Obsidian Wings

The Awful Truth

by hilzoy

In my last post, I noted the disquieting fact that Nick Gillespie, the editor of Reason, misquotes Carl Sandburg in the same way as Bill Ayers. Using Jack Cashill's methodology, I have now discovered frightening new evidence that Ayers actually ghostwrites Nick Gillespie's blog posts at Reason. Specifically:

* As Jack Cashill notes, both Bill Ayers and Barack Obama refer to a "yellow dog". Nick Gillespie uses the phrase "Yellow Dog Democrat". Coincidence? I think not.

* Bill Ayers refers to "ducks". So does Gillespie.

* Like Ayers, Nick Gillespie refers to "water buffaloes".

* Like Ayers, Nick Gillespie uses the word 'baleful', which even Jack Cashill had to look up.

* Like Ayers, and unlike Cashill, Nick Gillespie knows what the term "bill of particulars" means.

* Like Ayers, Nick Gillespie writes a lot about "social control".

* Gillespie also uses the phrase "beneath the surface", a sure sign of secretly being Bill Ayers.

* Gillespie does not talk much about eyebrows, a trademark Ayers word. However, his own eyebrows are rather impressive. Ayers probably implanted them as Gillespie slept.

I could go on, but you get the point. Faced with this mass of A-level matches, there is only one possible conclusion: the editor of the best libertarian magazine I know is actually Bill Ayers. 

In Which I Discover Bill Ayers In My Head

by hilzoy

Of all the bits of lunacy unleashed by the prospect that Barack Obama might actually win the election, my personal favorite was Jack Cashill's claim that Bill Ayers had ghostwritten Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father, based on such stunning evidence as this:

"Although there are only the briefest of literal sea experiences in Dreams, the following words appear in both Dreams and in Ayers' work: fog, mist, ships, seas, boats, oceans, calms, captains, charts, first mates, storms, streams, wind, waves, anchors, barges, horizons, ports, panoramas, moorings, tides, currents, and things howling, fluttering, knotted, ragged, tangled, and murky."

Guess what? Cashill is back with a new installment, which is even funnier. His first piece of evidence: Both Obama and Ayers not only quote the same line from Sandburg's Chicago, they misquote it in the same way: "Hog butcher to the world", not "Hog butcher for the world." I misremembered it as 'to the world', which just goes to show that I am, in fact, Bill Ayers. But I'm not alone: writers for the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and even, to my amazement, Reason's Nick Gillespie all turn out to be Ayers too. Who knew?

But wait! There's more:

"In his Indonesian backyard Obama discovered two "birds of paradise" running wild as well as chickens, ducks, and a "yellow dog with a baleful howl."

In Fugitive Days, there is even more "howling" than there is in Dreams.  Ayers places his "birds of paradise" in Guatemala.  He places his ducks and dogs together in a Vietnamese village being swept by merciless Americans.  In Parent, he talks specifically about a "yellow dog."   And he uses the word "baleful" to describe an "eye" in Fugitive Days. For the record, "baleful" means "threatening harm."  I had to look it up."

Wait: they both mentioned yellow dogs? And ducks? Well: that settles it. It also means that Bill Ayers wrote Old Yeller and Make Way For Ducklings. As a birder, I should also note that while Obama managed to put his birds of paradise in Indonesia, where Birds of Paradise are actually found, either Ayers' bird was an exotic captive or he just appropriated the name because it sounded nice.

I didn't have to look up 'baleful'. Funny thing, that. Moving right along:

"Ayers is fixated with faces, especially eyes.  He writes of "sparkling" eyes, "shining" eyes, "laughing" eyes, "twinkling" eyes, eyes "like ice," and people who are "wide-eyed" and "dark-eyed." 

As it happens, Obama is also fixated with faces, especially eyes.  He also writes of "sparkling" eyes, "shining" eyes, "laughing" eyes, "twinkling" eyes, and uses the phrases "wide-eyed" and "dark-eyed." Obama adds "smoldering eyes," "smoldering" being a word that he and Ayers inject repeatedly. Obama also uses the highly distinctive phrase "like ice," in his case to describe the glinting of the stars."

Twinkling eyes? That's evidence? 

Cashill does not think that Ayers wrote The Audacity of Hope, though. That had to have a different author. Why? 

"In Audacity of Hope, Obama does not use (...) most of the distinctive words or combinations of words in Dreams.  In Audacity, for instance, there are virtually no descriptions of faces or eyes, and the few that the author does use are flat and cliched -- like "brave face" or "sharp-eyed." In Dreams, seven different people "frown," twelve "grin," and six "squint."  In Audacity, no more than one person makes any of these gestures. (...)

These two Obama books almost assuredly had different primary authors."

It would be foolish, in the face of this evidence, to point out that Dreams is a memoir while Audacity is a campaign book about policy, and thus that one would expect both more description and more striking language in the first than in the second. Likewise, after extensive analysis, I have concluded that while I seem to myself to have written both my scholarly publications and my blog posts, I cannot have done so, since there are lots of phrases -- 'Oh Noes!' and 'Ya Think?' leap to mind, as does the word 'blog' -- that never appear in my scholarly work, but do appear in my blog posts.

