Right Wing Nut House

I refuse to take a back seat to anyone in my support for constitutional principles. No lefty, no privacy advocate, no civil liberties absolutist, and certainly no smarmy, self righteous, sickeningly smug Executive Editor of a newspaper like the New York Times and its cowardly editor Bill Keller can look me in the eye and accuse me of less. Those who question my support for those principles know nothing of me, my past, my passions nor my sincerity.

I have questioned many of this Administration’s anti-terrorist measures and am troubled by the accumulation of power by the executive branch - a process, I might add, that both the President and Vice President have stated on numerous public occasions their intent to justify and continue. They have made no secret of their goal to, in their words, “bring the constitution back in balance,” a state of affairs they attribute to the stripping of executive power by Congress following Watergate. I look at these statements and some of their actions with the jaundiced eye of a conservative who remembers what untrammelled executive power is capable of when used by men whose primary goal is not preservation of the nation but preservation of their own personal, privileged positions in power.

I have wrestled with with these issues on a case by case basis as any thinking American should. This lets out the overwhelming majority of liberals whose knees automatically jerk and whose heads explode with every revelation of government trying to figure out if there is someone out there trying to blow me to smithereens. They are not serious people and should never, ever be trusted with anything more important to national security than running the local YMCA.

This most recent attempt by the New York Times and others to throw a body block against the Administration to spring al-Qaeda for an open field run at the United States is so far beyond the pale that any attempt to justify their actions only reveals them to be as clueless about national security as they are partisan in their political beliefs.

Indeed, this jaw dropping “explanation” by Times Executive Editor Bill Keller reaches heights of hubris and arrogance not seen since the days of Hearst, McCormick, and other press barons who believed they, not the elected representatives of the people, ran the country:

Bill Keller, the newspaper’s executive editor, said: “We have listened closely to the administration’s arguments for withholding this information, and given them the most serious and respectful consideration. We remain convinced that the administration’s extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use of it may be, is a matter of public interest.”

There are many, many things “in the public interest” that I would love to see splattered all over the front pages of the Times. For instance, I would find it irresistible to know what was in the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) from the CIA each day, wouldn’t you? I would love a transcript of the private briefing listened to by the President. What questions did he ask? What were the spook’s sources? And while we’re at it, I would find it fascinating to get the CIA’s take on the situation inside Syria or what’s the real scoop on President Ahmadinejad of Iran. Is he really as loony as he sounds? Or is it all an act?

Talk about “public interest!” The Times would sell a gazillion copies if they printed that stuff. Of course, I’m not saying the Times is quite so irresponsible as all that. But the point needs answering.

Where does one draw the line on “public interest?” Does the Times have the obligation to disclose its internal debates that went into the decision to out this particular program? Do its editors and writers have an obligation to fan out and appear in public forums like the cable nets and talk radio shows to explain their rationale for publicizing a program that even they admit in their 5,000 word article is legal?

Keller is a coward. And his refusal to appear on shows like Hugh Hewitt’s program only leaves the impression that he knows what he did is unjustifiable under any doctrine that includes “the public’s right to know” or that the Times was acting in the even more problematic “public interest.” The reporters on the piece are less responsible but should still demonstrate a little backbone and come out from behind the Time’s firewall and explain themselves.

Patterico wrestles with the legal implications:

As to the separate question of whether these folks can and/or should be criminally prosecuted, I haven’t made up my mind. I lean toward the conclusion that prosecutions are possible and wise. But it’s not as obvious as you might think. In the context of the current situation, the answer may seem obvious. But it is easy to imagine other situations where it is not.

The boys at Powerline are much more certain about what should be done:

It is unfortunately past time for the Bush administration to enforce the laws of the United States against the New York Times. The Times and its likeminded media colleagues will undoubtedly continue to undermine and betray the national security of the United States until they are taught that they are subject to the same laws that govern the conduct of ordinary citizens, or until an enraged citizenry decides, like Bill Keller, to take the law into its own hands and express its disagreement some other way.

From a purely practical point of view, making Keller and the Times reporters do the perp walk would cause a constitutional crisis no matter how “legal” the prosecutions would be or how justifiable they would be under the present circumstances. Nearly every media outlet in the country would condemn it and it would certainly set off a Congressional row. It may actually end up being much more trouble than those gentlemen are worth. In fact, the prosecutions may have the opposite effect that Powerline envisions. Just to prove how brave they are, journalists would take it upon themselves perhaps to publish all sorts of classified information, daring the Department of Justice to prosecute them.

What we can do is being done - flood their inboxes with mail and condemn their actions with all the moral outrage we can muster. It won’t change a thing with regards to this story. But it may make Keller and the Times think a little harder next time about publishing national security secrets.

UPDATE

Patterico has cancelled his subscription to the Los Angeles Times, one of three papers who broke the story yesterday. The other two were the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal.

He pointed out to the subscription specialist who tried to talk him out of cancelling that he wasn’t doing it because he disagreed with the newspaper. And anyone who has read Patterico’s year end summaries of what the LA Times has done knows that he has plenty of ammunition there. Rather, he cancelled because he cannot abide by the paper’s decision to publish details of the top secret program:

I told the man that officials from the Bush Administration had begged the newspaper’s editors not to print this story, but the editors ran the story anyway. I told him that I think publishing the story was completely irresponsible, totally lacking in any justification, and has posed a threat to the safety of our country. And I just can’t continue to subscribe to a newspaper that would do such a thing.

This is another way to make newspapers think twice about publishing such stories. Hopefully, many more will follow his example.

There are many who dismiss the suicides of the three detainees at Guantanamo with a kind of “good riddance” wave of the hand, a casual shrug of the shoulders denoting indifference to the fate of those who, if given half a chance, would kill us all.

But it is by no means clear that those detainees and the others being held there pose that kind of threat. And the reason we aren’t sure - sure enough to have a clear conscience as we lock them away for the rest of their lives - is because of the unconscionable foot dragging by the Administration on determining exactly what rights the prisoners will be granted before US courts.

The Justice Department last year passed the buck to Congress, giving them the opportunity to determine how to go about judging the detainees on a case by case basis The Congress demurred, believing the matter to properly belong to the courts. And while lower courts have granted the prisoners some rights like habeas corpus and the right to an attorney, the legal limbo of the detainees won’t be cleared up until the Supreme Court rules on the matter.

On Friday, the President acknowledged that Gitmo has got to be closed and offered his explanation as to why it still functions:

“We would like to end the Guantanamo — we’d like it to be empty,” Bush said. But he added: “There are some that, if put out on the streets, would create grave harm to American citizens and other citizens of the world. And, therefore, I believe they ought to be tried in courts here in the United States.”

Bush said his administration was waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on whether he overstepped his authority in ordering the detainees to be tried by U.S. military tribunals.

Even the President is now convinced Guantanamo needs to be closed and that the prisoners have their cases tried in American courts. The amazing thing about the President’s statement is that if indeed the Supreme Court rules that the President “overstepped his authority” in using military tribunals to detain the prisoners illegally, there’s a chance that there may not be any trials in US courts at all; that most if not all the prisoners will be released outright.

To forestall that possibility, the Supreme Court’s ruling is likely to be hazy enough so that the prisoners will not be released due to any technical violation of their “constitutional rights” - an incendiary term when applied to accused terrorists - but will grant the detainees a habeas corpus hearing that will force the government to reveal in open court some of the evidence compiled against them.

This is also problematic as apparently much of the evidence is of a sensitive nature and revealing it in open court would compromise intelligence methods and assets. This puts the United States government squarely behind the 8-ball; in order to keep the accused terrorists in jail, we may be forced to reveal sources, allowing the detainee to “face their accuser.” And since one study of detainee records shows that a sizable number of them were not captured on any battlefield in Afghanistan but rather handed over by warlords and tribal leaders, having the detainee “face their accuser” may indeed be a monumental problem resulting in the release of people who may very well pose a threat to the United States. As it stands now, only 10 detainees stand accused of any crime at all. The rest are being held as enemy combatants with evidence of a classified nature used to keep them in prison.

This has been the beef against military tribunals all along; evidentiary standards are much more lax than they are in any court in the United States. There have also been questions about the availability of defense counsel to the detainees during their hearings as well as other roadblocks which have made the tribunals seem more like drumhead court martials than legal proceedings in keeping with the honorable traditions of American jurisprudence.

Much as we loathe the men who have sworn to kill us all, we simply must come to grips with the idea that if we aren’t able to kill them on the battlefield, they must be granted some of the rights guaranteed by international law and our own constitution. To do any less cheapens our entire justice system. It isn’t a question of loving the terrorist. It is a question of loving liberty and the blessings granted by a constitution that recognizes value in every individual and equality before the law.

I don’t know if the suicides at Gitmo were the result of despair, as the New York Times says or whether it was a public relations ploy as Colleen Graffy, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy says. I do know that as long as the detention center remains open, it represents, in my opinion, a black stain on American justice and a sad chapter in the history of American jurisprudence that should be closed for good.

I have pretty much ignored Ann Coulter for the last year or so. As her celebrity has grown - actually since she appeared on the cover of Time Magazine - she has had to make ever more outrageous and off the wall statements in order to maintain her position as a “controversial” commentator. This has often placed her at odds with many of us who, while generally in agreement with much of her critique of American liberalism, nevertheless recoil in horror and disgust at her rhetoric.

She has descended into a black hole of necessity from which there is no escape; where she is forced to please her rabid base of red meat conservatives usually by going beyond the bounds of decency and proper public discourse in order to make a point that could have been made without resorting to the kind of hurtful, hateful, personal attacks that have become a hallmark of her war with liberals.

Make no mistake. Ann Coulter is a brutish lout, a conservative ogre who should be denied a public platform to spout what any conservative with an ounce of integrity and intellectual honesty should be able to see as unacceptable. To descend to the level of your opponents in order to criticize them is not an excuse. And for such a gifted wordsmith, Coulter does not have the excuse of ignorance.

