“The one thing that you all share is a moral conviction,” Obama said. “This debate over healthcare goes to the heart of who we are as American people… This is part of an ethical and moral obligation that we look out for one another.”

***

“In the wealthiest nation on Earth, we are neglecting to live out that call,” the president said.

Everyone who invokes this “richest nation” argument is missing the point. There’s a reason we’re the richest nation in the world, and that reason is that we have not done all the things that lefties want us to do. I’m tempted to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they have no idea they keep proposing ideas that will ensure we don’t remain the richest nation on earth, but for some of them, I’m sure that is exactly their intent.

Click the image for the punchline

]]> http://www.skepticrats.com/2009/08/12/conservatives-can-rhyme-too/feed/ 1 http://www.skepticrats.com/2009/07/05/cold-fury-indeed/ http://www.skepticrats.com/2009/07/05/cold-fury-indeed/#comments Mon, 06 Jul 2009 07:46:50 +0000 Deuce Geary http://www.skepticrats.com/?p=1934 Mike at Cold Fury is plenty pissed at Palin’s slanderers. He recognizes we can’t take the bullshit attacks lying down, because that will only encourage more of them. Some people might call this a temper tantrum, but I think it is a call to arms that should be heeded:

Sue them, bankrupt them, ruin their lives, destroy their careers, shut down their blogs and other propaganda outlets, get ‘em locked up wherever possible. Kick them in the teeth again and again, until they howl in pain from the gutter they roll in. Scorch the very earth under their feet. Unleash pure hell on them, and make every single day of their lives a horror and a misery — just as they did to you, just as they’ve done to so many other decent men and women who have the temerity to disagree with their anti-American ideal of what this country should be. Liberal asswipes have gotten away with this sort of thing for far too long.

And here he was yesterday:

And for the rest of us, attack them we must. We must leave no stone unturned when it comes to Democrat Socialists at every level of government and their bought and paid-for media whores; we should mete out to them, measure for measure, the same vicious vitriol that they hurl at us. We should plow them under, bury them, and salt the earth over their heads. We should go after every last one of them — from Obama on down — not with open hearts and hands, but with clenched fists and hard-hearted ruthlessness.

It will never be enough merely to defeat them; we must destroy them utterly, with every means we can possibly find to use, fair or foul. From here on out, the question should never be: is this polite? Is this decent? Does this make us more like them than we’re comfortable being? Rather, it should be: is this effective? Does it lead us to victory? Does it assure that, when they smear and vilify us, they know there will be a heavy price to pay for it?

The stakes here are way too high to pull our punches in the name of supposedly fighting fair; the stakes are our country, our freedom, and likely enough, our very lives. Anyone who thinks these things not worth fighting hammer and tongs for ought to step aside until the dust settles.

I’m with him all the way, as long as he is not advocating throwing around lies and frivolous ethics charges. With the abundance of corruption in politics, we shouldn’t need either. But I’m all for exposing skeletons in the closet, as long as they are real skeletons.

1. Homosexual married (to each other) guys in California file suit against the U.S. and the State of California challenging the constitutionality of DOMA.
2. United States files a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
3. Department of Justice — the United States’ “law firm,” if you will — files a document supporting its client’s motion to dismiss. (Since everyone is calling this document a “brief,” I will do likewise, even though it isn’t.)
4. Lefty and LGBT bloggers go absolute apeshit and start spewing dishonest attacks on the brief’s substance.

Among the hysterical descriptions of the brief: it is a “hate brief against gays,” includes “gratuitous demeaning statements,” is “filled with hate and bigoted religious right talking points,” is “breathtakingly bigoted” and repeats “countless spurious and unnecessary slurs against gay people.”

I can fully understand why they’re covering it this way. What the brief is really about — and I’ve read every word of it — consists mostly of dry arguments about jurisdiction, sovereign immunity, jurisdictional standing, prudential standing, full faith and credit, equal protection and due process. None of that makes for very exciting blogging or other media coverage. Much better to scream Bigot! Homophobe! Hater! That will get everyone’s attention. In a normal world, it would also thoroughly discredit these folks, but the media will not challenge them on it at all.