The explanation is obvious. As I said, since I remembered Sandburg's poem wrong, Bill Ayers apparently ghostwrites my memories. He probably writes my blog posts too. I just wish he had told me himself, rather than leading me to infer his presence in my head on the basis of all this literary "analysis."

"Hot Air", Indeed.

by hilzoy

Here's an exchange from ABC News' special on Obama's health care proposal:

"Q: If your wife or your daughter became seriously ill, and things were not going well, and the plan physicians told you they were doing everything that could be done, and you sought out opinions from some medical leaders in major centers and they said there's another option you should pursue, but it was not covered in the plan, would you potentially sacrifice the health of your family for the greater good of insuring millions or would you do everything you possibly could as a father and husband to get the best health care and outcome for your family?

OBAMA (after talking about his grandmother): I think families all across America are going through decisions like that all the time, and you're absolutely right that if it's my family member, my wife, if it's my children, if it's my grandmother, I always want them to get the very best care.

Ed Morrissey calls this Obama's Michael Dukakis moment", and writes:

"Oopsie!  So ObamaCare for thee, but not for me?  Hope and change, baby! (...)

If ObamaCare isn't good enough for Sasha, Malia, or Michelle, then it's not good enough for America. Instead of fighting that impulse, Obama should be working to boost the private sector to encourage more care providers, less red tape and expense, and better care for everyone."

It's worth taking this apart a bit. It is true now, and would be true under any remotely plausible insurance scheme, that sometimes insurers will not pay for treatments, on the grounds that they are too experimental and unproven, or that they just plain don't work. That is true under our current system, and it would remain true under Obama's plan. 

It is also true, both under our present system and under Obama's proposal (and, for that matter, any other proposal out there) that people who want medical care that is not covered by insurance can get it, so long as they are willing to pay for it themselves (or find someone else to pay for it.) Thus, if Bill Gates wants to try some very expensive unproven treatment, he can. If I wanted that same treatment under the same conditions, I would not be able to have it. 

If this counts as "ObamaCare for Bill Gates but not for me", then it exists now, and will continue to exist under Obama's plan, and any other plan under even remotely serious consideration. Curiously, we have the same system for all sorts of things. Cars, for instance: much as I love my Prius, I would really, really love to have a vintage Jag. Unfortunately, I can't afford one. I imagine that Barack Obama can. Oh no: he's a hypocrite again: it's ObamaCar for him but not for the rest of us, who can't afford vintage Jags! I could go on -- ObamaFood, ObamaLivingRoomSets, and so forth, but you get the point.

The main difference between ObamaMicrowaves and ObamaCare is that the government does not so much as try to ensure that everyone will have a toaster oven. So Obama and I get what the government provides in the way of toaster ovens, namely nothing, and then we have the option to buy more. This is what we call "the market", and it means that some people end up better off, toaster-oven-wise, than others. 

With health care, by contrast, we guarantee that certain kinds of people -- the elderly, children, veterans, federal workers, etc. -- will get health insurance, which in turn provides them with health care -- at least, it's supposed to. As I said above, it will not pay for experimental treatments, or treatments that don't work. Nonetheless, unlike toaster ovens, the government provides some people with a decent level of health care; as with toaster ovens, they are free to get more.

Obama's health care plan would extend insurance to more people; ideally, to everyone. The point is to put a floor under everyone -- and a decent one. It's also to give them more choices about the health insurance they or their employers purchase. The point was never to put a ceiling on how much people can spend, or to make absolutely sure that Bill Gates has no advantage over anyone else, as far as health care is concerned. 

Nothing -- nothing -- about this idea is in any way inconsistent with the idea that someone who can pay for health care that his or her insurance company declines to cover should be able to do so. The alternative would be to forbid people to get any care that is not covered by their insurance. Again, that is something that no one has seriously proposed. Surely Ed Morrissey isn't faulting Obama for not proposing to forbid people from buying health care on his own -- is he?

Who Is This "Hard Left" Of Whom You Speak?

by hilzoy

Andy McCarthy has gone off his meds again:

"The fact is that, as a man of the hard Left, Obama is more comfortable with a totalitarian Islamic regime than he would be with a free Iranian society. In this he is no different from his allies like the Congressional Black Caucus and Bill Ayers, who have shown themselves perfectly comfortable with Castro and Chàvez.  Indeed, he is the product of a hard-Left tradition that apologized for Stalin and was more comfortable with the Soviets than the anti-Communists (and that, in Soros parlance, saw George Bush as a bigger terrorist than bin Laden).

Because of obvious divergences (inequality for women and non-Muslims, hatred of homosexuals) radical Islam and radical Leftism are commonly mistaken to be incompatible. In fact, they have much more in common than not, especially when it comes to suppression of freedom, intrusiveness in all aspects of life, notions of "social justice," and their economic programs. (...) The divergences between radical Islam and radical Leftism are much overrated — "equal rights" and "social justice" are always more rally-cry propaganda than real goals for totalitarians, and hatred of certain groups is always a feature of their societies."

