Right Wing Nut House

This article originally appears in The American Thinker.

It may be the most underreported story of the new year. Very quietly and without any fanfare from a biased and hostile press, George Bush has emerged from the dog days of summer and early autumn where his approval ratings sat at a Nixonian 34% in some polls to a much healthier 46% in the latest Washington Post-ABC News survey.

What makes this comeback even more remarkable is that it is occurring amidst a relentless barrage of media negativity and partisan bomb throwing where all manner of evil doings are ascribed to the President and his Administration. The thundering denunciations from the left of the Administration’s efforts to intercept al Qaeda communications here in the United States as well as the sonorous editorializing by the mainstream press about an “imperial” presidency that seeks to undermine civil liberties seems to have had little or no effect on the American people’s attitude toward the way the President is performing his job. If anything, the most recent polls show that, unlike Democrats and their leftist allies in the media, the American people know that the United States is at war and that President Bush is doing what is necessary to both protect the homeland and win the fight against al Qaeda.

While there may be serious privacy questions about the NSA’s intercept program, it is unfortunate that any rational debate on the matter is impossible given the current poisoned political climate that holds sway in our nation’s capitol. As it is, Americans believe by a huge margin - 65% to 32% - that it is more important for the government to investigate terrorist threats even if it intrudes on personal privacy. And on more specific questions such as whether or not the program is justified, a plurality of 49% to 46% support the Administration’s efforts.

In short, it appears that the New York Times outed a top secret program vital to national security for nothing. If they did it because they believe it is the people’s “right” to know, citizens evidently don’t agree with them. And if they did it to undermine the Bush Administration, they have failed miserably.

All of this points to a dramatic shift in public opinion since late October when the President’s fortunes were at their lowest ebb. For most of 2005, Bush had ceded the playing field to his political opponents on the war, the economy, and a host of domestic issues like social security and tax reform. Inexplicably, the White House allowed the Democrats to define all of those issues by demonizing the President, attacking Bush in a personal way that ate into his credibility and eroded the trust the American people had in the President following the 2004 election.

The Democrats were able to do this because the President was not defending himself effectively. Rather than going out on the hustings and aggressively taking on his opponents, Bush allowed surrogates in Congress and his Administration to talk about policy prescriptions at home and progress in Iraq. In a less incendiary political time, this rational approach to governance would probably have worked. But when your Secretary of State is talking about Iraqi reconstruction while your political opponents are viscously tearing you down and attacking you personally by calling you a liar, a tool of the oil companies, and an uncaring monster, being rational doesn’t work.

There are indications that the President’s reluctance to engage his political opponents on Iraq was based on his advisor’s mistaken belief that keeping Iraq out of the news was the best way to tamp down opposition to the President’s policies. After an all too brief effort for two weeks last June to defend his policies at several military bases around the country, the President once again went into a shell while Cindy Sheehan and the Democrats took over the dog days of summer and dominated the news much to the Administration’s disadvantage.

Then came Katrina and the President’s people once again were slow off the mark, not only in recognizing the scope of the catastrophe but in generating a response to the savage personal attacks by the left which questioned the President’s compassion for his fellow citizens as well as the Administration’s competence in dealing with the disaster. The barrage began almost before the winds stopped blowing in New Orleans and continued unabated as the press breathlessly reported every rumored atrocity and morbidly dwelt on the deteriorating conditions at the Superdome and the Convention Center. The fact that so much of what the media passed along proved to be false or wildly exaggerated didn’t help the American people’s perception of the President at the time.

In retrospect, the months of September and October may be seen one day as the nadir of the Bush Presidency. Every poll that came out which showed the President’s approval rating dropping was trumpeted to the skies by the left. The editorial pages of the nation’s newspapers were filled with questions about the President’s effectiveness, his “lame duck” status, and the imminent collapse of his Administration into political irrelevancy.

But the turnaround had already started. The President hit a home run with his choice of John Roberts for Chief Justice. The selection was supported across a broad swath of the American electorate and marked the beginning of the President’s rebound. While not immediately apparent, an uptick in Bush’s credibility numbers was followed by the vote for the Iraqi Constitution. Once again, massive numbers of Iraqis went to the polls. And despite the desperate downplaying of this seminal event in the American press, the pictures of smiling Iraqis proudly displaying their purple fingers to the world did not go entirely unnoticed by the American people. The President’s competence numbers on Iraq, which had been in the low 40’s, started to rise in mid-October and have been going up ever since.

The turnaround began in earnest on Veterans Day as Bush finally took off the gloves and started to fight back against his opponents. While being careful not to tar them with the charge of being unpatriotic, the President finally got around to accusing his political opponents of at least being disingenuous about their opposition and hinted at their playing politics while American soldiers were fighting and dying in Iraq.

It worked. And the reason it worked was because the President continued a spirited defense of his war policies over an extended period of time. Now he was dominating the debate about Iraq. It was no longer a question of whether or not the President misled the country into war, the question became what policy alternative, if any, the Democrats could offer. It’s hard to say whether the Administration trapped the Democrats into revealing their true feelings about the war, but if they didn’t then the Democrats surely stepped into it with both feet when they began to push a resolution in the House that advocated what could only be called an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. The fact that it was proposed by one of the party’s more recognizable “hawks” in Representative John Murtha and was backed by their leader Nancy Pelosi only served to highlight to the American people the total lack of credibility of the Democratic party on national security issues. And when all but a handful of Democrats helped defeat the resolution, it became clear that the Democrat’s critique of the war had little support in the hinterlands. In fact, almost 60% of the American people still support the effort to stay in Iraq until democracy and security are established in that tragic, bloody country.

With momentum going the Bush’s way, and with hardly a peep from the media, the President’s approval ratings have risen dramatically. In contrast to the massive coverage of Bush’s poll numbers when they were on the way down, the press has largely ignored this upswing in Presidential popularity in favor of highlighting the continuing split in the country over whether or not the war is “worth it.” Even here, the press has failed to note that the number of people who support the President on Iraq is once again at 50% which is just slightly below where his support was in November of 2004.

