created by the administration to try the Guantanamo detainees are invalid, since they were never authorized by congressional statute. The justices seem to have repudiated Bush’s claim that the Constitution invests the president with sweeping unilateral authority in wartime. “The court’s conclusion ultimately rests upon a single ground,” Justice Stephen Breyer pointedly notes in a concurrence. “Congress has not issued the Executive a `blank check.’ ”

Whereupon Bush says — what? “The justices have made their decision; now let them enforce it?” Something even more acidic? Perhaps he repeats a statement he has made previously — “I’m the decider, and I decide what is best”?

Not quite. He says he takes the court’s decision “seriously.” A few moments later he says it again. And then comes this: “We’ve got people looking at it right now to determine how we can work with Congress, if that’s available, to solve the problem.” There is no disdain. No bravado. No criticism. Just an acknowledgment that the Supreme Court has spoken and the executive branch will comply.

Some dictator.

Alas, while the Administration has already begun working with Congress to lay out the specifics in order to comply with the ruling, the left has conveniently ignored this bursting of their dictator balloon and kept up a steady drumbeat of ever wilder notions that Bush is the second coming of Ivan the Terrible. This criticism of Jacoby’s reasoned article is from the liberal blog Shakespeare’s Sister:

Failure to even mention in passing the rigorous endeavors of the Bush administration to undermine checks and imbalance the three branches of government is the least of his omissions, however. Perhaps the most important person who Jacoby fails to mention in his list of “D-word” spouting lunatics, is Bush himself.

“You don’t get everything you want. A dictatorship would be a lot easier.” (Governing Magazine 7/98) — From Paul Begala’s “Is Our Children Learning?”

“I told all four that there are going to be some times where we don’t agree with each other, but that’s OK. If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator.” — CNN.com, December 18, 2000

“A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there’s no question about it. ” — Business Week, July 30, 2001

Convicted out of his own mouth? Or the freely elected President of the United States stating the obvious?

The above is revealing in that for the dedicated lefty, it is impossible to take anything the President says as he means it. It is necessary instead to substitute a meaning wholly irrelevant to the issue the President was raising - an issue commented on in one form or another by every President in history - in order to validate a set of beliefs that places the commenter in the privileged position of knowing something hidden from the rest of us; that because dictatorship is “easier” it follows that Bush wishes to be one.

As we approach the end of the President’s constitutionally mandated term in office, I have no doubt we will see rampant speculation on the left about whether or not Bush will in fact engineer another terrorist attack and use it as an excuse to remain in office regardless of who wins the Presidential election in 2008. Like the certainty espoused by liberals during the 2004 election that Bush would re-institute military conscription and other idiotic “sure things,” I’m convinced that on January 20, 2009 when the next President takes the oath of office, all the talk of Bush as dictator will disappear overnight and the left’s rhetorical slings and arrows will be readied for the next occupant of the oval office who incurs their displeasure.

Unless she’s a Democrat, of course.

I’m So Ronery
I’m so ronery
So ronery
So ronery and sadry arone

There’s no one
Just me onry
Sitting on my rittle throne
I work very hard and make up great prans
But nobody ristens, no one understands
Seems that no one takes me serirousry
(”I’m So Ronery” sung by the puppet Kim Jong Il from the film Team America: World Police)

I almost feel sorry for North Korean strongman Kim Jong Il. The poor bastard sits atop a country that is beyond being a basket case and probably beyond salvage. This from StrategyPage this morning from a piece entitled “Forget the Missiles, This is Even More Bizarre:”

While everyone’s attention was focused on North Korean missiles, the real story is the North Korean economy. It continues to fall apart, and more North Koreans are unhappy about that. Worse yet, more North Koreans are finding out how badly they have been screwed by their leaders. Meanwhile, North Korean officials engage in even more bizarre behavior. For example, food and fuel supplies sent to North Korea have been halted, not to force North Korea to stop missile tests or participate in peace talks, but to return the Chinese trains the aid was carried in on. In the last few weeks, the North Koreans have just kept the trains, sending the Chinese crews back across the border. North Korea just ignores Chinese demands that the trains be returned, and insists that the trains are part of the aid program. It’s no secret that North Korean railroad stock is falling apart, after decades of poor maintenance and not much new equipment. Stealing Chinese trains is a typical loony-tune North Korean solution to the problem.

