Oh, no. It’s come to this.
Is it time to comment on the O’Keefe arrest?
James O’Keefe, the man who was instrumental in making the ACORN-sting videos featured prominently by Breitbart, has been arrested along with three other men:
A witness told authorities O’Keefe was sitting in the waiting area of [US Senator Mary] Landrieu’s office and appeared to record [alleged accomplices] Basel and Flanagan on his cell phone when they arrived posing as phone workers. Landrieu, who was in Washington at the time, said in a statement that the plot was “unsettling” for her and her staff.
A federal law enforcement official said one of the suspects was picked up in a car a couple of blocks away with a listening device that could pick up transmissions. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the information was not part of the FBI affidavit. Another official said Dai was the suspect arrested outside.
All four were charged with entering federal property under false pretenses for the purpose of committing a felony, which carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
“It was poor judgment,” Flanagan’s lawyer, Garrison Jordan, said. “I don’t think there was any intent or motive to commit a crime.”
My response is: since we don’t know what really happened, it’s hard to say what really happened. But here’s my startlingly bold official statement anyway: if they did something illegal, they should be prosecuted and denounced for this act. If they didn’t, they should be acquitted and the matter put to rest.
Of course, there’s political hay to be made in the meantime:
Democratic National Committee spokesman Hari Sevugan said Republicans once praised O’Keefe as an American hero, “yet today, in light of these deplorable and illegal attacks on the office of a United States senator by their champion, Republicans have not offered a single iota of disgust, a whisper of indignation or even a hint of outrage.”
Disgust and outrage don’t seem all that appropriate; I seem to have noticed people saying to wait for the facts, which does. Rushing to judgment, as Hari Sevugan does in the above quote (“these deplorable and illegal attacks”) isn’t exactly the American way, is it? But I think I can safely predict that, if it is proven that James O’Keefe was bugging the offices of a US Senator, Republicans and other previous supporters will be quick to condemn his actions as both illegal and stupid, and disassociate themselves from him.
As for what we know of the facts so far, Patterico (who is a lawyer) has this to say:
When I first read a news story about this yesterday, it sounded to me like O’Keefe and company were being accused of an attempt to wiretap or bug Landrieu’s phones. Indeed, that’s the way I characterized the Government’s claim in my post based on a news story. But now I have had a chance to review the affidavit. And it doesn’t say that.
The link to the affidavit is here. I challenge you to find me the language that accuses O’Keefe et al. of a “plot to bug” Landrieu’s office, or an “alleged wiretap scheme.”
It isn’t there.
Read the rest of his piece. And then let’s all wait to see how this one develops, shall we?
The Abdulmutallab interrogation: it’s about the firewall, stupid
From another highly-recommended and comprehensive look at the Abdulmutallab fiasco:
Other than the first interview, the FBI’s focus was on ensuring that any statements obtained from Abdulmutallab could be used at trial. Intelligence gathering was, if thought of at all, considered a sideshow. It is deeply unsettling, but not at all surprising, that the FBI did not consult with counterterrorism experts in other agencies. The FBI was not about to invite other agencies onto its turf.
This is highly reminiscent of the much-criticized firewall that made it difficult for us to connect the dots before 9/11.
The FBI is part of the Justice Department, which comes under the aegis of Attorney General Eric Holder. In his execrable Congressional testimony (and please read the whole thing, if you’ve got the stomach for it), he has already made it clear that the focus of apprehending terrorists on our soil would be their conviction, rather than intelligence-gathering. He even had this to say when given a hypothetical about whether we’d read Osama bin Laden his Miranda rights, if we were so fortunate as to ever capture him:
Attorney General Holder: …The conviction of Osama bin Laden, were he to come into our custody would not depend on any custodial statements he would make. The case against him, both those of those cases that have already been indicted, the case that we would make against him in the 9/11 cases, would not be dependent on custodial interrogations, so I think that in some ways, you’ve thrown up something, with all due respect, is a red herring.
Sen. Graham: With all due respect, every military lawyer that I’ve talked to is deeply concerned that if we go down this road, we’re criminalizing the war and we’re putting our intelligence-gathering at risk, and I will have statements to back up what I’m saying.