In fact, the brief explicitly disclaims any argument regarding the morality of homosexual relationships. After noting that states have taken different approaches and acknowledging that some states have reaffirmed traditional marriage “as a matter of profound moral and religious conviction by many of their citizens” the brief carefully notes that “[t]his case does not call upon the Court to pass judgment, however, on the legal or moral right of same-sex couples, such as plaintiffs here, to be married.” Now, if the case doesn’t call for the court to decide the morality of gay marriage, why would the brief spend any time on it?  Answer: it doesn’t.

Andrew Sullivan writes: “I also understand the need to defend existing law. But the zealous defense of DOMA – including repeating countless spurious and unnecessary slurs against gay people – need not be a lawyer’s duty.” The part about slurs is a plain lie, and the remainder demonstrates a breathtaking ignorance of an attorney’s ethical obligations. Sully, pick up a legal ethics textbook or look at the the ethical code for attorneys in any state, and you’ll see that zealous representation of one’s client — in this case, the United States — is exactly what is required of an attorney.

The passage (or at least one of them) that seems to have set these folks off is this:

The courts have followed this principle [that a state may refuse to enforce another state's law that is at odds with its own public policy] moreover, in relation to the validity of marriages performed in other States. Both the First and Second Restatements of Conflict of Laws recognize that State courts may refuse to give effect to a marriage, or to certain incidents of a marriage, that contravene the forum State’s policy. See Restatement (First) of Conflict of Laws § 134; Restatement (Second) of Conflict of Laws § 284.5 And the courts have widely held that certain marriages performed elsewhere need not be given effect, because they conflicted with the public policy of the forum. See, e.g., Catalano v. Catalano, 170 A.2d 726, 728-29 (Conn. 1961) (marriage of uncle to niece, “though valid in Italy under its laws, was not valid in Connecticut because it contravened the public policy of th[at] state”); Wilkins v. Zelichowski, 140 A.2d 65, 67-68 (N.J. 1958) (marriage of 16-year-old female held invalid in New Jersey, regardless of validity in Indiana where performed, in light of N.J. policy reflected in statute permitting adult female to secure annulment of her underage marriage); In re Mortenson’s Estate, 316 P.2d 1106 (Ariz. 1957) (marriage of first cousins held invalid in Arizona, though lawfully performed in New Mexico, given Arizona policy reflected in statute declaring such marriages “prohibited and void”).

This merely notes that states have refused, apparently legitimately, to accord married status to couples whose union would be unlawful  in their own state. It does not equate homosexuality to incest or pederasty.

Then the lefties thought they were on to something when they discovered that W. Scott Simpson, the junior attorney on the brief (and presumably its principal writer) is a “Bush holdover” and — horror — a Mormon. To Andrew Sullivan, this explained everything, even in the absence of any reference in the brief to Joseph Smith or Brigham Young. (To his credit, Sullivan removed the reference to the attorney’s religion). I don’t expect others who picked up on this to back off, though.

These people are both stupid and bigoted. Stupid because they jumped on the “Bush holdover” language to infer that Simpson was a political appointee instead of the DOJ career lawyer he is. Bigoted because they assume Simpson can’t stick to the law when writing the brief.

The most unhinged response to the identify of Simpson that I ran across is Jim Yeager at Skippy the Bush Kangaroo revising his evaluation of AMERICAblog’s reaction to the brief (lack of capitalization in original):

i owe john aravosis a big apology…

you know that department of justice brief calling to dismiss the case against the defense of marriage act i mentioned in this post? at the time, i thought while obama’s defense of doma was a real downer, it was also legitimate, and john was overreacting to it.

well, it turns out he wasn’t: one of the people who wrote the brief, w. scott simpson, is both a holdover from the bush administration and a mormon. i didn’t know that yesterday.

john? i am very sorry for calling you hysterical. obama has some explaining to do for this one after all.