Make no mistake. There are plenty of pitfalls ahead for the President and the Republican party. A thousand things could go terribly wrong in Iraq. The corruption scandals could start to resonate with the American people to the party’s detriment (although the most recent polls show the American people believing both parties are equally corrupt). The privacy issues involving the NSA intercept program could come to the fore if it is revealed that the Administration is lying about the extent of the operation. And any number of ancillary issues could contribute to another downturn in the President’s approval ratings and with them, the fortunes of the Republican party at the polls this November.

But as it stands now, the President has made a remarkable comeback and, just as importantly, seems to have some momentum going into the new year. This can only bode well for the Bush presidency when he begins to campaign in earnest for Republican candidates later this year and as Republicans seeks to hold on to both the Congress and the Senate in what is going to be a very close election.

We’ve all seen the sneering challenge from liberal loons for someone to show them where our national security was damaged as a result of the NSA leaks. This challenge has two wonderful advantages for the moonbats:

1. In order to prove there has been damage to national security, the actual workings of the NSA program along with many technical details would have to be exposed. Since the idiots know the government will never do this because by doing so it would compound the damage, they can smugly claim that the program wasn’t necessary.

2. If the government did expose the program to answer their loony challenge, the galoots could then claim the Administration was “playing politics” with national security and skewer Bush for that.

Since we can then safely ignore the braying jackasses on the left with regards to this issue, for those of use who are more serious about the national security damage caused by the NSA leaks, here’s Orin Kerr who took information from the James Risen book and demonstrated just a couple of ways al Qaeda (and others) can now adjust their communications protocols to make it more difficult for the NSA to keep track of them:

Finally, and relatedly, the details of the program from Risen’s book arguably explains the national security interest in keeping the domestic surveillance program a secret. It’s not that terrorists may suddenly realize that they may be monitored; that argument never made much sense, as every member of Al-Qaeda must know that they may be monitored. Rather, I suspect the security issue is twofold. In the short term, terrorist groups now know that they can stand a significantly better chance of hiding their communications from the NSA by choosing communications systems that don’t happen to route through the U.S. And in the long term, some countries may react to the disclosures of the program by redesigning their telecommunications networks so less traffic goes through the United States. The more people abroad know that the NSA can easily watch their communications routed through the U.S., the less people will be willing to route their communications through the U.S. Cf. Bruce Hayden’s comment. No doubt it was a long-term priority of the NSA to ensure that lots of international communications traffic was routed through the U.S., where the NSA could have much better access to it. Indeed, Risen’s book more or less says this. The disclosure of the program presumably helps frustrate that objective.

So, thanks are due to our friends at the New York Times and the arrogant, unelected, and self-righteous leakers who made this story possible. They have the advantage over the rest of us in that when the next terrorist attacks occur, they will be comforted with the knowledge that they did their best to promote an absolutist position on the Constitutional rights of al Qaeda operatives and sympathizers here in the United States.

I wonder how eager they would be to meet with the families of people lost in any attack? And I wonder how hollow their smug, arrogant, self-righteous talk about “rights” would sound to people whose loved ones may have been saved if such an attack could have been prevented?

It may be too complex a notion for my conservative Neanderthal brain to take in but, correct me if I’m wrong.

When we’re talking about war, isn’t there usually someone who wins and someone who loses?

And if you’re an American, shouldn’t you like, you know, be rooting for our side to win? Or is that too much to ask of a Congressman?

I realize that my first question has many permutations to it. After all, from a military standpoint, there is little doubt that we “won” the Viet Nam war. Every time the North Vietnamese met our guys in stand up, open battles, they got the crap kicked out of them. But in the end, the general consensus became that we “lost” the war because of the failure of our political goals.

I guess it’s one thing to make a strategic assessment about whether or not we lost in Viet Nam. But it is quite another thing to say this:

Representative John Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat who has come to national prominence since his call for a quick withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, said Thursday night that he worries about “a slow withdrawal which makes it look like there’s a victory.”

Appearing at a town meeting in Arlington, Virginia, with fellow Democratic Rep. James Moran, Murtha said, “A year ago, I said we can’t win this militarily, and I got all kinds of criticism.” Now, Murtha told the strongly antiwar audience, “I worry about a slow withdrawal which makes it look like there’s a victory when I think it should be a redeployment as quickly as possible and let the Iraqis handle the whole thing.”

I suppose Murtha could claim that he’s talking about an al Qaeda “victory” as a result of a “slow withdrawal” but that’s not how I read it. It appears the Congressman is complaining that since his policy of “redeployment as quickly as possible” has been ignored that he’s worried that the United States will “appear” to win the war once our stated goal of establishing Iraqi self-government and an improvement in the security situation is achieved.

Since he’s so worried about even the appearance of the US winning the war, might we employ a little logic and ask the blowhard whether he would rather it appear that we are losing?

This would, in fact, reveal what Murtha was really trying to say; that no matter what, we’ve lost the war and any evidence to the contrary is simply administration spin. This would appear to be the Democrat’s war critique going into mid term elections this November. Their point being is that the war is lost, the men died in vain, Bush used the war as an excuse to gather unto himself extraordinary powers, and besides that, he says mean things about Democrats when we agree with al Qaeda.

Here’s al Qaeda’s #2 Ayman Zawahiri who also has a message for President Bush:

“Bush, you must admit that you have been defeated in Iraq and that you are being defeated in Afghanistan and that you will soon be defeated in Palestine,” Zawahiri said, according to a translation of his statement by the Washington-based SITE Institute.

Zawahiri, an Egyptian who is al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s top lieutenant, warned Americans that “as long as you do not deal with Muslim nations with understanding and respect, you will still go from one disaster to another. And your calamity will not end, unless you leave our lands and stop stealing our resources and stop supporting the bad rulers in our countries.”

