The liberal meme de jour: those cowardly conservatives, afraid of the US criminal justice system

The New Neo Posted on by

The word is out: the best way to defend Obama and Holder’s execrable decision to try KSM in civilian courts is that it’s just another example of the fraidy-cat nature of those well-known cowards, the conservatives. For example, we have Holder’s statement that:

We need not cower in the face of this enemy. Our institutions are strong, our infrastructure is sturdy, our resolve is firm, and our people are ready.

Unsurprisingly, Kos says something similar in an article in the Hill—conservatives are cowards who don’t trust the American justice system: “Seems that macho conservatives are terrified of shackled terrorists in orange jumpsuits and the United States Constitution.”

You can see virtually the same accusation in the comments section of almost any blog that has discussed the KSM trial. It’s not just the argument de jour; it’s the only argument the liberals have, and they’re working it for all it’s worth.

Which is: nothing. It’s a fun argument, though. It sounds good, it turns those macho conservatives on their heads, and as for logic—well, who cares? But for anyone who does still care, let me just say that the military justice system is part of the US legal system, is in full accord with our Constitution, and has a long tradition of successfully trying war criminals, terrorists, and illegal enemy combatants, the category into which KSM most definitely falls. It is a question of which system of justice is most suitable for KSM.

As for fear—well, I’ve dealt with this question already here:

The real question is whether the fear is realistic or whether it is exaggerated, and whether the person is paralyzed by that fear, or whether he/she takes appropriate action to forestall the feared consequences.

The left has its own fears, of course, and they are potent motivators, as well. As previously stated, they fear abuse of power by our own government in the pursuit of national security more than any foreign threat. To parse it even more finely, sometimes it seems that they fear abuse of power by a Republican executive branch more than anything; back in the days of FDR they liked a powerful federal government well enough, when it was run by a Democrat.

I would add that the current stance of conservatives towards KSM and his civilian trial shouldn’t even be called “fear”—it could best be described as troubled concern, and justified concern at that. Why give other terrorists the sensitive intelligence information that any civilian KSM trial will of necessity drag from the prosecution? Why is the system of military justice perfectly fine for our own military, as well as the other less-well-known Guantanamo resident terrorists who have specifically not been exempted from it by the recent Holder/Obama decisions?

Why, indeed—because military justice doesn’t afford the Left the same golden opportunity to embarrass Bush, Cheney, and the CIA.

[ADDENDUM: Oh, and speaking of the American criminal justice system—Obama-style….]

Mammograms: don’t you bother your pretty little heads about them

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s difficult to understand the new mammogram recommendations that suggest that women who are not in high risk groups because of genetic predispositions to breast cancer only begin screening at fifty, and then only every other year, and that doctors should stop recommending breast self-examinations. The reason given is that such things only save a few lives (one in 1,904 women in the age 40 to 49 group) but can cause unnecessary anxiety and unnecessary biopsies.

This is a disturbing calculus. The listed harms of extra mammograms seem minor although more frequent, the benefits admittedly less frequent but rather more major—life vs. death, for example. And deaths in the age group specified—women in their forties—involve a population of young mothers. We’re not talking about death squads for grandma here; we’re talking about mommy.

The panel making these recommendations is, according to the Times, an “influential group that provides guidance to doctors, insurance companies and policy makers.” The attempt to weigh these things in a cost-benefit analysis is exactly what we fear will become more frequent with ObamaPelosiCare. Although this already happens to a certain extent with insurance companies, is there anyone here who thinks the restrictions will become more rational and less Draconian when government is in charge? If you do, there’s a certain bridge in Brooklyn that I might be able to offer you…

Many doctors and many women are skeptical of the new guidelines, as well they should be. I can’t imagine that these new rules will reduce the amount of anxiety in women about breast cancer, either, if that’s the goal; it seems that women have a lot of anxiety about the new rules themselves, as well as the reasons behind the change.

And here’s an ominous line from the original article: The guidelines are not expected to have an immediate effect on insurance coverage…

Well, just wait folks. You ain’t seen nothin yet.

[NOTE: Breath of the Beast has a very interesting thought experiment on the subject.]