Stealing Chinese trains? Stealing from the only country in the world willing to keep selling you food and fuel to keep your robotic, regimented population from either starving to death or rising en masse to throw your ass on the dustbin of history?

Kim gets away with stuff like this because he’s a loon, not in spite of it. No one, including the South Koreans, really know what the tyrant is up to which makes him not only dangerous, but unpredictable. And there is nothing in the world that makes bureaucrats, diplomats, and government types more nervous and confused than unpredictability. The North Korean leader just doesn’t fit into one of the nice, neat little boxes that the State Department uses to categorize world leaders. Even President Ahmadinejad of Iran is understandable in that it is obvious that his motivations are at least grounded in his religious beliefs. But there simply is no rhyme nor reason to some of Kim’s stratagems, not when he pulls stunts like stealing trains from his major benefactor and launching missiles when most of the world is asking him not to:

North Korea test-fired several missiles in the early hours of Wednesday, July 5 (Tuesday afternoon Eastern time), apparently including the Taepodong-2, the long-range missile at the heart of diplomatic tensions with the United States and its allies, according to reports by Reuters, The Associated Press, CNN and other agencies, citing sources in Japan and Washington.

The long-range missile seems to have malfunctioned less than a minute into its flight, CNN and Reuters reported, citing American officials they did not name.

“Today’s launches were done despite advance warning by the relevant countries,” the top spokesman for the Japanese government, Shinzo Abe, told reporters early Wednesday in Tokyo, Reuters reported. “This is a grave problem in terms of peace and stability, not only of Japan but also of international society,” Mr. Abe was quoted as saying. “We strongly protest against North Korea.”

It seems silly but one of his motivations for acting the way he does could be that Kim feels neglected. Every couple of months it seems, his government says or does something so outrageous that it is bound to get headlines in the western media. Like a spoiled 2 year old child, Kim goes into a foot stomping, head banging tantrum so that all eyes will be upon him, however briefly.

Take yesterday’s missile launches. According to intelligence, the North Korean’s launched a total of 6 missiles including a couple of Scuds and their intermediate range missile, the Rodong as well as their ICBM, the Taepodong 2. The ICBM, of course, was the cause of all the excitement given that some analysts believed it capable of hitting the extreme Northwest part of the United States. At the very least, it would have no trouble hitting Japan, a fact not lost on Tokyo who has called for an emergency meeting of the Security Council today to discuss the matter.

What to make of this? First of all, the timing of the launches cannot have been lost on the United States, coming as they did on the 4th of July. Kim probably thought this a huge joke, a pulling of the lion’s tail as it were. And I can just see the tyrant clapping his hands together in joy at the prospect of the largest nations in the world worrying their heads over him as they sit down at the UN today.

But secondly there’s that curious “failure” of the ICBM about 40 seconds after launch.The Taepodong 2 had a successful test in 1998, buzzing Japan by flying over Japanese territory for much of its flight. Now, I haven’t seen this speculation anywhere else, but it could be that the missile was deliberately destroyed by the North Koreans themselves. Why? Because by launching the missile and then destroying it, Kim proves a point without being too provocative. He pulls the lion’s tail without awakening the beast so that it turns and mauls him. Kim gets his headlines on America’s birthday while proving to the world he can defy the United States.

Again, this is pure speculation but given Kim’s monumental unpredictability, it’s just cuckoo enough to have a ring of truth to it. In the asylum he inhabits, Kim would see such a stratagem as a huge victory. And the more unpredictable he is, the more fear he generates in the rest of the world. It is that fear that Kim is counting on as he expects Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, and the US to try and buy him off by giving him enough aid to keep his country from sliding into total destitution and starvation.