So to sum up, Murtha is worried that by achieving our stated goals and pulling out it will appear to be a victory for the US while Doctor Death from al Qaeda is bragging that an American pullout will be a defeat for the United States.

I hope Representative Murtha found some comfort in the words contained in Doctor Zawahiri’s statement. Between he and al Qaeda (and the press), I have no doubt that somehow, someway, the traitorous wretches will be able to spin their way to making Iraq into a defeat for the United States.

UPDATE

Goldstein at his absolute, lucid best:

Of course, this is a rhetorical ploy—another instance of an attempt to have perception trump reality—as the Democrat leadership (led by their military hero poster child, Jack Murtha) rushed around in advance of the latest elections (and in anticipation of the likely strong voter turnout) demanding a draw down of US troops on the patently false assertion that the war in Iraq was being lost, even while they knew such a draw down was inevitable (and was tied to a position of strength, and to conditions on the ground, rather than some arbitrary time table).

This is postmodern moment—where reality is granted to those who control the dominant narrative and assert its truthfulness. That such can be done purposely and cynically—and with full knowledge that the narrative is manufactured to persuade rather than to inform—is simply part of the game.

Read the whole thing. Now.

Don’t these guys in the Administration ever learn?

You may recall that prior to the Iraq War, the Bush Administration tried to foist the idea on the American people that Saddam’s Iraq was a training ground for terrorists.

Thanks to our brilliant intelligence services and the untiring efforts of left wing liberals, this dangerous lie was exposed and found to be utterly, completely, totally, and without question a prevarication.

Now there’s word that the Bush Administration is once again trying to promote this lie. Are these guys stupid or something? I mean, in order for anyone to believe them, they would have to have a huge amount of documentary evidence with pictures and testimony from Saddam’s henchmen. The evidence would have to be incontrovertible.

Thank goodness that kind of thing could never happen, right? RIGHT?

THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials.

The secret training took place primarily at three camps–in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak–and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria’s GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Some 2,000 terrorists were trained at these Iraqi camps each year from 1999 to 2002, putting the total number at or above 8,000. Intelligence officials believe that some of these terrorists returned to Iraq and are responsible for attacks against Americans and Iraqis. According to three officials with knowledge of the intelligence on Iraqi training camps, White House and National Security Council officials were briefed on these findings in May 2005; senior Defense Department officials subsequently received the same briefing.

The photographs and documents on Iraqi training camps come from a collection of some 2 million “exploitable items” captured in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan. They include handwritten notes, typed documents, audiotapes, videotapes, compact discs, floppy discs, and computer hard drives. Taken together, this collection could give U.S. intelligence officials and policymakers an inside look at the activities of the former Iraqi regime in the months and years before the Iraq War.

That thud you just heard was the collective sound of liberals hitting their heads on the floor after fainting.

I wrote here of Mr. Hayes’ herculean efforts to examine these non-classified documents. The fact was that at the time, the Pentagon seemed singularly unconcerned about the political ramifications of some of the things that might be found. They had a assigned a pitifully small number of researches to the task and were giving journalists like Mr. Hayes the runaround when they volunteered to go through some of the documents themselves. If what Mr. Hayes says here is true, that attitude may be changing:

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has convened several meetings in recent weeks to discuss the Pentagon’s role in expediting the release of the information. According to several sources familiar with his thinking, Rumsfeld is pushing aggressively for a massive dump of the captured documents. “He has a sense that public vetting of this information is likely to be as good an astringent as any other process we could develop,” says Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita.

The main worry, says DiRita, is that the mainstream press might cherry-pick documents and mischaracterize their meaning. “There is always the concern that people would be chasing a lot of information good or bad, and when the Times or the Post splashes a headline about some sensational-sounding document that would seem to ‘prove’ that sanctions were working, or that Saddam was just a misunderstood patriot, or some other nonsense, we’d spend a lot of time chasing around after it.”

This is a view many officials attributed to Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Steve Cambone. (Cambone, through a spokesman, declined to be interviewed.) For months, Cambone has argued internally against expediting the release of the documents. “Cambone is the problem,” says one former Bush administration official who wants the documents released. “He has blocked this every step of the way.” In what is perhaps a sign of a changing dynamic within the administration, Cambone is now saying that he, like his boss, favors a broad document release.

What this cache of information about the training of 8,000 terrorists in Iraq shows is that our intelligence agencies aren’t worth spit. What can you say about a culture that would rather be wrong about the facts than change their cherished, long held and flawed analyses?

This represents an extraordinarily troubling dysfunctionality at the top levels of our intelligence apparatus. Even with the most technologically sophisticated satellites and signals intercept equipment known to man, our “analysts” at the CIA were still unable to uncover a training program from which 2,000 hardened jihadists graduated every year. Could they have been blind to this danger because of stupidity? Or was there something more at work here?

Given the war being waged by the CIA over the last 3 years against this Administration, is it too farfetched to believe that the threat Saddam posed as a terrorist trainer and enabler was deliberately downplayed in order to try and convince the Administration not to go for regime change? How could they have missed this? It will take a tall amount of convincing for me to believe that somewhere in our National Reconnaissance Office - the top secret headquarters that analyzes intel from our spy satellites - that there aren’t pictures detailing exactly what is going on at those sites mentioned in Mr. Hayes article. Are we to believe that trained professionals were unable to spot these terrorist sites?

Someone at the CIA has some explaining to do.

I guess if your name is Clinton, violating the law means never having to say you’re sorry…just make sure you’ve got a good enough lawyer:

A fund-raising committee for Senator Clinton’s 2000 campaign has agreed to pay a $35,000 civil penalty and to concede that reports it made to the federal government understated by more than $700,000 donations to a California celebrity gala held to benefit her Senate bid.

The agreement between the committee, New York Senate 2000, and the Federal Election Commission ends the campaign finance regulation agency’s inquiry into a complaint filed in 2001 by an entrepreneur who financed the fund-raising concert, Peter Paul.