The content of the brief (and the decision to file it) all remained exactly the same before and after Yeager knew the author. But it only became objectionable once Yeager knew a Mormon drafted it. And he thinks Simpson is the bigot. If anything, this is proof that Simpson kept religion out of the brief.

And that wasn’t all. Yeager also wrote that Obama “letting a mormon co-write his policy on anything concerning marriage — when mormons are probably the last group of people who should be lecturing the rest of us on marriage — is unacceptable.” Like Sullivan, he demonstrates no knowledge of the role of the attorney in the attorney-client relationship. The client makes the policy. The attorney carries it out with his actions in court.

Oh, and never forget, the same people that want Simpson run out of the department (what else are we to make of the “Bush holdover”coment?) are the same folks who object to politicization of the justice department. And, at the same time, complain that the gay community wasn’t consulted before this brief was filed. And the same people who think empathy is a valuable component for a supreme court justice, but who show none at all for people who think differently on the issue of gay mariage.

You want to argue that Obama’s promises meant he would direct the DOJ to do otherwise? Fine. Complain that the legal arguments are insupportable? Great! (I find some of them rather weak.) Want to represent the brief as some hateful screed virtually calling for homosexuals to be burned at the stake and insinuate that the (presumed) principal author injected religious tenets that are wholly absent from the brief? Not cool. Not cool at all. But predictable.

“Oh, we had our moments to be proud of, but I’m afraid that we took many of those freedoms that our parents sacrificed to create for us, and we used them to go to excess,” Friedman said.

***

The notion that more is better came to be represented both literally and figuratively in the size of individual Americans and their homes, Friedman noted.

“From the beginning to the end of the long boom, the size of the average new house in America increased by half,” Friedman said. “Meanwhile, the average American gained about a pound a year, so that an adult of a given age is now at least 20 pounds heavier than someone that age back then.”

Then, presumably, he went home to his 11,000 square foot home on his 7.5 acre spread:

More at American Thinker, where Ed Lasky’s term for this photo is just priceless.

But one excerpt really grates on me (emphasis mine):

As a student of history, I also know civilization’s debt to Islam. It was Islam – at places like Al-Azhar University – that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing; our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed. Islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires; timeless poetry and cherished music; elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful contemplation. And throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality.

My God, I am sick of hearing of this crap. Throughout history? Can anyone who praises Islam for advancing civilization cite an example less than, say, 600 years old? I’d like to think that citing thousand-year-old examples is a subtle dig that really asks of Islam “How about coming out of the middle ages?” But I don’t think any speaker really means it that way.

Anyway, I started researching the origins of all these things, finding links to histories of these items, then I ran across someone who has already done all this. Looks like we owe ‘em for the pen.

The other thing that bugs me about this stupid praise for an Islamic world that no longer exists is that the same people who wax poetic about Islam’s 1000-year old contributions to civilization compare it to the Christianity of the same time to support their argument that the West has no right to criticize Islam because of Christianity’s own backwardness and evil. We cite a recent beheading in Buffalo, “honor killings” in the “modern” country of Jordan, stoning of gays in Afghanistan, and what do Islamic apologists offer in response? The Crusades. Oh, and George Bush.

UPDATE: Don Surber is on to this bullshit as well, citing Rush.

H/T: Patterico.

To be fair here, our first observation should go out to our Republican and conservative friends who were supporters of President Bush for the last eight years. If you didn’t complain – and do so loudly and often – about President Bush shattering all previous records for presidential vacation time in the midst of two wars that he began and various other crises, you should know how you look if you complain now. All those trips to Crawford and other destinations were on the public dime, involving Air Force One, staffers, supporting crew, etc. And they cost a fortune. If you take to the streets in manufactured outrage over this evening out, you are hypocrites, and there’s really no other way to put it.

Now, for the rest of our friends, if you were critical of President Bush for his vacationing ways, will you really just shrug your shoulders and say this is “no big deal” since it’s Obama going out on the town? The trip still involved three Gulfstream Jets, a large staff and press corps following, blocking off traffic for hours across several blocks in Manhattan on a Saturday afternoon and evening and a total taxpayer bill which the White House couldn’t even estimate for us. And it took place not only in the midst of two hot wars, but on the eve of GM likely going bankrupt and a rising unemployment rate where millions of Americans are wondering if they’ll be able to afford all their groceries next month. Could the optics of this Broadway fiasco possibly be any worse?