High stakes, indeed. But if nothing else, Kim has shown a talent for survival. And in the game of international brinkmanship, the winner is usually the one determined to prevail at any cost.

UPDATE

Proving the old adage, “Nothing succeeds like success,” the North Koreans have launched a seventh missile, splashing it into the Sea of Japan like the others.

Ed Morrissey doesn’t think that this latest launch will make any difference at the UN today and I agree. What Kim wants he won’t get anytime soon - bilateral talks with the United States that would confer legitimacy on his regime and give him the respect he craves so desperately.

The launch of WAR Radio yesterday was a stupendous success.

Unfortunately, too much of a good thing is sometimes hazardous; our server crashed a couple of times by mid-afternoon and by the end of the day, Boss Kender decided to take the stream off line.

In our wildest imaginings, we never envisioned the kind of traffic we were pulling by mid-day - a holiday when we thought most people would be out and about, enjoying time with their families. Given the traffic we experienced yesterday, Kender realized that there was no way we would be able to handle the normal weekday load, hence the decision to wait until the weekend to continue broadcasting after we install our brand new, state of the art server that should be able to take anything we throw at her.

“The Rick Moran Show,” scheduled to begin today, will therefore be delayed until next Monday, 7/10. We apologize for any inconvenience or disappointment.

WAR Radio is up and streaming!

We’re still ironing out a few bugs and annoyances, but this is to be expected given the fact that something like this hasn’t been tried before. We ask for your patience and understanding over the first few days of operation as we try and iron out issues like calls from listeners, recorded interviews, and a server that can handle a limited number of streams (until we get our new one later this week).

In fact, if you have problems accessing the stream, I ask that you not give up on us. By the end of the week, our server capacity will be able to handle anything. But at the moment, it may be a hit or miss proposition. In any event, watch this space or visit our WAR Radio site.

One the the reasons I love to study American history is the opportunity it affords me to travel back in time and put myself in the shoes of people who lived long before I was born.

Don’t get me wrong. There is no doubt in my mind that these are the best of times in which to live and I wouldn’t trade places with those earlier Americans for anything. The fact is, I’m much too addicted to flush toilets, electric lights, and bologna sandwiches to pine for an opportunity to live in a time when outhouses were a fixture of the American landscape and going nearly blind by being forced to read by the light of whale oil candles was considered part of the price of being an educated man.

And needless to say, given the way that bologna is processed today, I can’t even contemplate the 19th century alternative although sweeping the floor of the slaughterhouses here in Chicago and placing the contents in a sack would probably come pretty close to what our ancestors would translate as my favorite food.

But I think that visiting the 18th or 19th Century for a while would do all of us some good to one degree or another. It would help in understanding that the times we live in today are, in many ways, not that much different than the way things have always been in America. I have to laugh when someone on the right or the left points to our divisions, our polarization, the nastiness of our politics and use adjectives like “the worst” it has ever been or “we’ve never been this close to dictatorship” or anything to do with religious oppression, or race relations, or the economy, or any of a dozen other benchmarks that those ignorant of our past will use to try and convince us that the times we live in are unique in the strife and struggle manifested in our polity and politics today.

Balderdash!

Washington bemoaned the divisions in America of his day as the country split down the middle between those who supported the British and those that backed the French during the revolutionary struggles in France during the late 18th century. Washington himself was often accused of trying to set himself up as a monarch, a preposterous charge looking back on it but a cause for real concern back then.

During the campaign of 1800, Jeffersonians actually believed that if their man wasn’t elected, liberty in America would be destroyed (sound familiar?). When Jefferson won, there was a tremendous surge of relief that the evil Federalists would be prevented from turning the country into an English lap dog and a debased aristocracy.

This kind of thing wasn’t just rhetoric. Reading accounts of Jefferson himself from that time makes it clear that he saw his election as a fortuitous circumstance in history, that 4 more years of Federalist rule would have meant the nation’s ruin.