“The civil payment assessed to New York Senate 2000 resolves the question of underreported in-kind contributions, and there will be no further action on this matter,” an attorney for the fundraising committee, Marc Elias, said.

If you’re interested, the Hollywood gala took in $721,000 and Hillary’s campaign reported that she realized $57,000. That’s not so bad. Just hope that when she’s President, she doesn’t name her Finance Chairman David Rosen Director of the Office of Management and Budget.

That won’t be likely since Mr. Rosen is under indictment for misleading the FEC on what was taken in on that star studded night. Another organizer of that same fundraiser, Aaron Tonkin, has already pled guilty to fraud in connection to other charity events unrelated to the Clinton fundraiser.

That’s some crew. Given the number of crooks, scofflaws, leches, loons, and galoots who were in her husband’s Administration, I suppose we shouldn’t be so surprised.

What’s surprising is that Hillary herself has escaped with nary a scrape on her sparkling reputation. This is strange, since Hillary apparently knew all about the effort to flim-flam the FEC:

New York Sen. Hillary Clinton personally negotiated some of the fees for a star-studded Aug. 12, 2000 Hollywood fundraiser, the event’s producer, Peter Paul, said in an interview aired on Sunday - as the event comes under increasing scrutiny by a Los Angeles grand jury and the Justice Department.

And in another sign of potential legal trouble for the top Democrat, a spokesman for the law firm championing Paul’s case said his client informed Mrs. Clinton that her finance director, David Rosen, had failed to accurately report costs for the event to the Federal Election Commission.

“Hillary Clinton personally called the producer of the concert part of this event,” Mr. Paul told Fox News Channel’s Eric Shawn. “She asked him to lower the fee that he was charging of $850,000 at my request. So I don’t understand how she could possibly say that she didn’t know.”

Poor Mr. Paul. He evidently isn’t familiar with the Clinton SOP: Deny, deny, deny. And if that doesn’t work, blame the Republicans.

Ed Morrissey believes that there are lessons to be learned from Hillary’s great escape:

In the end, this probably doesn’t hurt anyone too much, but it should remind voters of two important issues. One: the Clinton’s always seem to trod through the outer fringes of election law when it comes to raising money. Two: These Byzantine rules for designating cash in elections only delight attorneys and accountants, and in that order.

Yep. Which means that the next round of campaign finance “reform” that will most surely be pushed as a result of the Abramoff fiasco will have the shysters and pencil necks licking their chops in anticipation.

UPDATE

Michelle Malkin links to Peter Paul’s blog for a more lengthy rundown on Hillary’s complicity in hoodwinking the FEC.

Alright, I give in. The left has won.

Let’s impeach Bush for…well, whatever the left can dream up. Since they really don’t have anything specific to hang their hats on, let’s just say that Bush should be impeached for letting his nose hair grow too long or maybe for trimming his toenails in public. The reason doesn’t matter. It never did. With the left, it’s always been about grasping for the reins of power without much thought to who or what gets hurt - and that includes tens of thousands of citizens who could be killed in the next terrorist attack.

Every single effort of theirs over the last 5 years to find something specific to impeach the President with has been rudely shot down by one investigation or another. Bush didn’t lie to get us into war. He didn’t “twist” the intelligence to sell the war to the American people. He didn’t play a game of slap and tickle with Jeff Gannon/Guckert and give away national security secrets when engaged in sexual acts with the faux journalist. He didn’t “out” a covert agent of the CIA according to Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald. Two Commissions have found he didn’t order American soldiers to torture prisoners (although not resolving their legal status is a disgrace). And the jury is still out - way, way out - on whether or not laws were broken in the execution of the NSA intercept program.

There have been other “scandals” during the last few years that the left eagerly embraced as THE scandal that will bring impeachment proceedings against the President. Each and every one of them as well as the citations above have resulted not in impeachment, but in people pointing at the left and laughing at them. Their rhetoric - so over the top, so out of touch with reality - have made them the laughingstock of the rest of America who they so arrogantly and despicably look down their noses at.

But let’s go ahead and grant them their wish. Let’s impeach the President. In fact, let’s fulfill their stated wish and put back up every wall between intelligence agencies that existed before 9/11. Let’s call off the FBI and prevent them from looking sideways at Muslims. Let’s stop profiling people based on the fact that 99% of terrorist attacks are carried out by one group and one group only. Instead, let’s start profiling 78 year old white women who wear pink polka dot dresses and cotton bloomers. Let us make absolutely sure that if al Qaeda wants to talk to someone in this country, that we scrupulously follow every law, every precedent before we intercept that communication. And let’s do as the left has been doing since 9/11 and stick our heads up our a**es as far as they can go.

In return however, the liberals must sign the following “Hold Harmless” agreement so that future occupants of the White House (no doubt all Republican unless the American people can stop laughing long enough at liberals to vote for them) will not have to put up with their unserious nonsense.
************************************************************************************

1. I, __________________________, the undersigned have read and understand, and freely and voluntarily enter into this Release and Hold Harmless Agreement with THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES understanding that this Release and Hold Harmless Agreement is a waiver of any and all liability(ies).

2. I understand the potential dangers inherent in being at war with a group of merciless, bloodthirsty thugs who will stop at nothing to kill as many Americans as possible. Understanding those risks I hereby release the entire Executive Branch of government and anyone else directly or indirectly connected with the federal government from any liability whatsoever in the event of injury or damage of any nature (or perhaps even death) to me or anyone else caused by or incidental to my electing to stick my head in the sand about said terrorist threat.

3. I understand and recognize and warrant that this Release and Hold Harmless Agreement, is being voluntarily and intentionally signed and agreed to, and that in signing this Release and Hold Harmless Agreement I know and understand that this Release and Hold Harmless Agreement may further limit the liability of The Executive Branch to include any activity, whatsoever, involving a terrorist attack including death, personal injury and/or damage to property.