So the treatment of Abdulmutallab should come as no surprise. It is in league with the entire thrust of nearly every relevant act and utterance of both the president and his appointee as head of Justice, Eric Holder.
[NOTE: For background on the firewall—how and why it came to be, and the manner in which it functioned—please see this extraordinarily insightful article on the subject by Andrew McCarthy, the prosecutor of the 1993 WTC bombers.]
Paul Krugman does not heart Obama
Paul Krugman is very angry at President Obama for his spending freeze proposal.
And when I say “very,” I mean very. Krugman’s most recent piece is short, only 214 words. But it contains a surprising amount of death imagery—mostly in a quote from blogger Jonathan Zasloff, but also in the title of Krugmans’s piece: “Obama liquidates himself.”
Wow. I have been impressed by the growing rage of the left towards Obama, eclipsing almost everything I’ve seen from the right. But this is chilling. The right never believed in Obama and so feels neither surprised nor betrayed. Krugman, on the other hand, quotes “a correspondent” as having written to him saying, “I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy.”
I would imagine Krugman is speaking obliquely of himself as well.
How not to treat a terrorist: on the Abdulmutallab interrogation
Stephen F. Hayes offers an excellent summary of the colossal screw-up that is the Obama administration’s response to the Christmas bomber.
Chaos, stupidity, ignorance, missed opportunities, coverup—it’s all there.
Who’s responsible? First and foremost, President Obama, for having adopted the pre-9/11 attitude that the civilian legal system is just fine for dealing with terrorists. He is philosophically simpatico with this idea, but it also fits in nicely with his deep desire to take the opposite position from whatever stance his evil predecessor Bush might have held on every possible subject. Obama must stick to this approach now because he appears to have no capacity to admit he was wrong, and no sense of how dire the possible consequences are of continuing to treat terrorists this way.
Next in line for blame is Attorney General Holder, who has covered himself with shame in his previous Congressional testimony, demonstrating abysmal ignorance on the entire topic of choosing a legal venue for terrorist trials. I suspect that, if there was an order given from above directing authorities to read Abdulmutallab his Miranda rights after a mere fifty minutes of questioning by the FBI, that directive came from none other than Eric Holder.
But there’s plenty of criticism left to go around. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, National Counterterrorism Center Director Michael Leiter, FBI Director Robert Mueller, and Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair say they were not consulted prior to the decision. That’s shocking, but it doesn’t really absolve them of responsibility. I don’t know the protocol, but since the Christmas bomber incident almost instantaneously made the news, might not at least one of them have weighed in at some early point to offer an opinion on the subject to the authorities—such as to find out what was happening regarding interrogation, and to request that the civilian justice system not take over just yet?
Is “really good one-term president” an oxymoron?
Obama has nobly declared that he’d “rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president.”
But wouldn’t a “really good” president ordinarily be re-elected? And if not, why not? Assuming that Obama is not obliquely referring to illness or violence taking him out of the running, why would the public not vote him a second term if he’s that good?
I can think of a couple of possibilities. The first is that Obama is saying that voters are stupid and don’t know what’s good for them. And actually, that’s the second and third as well.
It is instructive to take a look at history. Leaving out those presidents who died during their first term and therefore could not run for a second, the following one-termers remain: John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren, James K Polk, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Rutherford B Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter and George HW Bush. If we study their rankings by historians and other supposed experts, as well as public opinion polls, we see that none of them were rated consistently in the top quartile of US presidents.
Several of the one-termers did fairly decently. For example, early leaders John Adams and Polk received a few ratings in that top quartile, and none that were low. But the others on the one-term list were considered middling to mediocre to terrible. So Obama’s scenario of a president who is rejected for a second term by the body politic but whom history records as doing a bang-up job seems rather a longshot.
But history is written by the victors. I think Obama’s definition of “really good” contains the hope that his presidency will pave the way for America’s transformation into a leftist country, and that in retrospect he will appear to have been a visionary ahead of his time, unappreciated by the troglodyte voters who rejected him.