Boy - the Democrats sure haven’t changed much in 200 years.

During the Compromise of 1820, when South Carolina was agitating for the umpteenth time already to leave the union, the American people were ready to go to war to prevent such an occurrence. The level of vituperation directed against each other in Congress is shocking (as it would be until long after the Civil War ended) and individual members routinely came armed with pistols when the House sat in session.

Abraham Lincoln was usually caricatured as an ape in opposition newspapers. The invective hurled at our 16th President makes George Bush’s term of office look like a cakewalk.

I could go on and on. The clergy of early America railed against the materialism and the grasping for possessions of the American people - something de Tocqueville commented on as well. There were cries against the influence of religion in politics during elections of the late 19th century as prairie populism swept the country.

Moral condemnation has always been popular in politics. Abolition, “race mixing,” prohibition, and a dozen other “moral crisis” have roiled American politics since its founding. To believe that the mixing of politics and religion by ministers from the pulpit is somehow a new and novel political development indicates that those who make such an argument never read any of Martin Luther King’s thundering denunciations of racism and segregation from the pulpit of the Ebeneezer Baptist Church.

This is a very special 4th of July. It is special because despite more than 200 years of pretty much being at each other’s throats, America is still here. The miracle of America to me has always been this disconnect between our ideals of unity, community, and togetherness and a reality where those concepts are honored in the breach. And where the biggest schism occurs and where our schizophrenia is revealed in all of its glory is in the constant tension between individual liberty and sacrificing some of that liberty for the common good.

In the end, you can’t have charity without selfishness, altruism without greed, or love without hate. Not in this country. Not where 300 million people jostle each other on a daily basis with conflicting goals and ambitions. The friction caused by interest groups would make any other nation fly apart at the seams. Farmers versus city folk. Management versus labor. The rich versus everybody else. It’s a wonder sometimes that our preternaturally violent culture doesn’t explode into paroxysms of hate and murder given all the excuses we give ourselves to try and hurt each other.

To my mind, this is the most exceptional thing about America; our ability to live together in relative peace despite our differences.

So the next time you hear some blow-dried pundit solemnly intone about how unique our problems are, you have my permission to smile to yourself and remember that he doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about.

Less than 24 hours from now, yours truly will be on the air as Wideawakes Radio (WAR Radio) begins streaming.

I can’t tell you how excited I am at the possibilities this concept has for me, for my readers, and for conservatives in general. At the moment, we’re trying to iron out some bugs in the stream as well as get everything prepared for the launch. But by tomorrow morning, the 230th anniversary of our nation’s founding, WAR will be here.

The plan tomorrow is to follow a loose schedule with hosts jumping in and out all day previewing their shows and introducing themselves to listeners. I will be on from 8:30 AM to around 10:00 AM Central time. I will be reading and discussing the Declaration of Independence - what the times were like when it was written as well as some thoughts on American exceptionalism and how that idea has been disowned by the left in recent years.

Not just the left of course. The Supreme Court has made a hash of American exceptionalism by interpreting the law not so much according to the Constitution as much as how their rulings will play in the salons of Europe. This takes the Declaration’s admonition of having “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” to its outer limits as the Court subsumes American exceptionalism in order to advance theories of government that are both foreign and unwelcome.

It should be an interesting time and I hope you join me.

On July 5, “The Rick Moran Show” will premier at its regular time of 7:00 - 9:00 AM Central. Hopefully by then, we’ll have a way for you to stream the show using Internet Explorer. At the moment, the button on the left sidebar for accessing the stream only works in Firefox.

Ain’t the internet radio business interesting?

For a full rundown on hosts and times, go to the WAR Radio site.

NOTE: THE STREAMING BUTTON DOES INDEED WORK IN INTERNET EXPLORER NOW. HOORAY!

One fascinating aspect of the controversy over the terrorist bank monitoring imbroglio has been the insistence by the press that 1) the terrorists already knew about the program so it wasn’t a secret; and 2) it’s okay to reveal secrets as long is it’s in the cause of “the people’s right to know.”