4. I further understand and recognize and warrant that this Release and Hold Harmless Agreement precludes any nonsensical criticisms of the Executive Branch if, in fact, a terrorist attack occurs on American soil. I will fully and completely recognize that it is my own damn fault for being such an idiot as to refuse to believe that some minor compromises of our liberty must be made in order to increase the odds that terrorists will be prevented from killing me. I further recognize and hold harmless the Executive Branch by not acting like a spoiled brat and screaming “Neener, Neener, Neener…” if, in fact, we are attacked.

5. I further voluntarily agree and warrant to Release and Hold Harmless the Executive Branch from any liability whatsoever, including, but not limited to, any incident caused by or related to said terrorist’s negligence, relating to injuries known, unknown, or otherwise not herein disclosed; including, but not limited to injuries, death, and property damage as a result of my myopic and childish worldview.

In the event of any terrorist attack, I promise to keep my big yap shut.

Date: ________________________________

Person voluntarily entering into this Release and Hold
Harmless Agreement: ______________________________

______________________________
Printed Name

The holidays are a horrible time for bloggers. Capitol Hill is deserted as Congress goes into Christmas hibernation, our wallets blessedly safe for a few weeks. Moonbats and idiotarians alike are busy mending political fences back home while trying to squeeze that extra few hundred thousands bucks out of the special interests that will insure their political survival next November . The nation itself settles down for something of a long winter’s nap, looking forward to a week filled with family, parties, college football, and the inevitable overdose of nachos.

Even the MSM seems to be on its best behavior although this gaffe by the LA Times will be eagerly snarfed up by ravenous blog beasts across the political spectrum for its sheer goofiness. For some reason though, my blog was hungry for something else today and the story of a major metropolitan newspaper using in a front page story a quote from a press release put out as an April Fool’s joke just wasn’t going to sate the appetite my own personal demon of a website. After all, it can get pretty tiresome poking fun at an enterprise as clueless as the LA Times. I mean, how many times can you tell the same joke before it goes irretrievably stale?

So it’s after 6:00 AM and I haven’t started to write anything when to what my wondering eyes should appear but this gem from MSNBC’s Craig Crawford:

I have been watching dozens of back episodes of Fox Broadcasting’s “24″ over the holidays, and so far I haven’t seen rogue U.S. anti-terrorism agent Jack Bauer stop once for a court warrant — not even when he sawed off the head of an informant he was interrogating. Come to think of it, I haven’t heard the Constitution mentioned a single time as Bauer, played by Kiefer Sutherland, repeatedly breaks the rules to thwart terrorist plots.

This is how the President wants us to see the real world. Indeed, George Bush is the Jack Bauer of presidential power. There are no rules in Bush’s world when it comes to the War on Terror — only wimps like the whining bureaucrats on “24″ balk at torture, spying, propaganda, whatever it takes.

I guess I am one of those constitutional wimps. Even the reality cop shows get me riled, as we watch the police routinely trample the individual rights of hapless suspects. Maybe we do live in a Jack Bauer world where constitutional liberties take a back seat to stopping killers. But I’d rather live in Patrick Henry’s world: Give me liberty or give me death.

(HT: Anklebiting Pundits).

I want to publicly thank Mr. Crawford for rescuing me from blog ennui. This kind of fresh, jaw-dropping idiocy is what makes writing for this site so much fun. And the fact that he used my favorite thug Jack Bauer as a sophomoric metaphor to describe the Bush presidency is so perfect, so right, that if Craig was here now I’d give him a great big wet kiss full on the mouth.

Well…maybe I’m not that grateful.

Taking the last part to begin, the first thing one notices about this piece is that Crawford is laughably ignorant of history. To reference “constitutional rights” and “Patrick Henry” in the same breath is, to put it mildly, loony. Henry, like most of the more radical patriots who were in the forefront of the movement for independence, became unreconstructed opponents of the Constitution during the ratification debate. They saw it as something of a counter-revolution, an overreaction to the weaknesses inherent in the Articles of Confederation. Not only that, the establishment of a strong chief executive as well as mandating a Supreme Court who could overrule Congress was an anathema to patriots like Henry.

This Constitution is said to have beautiful features; but when I come to examine these features, sir, they appear to me horribly frightful. Among other deformities, it has an awful squinting; it squints toward monarchy, and does not this raise indignation in the breast of every true American? Your president may easily become king. Your Senate is so imperfectly constructed that your dearest rights may be sacrificed to what may be a small minority; and a very small minority may continue for ever unchangeably this government, altho horridly defective.

The irony of Crawford’s intellectual conceits regarding “liberty” is unfortunately lost on someone whose knowledge of history apparently comes from watching episodes of Rocky and Bullwinkle where Mr. Peabody and Sherman go back in time in their Wayback Machine to learn about the past.

But the meat of Mr. Crawford’s “critique” of the Bush presidency is his comparison of the world as seen by the President with the world in which Jack Bauer of “24” fame lives.

Would that it were true. In fact, we should be extremely fortunate if Jack Bauer was a real person working for a real agency like CTU (Counter terrorism Unit). But what is really interesting would be to ask Mr. Crawford if, during any of the scenarios in the history of the TV series that would, God forbid, come to life - nukes, assassination, power plant meltdowns, and bio-terror - he thinks the rest of us would prefer not to fully, completely, and to the letter respect the Constitutional rights of foreign terrorists and their American collaborators and sympathizers or die a horrible death and have the country destroyed.

This would be a no brainer - except for Mr. Crawford who evidently was stuck in the washroom when God was handing out that vital organ. Any of the terrorist scenarios that have played out on 24 would in real life necessitated the very actions that Jack Bauer and other law enforcement representatives took to prevent them. For, in real life, if the terrorists had been successful, the subsequent investigation that revealed a government and a President that followed Constitutional niceties while tens of thousands of Americans died, would have resulted in the immediate and justifiable impeachment of the President. And I daresay that the relatives and loved ones of the dead would not be quoting Patrick Henry in praise of the President’s Constitutional forbearance.