I suppose we’ll see.
Scott Brown vs. Obama: with friends like these…
The other day I was watching an in-depth personal profile of Scott Brown by Fox’s Greta Van Susteren. It featured interviews with the newly-elected senator’s friends, neighbors, former colleagues in the state senate, ex-coaches, and even the guy who fixes Brown’s truck.
They all seemed to genuinely love the guy (the car mechanic also verified the authenticity and antiquity of the famous vehicle). Person after person spoke warmly and even joyously of Brown’s depth of character (in many cases, going back to his high school days): his work ethic, his integrity, his drive, his intelligence and affability, and his just-folks quality despite all this. The consensus was: what you see is what you get, and it’s all good.
It struck me that, less than a week after the Brown election, we’ve already heard more good things from friends of the previously-unknown Brown than we’ve heard about Obama from his friends in the more than two years he’s been in the spotlight. In fact, if it weren’t for Obama’s shady friends—the ones he suddenly wasn’t all that friendly with, or whose dirty deeds he hadn’t really known that much about after all, such as Ayers, Rezko, and Wright—we’d think him nearly friendless.
He’s not; if one searches hard enough, friends such as this man can be found. He seems a relatively recent acquaintance, however. Perhaps the paucity of articles about old friends can be explained by looking at this early one, featuring interviews with some college roommates and former classmates of Obama’s.
It doesn’t present a glowing picture—and remember, these are Obama’s friends speaking:
The young man [Obama’s Occidental friend] Mifflin remembers was “an unpretentious, down to earth, solidly middle-class guy who seemed somewhat more sophisticated than the average college student. He was slightly reserved and deliberate in a way that I sometimes thought betrayed an uncertainty.”
But another former Occidental classmate, Robert McCrary, now general manager of a contract sewing company, saw him differently: “He definitely had a cocky, sometimes arrogant way about him. … He was not open to others.”
A roommate from Obama’s Columbia years, a Pakastani named Siddiqi (who was not a Columbia student), adds:
[Obama would] give me lectures, which I found very boring. He must have found me very irritating.”
Siddiqi offered the most expansive account of Obama as a young man.
“We were both very lost. We were both alienated, although he might not put it that way. He arrived disheveled and without a place to stay,”….
And then there’s Andrew Roth, whoever he is:
Andrew Roth knew Obama at Occidental and in New York. He speaks bluntly: “The thought, believe me, never crossed my mind that he would be our first black president.”
I’m not just cherry-picking quotes; even the more positive ones tend to indicate that Obama had an oddly detached and off-putting air. In other words, there is very little warmth or exuberance expressed, even from friends. Obama seems to have been admired for his intellect, but the human notes are discordant. Something was missing.
Why am I beating this tired and perhaps dead horse? For me, the impetus was the powerful contrast between Obama’s friends and acquaintances and Brown’s. The latter demonstrated an abundance of the exact qualities Obama’s friends’ descriptions lacked: a deep and abiding human connection.
Before this, I’m not sure I would have thought this especially important in a president. But in Obama’s case, it takes on even greater significance in retrospect. Before the election, we focused on the number of his dubious connections—the Ayers/ Rezko/Wright triumvirate. Now, one year into his term, and more familiar with his coldness and distance from the concerns of his fellow Americans, we start to see at least as much significance in what’s missing from his more ordinary relationships.
Regretting that Obama vote
At first glance I thought that this confession by Jill Dorson, a self-described independent who voted for Obama and now regrets it, would represent an example of political change.
Alas, no. Dorson—who is so excoriated by the commenters there that I feel further criticism from me would merely be a case of piling-on—appears to have fully retained the utterly self-centered, shallow, kneejerk, feelings-based, elitist orientation towards the world that led her to vote for Obama in the first place.
Pity.
Joe Klein says he’s smart
According to Klein, the reason Americans don’t appreciate the wonders of the stimulus is that they’re a nation of ill-informed dodoheads, especially those who listen to Fox News. The remedy he proposes, in true wordsmith fashion, is for President/Teacher Obama to explain things to us better.
[NOTE: Take a look here if you want to see how very very smart Klein is.