I have been told not to take what she says so seriously, that this is her “shtick.” I, like the Queen of England, am not amused. Neither I think, are the 9/11 widows who are using their position as victims of that tragedy to try and influence the public debate over what to do about the War on Terror and domestic security. We may violently disagree with their politics. We may scorn their portrayal by liberals as unbiased observers with some kind of moral authority that immunizes them from criticism. But as Coulter proved on the Today Show in an interview with Matt Lauer, this kind of rhetoric is uncalled for and wildly inaccurate to boot:

LAUER: On the 9-11 widows, an in particular a group that had been critical of the administration:

COULTER: “These self-obsessed women seem genuinely unaware that 9-11 was an attack on our nation and acted like as if the terrorist attack only happened to them. They believe the entire country was required to marinate in their exquisite personal agony. Apparently, denouncing bush was part of the closure process.”

“These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by griefparrazies. I have never seen people enjoying their husband’s death so much.”

There’s more but I won’t pollute my site by republishing it. Crooks and Liars has the video.

There are ways to criticize the widows without saying something so wrong, so hurtful. And what do you think their children would think if they heard Coulter’s remarks? Are they to be in the line of Coulter’s wildly off target fire as well?

This rhetoric is not designed to advance debate or even make any kind of a salient point about the political activism of grief stricken parents like Cindy Sheehan and the anti-Bush September 11 widows. The remarks were designed to hurt other people’s feelings in a deeply personal and entirely inappropriate way. Can you imagine some liberal commentator making similar remarks about Debra Burlingame, sister of Charles F. “Chic” Burlingame, III, captain of American Airlines flight 77, which was crashed at the Pentagon and who is fighting to keep the 9/11 Memorial from being hijacked by the anti-American left? We would be all over that worthy and deservedly so.

The anti-Bush 9/11 widows are not immune from criticism for their political positions nor even for the tactics they use to advance those positions. But to say that they are “enjoying” their status as widows is so far beyond the pale that anyone who makes such a statement deserves the most severe censure possible. And the networks who use Coulter as some kind of “Spokesman” for the right should be told in no uncertain terms by as many of us as possible that she doesn’t speak for any conservatives that we want to be associated with.

Coulter owes those women an apology. Failure to give it only reveals her to be a shallow, bitter, bitch of a woman whose hate filled mouthings will eventually lead to her destruction.

UPDATE

Confederate Yankee takes Coulter’s message - that grief does not bestow absolute moral authority - without mentioning her brutalization of the widows.

His point is well taken but he seems to be able to make an even stronger case than Coulter without resorting to the degradation of grief stricken widows.

UPDATE 6/7

It appears that one lefty blog in particular (although I’ve seen similar sentiments expressed elsewhere on the left) believes that I and other conservatives are trying to “distance ourselves” from Coulter’s idiocies.

An interesting concept, that. The fact that most responsible conservatives who see fit to dignify Coulter’s outrageousness in the past year or so by commenting on her over-the-top remarks end up strongly criticizing her, I wonder how much more “distance” the left wants us to maintain.

But my commenter SSheil put it nicely:

I think this post (and several others relating to the same topic) is illustrative of what I see is generally the largest difference between blogs on the right and left. As with Rick’s blog, most blogs on the right are not shy of taking our leaders, writers and speakers who represent the Right to task when they individually or collectively “step on their d*cks.”

When was the last time you saw one of Ted Kennedy’s incoherent rants brought to task by Kos kids or readers over at DU? Or Pelosi? Or Dean? Or Durbin?

I think I hear crickets chirping…

NOTE: A WORD ABOUT THE TOWER AD FOR COULTER’S BOOK

The answer is, yes I could request that the ad be taken off this site. But since I don’t believe in stifling debate (witness the insulting, degrading, comments from most of you directed towards me below), I will not make that request.

Such freedom of speech (and the freedom to abuse that right) used to be self evident in America. Nowadays, if you disagree with something written, many feel no compunction whatsoever about agitating for the offending literature to be banned.

Times have changed…

UPDATE

A few days ago in that same space, there was an ad for An Inconvenient Truth., a movie that most global warming skeptics (and even some advocates) believe is an execreable piece of propaganda.

I suppose I could have asked that it be removed since I don’t like propaganda being advertised on this site. I wonder how many people swearing at me for allowing the Coulter ad to run would be swearing at me for taking down the movie ad?

UPDATE 6/8

For the classically liberal perspective on Coulter’s remarks, you could do no better than visit my brother’s blog, The Vivid Air. And, no TBogg, my ignorant friend, not my “greater” brother. Since, as Jim points out in the comments, I have 6 other brothers, you are going to have to come up with some other shallow, simple minded way to criticize me. He’s just older, wiser, not quite as good looking, but considered by most to be a reasonable sort of fellow.

He can’t be all bad. He hates Kerry as much as Bush.

LAST WORD

Jim points out that he doesn’t “hate” Bush. Indeed, we in the blogosphere tend to toss that word around with a casual disdain for its meaning and by so doing, delegitimize the argument made. Separating the human being from the policies being promulgated or opinions expressed would serve us all well.

Well, not literally.

Bush has been blamed for most of the world’s ills over the past five years. He has been blamed for tsunamis, earthquakes, tornadoes, obesity, a rise in global temperatures, and the pimple on Duncan Black’s posterior.

But I never thought I’d see the day when anyone would accuse the President of the United States of facilitating a sexual encounter between a man and a woman (Well, not literally):

The conservative politics of the Bush administration forced me to have an abortion I didn’t want. Well, not literally, but let me explain.

I am a 42-year-old happily married mother of two elementary-schoolers. My husband and I both work, and like many couples, we’re starved for time together. One Thursday evening this past March, we managed to snag some rare couple time and, in a sudden rush of passion, I failed to insert my diaphragm.

It seems when learning about the birds and the bees, none of us were ever told that a woman could also get pregnant simply by listening to “Rush” Limbaugh.

Well, not literally

Thanks to said “rush of passion” - during which time all the higher functions of the human brain cease and our gray matter reverts to the primordial medulla oblongata thus forcing people to think like a crocodile - our correspondent knew she was in trouble.

The next morning, after getting my kids off to school, I called my ob/gyn to get a prescription for Plan B, the emergency contraceptive pill that can prevent a pregnancy — but only if taken within 72 hours of intercourse.

[snip]

The receptionist, however, informed me that my doctor did not prescribe Plan B. No reason given. Neither did my internist. The midwifery practice I had used could prescribe it, but not over the phone, and there were no more open appointments for the day. The weekend — and the end of the 72-hour window — was approaching.

But I needed to meet my kids’ school bus and, as I was pretty much out of options — short of soliciting random Virginia doctors out of the phone book — I figured I’d take my chances and hope for the best. After all, I’m 42. Isn’t it likely my eggs are overripe, anyway? I thought so, especially since my best friend from college has been experiencing agonizing infertility problems at this age.

Weeks later, the two drugstore pregnancy tests I took told a different story. Positive. I couldn’t believe it.

Here is where I actually sympathize with the woman. I’m not exactly sure where I come down on this issue but my gut tells me that if a doctor will not prescribe the needed medication due to his personal moral or religious beliefs, he should do everything in his power to see that his patient has access to that medication through another doctor. And this doctor failed to do that and, in my opinion, failed his patient.

But whatever sympathy I felt for the writer disappeared after reading this:

I felt sick. Although I’ve always been in favor of abortion rights, this was a choice I had hoped never to have to make myself. When I realized the seriousness of my predicament, I became angry. I knew that Plan B, which could have prevented it, was supposed to have been available over the counter by now. But I also remembered hearing that conservative politics have held up its approval.

Actually, one man held up approval of the drug; former FDA chief Lester Crawford, who took over the approval process when he believed that insufficient safeguards were in place to keep children under 17 from purchasing the drug. Talk about politics, it was pro-choice commissioners who were railroading the drug through the process for political reasons, satisfying their constituencies.

Pot, meet kettle. And this is an outright falsehood:

Apparently, one of the concerns is that ready availability of Plan B could lead teenage girls to have premarital sex. Yet this concern — valid or not — wound up penalizing an over-the-hill married woman for having sex with her husband. Talk about the law of unintended consequences.

That’s a Planned Parenthood talking point, echoing conservative Christian groups NOT anyone at the FDA. For the writer to include this was pure spin, an attempt to smear Crawford whose concerns overrode the eagerness of the pro choice advocates to push the drug on the market. The matter is now in litigation as a civil suit was filed by the Center for Reproductive Rights against the FDA.

And “penalizing” someone for having sex? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I realize we live in a time when taking responsibility for one’s actions is so…so…bourgeois - so “common” - but one would think that the most personal of all human activities could somehow resist the call of modernity to place the blame for human reproduction on someone or something else.

Sex has consequences. Even an atheist like me knows that. And one of those consequences is that despite all the pills, mechanical devices, jellies, latex, and the #1 safeguard against pregnancy - good intentions - those wriggly little devils will find a way to make it to the egg if at all possible. This is the fact of life, not “rushes of passion” or any other pitiful excuse for resisting what by any stretch of the imagination is the one human endeavor where both parties alone are responsible for the result of their actions.

But our correspondent doesn’t stop there. Not content with blaming “conservative politics” (despite her assurance at the beginning of the article that she wasn’t “literally” doing so) for her predicament, she then brings her dim bulb of a brain to bear on the intersection of religion and politics:

Although I had heard of pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control on religious grounds, I was dumbfounded to find that doctors could do the same thing.

Moreover, they aren’t even required to tell the patient why they won’t provide the drug. Nor do they have to provide a list of alternative sources. I had asked the ob-gyn’s receptionist if politics was the reason the doctor wouldn’t prescribe Plan B for me.

In other words, the religious or moral beliefs of the doctor are simply a matter of “politics.” What isn’t said is that only liberals’ political beliefs can have moral underpinnings. If a conservative follows their moral compass, it can be chalked up to “politics” only and thus delegitmized.

What a crock.

After relating how hard a time she had getting an abortion - something I wish wasn’t so but at the same time, like Bill Clinton, devoutly wish to see abortion a rarity in our society - She then lets loose with this eye popper:

It was a decision I am sorry I had to make. It was awful, painful, sickening. But I feel that this administration gave me practically no choice but to have an unwanted abortion because the way it has politicized religion made it well-nigh impossible for me to get emergency contraception that would have prevented the pregnancy in the first place.