Does anyone else see something a little strange there? It was okay to reveal a program that all the reporters and editors involved wrote was a “closely held” secret when the story broke but now we’ve decided it wasn’t a secret anyway?

I must confess to becoming dizzy from all the spin being created by the press and the left on this issue. Round and round we go, careening from explanations about what a good thing it is to reveal secrets that, in the opinion of the press, are essential to the preservation of liberty to why it doesn’t matter because the terrorists know everything so its not a secret anyway.

Stop the world I want to get off!

This encomium to the freedom of the press, waxing poetic about the media’s right to publish anything it damn well pleases by Time Magazine Managing Editor Richard Stengler is a real jaw dropper. For sheer brazenness on the issue of press irresponsibility, it has no equal. And its dripping condescension and arrogant assumptions about the American people reveal a man so out of touch, he may as well be writing from another galaxy:

The stories in the New York Times and other newspapers about the government’s highly classified program to monitor bank records have provoked outrage from the White House. President George W. Bush called them “disgraceful” and said the revelations caused “great harm” to America. Vice President Dick Cheney said the press had “made the job of defending against further terrorist attacks more difficult.”

I do not know if they are right. What I do know is that Presidents in wartime assert that their constitutional responsibility for national security trumps any issue of civil liberties. Often that has meant trampling on them.

First, I suppose it’s possible one could out a “highly classified program” that everyone knows about, although one would think the very definition of “highly classified” would preclude such a construct.

But note Mr. Spengler’s uncertainty about whether or not the Administration’s criticism is valid. In other words, when in doubt, publish. That seems to sum up all of the gratuitous chest thumping we’ve seen from the likes of Bill Keller and Dean Baquet who, as editors of the New York Times and LA Times respectively made the decision to publish details of this top secret program. And reporter Eric Lichtblau, who stressed how secret the program was in his New York Times article, is now backtracking furiously:

“USA Today”, the biggest circulation in the country, the lead story on their front page four days before our story ran was the terrorists know their money is being traced, and they are moving it into—outside of the banking system into unconventional means. It is by no means a secret.

(HT: Patterico)

The fallacy of that particular piece of illogic is in the details. For instance, Hitler knew full well we were going to invade France in the summer of 1944. But could you imagine the New York Times publishing the fact that the intended target of the invasion was Normandy and then defending its decision by saying that Hitler knew we were coming anyway?

I realize the exaggeration inherent in my example, but the essential truth of it holds. The terrorists may have known in a general way that we were tracking their bank transactions. But given the specificity of what we were doing with Swift contained in the Times article, it is ridiculous to assume that this information wasn’t at least helpful to terrorists and their financial enablers in either confirming their methods were effective in avoiding scrutiny or how vulnerable they truly were to detection.

The former is probably equally as damaging as the latter. And the fact that Stengler doesn’t even acknowledge that possibility is revealing. By taking on the role of Commander in Chief in deciding what information should be shared with the American people, the press in this case proves themselves inept, incapable, and incompetent in evaluating potential damage to our security, reason enough to slap them down particularly hard on this issue.

In fact, Stengler’s only acknowledgement of responsibility is this curious statement:

The government’s assertion that it must be unhindered in protecting our security can camouflage the desire to increase Executive power, while the press’s cry of the public’s right to know can mask a quest for competitive advantage or a hidden animus. Neither the need to protect our security nor the public’s right to know is a blank check. So listen carefully because, after all, you are the judge. It is the people themselves who are the makers of their own government.

What Stengler fails to mention is that if a President oversteps the bounds of the Constitution in his grab for excess executive power, he can be held responsible through impeachment. Making the press accountable for misusing their trust is an entirely different matter.

How do we hold the press responsible? The free market is a useful tool in that if enough people get upset with the newspaper over publishing secrets and cancel their subscriptions, the paper dies an ignoble death. But in reality, the chances of this happening are extremely remote and in fact, would be unprecedented in American history.