As for the stimulus itself, here’s something for Klein to chew on.]
Spambot of the day
From another admiring spambot, this one named “Democrats Suck,” of all things:
Just want to say your article is striking. The clarity in your post is simply striking and i can take for granted you are an expert on this subject. Well with your permission allow me to grab your rss feed to keep up to date with forthcoming post. Thanks a million and please keep up the accomplished work. Excuse my poor English. English is not my mother tongue.
Remember when they were saying…
…there was no way comedians could make fun of Obama?
Well, I think we can safely say that’s been remedied:
[Hat tip: American Digest: “Has this just been the bestest week in ever or what?”]
Politics and good looks: Scott Brown and his predecessors
It has not escaped my attention that Scott Brown is a very good-looking man.
Now, I know that’s not the only reason, or even the primary reason, that people voted for him. He has other tremendous assets that are far more important. He projects a strong sense of reliability, honesty, intelligence, fairness, and common sense, along with fiscal restraint and an assertive attitude towards terrorism.
But even the gals on “The View” couldn’t help but drool over Scott:
As Whoopi said, “Ding dong!”
Scott Brown is not just good-looking; he may just be the best-looking male politician ever to come down the pike on the national level. I would say the same for Sarah Palin on the distaff side.
In Palin’s case, I believe her beauty both helped and hurt her, since it attracted some but gave special ammunition to those inclined to call her a bimbo. As for Scott Brown, although a few on the left tried to use the fact that he had once posed revealingly (although not nude, as some tried to say) for Cosmo against him, that charge gained no traction. On the whole, I think Brown’s looks were a tremendous asset, if only to get people’s attention long enough for them to listen to him speak and display his other stellar attributes.
It’s interesting that in the last two years we’ve seen two of the most physically attractive people ever to come onto the political scene on the national level, and that both are straight-shooting Republicans of a populist nature. Before that, Romney was considered handsome, but too perfect and almost Ken-doll-like. As Joy Behar notes in the above video, John Edwards (who never rang my chimes) was considered too pretty-boy, a category into which Dan Quayle also fell so long ago, a fact that caused people to treat him as much dumber than he was.
When I think back on the presidents in my lifetime, it strikes me that a great many of them were relatively good-looking. JFK certainly was, although he was hardly in the Scott Brown class in that respect (but then, who is? Brown is one of those people for whom Hollywood would be challenged to find an actor handsome enough to play him in the biopic). LBJ, who followed JFK, was a strange hybrid, because people considered him an impressively good-looking man in person but he came across as a big-eared bumpkin on TV.
Although not ugly, Nixon was not a physically attractive man, nor did he seem comfortable in his own skin. Ford and Carter were both meh.
And then we come to Reagan. Because Reagan was elderly when elected, his looks were more avuncular than hot. But after all, the guy had been a real movie star, and rugged good looks of the very mature variety were part of his appeal—to those inclined to like him anyway. To those who were not, his handsomeness was just another thing to mock.
Say what you will about Reagan’s successor George Bush senior, but come to think of it (and I never really did think about it at the time), he was a good-looking man too, in a patrician grandfatherly way. And then when Bill Clinton came to town, I remember hearing that hordes of liberal women were reporting having erotic dreams about him. I seem to recall that, a few years later, one very young woman had those dreams come true.
Successor George Bush junior was an odd case. Not a bad-looking man, to his enemies he seemed ugly and ape-like, probably not only because they hated him, but because his close-set eyes did give him an unfortunately shifty look. And we all know that many consider his successor Barack Obama to be both a handsome guy and a sex symbol. There’s little doubt that, as with Brown and Palin and Reagan, that was at least part of his appeal, especially initially.
It’s hard to escape the idea that the days when someone who looked like Abraham Lincoln could get elected are over. Television was a factor in their demise. But I think attractiveness was always a plus in politics—consider FDR, for example. It’s just that it’s become more important over time, and unattractiveness more difficult to transcend.
But I wonder if those who voted for Obama and have become disillusioned with him still find him as physically attractive as before. After all, handsome is as handsome does.