And to think that, all these years after Roe v. Wade became the law of the land, this is what our children have to look forward to as they approach their reproductive years.

All this after saying at the beginning of the article that she was not “literally” blaming George Bush for her predicament.

Having blamed Bush for politicizing religion, perhaps she should read a little American history. Without the politicization of religion, she would be living in a city where African Americans were still riding in the back of the bus. And there’s a chance we would still have a draft and 100,000 troops in Viet Nam. Or perhaps slavery would still be a stain on our constitution.

No one has ever been able to separate religion and politics in America. They are joined at the hip, one leading the other depending on who’s in office. As secular as American society has become over the last 50 years, it has been religion and religiosity that has driven our politics for good or ill. Reverend Martin Luther King’s message was, in its heart and soul, a Christian message of sin and redemption. King changed America because he wanted to forgive us our sins and redeem the constitution and Declaration of Independence by making them living documents.

The Christian conservatives, so vilified (sometimes for good reason), see a culture so at odds with their beliefs that it has driven them out of the pews and into the voting booth in record numbers. They are not under some trance of Karl Rove or George Bush. They are genuinely frightened by the turn our culture has taken and fear for both the lives and the immortal souls of their children. To simply dismiss their concerns as “politics” is ignorant. They feel themselves prevented from living life the way that they see fit because others are imposing their beliefs on them.

Personally, I don’t mind the violence, gratuitous sex, and general mayhem found on TV, video games, and in films. But I can see some people asking that such fare be denied to youngsters as a responsible component of rearing children. This goes for everything from R rated movies to Plan B. And the writer’s complaints are symptomatic of a selfish disregard that liberals have for the sensibilities of those who disagree with an “anything goes” society. I would hate to live in a country where religion dictated what people could watch or wear or eat. But I would be equally uncomfortable living in a place where religion was prevented from impacting the political life of the country.

It’s no accident that this individual grew up in the late 60’s and early 70’s, a time when it was drummed into us that no on was responsible for anything. Criminals were routinely absolved of their crimes, sloth was celebrated as the natural state of man, and people could blame their problems on anything and anybody but themselves.

Well, not literally….

UPDATE

Cassandra and I are on almost the same wavelength as she fisks what little brains the dim wit was born with. Her take on personal responsibility is said much better than my clumsy attempts to come to grips with such out and out idiocy.

UPDATE: 6/5

Kevin Drum appears to be one of the only lefties who don’t think the woman should stop whining and take a personal responsibility pill. He calls Crawford “a liar” and then links to this news story that doesn’t prove Crawford was telling fibs but rather reveals Mr. Drum engaging in a typical blogger tactic of making an outrageous charge while supplying a link ostensibly supporting it but that does no such thing. In fact, here’s the money graf:

An April 2004 e-mail message from Jane Axelrad, associate director for policy at the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said that allowing over-the-counter and prescription sales of Plan B in the same package would be “consistent with precedent” and comply with “applicable statutory and regulatory provisions.”

But that same month, an unidentified FDA deputy division director wrote that McClellan and senior management in Axelrad’s department “do not concur” and “cannot support” such a move. They, in turn, asked the FDA’s Office of Chief Counsel for a final assessment on whether the drug could be sold both with and without prescription for different age groups.

Sounds like Crawford was concerned about safegaurds that would prevent little girls under 17 years of age from buying the drug over the counter.

Drum also points to this post by Digby where an FDA medical officer raised the specter of “sex cults” surrounding the use of Plan B:

In the memo released by the FDA, Dr. Curtis Rosebraugh, an agency medical officer, wrote: “As an example, she [Woodcock] stated that we could not anticipate, or prevent extreme promiscuous behaviors such as the medication taking on an ‘urban legend’ status that would lead adolescents to form sex-based cults centered around the use of Plan B.”

Rosebraugh indicated he found no reason to bar nonprescription sales of Plan B. (Emphasis mine)

So some wacky doctor at FDA makes an idiotic statement about adolescent sex. But I notice that Mr. Drum fails to mention that the same doctor supported over the counter sales of Plan B!

There is much to criticize regarding FDA procedures in this matter without making baseless, misleading charges. Drum should be ashamed of himself.

Robert Kennedy’s long, exhaustive, investigative piece in Rolling Stone magazine about voting irregularities in Ohio does an enormous service to the cause of making elections in America more free and fair. The article lists about a dozen credible instances where the GOP improperly tried to suppress the vote by purging voter registration rolls, discounting newly registered voters (most from Democratic precincts), highlighting GOP shenanigans on election day at polling places, and even making a good case for some good old fashioned ballot box stuffing in some rural Ohio counties.

That said, Kennedy is on much less firm ground when he tries to sell the notion that the voting machines were rigged, that Secretary of State Blackwell personally oversaw a massive vote fraud operation, that there is anything to the notion that there is proof of fraud in the difference between exit polling and the actual vote counts, that corporations involved in making the voting machines participated in any fraudulent activities, and that a full recount would have changed the eventual outcome.

Overall in fact, this is a jaw-dropping piece of partisan hackery. It might have been helpful if Kennedy had bothered to look into charges of Democratic vote fraud that were also swirling around in Ohio on election day and before. And a helpful overview of charges of Democratic vote fraud in other extremely close states that were lost by the President - specifically Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, three of the most heavily unionized states in the nation and featuring Democratic governors with their hands on the polling machinery - would have given his critique an air of authority and legitimacy.

Instead, Mr. Kennedy decided to mix in the most base of smears directed at a Republican gubernatorial candidate with his fact flakes, thus bringing much of his good work down to the level of the gutter.

This country is in desperate need of electoral reform. Not only do both parties plan and organize disenfranchisement operations, they have developed techniques over the years that have gone far beyond dirty tricks like graveyard voting, ballot box stuffing, and the outright bribery of voters, which are election day traditions in many parts of the nation and have been for almost two hundred years. Kennedy’s article reveals some of the dirty little secrets of our democracy and of our political parties (although again, Kennedy’s beautification of Democrats by not accusing them of any wrongdoing is laughable). The long and short of it is, the system is broke and there is apparently not much that anyone is willing to do about it.

Kennedy’s critique is strongest when detailing GOP efforts to disqualify registered voters, especially voters newly added to the rolls. There is also a good case made that the distribution of voting machines was deliberately manipulated to make likely Democratic voters wait much longer to vote than likely Republican voters. There were also enormous problems with the so-called “provisional ballots” that were supposed to be given to people who either had questionable registrar information or were voting in the wrong precinct.

This last charge was not confined to Ohio as both Democrats and Republicans across the country sought to fiddle with the requirements of the law. The statute in both Democratic and Republican controlled states appeared to be honored in the breach as there were numerous complaints in Wisconsin about Republican voters being disenfranchised the way Democrats were in Ohio (among other outrageous examples of Democratic vote fraud in that state).

Some of the charges against Blackwell are spurious:

To further monkey-wrench the process he was bound by law to safeguard, Blackwell cited an arcane elections regulation to make it harder to register new voters. In a now-infamous decree, Blackwell announced on September 7th — less than a month before the filing deadline — that election officials would process registration forms only if they were printed on eighty-pound unwaxed white paper stock, similar to a typical postcard.

There was very good reason to cite that “arcane” regulation - massive, systematic Democratic voter registration fraud:

The unfortunate fact is that Ohio election authorities experienced an unprecedented number of fraudulent voter registrations and some organizations appear to have been engaged in efforts to facilitate and pay for the submission of fraudulent voter registration forms.

This point was noted by Keith Cunningham, President of the Ohio Association of Election Officials, when he testified about the election in Ohio before the House Administration Committee in March 2005. During his testimony, Cunningham remarked that “disruptive” and “distracting” political activists on the ground in Ohio made it increasingly difficult for elections officials to do their jobs.

Cunningham: “[T]he November 2004 election was probably the single most difficult thing I have ever tried to manage in my life. … For instance, the card we send out to voters that tell them where they’re registered, what your precinct is. I spent the better part of an afternoon arguing with somebody that the type on that card was too small, when it’s the same card we’ve been sending out for some time and it’s the default setting on the printer. My belief is that not everyone in November 2004 was dealing in good faith. And there were people on the ground and present in Ohio who … were attempting to create chaos and confusion in hopes that out of it could come something that could be exploited.” (266)

Part of the “chaos and confusion” referenced by Cunningham stemmed from the thousands of fraudulent voter registrations submitted to elections officials in every corner of Ohio.

This is what happens when you make charges without giving any context to someone’s actions. Blackwell was responding to massive, systematic, planned voter registration fraud. Groups like the NAACP (paying for voter registration with crack cocaine), ACORN (massive voter registration fraud resulting in the arrest and conviction of several of their Ohio employees who were paid $5 for each new voter signed up), Americans Coming together (ACT), and the nation’s oldest purveyor of voter registration fraud, the AFL-CIO all sought to game the system and hand Ohio to the Democrats in a blatantly illegal scheme to place fraudulent or non-existent names on the voter list so that operatives would be able to vote several times. This is a time honored scheme in Democratic states and appears to have taken place in Wisconsin, a state the President lost by a mere 11,000 votes.

I urge you to read this link for a detailed description of what Blackwell had to deal with. Much of what is criticized in Kennedy’s piece could easily be chalked up to Blackwell’s grim determination to make sure that the registration process - already strained to the limit with more than 1.5 million new names - didn’t degenerate into a democratic farce. This concern regarding registration fraud also played a hand in the snafus with provisional ballots although clearly, Republicans failed to abide by the law in many, many cases.

Such lack of context permeates Kennedy’s critique:

In another move certain to add to the traffic jam at the polls, the GOP deployed 3,600 operatives on Election Day to challenge voters in thirty-one counties — most of them in predominantly black and urban areas.(157) Although it was billed as a means to ”ensure that voters are not disenfranchised by fraud,”(158) Republicans knew that the challengers would inevitably create delays for eligible voters. Even Mark Weaver, the GOP’s attorney in Ohio, predicted in late October that the move would ”create chaos, longer lines and frustration.”(159)

The day before the election, Judge Dlott attempted to halt the challengers, ruling that ”there exists an enormous risk of chaos, delay, intimidation and pandemonium inside the polls and in the lines out the doors.” Dlott was also troubled by the placement of Republican challengers: In Hamilton County, fourteen percent of new voters in white areas would be confronted at the polls, compared to ninety-seven percent of new voters in black areas.(160) But when the case was appealed to the Supreme Court on Election Day, Justice John Paul Stevens allowed the challenges to go forward. ”I have faith,” he ruled, ”that the elected officials and numerous election volunteers on the ground will carry out their responsibilities in a way that will enable qualified voters to cast their ballots.”(161)

What? Nothing about the legions of Democratic challengers who were also present? I guess we ought to just put the halo on Democrats in Ohio right now rather than waiting for the Vatican to bestow sainthood.