This has given the press a kind of immunity that no President or politician enjoys. For this reason, Stengler’s carefully constructed house of cards about the equal responsibility of the press and the executive is, in the end, a chimerical attempt to hide the fact that the press is asking the American people simply to trust it when it comes to revealing secrets, that their motives are pure and their judgement supreme to that of the people’s elected representatives.

If there is another definition of “hubris,” I haven’t seen it.

CHISOX CATCHER A.J. PIERZYNSKI TOSSES HIS BAT ASIDE AFTER HITTING THE GAME WINNING HOME RUN IN THE 9TH INNING, PROPELLING THE SOUTH SIDER’S TO AN 8-6 WIN OVER THE CUBS

If I didn’t hate them so much, I might be able to feel a smidgen of pity for those hapless Cubs.

After playing well enough to win with some timely hitting, good defense, and clutch pitching, their efforts fell victim to the World Champion South Sider’s penchant for pulling a rabbit out of their hat at the last possible moment to gain victory where defeat seemed a foregone conclusion.

Ten times this year the White Sox have come back to win a game in their last at bat which not only makes for exciting baseball but also necessitates my frequent use of a paper bag to purge the excess oxygen in my lungs due to hyperventilation. It worries me that at this rate, watching my beloved Pale Hose could become hazardous to my health - a prospect too horrible to contemplate. What with 24 on hiatus and my beloved Bears not set to start their run to the Super Bowl until September, I would be forced to do something useful with my life this summer like finding a cure for cancer or ordering up world peace.

Or I could write about politics which is becoming less and less enjoyable the more my Republican party insists on doing everything possible to lose the upcoming elections in November.

Regardless, the most recent feat of Chisox legerdemain was accomplished yesterday at Wrigley Field. Trailing 6-5 going into the top half of the ninth inning, Cubs closer Ryan Dempster (1-5) seemed to have regained his early season form as he retired the first two Sox hitters with ease. Dempster was a terror in April and early May, going 6 for 6 in closing opportunities with a minuscule 1.38 ERA only to lose his edge during the North Sider’s long losing streaks since. This is death for any closer who depends on frequent and regular work to stay sharp both physically and mentally. No opportunities to close out a victory meant a steady erosion in Dempster’s confidence and skills. It showed yesterday.

With light hitting Ross Gload at the plate, Dempster threw a pretty good slider that was hit straight back at him, right between his legs. The ball glanced off his glove as Dempster tried to field it and it caromed out to shortstop Ronny Cedeno who drifted behind second base in order to field it. Too late, Gload was able to beat the toss to first.

This seemed to cause Dempster to lose concentration as he then walked Sox clean-up hitter Jermaine Dye on 5 pitches. With runners at first and second, up to the plate stepped the man Cubs fans love to hate. A.J. Piersynski, who took a punch to the face delivered by Cubs catcher Michael Barrett during round one of the season series at US Cellular Park last month, paid the Cubbies back in spades when he got a hold of a hanging slider and sent the ball into orbit. Replays showed the pitch hovering like a ripe plum right in A.J.’s comfort zone - belt high and over the middle of the plate.

Piersynski’s blast made the score 8-6. All that was left in the bottom of the ninth was for Sox closer Bobby Jenks to come in and wipe the blood off the floor, which he did with his usual alacrity, setting the Cubs down with nary a peep. It was Jenk’s league leading 25th save and barring injury, the fireballer’s 100 MPH heater will make him as much of a sure thing when it comes to closing as anyone in baseball today. Simply awesome.

While both of the game’s starters Javier Vasquez and Greg Maddux had to deal with a 19 MPH gale blowing out at Wrigley, the game was not as much an offensive explosion as others have been in the history of wind-blown Wrigley. While there were 6 home runs hit by both sides, I can recall games where hitting a pop-fly behind second base ended up a souvenir for one of the bleacher bums in the right field stands. Suffice it to say that both pitchers fared better than others in that situation due to their both throwing an effective sinker. Vasquez especially was able to wriggle out of jams by sawing off Cubs hitters thanks to his moving, dipping fastball. In fact, if he had been able to contain Cubs slugger Aramis Ramirez, the score wouldn’t have been close. The third baseman had a double, triple, and home run, accounting for 5 of the six Cub runs (the other coming on a homer by Sox killer Jacque Jones).