The reason liberals like Crawford are likely to get a great many of us killed if they are able to hoodwink the American people into giving them power again is their willingness to allow the terrorists to win rather than do what is necessary to protect us. This is perfectly summed up in Mr. Crawford’s little blurb. By quoting Patrick Henry, he is embracing the idea that he would rather die than bend the Constitution to the exigencies of the times. That way lies madness - and death.

Using the example of poor Abraham Lincoln in this debate is getting tiresome but one wonders if Lincoln had not placed government’s extraordinarily heavy hand on the rebellious border states of Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri as well as other restless parts of the country whether he would have been victorious or not. Mr. Crawford is fortunate indeed not to have lived during those times. His writings may have landed him in jail.

As for Jack Bauer, Crawford misses the point. Jack is enormously conflicted by what he has to do to save the country. His methods have cost him the life of his wife. They have ruined his personal relationships as women recoil in horror after watching Jack in action. He has gone so far in so many critical situations that it seems as if at times he seeks the release that only death can bring.

In this letter I had published in The American Spectator, I pointed out the similarities between Jack and two other mythic American heroes; Daniel Boone and Davey Crockett. Both Boone and Crockett were single minded in their determination to succeed and would do whatever it took to come out on top. But Jack has another dimension to his personality:

The myth of the hunter/hero gave way to the lone hero motif popularized by Hollywood. This hero, usually played by a small town sheriff (Gary Cooper in High Noon) or the gunfighter with a heart of gold (Alan Ladd in Shane), used violence to defeat greater violence. This concept was turned on its head in the 1960s and 1970s as the great ” anti-heroes” of Clint Eastwood blurred the distinction between good and evil. Dirty Harry got the job done (as did the Man with No-Name) but at what cost?

Enter Jack Bauer who’s not quite the Clint anti-hero but not the pure, small town Gary Cooperish protagonist either. He is, in fact, the perfect hero in a post-9/11 world. Torn as America is between getting the job done at all costs while upholding American ideals, Jack simply can’t help himself. He necessarily sees the world in stark relief, a black and white universe populated by some really nasty thugs who don’t even blink at the idea of murdering hundreds of thousands of people. We recoil at some of Jack’s tactics. But we recognize that Jack is the guy doing what needs to be done to keep us safe.

In one respect, Crawford is correct in his comparison of Jack with Bush; they are able to clearly distinguish between good and evil, between who is right in this war and who is wrong. Crawford and his ilk can’t. This makes Crawford not only someone to be laughed at but someone to be feared as well. For if we ever have a government headed by a President who sees gray where there is clearly black and white, the chances of enjoying both liberty and security in the United States will disappear as surely as Jack Bauer will end up stretching the Constitution to its breaking point this season in order to protect us from disaster.

Sheesh…I hate shopping for Christmas gifts.

Actually, I hate shopping period. But for some reason, Christmas shopping seems to bring out the worst in me. For instance, there is nothing more depressing than having some bored, gum chewing, green haired teenager mouthing “Merry Christmas” while doing their best to make you feel like they are doing you a huge favor by placing your purchase in a bag. Have I missed something or has the value of shopping bags been linked to the price of gold recently? It’s all Sue can do to keep me from screaming some kind of very un-Christmasy retort when the clueless kid fails to bag up the $150 in clothes we just bought and then gives us one of those insolent “What else do you want” stares.

I don’t really dislike teenagers. It’s just that I believe that some of them should be put in hibernation at about age 11 and woken up when they’re about 30.

Ditto for some liberals. Since many of them act as if they are 11 years old anyway, I suggest a national program to place them in stasis until they grow out of their callow and immature beliefs. Of course, that won’t work because, like Peter Pan, they absolutely refuse to grow up which would make any government mandated stasis program problematic.

That said, I couldn’t let the spirit of the season pass by without giving gifts to the loons, goons, poltroons, and galoots that make writing this blog so much fun. I often ask myself where would I be today if we didn’t have Cindy Sheehan to kick around? Or Paul Krugman to fisk? Or the maintsream press to laugh at?

Nowhere, my friends, that’s where I’d be. These pages instead would be full of recipes, and cat pictures, and baseball news not to mention pedantic observations on such arcane subjects as “Game Strategies for Stratego Lovers” and “Winning At Monopoly.”

So, in gratitude, here is my Christmas gift list for 2005. (Note: It would be much too easy for me to play “Wizard of Oz” and give any of these characters a brain, a heart, or some courage even though most of them could use all three).

* Nancy Pelosi - A unified Democratic Party position on Iraq. Or at least one that doesn’t include the words “timetable” or “redeployment.”

* Harry Reid - New shoes. He’s put his foot in his mouth so many times this past year his old ones are all chewed up.

* Ted Kennedy - Coherence.

* John Kerry - A dead cat to stand next to during his speeches. It’s the only way he can come off more interesting by comparison.

* Hillary Clinton - Mass amnesia by the American people so that everyone can forget what she’s really like.

* Bill Clinton - A sense of honor, decency, morality, and fidelity. Or Playboy’s “Cyber Girl of the Year.” Which do you think he’d rather get? (Link NSFW)

* John Conyers - A brand new, state of the art, spit shined tin foil hat.

* George Galloway - A damn fine lawyer. Or a “Get out of jail Free!” card.

* Mary Mapes A reacquainting with reality.

* Dan Rather - Humility, perspicacity, and a sense of humor. Failing that, Katy Couric’s smile.

* Maureen Dowd - Guilt free sex…with a man.

* Arlen Specter - A dictionary so that you can look up the word “loyalty.”

* Pat Robertson - A face to face meeting with God here on earth. You have a lot of explaining to do.

* Kansas Board of Education - A calendar so that they can confirm that we have in fact entered the 21st century.

* Democratic Underground - One ton of bituminous coal, enough for everyone. And make it the kind that burns real, real dirty.