And in a rerun of issues surrounding the 2004 Florida debacle, Kenned pulls out the same, tired canard about “ballot crawl” - the practice that some voters inadvertently or out of sheer stupidity vote for the wrong person on the punch card ballot:

In addition to spoiling ballots, the punch-card machines also created bizarre miscounts known as ”ballot crawl.” In Cleveland Precinct 4F, a heavily African-American precinct, Constitution Party candidate Michael Peroutka was credited with an impressive forty-one percent of the vote. In Precinct 4N, where Al Gore won ninety-eight percent of the vote in 2000, Libertarian Party candidate Michael Badnarik was credited with thirty-three percent of the vote. Badnarik and Peroutka also picked up a sizable portion of the vote in precincts across Cleveland — 11M, 3B, 8G, 8I, 3I.(178) ”It appears that hundreds, if not thousands, of votes intended to be cast for Senator Kerry were recorded as being for a third-party candidate,” the Conyers report concludes.(179)

But it’s not just third-party candidates: Ballot crawl in Cleveland also shifted votes from Kerry to Bush. In Precinct 13B, where Bush received only six votes in 2000, he was credited with twenty percent of the total in 2004. Same story in 9P, where Bush recorded eighty-seven votes in 2004, compared to his grand total of one in 2000.(180)

This is the “idiot factor” at work and there is little to be done about it. The fact that it happens in precincts where people are less educated:

In an attempt to bring illiteracy to the attention of the American people, the U.S. Department of Education pointed out a decade ago that an alarming 47 million American adults were functionally or marginally illiterate. Arguably, little meaningful progress has been made in the fight to reduce illiteracy in the most affluent nation in the world.

A 2001 Newsweek article pointed out that an astonishing 47 percent of Detroit, Mich. residents, or almost one-out-of-two adults in the predominately African-American and urban city were functionally illiterate. By way of comparison, only 6.7 percent of citizens in Vietnam are functionally illiterate.

“Ballot crawl” is a problem of reading, not fraud. This is another dirty little secret of American politics - a sizable minority of people (black and white) are unable to function in our democracy as a result of their being marginally or functionally illiterate. I don’t see Kennedy or Conyers advocating doing anything about it either when they attempt to intimate fraud where remedial reading classes are called for.

Kennedy really jumps the shark when trying to tie the idea of massive vote stealing by the GOP to the skewed exit polls. Ed Morrisey does an excellent job debunking this canard:

News flash: mathematics is an exact science. Polling isn’t, and for at least one basic reason — you can’t force people to participate. The only people answering exit polls are those inclined to share their opinions. It also relies on the skill, integrity, and execution of the actual polltakers, many of whom are hired with little training. Moreover, reporting results in the middle of the sample almost always guarantees bad conclusions.

And interestingly enough, that’s exactly what two research firms looking into the exit poll debacle found:

Indeed they did. And, as I pointed out on election night, the high turnout was playing havoc with the computer models anyway:

A word about exit polls…they take a couple of dozen “key” precincts and average turnout, party reliability, and a few other mundane factors to project a winner. The big turnout here COULD be skewing the computer models and not giving confidence to the networks.

Indeed, that is what happened. An increase of almost 17 million Republicans offset an increase of 15 million Democrats. Rove won the numbers game and Democrats still can’t believe it. And the forecaster’s models broke down as a result of the unpredictability in the increase in voters.

Any notion that the exit polls were going to reveal who won can safely be put to rest by the projected results in these states:

But Kerry winning by 16 in PA? Up 15 in MN? Kerry by 17 in NH? These numbers aren’t just wrong, they’re numbers taken from some kind of weird parallel universe where bloggers don’t exist! How could they have gotten it so wrong?

Not to mention the poll’s split of 59% women and 41% men. Did anyone bother studying that anomaly?

Those exit polls also showed Kerry winning North Carolina and Arizona - two states where there are no charges of vote fraud and which the President carried comfortably. I wonder if Mr. Kennedy would be kind enough to explain that?

In summary, Kennedy should have applied Occam’s Razor to his Exit Poll theory; given multiple explanations for the same outcome, the simplest is probably true. And it’s a helluva lot easier to say that the exit polls were wrong rather than positing the notion of massive, nationwide vote fraud.

Finally, Kennedy raises legitimate questions about the recount of the vote by the state. There apparently were many irregularities in following established procedures and the law for which Mr. Blackwell should be criticized. But would a recount really have given the state and therefore the election to Kerry? The candidate himself didn’t think so and was advised I’m sure by the most knowledgeable and savvy pols in his party. Besides that, it would have been asking too much to expect the President’s lead of nearly 128,000 votes to disappear entirely in a statewide recount. Such an eventuality would have no precedence in American history which is why Kerry probably conceded in the first place.

If I sound dismissive of most of Kennedy’s article, I don’t mean to. As I pointed out, he makes several troubling and valid points about what happened before and after election day in Ohio. Overall, however, his criticisms ring hollow due to his total disregard for Democratic tomfoolery - especially the blatant disenfranchisement campaign carried out against overseas citizens (among many other transgressions) in next door Pennsylvania by Governor Ed Rendell - a state where Kerry’s margin of victory was smaller than Bush’s in Ohio.

What I applaud Mr. Kennedy for is in bringing these issues out into the open for discussion. I have no idea how to solve these problems - I will leave solutions to others. But there is no doubt in my mind that the problem of election and registration fraud is getting worse and threatens our entire democratic system. Best heed the calls for reform now before people lose faith in our system of government entirely.

UPDATE

The Editors make some interesting points about the article while taking some righty bloggers to task for inconsistency. Check out some of the comments as well - some of them still don’t get the fact that the exit polls were so far off thanks to methodology, not conspiracy.

Kim Priestap:

The Democrats just can’t accept that they lost in 2000 and 2004. As far as they are concerned, power is their right, their entitlement. Therefore, as they see it, Democrats don’t lose elections. The elections are stolen from them, which is why Kennedy puts all his eggs in his the-exit-polls-were-accurate basket. Now their target is Secretary Blackwell. And it appears that no smear is low enough for them.

I would say there is a lot of truth in that but in RFK’s case, I think he did raise some legitimate issues.

UPDATE II 6/3

James Joyner does a first class job debunking many of Kennedy’s theories and links to a Salon article that also criticizes Mr. Kennedy’s fact flakes.

A decent critique of the Ohio vote in 2004 would have included the intense scrambling for new voters that caused the Democrats to step over the line of legality and the Republicans to respond by trying to suppress some of the registrations. Again, Blackwell was in an impossible position but, as one of my non-partisan commenters pointed out, it is ludicrous to have the state Chairman of one party’s nominee in charge of seeing that a fair vote is conducted. The appearance of impropriety is too great to give much confidence to the people that nothing underhanded is going on.

Tristero also notes the Salon article and walks back a little from his flat statement that the 2004 election was stolen. He believes Kennedy should acknowledge his mistakes and apologize.

The last forecast I saw for hell did not show any cooling trends in the near future.

UPDATE: 6/7

Readers who have come here via The Poorman Institute must be a little confused. I’m sure they were expecting to read a piece that tries to whitewash Republican malfeasance during the election, when in fact I praise Mr. Kennedy for bringing many of these issues - including the deliberate disenfranchisement of Democratic voters - into the light.

No, the Editors did not direct you to the wrong link. And no, I will not descend to the level of the barnyard to point out that whoever wrote that post did not read much of what I had to say and further, did not give even a hint that both sides were doing their best to supress the other’s vote in Ohio on election day.

To say otherwise is moronic…or is it “moranic?”

I must confess to having a secret admiration for those protesters who willingly get themselves arrested in order to make a statement of defiance against the war as well as standing up in a very public way for what they believe in.

Some may call them traitors and perhaps, in the strictest interpretation of the law, they may be considered as such. I know that in another time, a less tolerant era, they would face considerable jail time. Even today, those who have dedicated their lives to protesting our stockpile of nuclear weapons have faced jail terms up to 18 years for some serious infractions at top secret missile sites. We don’t have to agree with these people to admire their sense of purpose and steadfast adherence to their own set of principles. In fact, we can and should vigorously condemn their myopia and stupidity. But that shouldn’t lessen our respect for their sincerity.

Others may object to my romanticizing the activities of these people but in truth, they follow in the footsteps of a long line of principled Americans who believed so strongly that their government had lost its way that they were willing to disobey the law and, just as importantly, accept the consequences of their disobedience by going to jail. Civil disobedience like this takes true courage. Perhaps not the same kind of courage exhibited on the battlefield but nevertheless a kind of courage that recognizes the fact that doing what is right will entail a personal cost. For the soldier, it may mean his life. For the anti-war protester, or the civil rights advocate, or the anti-apartheid demonstrator, it may mean the loss of liberty and the shame of prison.

The motivations of those who get themselves arrested these days is certainly a mixed bag. This group, for instance, seems to be made up of some of our scruffier peace-loving, anarchist brethren whose reasons for getting thrown in the slammer may revolve more around the fact that one is able to procure “3 hots and a cot” rather than any grand, anti-globalization crusade. At the same time, there appear to be many citizens who are dead serious about their beliefs and are willing to risk injury and jail time to bring public attention to them.

Selfish or sublime, the motivations of this subset of anti-war activists stands in stark contrast to the lazy, loud, insufferably arrogant rantings of the netnuts who talk a good game but refuse to put their hides on the line when other, more courageous souls run all the risks. These are the same goofs who continue to insist on calling their opponents “chickenhawks” while ironically exhibiting true cowardice by sitting safe and secure behind their little keyboards, ranting and raving about evil George and the Neocon wars of conquest, with the full knowledge that their execrable, rambling screeds are protected by both American tradition and the Constitution of the United States. In short, they have as much chance of going to jail for what they write as I do of winning the Miss America title.