Besieged manager Dusty Baker could only shake his head at his team’s creativity in finding one more way to lose a ballgame. It probably won’t matter to him too much longer as attendance starts to plummet on the North Side thanks to the Cubbies being out of the race earlier than usual. This will lead to the inevitable dismissal of a manager who has proven himself a winner everywhere he has been. And it will hide the incompetence and myopia of one of the richest corporations in the world, the Tribune Company, who fielded a team this year unworthy of a great city and a storied franchise.

The Cub’s troubles aren’t only on the field; they are also in the front office and on the top floors of the Tribune building. Until those issues are addressed, the North Siders’s famous adage of “Wait until next year” will be chanted earlier and earlier in the season until the saying itself becomes an anachronism, a quaint hope for the fans of a franchise that just doesn’t care enough about winning.

To those of us on the right who still vigorously support the President in the War on Terror, the Hamdan ruling presents us with a golden opportunity to start repairing the damage our detainee policy at Guantanamo has inflicted upon our constitutional principles as well as our image abroad.

To those on the left who, despite the unambiguous ruling by the Supreme Court in Hamdan that we are indeed in a shooting war with al-Qaeda, but still insist that the War on Terror is some kind of gigantic Rovian plot to win elections, the decision is a godsend. It gives liberals a second chance to prove they are serious about protecting America from her enemies by joining with the President and Republicans in Congress in resolving the legal status of detainees in such a way that satisfies both the demands of justice and our national security.

Camp Delta has become an iconic symbol worldwide of American hypocrisy in the War on Terror. The name “Guantanamo” will go down in history with other notorious prisons such as the French nightmare penitentiary on Devil’s Island and the North Vietnamese disreputable POW camp known as “The Hanoi Hilton.”

Regardless of whether or not Guantanamo matched those two facilities in sheer brutality and horror, the fact remains that the narrative supplied by western media to describe Guantanamo to the rest of the world has made it so. And in propaganda, perception is everything. There are no starving skeletons or daily beatings as there were on Devil’s Island and the Hanoi Hilton. But the brutality that has been confirmed by independent observers, including our own military and the FBI, is real enough and has brought shame to the United States and damaged our reputation as a champion of justice and human rights among friend and foe alike.

These are simply the facts. It does no good to argue that what goes on at Guantanamo doesn’t rise to the level of torture. Not anymore. One of the main findings in Hamdan was that the detainees at Guantanamo - no matter how bloodthirsty and heinous their crimes - are entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention. This includes being protected against “[o]utrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.” This means that many of the relatively mild “stress techniques” of interrogation well documented elsewhere were and are illegal.

And that’s only the half of it. The Hamdan decision also knocked the chocks from underneath the government’s position that it could try Guantanamo detainees using the rubric of military tribunals. While sympathetic to the reasons given by the government for using the tribunals - namely that trying terrorists in open court could endanger the innocent - the Supremes nevertheless firmly ruled that such tribunals violated the Geneva Convention and hence, U.S. law.

The bottom line is that the Supreme Court ruled that the United States government acted illegally and unconstitutionally in the way it has treated detainees at Guantanamo. So the question is no longer one of right or wrong but rather what to do about the mess we have made in Guantanamo.

This mess includes the fact that our government lied to us when they informed the American people that the prisoners at Guantanamo were “the worst of the worst.” The facts contained in the military’s own records simply do not bear that out. And it is clear, at least to this observer, that one of the main reasons the government insists on holding many of these detainees is not the fear that if released they would commit heinous acts of terror but rather because by releasing them now it would prove that the military made many, many tragic mistakes in capturing, interrogating, and holding dozens of innocent men and boys.