[NOTE II: Here’s a link to the full study. I’ve only given it the most cursory skimming possible, although I plan to take some time later to read it more fully. I’d be curious what the scientists among you have to say, but what I’ve gleaned from my very brief look at it is that: (a) the assumptions behind it are somewhat shaky, as is true in a great deal of research dealing with human subjects and effectiveness evaluations; (b) it’s mostly about “efficiency;” and (c) the study found that, if you look at years-of-life saved rather than lives saved, mammography for women in their 40s is more cost-effective than for women in their later years, a fact which is not mentioned in most of the popular articles about the research, nor does it appear to have affected the recommendations of the researchers themselves.]

Bowing to Mao—you be the judge

The New Neo Posted on by

Another non-surprise is that Obama’s defenders have been poring through old footage to find presidential bows similar to Obama’s. They’ve come up with this one from Nixon to Mao (at minute 1:24):

I admit that I don’t like it. But it’s a little head bob compared to Obama’s extraordinarily deep obeisance. What’s more, in Obama’s case the bow is symbolic of his policies to humble America. In Nixon’s, the intent and the policies were—different.

If you’re going to bow to someone, however, I’d rather it be to the present emperor of Japan than to Chairman Mao, one of the great tyrants of history. Then again, it seems ironic when the Left offers Nixon as an example of the president whom Obama is supposedly emulating.

Palin, Palin, Palin

The New Neo Posted on by

With her new book and her new book tour (including a cozy-but-wary chat with Oprah), Sarah Palin has certainly managed to be in the spotlight lately.

The fierce rage Palin inspired (and still inspires) was first and foremost a class war (see also this), and secondarily about academic credentials and mannerisms, all of it helped along by a media all too willing to spread lies about her actual record and positions, and to grant her the most hostile of interviews edited in the most damaging possible ways.

Now, although the sides have become entrenched—Palin-haters vs. Palin-lovers—Palin occupies a strange hybrid position in the public eye. At the moment anyway, she’s no longer running for public office. In fact, she no longer has a public office. Palin is now officially a celebrity, getting the celebrity treatment. Thus, the Oprah interview, which could never have happened during the campaign, because Oprah was an Obama partisan. If Oprah is interviewing Palin, it means that (for Oprah, at least) Palin represents no threat and no danger.

So, has Palin been permanently marginalized in terms of her political future? I certainly can’t answer that question. But my gut feeling is that, as they say in the campaign biz, her negatives are too high, and I think they will probably remain so.

The problem for the Republican Party is that, so far, it has a dearth of charismatic and exciting candidates. There is a tendency towards boring grayness, which might work very well for governing but doesn’t usually win elections on the national level. America goes for surface charm, and if we didn’t know that already, Obama’s 2008 victory should have sealed that knowledge for us.

Palin is charming—and I believe her to intelligent as well, although her brand of intelligence is less academic than most running for national office these days, and more on the order of common sense. But Palin’s charm is of a type that infuriates many people, and the press has uniformly been about as vicious to her as to any politician I’ve ever seen in my lifetime. Therefore, I don’t think the Republican Party would do itself a favor if she were to be nominated for either President or Vice-President in 2012.

She’s not my candidate of choice, but I don’t share the disdain for her. Every time I see Palin, however, I’m struck by how extraordinarily different she is from every other politician of the day. She seems to me to be a throwback to a time before candidates had been trained to smooth out and homogenize all their quirks and idiosyncrasies, a time when they didn’t speak in bland platitudes but used language that expressed their special sensibilities and history.

Harry Truman comes to mind (as it often does for me with Palin). But could the unsophisticated, decidedly un-academic, and definitely idiosyncratic Truman could have been elected in this day and age, even with the head start of having inherited his first term on the death of his predecessor? I’m not at all sure.

Two days after then-Governor Palin had been chosen by John McCain as his running mate, and the general patten of harsh criticism of her had already been set (it was only to get worse), I wrote a piece with some words I would like to quote now, because I see no reason to change them:

The biggest difference [between Obama and Palin] is that Obama is of the Left and Palin of the Right. That he speaks as though he’s a reformer but was deeply in league with and assisted by the corrupt Chicago political machine of his own party, while she fought against the corrupt politics of fellow Republicans in her own state and won. That her admittedly meager high-level political experience is of the executive sort, while his similarly sparse resume contains only the legislative type. That she is a woman of action and he a man of words. That she chose to have her Downs baby and care for it and he fought to allow babies born alive after attempted abortions die. That he is inordinately fond of weasle words, contradicting himself, and the repetitive hum of “ummm;” and she (in the little we’ve seen of her) seems direct and straightforward.