Shaw puts those reminders in a post in which he terms the night out a “dumb move.” I’m not so sure about that. It would be a dumb move if Obama were to take flack for it anywhere but on righty blogs and from Republican politicians. It’ not a dumb move if it gets no negative mainstream press coverage . . . which I doubt it will. In fact, it’s pretty damn smart if the righty blogs can be painted as “hyperventilating” — which I think they are — and the vocal Republicans are painted as hypocritical for the reasons Shaw notes.

UPDATE: And more common sense, from DrewM at Ace’s:

I’m of two mind about this. A President shouldn’t be a prisoner in the White House and the simple fact is it’s expensive for him to do anything. It’s just the reality of the modern world.

What does bother me is that had George W. Bush or any Republican had done this, especially during this economy, the Democrats and their press mouthpieces would be going nuts.

As for the treatment of terror suspects, Jack Goldsmith has a definitive piece called “The Cheney Fallacy” online at The New Republic. He lists a broad range of policies — Guantánamo, habeas corpus, military commissions, rendition, interrogation and so on. He shows how, in most cases, the Obama policy represents a continuation of or a gradual evolution from the final Bush policy.

What Obama gets, and what President Bush never got, is that other people’s opinions matter. Goldsmith puts it well: “The main difference between the Obama and Bush administrations concerns not the substance of terrorism policy, but rather its packaging. The Bush administration shot itself in the foot time and time again, to the detriment of the legitimacy and efficacy of its policies, by indifference to process and presentation. The Obama administration, by contrast, is intensely focused on these issues.”

Obama has taken many of the same policies Bush ended up with, and he has made them credible to the country and the world. In his speech, Obama explained his decisions in a subtle and coherent way. He admitted that some problems are tough and allow no easy solution. He treated Americans as adults, and will have won their respect.

Do I wish he had been more gracious with and honest about the Bush administration officials whose policies he is benefiting from? Yes. But the bottom line is that Obama has taken a series of moderate and time-tested policy compromises. He has preserved and reformed them intelligently. He has fit them into a persuasive framework. By doing that, he has not made us less safe. He has made us more secure.

The odd thing is that Brooks views this as some sort of triumph, when it’s really an indictment. Not of Obama (whom I’ll get to in a moment), but of anyone who suddenly finds palatable virtually the same policies they condemned under Bush. Those people might as well say Since George Bush didn’t ask nicely, we will squawk, leak, and generally undermine the war on terror, because we’re that petty.

Oddly enough, far lefties and those who supported Bush all along both come out looking good, or at least consistent. Most conservatives I read are rather relieved that Obama has retained as much of Bush policy as he has, and the lefties have enough integrity to bitch about Obama.  Those who look terrible are those who flip-flopped, demonstrating once again the national security blackmail played by Democrats.

Hard as it is to admit, however, Brooks has a point about President Bush’s failure to realize that other’s opinions matter. Bush’s mistake was in thinking that the country would see him doing the right thing and that would be enough. He never adequately defended his policies. That defense would have been necessary in any event, but was even more necessary in light of the shrill attacks that were constantly waged against him.

As for Obama . . . well, as I’ve said before, I hope he was simply lying like crazy on the campaign trail about dismantling Bush security policies. Because the only other alternative is that he was very naive while campaigning and learned he was wrong upon taking office. And having someone that naive as president scares the crap out of me way more than having a liar for a president.

I know I’m late to this game, but I need to point out the best conservative take I’ve seen on the topic, which comes from Plumb Bob Blog (with my emphasis):

At the near extreme, this report might be nothing more than the opinion of a paranoiac leftist at DHS thinking out loud that the militias are likely to use current turmoil as a recruiting vehicle. If it’s that, the only problem is that the wording is so unspecific that they’ve taken the entire political right in a net that was aimed at catching hard-right militia. They could solve the entire furor by retracting the report and re-releasing it with tighter wording, including a definition of “extremist” that excludes ordinary Republican and Libertarian issue voters. Let’s hope they do that.