An exhaustive examination of the military’s “Combatant Status Review Tribunals” by two National Journal reporters last February revealed this shocking conclusion:

Many of them are not accused of hostilities against the United States or its allies. Most, when captured, were innocent of any terrorist activity, were Taliban foot soldiers at worst, and were often far less than that. And some, perhaps many, are guilty only of being foreigners in Afghanistan or Pakistan at the wrong time. And much of the evidence — even the classified evidence — gathered by the Defense Department against these men is flimsy, second-, third-, fourth- or 12th-hand. It’s based largely on admissions by the detainees themselves or on coerced, or worse, interrogations of their fellow inmates, some of whom have been proved to be liars.

Perhaps most shocking of all is that despite repeated assurances from Administration officials that the Guantanamo detainees were captured “on the battlefield” in Afghanistan, the facts contained in the military’s own records do not support that contention. In fact, it appears that many of the detainees were captured in Pakistan and were handed over to the Americans by:

“…reward-seeking Pakistanis and Afghan warlords and by villagers of highly doubtful reliability. These locals had strong incentives to tar as terrorists any and all Arabs they could get their hands on… including noncombatant teachers and humanitarian workers. And the Bush administration has apparently made very little effort to corroborate the plausible claims of innocence detailed by many of the men who were handed over….”

How little effort has been made to establish claims of innocence? The Guardian features a story today about one Abdullah Mujahid who the government claims was plotting against the United States. Two years ago, the military invited Mr. Mujahid to prove his innocence by calling witnesses in his defense before a tribunal.

A few months later, the government informed Mujahid that the witnesses could not be found which meant that his incarceration would continue indefinitely. The newspaper however, found three of the witnesses within three days. One was working for President Karzai, advising him on tribal affairs. Another teaches at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C.

The Guantanamo records are replete with examples of such incompetence or deliberate malfeasance, depending on your point of view. And herein lies the root of the quagmire at Guantanamo; our inability to admit we were wrong about some of these people and work to redress the injustice.

Clearly, there are many detainees at Guantanamo who should never see the outside of prison bars again. And now that the Supreme Court has offered guidance on what to do with these terrorists - specifically asking the President to go to Congress to get the legal authority to try them - those of us who are interested in both justice and our nation’s security should wholeheartedly support this effort.

But what can we do to determine the status of hundreds of others whose incarceration is a blot on American jurisprudence and shames our constitution and our most cherished values? Clearly there must be procedures using our civilian courts to weed out the innocent from the dangerous. And Congress can also intervene here by developing guidelines in concert with the Justice Department and the Department of Defense to insure that justice is done and our national security is protected.

One of the major stumbling blocks is the fact that much of the evidence gathered against detainees is of a classified nature. And evidence gathered as a result of interrogation of other prisoners, if released in open court, could endanger the person who supplied that information. For this reason, detainees cannot enjoy all the rights afforded American citizens in similar circumstances. But they should have the right to an attorney, the right to a speedy review of their case, the right to an examination of the evidence by an impartial judge, and perhaps a limited right to face their accuser if possible.

At the very least, the above gives us a basis for action. Congress has been dithering about this issue for more than three years, passing the buck to the Department of Justice and the Defense Department. Now that the Supreme Court has cleared up some of the issues surrounding detainees at Guantanamo, Congress could indeed clear up most of the others by dealing with detainee rights in a forthright manner that could begin to repair some of the damage done to our reputation as a champion of human rights and the rule of law.

We will be at war with International jihadism for many years. Besides winning on the battlefield, it is absolutely essential that we also win the hearts and minds of the hundreds of millions of Muslims who reject the violence and nihilism of the extremists and really do wish to rid themselves of the terrorists. This won’t happen as long as some of our policies reveal us to be hypocrites and worse, little better than the governments that oppress them on a daily basis.

We simply must stand for something better, something that we can be proud of. But as long as our detainee policy continues to show us at our worst, it will be impossible for many to see us at our best.