Obama trumps Palin in the category of academic credentials, if you like that sort of thing. I’ve never noticed it has much to do with whether a President is effective or not, or even especially smart in terms of what one might call horse sense.

Palin has similarities not only with Obama. Her personal vibe is a bit like that of Harry Truman. Although he had a much longer pre-VP tenure in national political life than either candidate (twelve years as Senator from Missouri) he, like Palin, was a folksy down-to-earth plainspeaking rural sort. He even wore the wire-rimmed eyeglasses, although they didn’t look as good on him as they do on her (and Truman bears the distinction of having been the last President who didn’t even go to college).

Now that we’ve seen more of both Palin and especially of President Obama, the comparisons only seem to go more in her favor—for example, just for starters, she’s not pretending to be a moderate while actually having a far Left agenda, nor is she planning to make the United States weaker and more vulnerable on the world stage.

[NOTE: Plain Speaking was the name of a so-called “oral biography” of Truman, written many decades ago. Even though Palin herself is far from plain in the physical sense, it strikes me that her own “plain speaking” is one of the things that so riles her opponents. Palin’s speech is plain in the sense of unsophisticated, and plain in the sense of clear and blunt and direct, very much unlike Obama. And I find it amusing (although perhaps irrelevant) that if you scramble the letters of “Palin,” you get “plain.”]

Is anyone…

The New Neo Posted on by

…the least bit surprised by this?

We’ll never know what really happened to much of that stimulus money. And tune in for more of the same when the government starts taking over more and more of our economy.

America held hostage: the Obama administration so far

The New Neo Posted on by

For a while, I thought each day that I’d finally seen the worst Obama had to offer. Then I realized that was naive of me, and that Obama’s actions would probably continue to become ever more outrageous as he perceived he had less and less to lose.

What do I mean by that? Isn’t he losing more—for example, in the polls—as time goes on? While that’s true, I believe that at some point in the last few months Obama realized he had gravely damaged his own chances of re-election, perhaps beyond repair, and that the Democrats in Congress were bent on doing something similar for themselves. So his calculation was that there was no longer any need to dissemble by posing as a moderate in any way. Rather, it was desirable to take the mask off and push ever more quickly to get as much of his agenda as possible accomplished before 2010, and certainly before 2012.

And what might his agenda be? Statism. Socialism. Destruction of private wealth. Taxation. Rewards for friends (unions, minorities, lawyers, ACORN, SEIU) and punishment for enemies (Republicans, rich people, capitalists and capitalism). Reduction of American power on the international scene, as well as humiliation. Gutting of defense. Chaos and/or abandonment in Afghanistan. Projection of weakness. Appeasement of terrorists. Sowing fear in the ranks of the intelligence corps. Demoralization of the military. If possible, institutionalization of voter fraud that favors Democrats (this last might manage to counter the falling poll numbers, as well).

Have I forgotten anything? Probably. But Obama hasn’t; he’s a thorough man, and he’s got a job to do.

None of this is stupidity on his part; I’ve never thought him anything but intelligent and highly competent. He only seems incompetent to those who think his aims have much similarity with those of past presidents, or to those who think he expects to be re-elected. He’s given this up, and it has made him more reckless.

Obama doesn’t care what most of us think of him; he’s beyond our reach. He knows that he probably can’t be impeached (unless Breitbart comes up with a video of him selling state secrets to Osama Bin Laden, and perhaps not even then). Even if every single Democratic Senator up for re-election in 2010 lost to a Republican—a highly unlikely event—a great many of the remaining Senate Democrats would still have to vote for conviction in order to reach the required 2/3 majority.

So Obama feels safe. And although after 2010 it may become more difficult for him to pass legislation if Congress goes strongly to the Republicans, much of what he wishes to accomplish might already be completed by then, or could still be achieved without the assistance of the legislature.