Instead of thousands or tens of thousands of these “activists” (a misnomer if ever there was one unless one were to include watching Keith Olberman as anti-war activism rather than the cruel and inhuman torture it should be defined as), peacefully protesting on a daily basis, getting themselves arrested for blocking traffic in and out of military bases or chaining themselves to the White House fence or gathering in front of the Pentagon, all we get out of them is talk, talk, talk, and more talk.

Hint to netnuts: Activists are supposed to, you know, engage in “activities” not sit at a computer spitting out incoherent rants that few people outside of the digital asylum inhabited by your ideological compatriots ever read. Why not get up off your overly ample posteriors and do something about ending the war rather than simply whining like the spoiled brat, upper middle class sloth brains you appear to be?

Being smug, self-righteous, and cowardly will not end the war in Iraq in your favor (i.e. America losing). Yes, a large majority of Americans hate the way Bush is handling the conflict. And a majority of Americans believe that the war was a mistake. But you’ll never get American troops to come home until you start clogging the jails of this country with protesters who willingly break the law and are equally willing to take the consequences of prison time in order to achieve their goal. About the only inconvenience you’ve suffered in your “activism” is in missing episodes of MTV’s Pimp My Ride. Let me tell you, that just won’t get it done.

This is why you are held in such contempt by most of us. It would be one thing if you backed up your bluster with concrete citizen’s action. But your simpering, sniveling, hateful missives only serve to make you a target of derision and disapprobation - the fate of those who posit empty headed platitudes instead of directly acting on your beliefs.

Last year, I jokingly referred to the community of faux activists who were backing Cindy Sheehan’s camp out in Crawford without actually joining her as “chickendoves:”

You’d think with all the ink spilled and pixels filled with Cindymania that there would be thousands of lefties down there, screaming their rage and anger at Bush for not doing what they want – which is basically roll over and die.

What’s the matter? Don’t have the courage of your convictions? Don’t want to camp out under the broiling west Texas sun and suffer for the cause? Is the issue of war and peace so unimportant to you that you’re not willing to leave your families, you jobs, all the comforts of home and endure the danger of tripping over a camera cable or getting hit by a speeding satellite truck? Are you afraid you’re going to get poked in the eye by a wayward reporter’s pencil? Does the prospect of being in such close proximity to a bunch of tobacco chewing, bible reading, shotgun toting, red state goobers give you the cold sweats?

The answer was apparently yes. Sheehan never had more than a couple of hundred activists join her at the Bush ranch. All the more reason to start asking serious questions about the commitment of people to “peace” when they fail to show the courage of their convictions by standing up and being counted when the roll is called and the tocsin sounds for the kind of action that would mark them as true “warriors for peace.”

Somehow, I don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon.

UPDATE

As if on cue, Darksyde at Daily Kos has a “Memorial Day” post up that criticizes those conservatives and Republicans who never served in the armed forces.

This from a guy whose closest brush with standing up for his convictions that risked anything except contracting Carpel Tunnel Syndrome from sitting on his ass, typing away at his keyboard was watching an episode of Judge Judy.

How much courage does it take to call people names while a war that you purport to hate more than anything (except maybe George Bush) rages on with Americans and Iraqis dying and being maimed without you lifting a finger to oppose it?

Calling political opponents chickenhawks may be emotionally satisfying - if you happen to have the maturity of a 6 year old. But when it comes right down to it, you are all fakes, phonies, and hypocritical cowards who would let George Bush take the United States into dictatorship and who don’t have the courage of their convictions to protest this war en masse in order to put the kind of pressure necessary on the Administration to bring this war to a close.

What kind of a patriot sits behind a keyboard and writes about the country slipping into a dictatorship without getting up off your fat behind and doing something about it - even picking up a gun if necessary? Your words are meaningless. If you are really serious about this dictatorship business, what the hell are you people doing sitting at home?

I guess it’s true. Liberals really don’t love their country as much as conservatives do. Because I don’t care how old I was, if I thought for one second that a President, regardless of party, was trying to establish a dictatorship, I would be carrying out some kind of direct action - even if I was alone. And that’s the difference between liberals and conservatives; the left are intellectual cowards who don’t have the guts to do what is necessary to act on their beliefs.

For a little less emotional response (and one more devastating), please see Mark Coffey’s excellent post quoting Hitchens on the chickenhawk criticism.

Trying to have any kind of a conversation with a liberal over the revelation today that a government insider informed ABC News reporters that the government was “tracking” their phone numbers is an absolute impossibility. They are in hysterics. They are bursting blood vessels, trying to outdo each other in coming up with adjectives to describe their outrage. Or, taking an opposite tack, they are assuring us that they knew it all along - Bush=Hitler.

They may be right.

Then again, they may be full of crap. The fact is, WE DON’T KNOW. And I know how hard it is for the lefties to admit to those three little words but if they were actually serious about discussing the limits of federal power (as I will attempt to do in this post), they would admit the following:

1. WE DON”T KNOW many of the technical details of any of the NSA programs revealed to date.

2. WE DON’T KNOW if any of those programs are illegal or violate the Constitution. We can guess. We can extrapolate from known facts. But until the actual details of HOW the programs work are released, only fools, little children, and liberals proclaim them to be beyond the pale.

3. WE DON’T KNOW if these latest revelations are true.

4. WE DON’T KNOW if legal warrants were obtained in furtherance of an investigation into the leaking of classified information. Not “politically embarrassing or “anti-Bush” information but classified information. You can spin it all you want to my lefty friends, but there are statutes on the books about giving that information to anyone - including reporters - with stiff penalties involved including jail time.

ABC’s outing of the names of the east European countries where the CIA’s prisons were located did so little damage to Bush politically but hugely damaged our foreign policy in ways that are shocking to contemplate. So much for the idiocy that going after the leakers in this case was due to the embarrassment caused the Administration. The reason for the leak is because some unelected, self-important lickspittle of a bureaucrat disagreed with the policy . It’s not about embarrassment or revenge; it’s about catching a criminal.

And anyone who can’t tell the difference between leaking parts of an NIE (that were in the process of being declassified anyway) and leaking information that causes enormous problems to allies who went way out on a limb to help us in fighting the War on Terror, is an ignoramus.

All this being said, what they hell is the government doing “tracking” the calls of newspeople?

Spook86:

The MSM will scream long and loud about this one, but let’s keep things in perspective. Under existing federal statutes, intelligence officials who divulge sensitive information to the press are likely in violation of the law. The unauthorized leak of such data results in a referral from the intelligence agency to the Justice Department, which launches a criminal probe. Federal prosecutors then have the right to gather and subpoena evidence in support of that effort, including phone records. If authorities discover a series of calls between the office phone or cell phone of an intelligence officer and Brian Ross of ABC News, well, that could certainly be relevant in identifying and prosecuting leakers.

But the phone records of reporters are protected:

In New York Times Co. v. Gonzales, 382 F.Supp.2d 457 (S.D.N.Y. 2005), the New York Times sought a declaratory judgment to protect the telephone records of two of its reporters, Judith Miller and Philip Shenon. Miller and Shenon had written articles in the aftermath of September 11th detailing how the government planned to block assets and search the offices of two Islamic charities.

Patrick Fitzgerald wanted to know who leaked this information. He argued that Miller and Shenon’s reporting tipped off the charities to the searches and increased the likelihood that evidence and assets were destroyed or concealed. As part of his investigation into the leak, he requested that Miller and Shenon voluntarily produce their phone records. They refused and eventually filed the lawsuit to determine whether their phone records were protected.

Judge Sweet ruled that indeed the phone records in that case were “protected by the qualified reporters’ privilege for confidential sources, which exists pursuant to the First Amendment and federal common law.” The government in that case was unable to overcome that privilege, so it could not have access to the phone records.

Does this mean that their phone conversations are protected? Their “phone records” (which should include telephone numbers of the type stored in the NSA telephone surveillance database)? Or is it monitoring of a sort of which we are currently unaware?

WE DON’T KNOW.

And neither does ABC News:

ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.

Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.

In short, the tens of thousands of words already written by lefty bloggers (and righties who have felt compelled to respond) may be a big waste of time.

ALL OF THIS MAY HAVE ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH THE NSA!

If it is a legal, authorized monitoring by the Department of Justice that is part of an ongoing criminal investigation into the illegal leaking of classified data, then no one has anything much to complain about.

However…

If it is an attempt by the Bush Administration to use the tools of data mining and the extraordinarily powerful technical collection apparatus of the NSA to spy on reporters (and political opponents), I daresay that the President would be in danger from many Republicans of having them fulfill the wildest dreams of the netnuts and agitate for his impeachment and removal from office.

Myself included.

There are limits to the power of the Federal government. There must be. “We are at war” may cover many, many situations that the civil liberty absolutists and Bush deranged leftists may find problematic but can be justified under the general rubric of “national security.” But using that excuse to harass journalists or intimidate political opponents is so far beyond the pale, so UNAMERICAN that I feel a little embarrassed even having to mention it. It should be as “self evident” as the truths found in the Declaration of Independence - that we have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; none of these is possible without some guarantee that opposition to government policies will not lead to retaliation by the government itself.

This is not to say that I as an individual American citizen can’t call you a traitor or a treasonous lout if I disagree with you (something I rarely do). But it does mean that simply opposing government policies or trying to report what a journalist sees as the “truth” (subjective though that may be) should not bring the heavy hand of government down on the critic or the newsperson.

And if this is what the Bush Administration has been up to with the various NSA programs then the President will be able to look fondly back on the day when his support was in the low 30’s. And he will have presided over a political debacle as horrendous as the elections of 1974-76 when the Democratic congressional “Watergate babies” - all 72 of them - rolled into Congress and nearly destroyed the country.

There is no reason to call for an investigation - yet. But I am a little more amendable to Arlen Specter’s ideas about finding out some additional details on these programs including the Senator trying to get a better idea of exactly who they are targeting.

