The president doesn’t have time to help the Germans celebrate the anniversary of their freedom, but he wants to go to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I predict that on the sevensixty-fifth anniversary, next August, he will go there and apologize for the barbarism of the US in dropping the bombs.
He probably would have liked to apologize to the east Germans for losing their worker’s paradise, too, except he wouldn’t want to give the credit to Reagan.
…of communism:
[Update a few minutes later]
Thoughts on the Berlin Wall, from John O’Sullivan.
(Yes, I know I’m a day late with this stuff, but hopefully not a dollar short. But then, a dollar’s not what it used to be.)
…and journalism.
This is your country: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
This is your country on fascism:
The Chicago Tribune weighed in with an editorial late last month accusing the prosecutors of “wielding this subpoena to send an unsubtle message to these students and other journalists: Back off. Don’t make waves. You’re embarrassing us.” And in an article in Salon.com last week, American University law Prof. Darren Hutchinson called their behavior “shameful,” exemplifying “a deep contempt for the law, which makes the students’ efforts to uncover wrongful convictions even more compelling.”
The Cook County prosecutors’ actions are certainly shameful. But they may be excused for thinking that attacks on media critics are, in today’s political era, business as usual. Indeed, they need look no farther than the White House, whose occupant has sometimes styled himself the nation’s chief media critic.
It is, after all, the Obama administration that declared that its critics at Fox News Channel are not real journalists, and that Fox is not a “legitimate news organization.” In doing so—as White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs admitted with a reference to “brushback pitches” in baseball—the White House’s goal was just the same as that of the prosecutors in the president’s native city: To chill criticism, and to get journalists to think twice before stepping up to the plate.
Bert Gall and Robert Frommer of the Institute for Justice have made a compelling case that the Obama administration’s word choice is quite significant. They think that by branding Fox as something other than a “legitimate news organization,” the White House is actually setting up a more brutal attack using campaign finance laws. News media organizations are exempt from campaign-finance laws’ speech regulations. But if Fox is not a “legitimate news organization,” then federal election authorities might be able to argue that its political speech can be regulated like that of any other non-news corporation.
I hope that SCOTUS finally defangs McCain-Feingold this session.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s more on the Northwestern case.
[Update a few minutes after the previous one]
Here’s another story along the same lines:
In a case that raises questions about online journalism and privacy rights, the U.S. Department of Justice sent a formal request to an independent news site ordering it to provide details of all reader visits on a certain day.
The grand jury subpoena also required the Philadelphia-based Indymedia.us Web site “not to disclose the existence of this request” unless authorized by the Justice Department, a gag order that presents an unusual quandary for any news organization.
<TONE=”sarcasm”>Why should they object? What do they hav to hide?</TONE>
…for cop-killer weapons. They may have saved lives in Fort Hood.
Continued apologists for the communist monsters, particularly on the left and in academia. Imagine the uproar if Anita Dunn had said “…Hitler, one of my favorite personal philosophers.” And yet Mao murdered many more people, an order of magnitude more, than Hitler ever dreamed of killing.
And unfortunately, the old demon isn’t dead. It continues to insinuate itself into our political discourse, but in more subtle ways, via watermelon environmentalism, and demands that health care is a “right,” and that profits and those who earn them are evil.
Leonard David has the story of the budding lunar environmental movement.
Is this stupid? Why, yes, as a matter of fact. Yes, it is.
More thoughts on the nuttiness of not allowing weapons on base:
“It’s a tragedy to lose soldiers overseas and even more horrifying when they come under fire at an Army base on U.S. soil,” said President Obama.
Indeed. How ironic: Survive Iraq or Afghanistan then get picked off like a game bird in a bland, institutional “Soldier Readiness Center” in Texas.
Soldiers in other countries are allowed to carry arms on base and even when they are off-duty. In Israel, for instance, soldiers are issued a rifle and then . . . it’s theirs. One sees slender 18-year-old girls, traveling from base, home to the suburbs for Shabbat dinner, still slung with a massive M-16 rifle almost as big as they are. The prevelance of arms doesn’t mean the country experiences the kind of random mass murders seen in the United States. It means that the few times someone has gone crazy with a gun in a city street, he was taken down fast by bystanders.
But not American soldiers. When asked if ordinary soldiers nearby had been carrying their service weapons, Fort Hood spokesman Lt. Gen Robert Cone said piously, “We do not carry weapons. This is our home.” Defense is out-sourced to military police, or even — oh the indignity! — to civilian policemen.
More dips for the tar and feathers.
Gee, why aren’t there ever mass shootings at gun shows?
Read the whole thing. There’s also an appalling story about the USS Cole bombing that I hadn’t heard before.
Andy McCarthy expands on some Fort Hood thoughts that I had in comments yesterday:
The depth of the challenge we face is daunting. Hatred for America and the West is rampant in the Islamic world. We are not merely willfully blind to it. Our government, wittingly or not, is endorsing it, and not just by Obama’s apology tours. At his ballyhooed Cairo speech on Islam and the West, the president insisted — over the objections of the Mubarak government — on inviting members of the Muslim Brotherhood, whom administration insiders view as Islamists we can work with. This is the same Muslim Brotherhood whose motto remains “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Koran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” It is the same Muslim Brotherhood that encourages suicide bombings and other terrorizing of Israelis (i.e., “resistance”) in the Palestinian territories. It is the same Muslim Brotherhood for which Qaradawi — who has promised that Islam will “conquer America” — speaks.
Islamism is about a lot more than al Qaeda. Nidal Malik Hasan committed a mass-murder under the influence of principles held by a disturbingly large percentage of the world’s billion-plus Muslims. Rather than condemning those principles as barbaric, it is the policy of our government either (a) to pretend that those principles do not exist, (b) to pretend that they are held only by a teeny-tiny handful of extremists who have “hijacked” Islam, or (c) to encourage the Muslims who hold them by engaging, embracing and legitimizing the leaders who preach them. Under these circumstances, I think Victor’s three-to-six-month timeline is not only sensible; it’s the best we can hope for — and the atrocities are going to get worse.
You can’t win a war when a) the country’s leadership refuses to recognize that we are in one and b) the country’s leadership doesn’t even believe in the concept of victory. At least when it comes to non-domestic enemies.
Dr. K. says that Obamaism is over:
White House apologists will say the Virginia Democrat was weak. If the difference between Bob McDonnell and Creigh Deeds was so great, how come when the same two men ran against each other statewide for attorney general four years ago the race was a virtual dead heat? Which made the ’09 McDonnell-Deeds rematch the closest you get in politics to a laboratory experiment for measuring the change in external conditions. Run them against each other again when it’s Obamaism in action and see what happens. What happened was a Republican landslide.
The Obama coattails of 2008 are gone. The expansion of the electorate, the excitement of the young, came in uniquely propitious Democratic circumstances and amid unparalleled enthusiasm for electing the first African-American president.
November ’08 was one-shot, one-time, never to be replicated. Nor was November ’09 a realignment. It was a return to the norm — and definitive confirmation that 2008 was one of the great flukes in American political history.
One of the reasons that I called it wrong last year was that it was such a perfect storm of unforeseeable events. In 2012 (or even next year), the president won’t be able to repeat his Rorschach act, and be all things to all people. He’s now a much better-known quantity and a lot of people aren’t liking what they’ve learned, and what the press did such a good job of hiding from them last year. Plus, the voters have assuaged their racial guilt by voting for him once, and will now feel no need to continue the punishment by doing so again.
[Update a few minutes later]
Barack Obama’s mandate gap.
…from Pulitzer-winning Maureen Dowd. Are any of these supposedly prestigious awards worth anything, any more?