At the far extreme, however, a government that plans to institute restrictive and anti-libertarian measures in the near future might issue a report like this in advance to categorize as “extreme” the expected outrage of ordinary citizens against the loss of their liberties.

And let’s be candid, here: if the Obama administration does intend to remove Constitutionally-protected liberties and criminalize their political opposition, in a style reminiscent of the Bolsheviks in Russia or the Maoists in China, then they are correct in warning against violence from opponents. That will happen; they can count on it.

He’s not making a threat, he’s stating a rather obvious truth. And his analysis is very level-headed (as usual, though some of the commenters at his pst find it sensational). No shrieking or hyperventilating.

And in doing so, he also demonstrates the ridiculousness of the debates we keep having, and especially those we have had since 9/11, over the legitimacy of tactics instead of ends. At best it is unproductive, at worst it is a dishonest tool wielded by both sides of the political spectrum.

Plumb Bob Blog suggests violence from even mainstream conservatives would occur if their very right to advocate is criminalized and reform by any lawful means is made impossible. And by “impossible,” I mean in the sense that reform is prohibited because democratic functioning has been replaced by a totalitarian government that makes no mechanism for peacefule change available and criminalizes dissent. And I also mean that the government must do this in reality, not just in the fevered brains of its opponents. We wouldn’t have condemned violent German resistance to Hitler as terrorism. And we wouldn’t condemn it in the nightmare scenario I have painted, at least so long as it was targeted.

When you’re a member of the radical left or right, on the other hand, you set the bar for revolution much, much lower.  When the establishment of the utopia imagined by Bill Ayers’s Weather Underground group in the early ’70s was stymied by the political process — that is, when they were unable to effect lawful change through the political (or legal) process (assuming they were ever interested in doing so, and that’s a generous assumption)  they decided that the deaths of 25 million Americans was a perfectly acceptable price to pay for imposing the utopia by force and stifling dissent after that.

Is there any doubt we would support violent resistance in the first scenario and condemn it in the second?  Same means, different causes.

The radical right described by the report is undoubtedly subject to the same temptations as the fringe left. And the report does seem to concentrate only on the fringe. As the lefty blog Crooks and Liars notes (emphasis in the original):

[The report] delineates that the subject of its report is“rightwing extremists,” “domestic rightwing terrorist and extremist groups,” “terrorist groups or lone wolf extremists capable of carrying out violent attacks,” “white supremacists,” and similar very real threats described in similar language.

Nothing about conservatives. The word never appears in the report.

And these fringe elements will believe that peaceful reform is impossible, and revolution thus justified, despite the fact that their right to organize politically is not hampered  in any way, let alone criminalized. Just think back to all the wailing about Bushitler — wailing that continued for his entire administration precisely because the wailers were free to wail.

Still, there is room for concern about how the report defines radicals in part by their issues. And the administration left itself open to the charge that they were linking mainstream conservatives and radicals by releasing the report just prior to the nationwide tea-party protests. While I think Michelle Malkin’s arguments that the report slams mainstream conservatives is over the top — the language she cites appears only to describes radicals on those views who are unwilling to abide the democratic process — DHS would be wise to take Plumb Bob Blog’s suggestion to explain itself and the report — and modify it, if necessary, to demonstrate that it does indeed draw a distinction between mainstream conservative political opposition and violence-prone radicals on the same conservative issues. (Better than their buck-passing, to be sure.) The administration needs to make clear that mainstream conservatives opposed to illegal immigration or abortion are no more allies of radical groups willing to do violence over these issues than Nancy Pelosi is of some modern-day version of the 70s lefties ready to kill millions to impose their utopia.

So, am I pissed if DHS is concerned about fringe right-wing groups? No, not really, as long as they are concerned about fringe lefties and radical Islamists. Concerned, I said. Not criminalizing opposing political viewpoints.