In the meantime, some words of wisdom from Josh Marshall:

I think part of the issue for many people on the administration’s various forms of surveillance is not just that some of activities seem to be illegal or unconstitutional on their face. I think many people are probably willing to be open-minded, for better or worse, on pushing the constitutional envelope. But given the people in charge of the executive branch today, you just can’t have any confidence that these tools will be restricted to targeting terrorists. Start grabbing up phone records to data-mine for terrorists and then the tools are just too tempting for your leak investigations. Once you do that, why not just keep an eye on your critics too? After all, they’re the ones most likely to get the leaks, right? So, same difference. The folks around the president don’t recognize any real distinctions among those they consider enemies. So we’d be foolish to think they wouldn’t bring these tools to bear on all of them. Once you set aside the law as your guide for action and view the president’s will as a source of legitimacy in itself, then everything becomes possible and justifiable.

I would take issue with Mr. Marshall’s blanket characterization of “the folks around the President” not recognizing any distinctions “among those they consider enemies.” But otherwise, his analysis should be taken to heart.

Just what are they up to?

UPDATE

Glad to see I’m not the only one on the right troubled by this.

Mark Coffey:

This doesn’t change my stand on the surveillance program or the phone database. It may (MAY, I stress) be an abuse of an otherwise useful tool. It’s important to note that we don’t have any proof for Ross’s allegations.

I’m troubled by the allegation, and I’m troubled by the leaks, and I’m troubled by just about everything associated with this entire subject. More than ever, I stand by my call for a new regulatory surveillance framework…

UPDATE II

Here is a rather cryptic update from ABC News:

The FBI acknowledged late Monday that it is increasingly seeking reporters’ phone records in leak investigations.

“It used to be very hard and complicated to do this, but it no longer is in the Bush administration,” said a senior federal official.

The acknowledgement followed our blotter item that ABC News reporters had been warned by a federal source that the government knew who we were calling.

The official said our blotter item was wrong to suggest that ABC News phone calls were being “tracked.”

“Think of it more as backtracking,” said a senior federal official.

“Backtracking” would seem to indicate something much less intrusive and less alarming; they would already have a suspect’s phone records that showed the ABC News phone number.

The FBI released a statement that sort of confirms that:

In a statement, the FBI press office said its leak investigations begin with the examination of government phone records.

“The FBI will take logical investigative steps to determine if a criminal act was committed by a government employee by the unauthorized release of classified information,” the statement said.

Officials say that means that phone records of reporters will be sought if government records are not sufficient.

In short, the government is not specifically targeting news organizations unless they have probable cause gleaned through a legal search of a suspect’s phone records. That would seem to be pretty standard law enforcement practice and no cause for alarm.

Then again, still, WE DON’T KNOW.

Oh, the perilous, evil times in which we live.

The current escalation in the war between liberals and conservatives just took a very nasty turn as far left websites have published personal information, including the address and exact location, of Michelle Malkin’s house. The stated purpose was revenge: Malkin published the contact information contained in a press release from a University of California-Santa Cruz student group who physically threatened and violently intimidated military recruiters who had come on campus to participate in a job fair. The young military men were forced to leave fearing for their safety as well as the safety of anyone who may have been able to run the gauntlet of shouting, spitting, pushing leftist lickspittles who were trying to impose their idea of “free speech” on those who may have been a little more open minded about that alien concept in wishing to see the recruiters. (I would think anyone with courage enough to endure those kind of hardships just to see military recruiters should have been signed up pronto).

It is unfortunate that these facts have been drowned out by the subsequent brouhaha over Malkin’s publishing the student’s contact information. Or perhaps not. Lefty websites ignored the free speech implications of the UCSC incident until Ezra Klein came out with his best imitation of Joe “Have you no shame” Welch. His curious use of the euphemism “slug” to describe Malkin was probably appreciated by Michelle in that lefties routinely use very personal anatomical descriptives in referring to her. Klein’s dramatic, chest thumping denunciation of Malkin for publishing a press release was extraordinarily revealing. The student “protest” (assault) was just harmless fun! They’re “undergraduates,” for Gosh sakes.

And then, the jaw dropper:

Malkin has already done grievous harm to an idea. I went to UC Santa Cruz. It’s entirely possible I was friends with some of those Malkin has placed in danger. It’s a school filled with young, idealistic kids determined to save the world, feeling their way through uncertain thickets of ideology and unfamiliar collections of ideas, and naive about the dangers of direct political action outside a university’s protected confines. That, after all, is what college is about — providing a protected space for young adults to experiment, learn, try out ideas and identities. If they made a mistake attaching their home numbers to a press release, it’s understandable — forgive them father, they know not what they do.

Malkin lays claim to no such ignorance. A skilled and experienced rhetorical warrior, she saw the pale, white flesh of their throats and lunged. The vicious always seek out the weak. Rather than forgive their poorly-written, too-revealing press release, she published their oversight, opening them to danger and harm. If any of these students are hurt by a crazed Malkinite, the blood will drip from her hands, the guilt will burden her shoulders. But forgive her just the same, for there is nought else she can do.

Oh puh leeze!

Did anyone else laugh out loud when reading “she saw the pale, white flesh of their throats and lunged?” That’s not hyperbole. It’s juvenile. One might expect to see something like that in the diary entry of a 12 year old girl.

And the idea that college “provides a protected space” so that these students can violently intimidate people they disagree with is one of the most outrageous ideas I’ve ever heard. Yes, let them protest the recruiters visit. Let them stand outside the venue and spout their slogans, wave their signs, even try and shame people who wish to visit the recruiters. But to physically insinuate themselves to prevent people from seeing the recruiters in the first place is wrong - wrong for anyone, of any age, in any place, at any time. And throwing rocks, slashing tires, pushing, shoving, spitting, and threatening violence are not the acts of innocents. They are the acts of criminals.

Of course, we’re now beyond the debate about what went on at UCSC and into the bloody aftermath; Malkin’s publishing the press release containing the telephone numbers of those poor, innocent college students. This is something Malkin does quite often. She publishes contact information of school principals, corporate CEO’s, college professors, local elected officials, and anyone and everyone who demonstrates either extraordinary cluelessness or a particular bias against conservatives. It is the fact that she encourages her readers to initiate contact that has lefty blogs up in arms.

The default position of Klein, et al is that because there is a minuscule percentage of Malkin’s 144,000 daily readers who are in desperate need of psychological help, she should have refrained from publishing the contact numbers of the students. This brings up a fascinating question; are bloggers responsible for the actions and attitudes of their readers? Are novelists? Are newspapers, screenwriters, and anyone else whose writings see the light of day responsible if some wacko makes a threatening phone call?

John Aravosis agrees with Klein; absolutely yes:

Malkin, on the other hand, has posted the phone numbers and email addresses of college kids on her uber-trafficked site, and the kids are now getting deluged with hate. It’s wrong, in terms of sicing your audience on kids. It’s also wrong in terms of once kids are getting death threats and they ask you to stop, you really ought to stop (hell, even for adults, if things start to get THAT out of control, you really ought to reconsider your activism strategy). Not dig in your heels in order to prove some bizarre, and rather sick, point.

And finally, having her audience call these kids is a rather bizarre, and I’m not convinced defensible, practice. It’s one thing to call a corporation to complain about their sponsorship of x, y or z. But having your audience call up individual activists and yell at them because of a protest they held, that seems to start bordering on creepy and un-democratic.

In a demented sort of way, Avarosis has a point. Even though the last I heard, none of the students had been in contact with Malkin and asked that she remove the information (the same info is still available on at least three lefty websites), from my own personal point of view, once I heard that they were receiving death threats, I probably would have pulled the information. In the end, one does have a modicum of responsibility not only toward people who read your site but also anyone affected by what’s on it. It’s ridiculous to believe that Malkin deliberately set out to injure these idiot kids by publishing their little mimeographed press release. But once it became clear that some of her readers had crossed the line, I personally would have pulled the information without comment or notice.

That said, what do you make of people publishing Malkin’s home address and the location of her house?

The crickets are chirping on the left as only one blogger has mentioned the outing of Malkin’s personal information - and that was to simply tweak Jeff Goldstein’s nose. Goldstein applauds Malkins defiance of her tormentors and adds this:

So. I am now calling for the very public condemnation and ostracizing of those who would post satellite photos and personal addresses of a their political opponents on the web. I am also calling for the public condemnation and ostracizing of those hyperpartisan bloggers / media figures who condone or applaud such actions.

Jeff Goldstein is absolutely correct. The potential damage this practice could do to political speech demands that left and right make this a line of demarcation - a “line of death” to cross. Anyone, be they right or left who crosses this line should be immediately de-linked. Anyone who still links to the offending site should also be delinked. Anyone who links a post from the offending site (even to make sport of it or to criticize it) should be delinked.

For that reason, I am going to delink the Democratic Underground from my sidebar (as soon as I can figure out how to do it). And I am putting on notice anyone who still has them on their blogroll by this time next week will also be delinked. This includes numerous righty bloggers who link to them under the rubric of “The Enemy” or “The Left.”

And no, I will not delink Malkin even though some apparently have. The difference between what she did and what the DU crew did is night and day. Publishing a press release is one thing. Inviting people to physically harass someone is quite another.

This kind of thing must be nipped in the bud now before it gets out of control.

UPDATE

If you know of other lefty websites who published this information or linked to it, please let me know who they were.

Also, an absolute must read by The Anchoress: Judas and the Cult of Malevolent Mendacity.

George McClellan was in a snit.

The Commander in Chief of the Army (circa 1862) had just returned from a meeting with a Congressman who was urging him to get the army moving toward Richmond pronto. It had been more than 6 months since the disaster at Bull Run and everyone in Washington was getting antsy, not least the President who quipped morosely that if McClellan was not going to use the army, then perhaps he (the President) might borrow it for awhile.

McClellan was feeling persecuted. Everyone in Washington was an armchair general, telling him how to win the war. The President, in a pathetically amateurish attempt to remedy his lack of military knowledge, was reading treatises on war by night and writing long, chatty letters by day telling him:

And once more let me tell you, it is indispensable to you that you strike a blow. I am powerless to help this. You will do me the justice to remember I always insisted, that going down the Bay in search of a field, instead of fighting at or near Mannassas, was only shifting, and not surmounting, a difficulty — that we would find the same enemy, and the same, or equal, intrenchments, at either place. The country will not fail to note — is now noting — that the present hesitation to move upon an entrenched enemy, is but the story of Manassas repeated.