UPDATE

Michelle Malkin has a few other lists up, most of them done in a more serious vein than this one. I would exclude the AP list of Top Ten News Stories for 2005 if only because anything done by the Associated Press is not to be taken seriously.

This is shaping up to be quite a Christmas for our thuggish friends in al Qaeda. Thanks to an anonymous donor who told tales out of school to the New York Times while kissing the old whore under the mistletoe, visions of sugar plums (not to mention the bloody, mangled bodies of thousands of infidel dogs) are dancing in their heads. For unless something is done to stop it, every loving detail of how the United States government has been listening in to their conversations with their cells and supporters here in America are about to be plastered all over every front page and top every satellite newscast on the planet.

Don’t believe me? The ACLU has already bought the wrapping paper and is about to send a Christmas card with some FOIA requests:

The requests submitted today seek all records about “the policies, procedures and/or practices of the National Security Agency for gathering information through warrantless electronic surveillance and/or warrantless physical searches in the United States …”…. Information received by the organization will be made public on its Web site.

Words fail me at this point. The generosity of the ACLU to the deadly enemies of the United States is beyond belief. The only possible explanation for wanting to expose “all records about the policies, procedures and/or practices of the National Security Agency” with regards to the NSA intercept program is that the ACLU wishes to make it harder for the government to thwart a terrorist attack.

The reason I say this is because this FOIA request is not necessary if one wishes to take an absolutist position in defense of our Fourth Amendment rights. It’s only purpose would be to sabotage the program. For once al Qaeda knows the details of how we keep track of them, it becomes much easier to develop communications strategies to thwart our attempts to monitor their activities.

If the ACLU is against warrantless searches, it is their duty to protest it in a responsible manner, one that would not harm national security so grievously. And please note there is nothing in the FOIA request that would seek to uncover who the government listened in on with the program. Doesn’t that strike you as a bit odd? Rather than ask for the names of specific Americans who have been targeted, they instead seek to shut the program down by revealing its operational secrets.

The more I read about the technical aspects of the program - both hints revealed by participants and intelligent speculation by SIGINT veterans - it is becoming apparent that there is much more to this intercept program than meets the eye. Here’s some general information about the procedures NSA employees went through before they could carry out a “warrantless search:”

At a news conference at the White House on Monday, General Hayden also emphasized that the program’s operations had “intense oversight” by the agency’s general counsel and inspector general as well as the Justice Department. He said decisions on targets were made by agency employees and required two people, including a shift supervisor, to sign off on them, recording “what created the operational imperative.”

An intelligence official who was authorized to speak only on the condition of anonymity said, “It’s probably the most scrutinized program at the agency.” The official emphasized that people whose communications were intercepted under the special program had to have a link to Al Qaeda or a related group, even if indirectly. The official also said that only their international communications could be intercepted. Other officials have said, however, that some purely domestic communications have been captured because of the technical difficulties of determining where a phone call or e-mail message originated.

While the left continues to go bonkers over this and compare the NSA program with what Nixon did a couple of salient facts should be pointed out:

* There is not one scintilla of evidence that any political opponents, anti-war groups, media people, or John Conyers Aunt Sue was caught up in this digital dragnet.

* There is not a shred of proof that the NSA deliberately targeted domestic-only calls.

* There is no evidence that Bush was trying to set up a dictatorship (I know…I know. But I had to put that in there because so many loons on the left actually believe that is what the program is about)

* It is more than probable and in fact likely that one or more terrorist attacks on American soil was thwarted as a result of this program. I have as much proof for saying that as critics have that this is the most egregious case of domestic spying in history. Which is to say, I have zero proof but at the same time have a better chance of being right than the lickspittles who are blowing smoke out of their ass about the criminality of the program.

In the meantime, al Qaeda sits, waits, and watches knowing that they’ve been good little terrorists and that Santa won’t forget them as long as they have the ACLU doing their dirty work for them.

Merry Christmas to all - and to all the self-important, arrogant sons of bitches at the ACLU - a goodnight.

UPDATE

Blogbud Jay at Stop the ACLU has THE question of the day - one that reveals the total hypocrisy of a once admired civil rights organization whose leadership has led it down a partisan political path that is destroying it:

Isn’t it ironic that the ACLU wants our government’s secrets released so the enemy can see, yet they tell our enemies they have the right to keep their secrets from our interrigations?

And the hell of it is, the idiots will never be able to enjoy the irony that question implies. They are that clueless.

Comrades, do you know who is responsible for this? Do you know the enemy who has come in the night and overthrown our windmill? SNOWBALL! (The pig Napoleon in Orwell’s Animal Farm)

Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter is a pig. But not just any pig. Alter is the perfect representation of Napoleon, George Orwell’s Stalinesque pig character in Animal Farm whose rhetorical obfuscation and hyperbole helps him manipulate the other animals on the farm:

As Napoleon was deceiving the neighboring farmers he was also tricking his own animals. The scapegoat was again Snowball. “Whenever anything went wrong it became usual to attribute it to Snowball.” In fact many of the claims begin to sound ridiculous to the objective mind. Of course, Squealer’s mission is to keep everything subjective in the minds of the animals.

“If a window was broken or a drain was blocked up, someone was certain to say that Snowball had come in the night and done it, and when the key of the store-shed was lost, the whole farm was convinced that Snowball had thrown it down the well. Curiously enough, they went on believing this even after the mislaid key was found under a sack of meal.”

Here’s Alter in Newsweek on the actions of the President of the United States following 9/11:

Finally we have a Washington scandal that goes beyond sex, corruption and political intrigue to big issues like security versus liberty and the reasonable bounds of presidential power. President Bush came out swinging on Snoopgate—he made it seem as if those who didn’t agree with him wanted to leave us vulnerable to Al Qaeda—but it will not work. We’re seeing clearly now that Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator, or in his own mind, no doubt, like Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.

In one paragraph, Alter manages to accuse the President of “clearly” acting like a dictator and ascribing delusions of grandeur to the President for thinking himself “like Abraham Lincoln.”