For example, look at his foreign policy; he can do a lot of damage there without the approval of any other branch of government. And look also at the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed case, and the actions of Attorney General Holder. No input was required from Congress in order to make this particular choice and undermine our security. As the audacity (one of Obama’s favorite words) of the decision sinks in, it becomes even more apparent that this was a nakedly political calculation destructive to the interests of America but favoring certain pet projects of Obama.

Those of you old enough to remember the Iran hostage crisis at the end of the Carter adiministration probably also remember that it gave the TV show “Nightline” its start—only back then the show was called “The Iran Crisis— America Held Hostage: Day [fill in the blank].” Now we need a new show, as well as a new count. We could call that program “The Obama Administration—America Held Hostage: Day [fill in the blank].”

The trial promises to be many things: an opportunity to embarrass the Bush administration and put it on trial ex-post-facto, as well as a way to appease the Left, give terrorists a bully pulpit, set some dangerous legal precedents, endanger the people of New York and cause the city to edge ever closer to bankruptcy, further neuter the CIA, and ensure that any judge and jury involved will be risking their lives for the rest of their lives. But it is also the clearest signal so far that President Obama is in fact what the craziest of right-wing nutjobs said he was long ago: a man who lied his way to the office while bent on harnessing the power of that office to undermine the country he swore an oath to protect.

[NOTE: Is there a way to stop this terrible move by Obama and Holder? Bill Kristol thinks there might be, although it’s a longshot:

Congress could insist on military tribunals, and indeed in the past it has provided for such tribunals. I imagine Republicans on the Hill will try to move to overrule Holder, with legislation in the Senate, and with legislation and perhaps a discharge petition in the House. Holder can take his lumps for his reckless ideological decision if he wishes. Will congressional Democrats follow him off the cliff?

It remains to be seen whether even the Republicans will even try to stop this, and whether they could possibly get enough sane Democrats to follow them. Somehow, I doubt it.]

Even liberals may be getting a bit nervous…

The New Neo Posted on by

…about Obama’s Afghanistan indecision. If the AP’s Jennifer Loven and Doyle MacManus of the La Times are starting to ask the tough questions (almost sounding like Dick Cheney in his “dithering Obama” speech), then you know Obama has passed the point where even some of his supporters may be wondering why he’s taking so long to decide something they think he should have decided quite some time ago.

Obama’s testiness when challenged—something he’s clearly unused to and for which he has no tolerance—can’t possibly help matters for him, either.

And is Obama a fiscal conservative—on defense, that is? Or is the Afghanistan hesitation actually about much more than money—perhaps the fact that although Obama talked a tough Afghanistan line during his campaign, following through there was never his intent?

After all, on many other issues (such as, for example, health care reform), he certainly doesn’t think we need to take a moment to deliberate. “The fierce urgency of now” and all that.

Victor Davis Hanson…

The New Neo Posted on by

…manages to summarize the last few years of insanity in one incisive essay.

Here’s a sample, but please read the whole thing:

These are the most interesting of times: we are witnessing nothing less than an attempt in just 10 months to reinvent the United States at home and abroad into something it never was, led by someone who, the more soothing, comforting, and melodic his speech-making, the more bruising, cut-throat, and ruthless the act that follows.

Behind Obama’s bow: making up to Hirohito for past humiliations

The New Neo Posted on by

I was just reminded of something I’d forgotten, something I should have recalled because, after all, I wrote an article for American Thinker about it.

Back in July, Obama was quoted as having said:

I’m always worried about using the word ‘victory,’ because, you know, it invokes this notion of Emperor Hirohito coming down and signing a surrender to MacArthur.

I noted in my article that the scene that so haunted Obama never occurred. But why did it bother Obama so much anyway? Here was my speculation:

If I had to guess, knowing what I now know about our President, I’d say that it’s related to what he sees as the humiliation (“coming down”) of a non-white (in this case, an Asian) at the hands of a white American military man who was nothing if not overbearing (in this case, MacArthur), in order to not only surrender but to unconditionally surrender, and then to have his country occupied by the morally despicable US.

So my guess now is that one of the many things that motivated Obama to bow to the present emperor of Japan was to make up just a tiny bit for the terrible humiliation the previous emperor received at the hands of the United States, which had the effrontery to win a war that the Japanese began by their sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.

Akihito, the emperor to whom Obama bowed, is Hirohito’s son.