I beg to assure you that I have never written you, or spoken to you, in greater kindness of feeling than now, nor with a fuller purpose to sustain you, so far as in my most anxious judgment, I consistently can. But you must act.

Lincoln wrote that letter as McClellan’s 100,000 man army sat in front of a Confederate battle line on the James Peninsula in Virginia that featured fake wooden guns and the theatrics of rebel General John Magruder who, in order to make his 15,000 man force appear to be a great host, continuously marched a brigade across the front of the Union lines, easily fooling the cautious McClellan into thinking he faced more than 100,000 men.

But that was in the future. The Congressman McClellan was so disgusted with was John Covode of Pennsylvania who sat on the most powerful Committee in the history of the United States Congress: The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. Covode had just informed Little Mac that he was in danger of losing his command unless he got the Army of the Potomac up and moving toward Richmond and the General was in a foul mood. He sat down and wrote a letter to his wife complaining bitterly about the interference of the “rascals” in Congress who seemed more interested in assessing an officer’s anti-slavery credentials than in their military abilities. Despite being given more power than any general since Washington, McClellan felt hemmed in and hamstrung by a group of amateurs who were looking over his shoulder and criticizing every move he made or, in the present case, didn’t make.

The Joint Committee was born out of the frustration in Congress with Union setbacks in the early days of the war and what the radicals saw as insufficient zeal for victory on the part of some officers. If, as Clemenceau said “War is too important a thing to be left to the generals,” then the Committee felt perfectly comfortable in making it their business to meddle in the affairs of the army. Woe betide the luckless officer who got into their sights. Because America was fighting a civil war, even the loyalty to the flag of officers could be and was questioned.

Nothing illustrated this salient fact more than the case of General Charles P. Stone whose attack on a small rebel encampment near Leesburg ended up an unmitigated disaster. Not only did he lose the battle, but the man most responsible for the loss, a former United States Senator Edward Baker, was killed in action. The Battle of Balls Bluff was a minor skirmish by Civil War standards but its impact would be felt for the rest of the war. In response to the defeat, the Congress decided that the executive branch needed guidance in the prosecution of the conflict and the Joint Committee was born. Their first target was General Stone himself who, while never accused outright of treason, was nevertheless tarred by innuendo and gossip to the point that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton ordered his arrest. For 189 days, Stone sat in a cell without being charged with any specific crime. He was finally released without apology and was never able to live down the cloud placed over him by Congress.

Whether it was the Committee’s intent or not, Union officers got the message. Headquarters operators like General Joe Hooker and Benjamin Butler cultivated Committee members, taking them into their confidence and lavishing praise on their activities. Combat officers like General Phil Kearny complained that the Committee’s second guessing was having a deleterious effect on an officer’s ability to carry out their duties.

Indeed, that was almost a universal criticism of the Committee’s investigations:

The Committee on the Conduct of the War was feared during its lifetime. Army commanders saw what was happening to their predecessors and let this influence the decisions they made on the battlefield. General Ambrose Burnside most certainly let the phantom of McClellan’s non-aggressive behavior color his judgment when he continued to send the waves of Union soldiers to their deaths up the slopes of Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg, and again when he moved his army out of their winter camps into the Virginia quagmire in the infamous Mud March. How many other general officers made decisions based not strictly on what was best for their commands on a given field, but rather on what was “safe” conduct as far as the CCW was concerned? George Meade knew what was happening when he testified to committee members at Falmouth, after the Fredericksburg defeat. In a personal letter he wrote, “I sometimes feel very nervous about my position, [the committee is] knocking over generals at such a rate.”

In fact, the Committee did an enormous service to the Union cause. More often than not, they were able to weed out incompetent officers who were usually replaced by competent ones. They cared not a fig if an officer had West Point credentials, something that the President seemed over awed with at times. In fact, the Committee saw West Point as something of a bastion of Southern sympathizers, so many of the US trained officer corps leaving the army to fight for Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy. And while it is true their meddling sometimes caused problems for armies in the field, their investigation into medical treatment of wounded soldiers led to the formation of the U.S. Sanitary Commission which forever changed the way the army cared for its wounded. And other investigations into corruption in the granting of military contracts as well as being out front in urging President Lincoln to recruit and train black soldiers proved to be tremendously helpful to securing victory.

Could such oversight by Congress have prevented Abu Ghraib and other prisoner abuses? Would such a Committee if in existence today insisted on more troops on the ground at the beginning of the occupation? Could Donald Rumsfeld have survived this long if Congress had been looking over his shoulder? Would 363 tons of $100 bills been flown into Baghdad - $12 billion dollars worth - and ended up with employees of the Coalition Provisional Authorities using the banded stacks as footballs?

The Republican Congress has failed. It is as dysfunctional a legislative body as has ever been elected in my lifetime. While individual members have shown brains, courage, and thoughtfulness, as a group - and especially its quiescent, arrogant, and clueless leadership - it has been a disaster. We on the right have acknowledged this fact in one way or another. There has been nary a commenter on this site (with the exception of the few hopeless partisans who still drop by now and again) who hasn’t pointed out with brutal clarity the shortcomings of our party’s elected representatives. We should now take the next step and set up the guillotine because its time for some heads to start rolling.

To the Republicans in Congress, I would say yes, investigating Administration shortcomings is a partisan undertaking and it is a given that Democrats will turn hearings on any wrongdoing involving the war be it corruption in contract letting or prisoner abuse into one long diatribe against George Bush and the war. But you are all big boys and girls and politics is a tough business. If you can’t take the heat, stand aside and let others take your place with more fortitude and a desire to do the job citizens elected you to do. The medicine will be strong. But not taking it will once again plunge Republicans into minority status and elevate people who, we all believe, would not do the job of protecting America in this critical hour.

If Congress had something like the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War today, I daresay not only Donald Rumsfeld, but also the self serving, ass covering Generals who have recently come out calling for his resignation would have been in the Committee’s sights from day one. Rumsfeld’s failures are their failures. The fact that they are too arrogant to see that says everything you need to know about their “confessions.”

I really am at a loss about what to do. Staying home on election day goes against everything I believe about Republicans and democracy. But I am coming around to the belief that if not voting is the only way to change the leadership dynamic of the Republican party so that honorable conservatives rise to positions of prominence, then so be it.

In trying to decide how to respond to this thoughtful, yet seriously flawed article by David Neiwert, I had my pick of several different threads where the author, in an effort to ferret out what he considers to be “racism” and “hate” on right wing blogs, actually reveals some profound truths about the left and their total cluelessness regarding what constitutes legitimate debate in a free society about race and public policy.

Neiwert’s thesis - that right wing “movement” bloggers are “transmitting” the very same themes and ideas that fascists and racists espouse only dressed up in mainstream intellectual couture - is an old one, as ancient as similar lines of attack followed by the left against William Buckley, Barry Goldwater, and the bête noire of liberals Ronald Reagan. The assault is based on false assumptions, setting up straw men, towering intellectual conceits, and a moral absolutism with respect to one’s own privileged frame of reference regarding issues of race, class, and politics.

It should be noted that Mr. Neiwert has done more than most to expose the dark underbelly of the extreme right, writing extensively on the Neo-Nazi and White Supremacist movements in the Northwest. His book, Death on the Fourth of July was well received and praised for its penetrating look at hate groups and hate crimes.

That said, Mr. Neiwert should be ashamed of himself. By trying to connect right wing bloggers and the positions they advocate on the issues, however tangentially, to the haters, the Hitler lovers, the cross burners, and the racial purists, he demonstrates an arrogance commonplace on the left where it has become de rigueur to simply mouth the words “racist” and “fascist” in order to cut off debate on the issues and destroy any moral authority to which their opponents might aspire.

Mr. Neiwert sets up his hit piece by recalling his visits to a Neo-Nazi compound before it was shut down by Southern Poverty Law Center, a truly unsung organization, having done more to eliminate race and ethnic hate groups through the creative use of lawsuits than even the government. After this promising beginning, Neiwert descends rapidly into madness:

The compound represented an era when white supremacists were relegated to the fringes of American society. And while their tireless efforts to promote racial hatred were now muted, their simultaneous efforts to gain mainstream acceptance — particularly by disguising themselves and muting their core beliefs — had obviously begun to take root.

What was most disturbing was, even in 2000, the way the mainstream conservative agenda was beginning to resemble the politics of longtime racists like David Duke and Richard Butler, the Aryan Nations leader: bashing welfare recipients, attacking affirmative action, complaining about “reverse discrimination,” calling for the elimination of immigrants. Since then, this trend has only accelerated, to the point that old-fashioned haters like Duke and the National Alliance are finding their ranks thinned by followers who just become Republicans.

How many straw men can one writer set up in a paragraph or two?

First of all, it might be helpful to give Mr. Neiwert a little history lesson. “Bashing welfare recipients” (welfare reform) “attacking” affirmative action and complaining about (quotes please) “reverse discrimination” - as if such a thing didn’t exist - calling for the “elimination” (?) of immigrants (immigration reform) are in fact, conservative issues. The only problem with Mr. Neiwert’s notions of insidious issue creep by racists and fascists into the mainstream of conservatism is that he is blaming the responsible right for the fact that the racists adopted these issues, mixed them into an unrecognizable porridge of nauseating half truths and bowdlerized slogans, and spewed the result onto the internet and elsewhere trying to appear reasonable.

In short, while trying to connect Neo-Nazis to conservatives, Mr. Neiwert makes a classic, some would say stupid mistake; he puts the cart before the horse. It was not conservatives who adopted these issues from the extremists; it was the other way around.

I would suggest to Mr. Neiwert that his next article deal with the adoption by the Communist Party USA of many liberal issues such as racial justice, anti-war agitation, universal health care, and reigning in corporate power. Or better yet, he might want to take on Osama Bin Laden and that worthy’s peculiar habit of regurgitating liberal talking points about America, the war, and western civilization every time he makes a videotape.