Of course, there is absolutely nothing “clear” about this wiretapping story except in the fevered imagination of Alter and the left. And what evidence does Mr. Alter have that Mr. Bush thought of himself as Lincoln?

Zero. Zip. Nada. It is an hysterical fantasy. And like poor Snowball, Alter has targeted the President and accused him of doing everything except perhaps losing the keys to the storage shed:

No, Bush was desperate to keep the Times from running this important story—which the paper had already inexplicably held for a year—because he knew that it would reveal him as a law-breaker. He insists he had “legal authority derived from the Constitution and congressional resolution authorizing force.” But the Constitution explicitly requires the president to obey the law. And the post 9/11 congressional resolution authorizing “all necessary force” in fighting terrorism was made in clear reference to military intervention. It did not scrap the Constitution and allow the president to do whatever he pleased in any area in the name of fighting terrorism.

The President as “lawbreaker?” I’m sorry, but the absolute worst that can be said of the President’s actions in this case is that his legal standing on the issue of intercepting communications is open to debate. Alter implies that there is no argument. It is apparent he doesn’t read much because the debate currently raging on both the right and the left among some of the best legal minds in the country is far from having a “clear” resolution. The idea that the President authorized willy nilly the blanket use of the technical abilities of the NSA to spy on American citizens is an outrageous lie and Alter knows it. And as for the President’s legal standing regarding the Congressional resolution authorizing “all necessary force” in fighting terrorism where in God’s name has the President “scrapped the Constitution” in carrying out this limited intelligence program. It is rhetorical excess. It is hyperbole of the worst sort. It simply is not true.

Bush claimed that “the fact that we are discussing this program is helping the enemy.” But there is simply no evidence, or even reasonable presumption, that this is so. And rather than the leaking being a “shameful act,” it was the work of a patriot inside the government who was trying to stop a presidential power grab.

Of course there is a “reasonable presumption” that by discussing any NSA operation we are helping the enemy. What kind of a nitwit is Alter anyway? Why does he think that the NSA has such extraordinarily strict rules against leaking? Letting the enemy know how we are keeping track of him is not “a reasonable presumption” that plastering this program all over the front pages of an international newspaper isn’t damaging national security?

And I somehow have the feeling that the leaker of this program will not be looked on by anyone except Mr. Alter and his defeatist friends on the left as a patriot. He will certainly not be looked at as a patriot by the law which will send them away for a very long time to contemplate the damage done to our ability to spy on terrorists.

This will all play out eventually in congressional committees and in the United States Supreme Court. If the Democrats regain control of Congress, there may even be articles of impeachment introduced. Similar abuse of power was part of the impeachment charge brought against Richard Nixon in 1974.

Yep. Snowball did it. And while we’re at it, let’s raise poor Dick Nixon from the grave and trot out his rotting corpse one more time before everyone forgets what Nixon’s crimes really were all about. One reason historians 100 years from now will cut Mr. Nixon a little more slack than his contemporaries is that liberals always forget to mention that at the time of the domestic wiretapping scandals, there were literally tens of thousands of Americans in the streets waving the flag of an enemy that was shooting down American soldiers in Southeast Asia and calling for the violent overthrow of the United States government. What’s more, as we know now, the government was aware that much of this activity was funded and directed by a foreign power sworn to destroy us - the Soviet Union.

Nixon was in fact fighting a domestic insurrection which would seem to give the lie to Alter’s contention that there was anything at all “similar” between what Bush was doing and Nixon’s questionable use of wiretapping against both his political enemies and the internal enemies of the United States. The fact that Alter sees a similarity brands him as a certifiable loon.

Of course, the program launched by this Administration did not specifically target Americans unless they were working with a group that had just launched the deadliest attack on American soil in a couple of generations. But Alter and his hysterical comrades on the left just don’t think that this was any reason to get all bent out of shape and take extraordinary measures to protect ourselves. After all, what’s the big deal about a few thousand Americans being incinerated as a result of a terrorist operation planned overseas but carried out using established cells here in the United States?

Does Alter expect the NSA to intercept only one side of the conversation? That’s a ludicrous notion, of course, but since Alter is having a cow over any use of our technical abilities to stop the next terrorist attack if those capabilities would be used in any way to target Americans on American soil one must come to that inescapable conclusion.

Newsweek may be the first major news organ to give life to the accusation that the President of the United States has been acting like a dictator, a charge that previously saw the light only in the darkened corners of the left side of the blogosphere. It puts Mr. Alter and Newsweek in the same boat as people who have accused the government of carrying out 9/11 in order to establish a fascist state. I can’t believe that Alter is not aware of this. His deliberate use of the “D” word is the opening salvo by the left in the 2006 election battle. They are setting the stage for a possible Democratic takeover of one and possibly both Houses of Congress and have put both the President and his supporters on notice that they intend to impeach George Bush if given half a chance.

I hope the President has noticed this. The next 11 months he will be fighting for his political life and, in no small way, the life of this Republic. To allow this bunch of power mad hysterics to have their hands on the levers of government would be a disaster of the first magnitude.

UPDATE

Welcome Hugh Hewitt readers!

While you’re here, why not take a look at the newest edition of Carnival of the Clueless for some hilarious takes on the people who make blogging so much fun - the truly and completely clueless of both the right and the left.

Also, check out John McIntyre’s classic takedown of Alter’s lunacy. John has similar thoughts about the difference between Nixon’s criminal activity and Bush’s legitimate security concerns. (HT: Michelle Malkin)

UPDATE 12/21

First, I am more than a little amused that 3 different lefty bloggers saw the above headline and assumed I was calling Mr. Alter a pig. I was doing no such thing of course, except in a literary sense.

Secondly, Alter appeared on the Hugh Hewitt Show yesterday. The transcript is here. Mr. Alter is just a little out of his league in arguing the finer points of Constitutional law with Professor Hewitt. Also, read Mr. Hewitt’s further thoughts on the controversy here.