It should make for some interesting reading. Especially the part where I’m sure Mr. Neiwert will point out that communists don’t “hate” anyone nor, for that matter, does Osama desire anything more than America leave his poor, benighted beheading jihadis alone. Yet Communists have proved themselves over the years to be inveterate haters of everything that we Americans - even patriotic liberals like Mr. Neiwert - love about this country; freedom and liberty for the individual. Any bets on what would happen if the CPUSA actually managed to seize power here? There hasn’t been a communist revolution yet that didn’t prominently feature gulags and “re-education camps” in their takeover brochures. Osama, of course, has his own axes to grind - literally.

Not content with straining every effort to connect conservative bloggers to hate groups, Neiwert then sets up the most extraordinary canard I’ve ever seen on a lefty website: that, in fact, this “transmission” of hate issues into the conservative mainstream has already happened and that righty bloggers have in fact become closet racists only awaiting the right moment for their bigotry to show itself in all its glory:

The main mechanism for converting mainstream conservatives into right-wing extremists and white nationalists is a process I call transmission: extremist ideas and principles are repackaged for mainstream consumption, stripped of overt racism and hatefulness and presented as ordinary politics. As these ideas advance, they create an open environment for the gradual adoption of the core of bigotry that animates them.

This strategy was first enunciated by Patrick Buchanan back in 1989, in a nationally syndicated column that expressed a level of kinship with David Duke, who at that point was building momentum in a bid to win the Louisiana governorship. Buchanan thought the GOP overreacted to Duke and his Nazi “costume” by denouncing him; he urged:

Take a hard look at Duke’s portfolio of winning issues and expropriate those not in conflict with GOP principles, [such as] reverse discrimination against white folks.

It was a simple formula: Look at the issues that attract white supremacist votes, strip out the racism (or anything inimical to good public relations for the GOP) and present them to the public as fresh, “cutting edge” ideas. In the process, you’ll attract a lot of middle-class white voters who harbor unspoken racial resentments.

Put aside the personal affront to the integrity and intent of conservatives. This is just plain ignorance. Conservatives didn’t need David Duke or any other extremist to come out against reverse discrimination. The Bakhe case was decided in 1979 - 10 years before Pat Buchanan wrote his political analysis regarding the efficacy of Duke’s “issues.” Again Mr. Neiwert is ascribing views held by extremists as being adopted by conservatives instead of the other way around. By trying to make conservatives responsible for how extremists attach themselves to their issues while at the same time smearing the entire conservative movement, Neiwert reveals himself to be little more than a petty partisan hack, an ideologue who can’t tell the difference (or deliberately obfuscates it) between legitimate arguments about public policy and the coarse, bastardization of conservative issues by the haters.

It is monstrous calumny to accuse conservatives thusly. Especially dressing his screed up, as Mr. Neiwert does in this piece, as some kind of psychological analysis of the motivations and deeply held beliefs of conservative bloggers. At bottom, the way conservatives are attacked in this piece says more about the arrogant, smug, self-righteous, self congratulatory left than it does about the people it seeks to deliberately defame.

What are we really discussing here? Nothing less than the ability to debate public policy issues without one side having recourse to use blood libel terms like “racist” in order to delegitimatize the thoughts, words, and deeds of one’s opponent. This is the reason “race” as a matter of public policy cannot be discussed rationally. The left starts with the premise that any deviation from its base assumptions on race is non-negotiable - an advantage they see as set in stone as the Ten Commandments. Hence, one cannot discuss reforming affirmative action because to do so is, by definition, racist.

Neither is it possible to discuss immigration reform as evidenced by Mr. Neiwert’s loony contention that conservatives have adopted the extremists viewpoint of “eliminating immigrants” - one would assume both legal and illegal - which is a laughable corruption of the conservative’s belief that the laws of the land currently on the books should be enforced and that in a just society, one group should not be treated differently by the law than another. Ergo, what should be a necessary and vital debate on the nature of law and society not to mention the very real and vital issues of securing our borders, allowing for orderly immigration to the United States, and dealing with the problem of illegal immigrants already here, instead degenerates into more name calling and a ghastly oversimplification and distortion of the conservative position - par for the course when the left feels it is losing an argument with the American people.

Neiwert then takes on conservative bloggers in a specific and, from my point of view, dubious way by positing that 1) Glenn Reynolds is a “right wing blogger”, 2) that commenters at right wing websites don’t speak for the proprietor of that blog (unless they really do), and 3) that David Neiwert is a mind reader of such stupendous gifts that he should be classified as a secret weapon by the Pentagon, so incisive and penetrating his analysis of people’s thoughts and motivations.

After taking blogger Michelle Malkin and Reynolds to the woodshed for their ideas on Mexican irredentism - a notion currently being mainstreamed itself by leaders of the current round of immigration protests - Neiwert reveals that attacking the reconquista issue is in and of itself, racist:

Malkin, in truth, was simply following in the footsteps of the most prominent right-wing blogger, Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, who for several months in 2004 was likewise promoting the “reconquista” notion while arguing, groundlessly, that the student organization MEChA was a pack of “fascist hatemongers” comparable to the Klan.

But in Malkin’s case, the thread from far-right extremism to mainstream consumption is especially pronounced, since she herself has a considerable history of dalliances and associations with extremists and far-right organizations, most notably VDare, the SPLC-designated hate group that publishes not just Malkin’s work but that of Steve Sailer and Jared Taylor.

Malkin, of course, has never explained her association with VDare, just as Reynolds never recanted his groundless smearing of MEChA. Similarly, they never confront the effects of their reliance on old appeals from the far right, because that would undermine the whole enterprise.

Malkin is perfectly capable of defending herself although I will point out that her articles in VDare appear courtesy of Creative Syndicate which gives her about as much “connection” to VDare as any writer would have to a site that publishes their articles through an agreement with a third party. I suppose Mr. Neiwert could have missed that very salient point in his haste to smear Mrs. Malkin. As an aside, it might be interesting to see what websites some of Mr. Neiwert’s articles have turned up on. He may not like the results of such a search.

But calling Reynolds a “right wing blogger” is a surprise - especially, I’m sure, to Glenn who has made it clear on almost a daily basis that he is not a conservative by any stretch of the imagination. His dissatisfaction with conservatism is well known by most of us on the right which means either Niewert can’t read or he simply chooses to ignore the facts.

That said, calling MEChA “fascist hatemongers” may be a touch hyperbolic but I’ll let the reader decide. Neiwert links to an article that points out MEChA’s founding document never mentions “reconquista” which is true. But the “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan” mentioned in the linked article does contain some interesting ideas regarding “reclaiming the land” of their forefathers and a despicably racist statement for its motto:

The Plan Espiritual appears to translate the foregoing principles into a militant plan of action. The Plan offers an ahistorical counterrevolutionary version of Manifest Destiny for Chicanos:

In the spirit of a new people that is conscious not only of its proud historical heritage but also of the brutal “gringo” invasion of our territories, we, the Chicano, Mexican, Latino, Indigenous inhabitants and civilizers of the northern land of Aztlan from whence came our forefathers reclaiming the land of their birth and consecrating the determination of our people of the sun, declare that the call of our sangre [blood] is our power, our responsibility, and our inevitable destiny.

It explicitly states that Aztlan does not belong “to the foreign Europeans” and declares MEChA’s refusal to “recognize capricious frontiers on the Bronze continent.” And then, following these remarks, the Plan goes further still, uttering those infamous words:

. . . . [W]e declare the independence of our mestizo nation. We are a bronze people with a bronze culture. Before the world, before all of North America, before all our brothers in the bronze continent, we are a nation, we are a union of free pueblos, we are Aztlan. Por La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada.

The translation of that last little ditty is “On behalf of the Race, everything. Outside the Race, nothing.”

But hey! Don’t call them hatemongers!

Here’s where Neiwert employs his mind reading powers to their fullest extent:

Rather, they trot them out for consumption and play coy about any of the deeper implications of what they’re saying. Then, they leave it up to their readers to complete the connection.

Thus, the editors at sites like Little Green Footballs, Free Republic, or RedState provide few substantive instances of outright racism — but plenty of examples of repackaged extremism. Their commenters, however, are another story altogether; as we’ve seen, their audiences are all too glad to revel in the underlying bigotry.

The end result is a poisonous environment in which not merely the ideas, but the endemic attitudes and worldview, of the racist right receive not just fresh clothes but a whole new generation of adherents. This is why, for instance, so much naked eliminationism aimed not just at illegal immigrants and Muslims but, generically, “treasonous” American liberals has become inextricably interwoven with right-wing rhetoric in recent years.

First of all, may I propose a truce? We on the right will stop holding liberals responsible for what unhinged lefty commenters say on their sites if liberals stop the same practice regarding idiots who comment on right wing blogs. The notion that our commenters (I’m stifling a laugh here) “complete the connection” to our racist views is absurd. I had to reread that part to make sure that a grown up had actually written something so dramatically out of kilter with reality. For once again, Mr. Neiwert takes the legitimate policy positions taken by responsible conservatives and tries to destroy them by linking the ideas behind them with the mindless gibberings of the haters. Doesn’t he get tired of pulling both the horse and the cart?

When political writers like Neiwert try to play amateur psychologist by pretending to examine the innermost feelings of people for which they feel nothing but contempt and hate, the result is predictable; a slanderous, disjointed, and in the end, disquieting example of what passes for rational thought on the left. Neiwert’s piece is symptomatic of the level that civil discourse in this country has descended. And it speaks volumes to why this sad state of affairs will not be turned around anytime soon.

UPDATE

I experienced a full blown mandible gravity event when I read this bit of idiocy from David Anderson of ISOU:

The Firedoglake post makes some great points about racism in the conservative blogsphere. I find it interesting that one of the most vile racist [sic] is Michelle Malkin, who in a White Supremist [sic] Society would be at best a concubine for some Brownshirt. Perhaps Michelle has not payed [sic] much attention to her own image in the mirror lately, but HELLO, Michelle… You are a BROWN PERSON. If your Utopia ever came to pass, you might… as a reward for being a collaborator, get to work as a maid in Anne Coulter’s house, but having kissed Anne’s rear end so much, LaShawn barber [sic] would probably beat you to that job.

Thus speaketh the mainstream left.