When Rich Lowry politely demurs, McCarthy doubles down:

"As between freedom and dictatorship, in principle Obama is fine with dictatorship -- we are seeing less and less freedom in our own country, and I believe Obama (who is dirigiste by nature) values stability over the rambunctiousness of a free society. He has certain values, and while he'd be delighted to have a free society arrive at them, he'd rather see them imposed if the alternative was a free society likely to shun them."

Leave aside the fact that this is completely insane. And leave aside as well the fact that this was written by Andy "detaining US citizens without charges is fine" "waterboarding someone once or twice is not torture" McCarthy. What puzzles me is this: I have spent a lot of time in places where one might suppose the Hard Left might be found. I mean, I grew up in the Kremlin on the Charles, for heaven's sake. Moreover, I know some people who are fairly far to the left. And yet I'm not sure I've ever met anyone in this country who even remotely resembles McCarthy's "Hard Left". 

My guitar teacher might have -- he didn't talk politics enough for me to be sure -- but that was in the early '70s. I might have found one had I ever ventured into Revolution Books in Harvard Square, but I can't recall that I did. There's one other person I knew back in the mid '80s who might have fit the bill, though I'm not sure how much of what makes me think this wasn't just general obnoxiousness, rather than a substantive political view. 

But with these possible exceptions, none of the people I have known, in a long life of knowing leftists, has been "fine with dictatorship". None of them has the slightest interest in the "suppression of freedom", or "intrusiveness in all aspects of life". Like most people, they would prefer that the policies they think are best get adopted, but none of them would want to impose those policies by force if they lost the political argument. 

So here's my question: have I just been hanging out in the wrong places? Are there, in fact, any substantial numbers of "Hard Leftists", as Andy McCarthy uses that term -- not just the handful of surviving Stalinists that I'm sure exist somewhere in the US, but an appreciable number of people who are "fine with dictatorship"? And if so, how did I miss them?

Ross Douthat Makes No Sense

by hilzoy

Ross Douthat has a very peculiar column on abortion in the New York Times. In it, he asserts, falsely, that "under current law, if you want to restrict abortion, post-viability procedures are the only kind you’re allowed to even regulate": in fact, it is possible to regulate abortions before viability, and the Supreme Court in Casey upheld precisely such restrictions. He claims, also falsely, that "Americans aren’t permitted to debate anything" besides post-viability abortions (which would surely come as a surprise to the First Amendment), and that abortion needs to be "returned to the democratic process." As Freddie at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen notes:

"Setting aside the banal fact that the judicial system is a part of our democratic process, there is a clear, straightforward and well-known way to overturn Roe v. Wade– pass a constitutional amendment criminalizing abortion. That’s how you override Supreme Court decisions; that’s how Dred Scott was effectively overturned. That’s how the federal income tax was passed. There’s a method for overturning Supreme Court law you don’t like, it’s well known, it’s time tested, and it’s as open to abortion foes as it is to anyone else."

But what's really odd is his reasoning. Try, if you dare, to make sense of this:

"The argument for unregulated abortion rests on the idea that where there are exceptions, there cannot be a rule. Because rape and incest can lead to pregnancy, because abortion can save women's lives, because babies can be born into suffering and certain death, there should be no restrictions on abortion whatsoever.

As a matter of moral philosophy, this makes a certain sense. Either a fetus has a claim to life or it doesn't. The circumstances of its conception and the state of its health shouldn't enter into the equation.

But the law is a not a philosophy seminar. It's the place where morality meets custom, and compromise, and common sense. And it can take account of tragic situations without universalizing their lessons."

First of all, the claim that "where there is an exception, there cannot be a rule" does not make sense as a matter or moral philosophy. If it's possible to distinguish clearly between the exceptions and the other cases, there's no problem at all with having a rule. This is why we can have such rules as: No parking in a handicapped spot, unless you have a handicapped badge. When it's not easy to tell the exceptions from the rest, whether or not it's OK to have a rule depends on how bad it is to miss those exceptions, and how bad it is not to have a rule. 

There are surely circumstances in which it would be fine to drive on the left, but we do not normally think that these should prevent us from having a rule about which side of the street to drive on. On the other hand, the existence of people who have been falsely convicted of capital crimes is a much more compelling argument against capital punishment: even one mistake is a horrendous injustice.

More importantly, consider this sentence:

"Because rape and incest can lead to pregnancy, because abortion can save women's lives, because babies can be born into suffering and certain death, there should be no restrictions on abortion whatsoever."

How on earth is that supposed to be evidence for this?

"Either a fetus has a claim to life or it doesn't. The circumstances of its conception and the state of its health shouldn't enter into the equation."

The whole point of bringing up cases of rape and incest is to argue that the circumstances of a fetus' conception are relevant to the question whether abortion should be legal. If we were convinced that a fetus was a full person, they wouldn't be: we do not think it's OK for a mother to kill her five year old child on the grounds that it is the product of rape or incest. Likewise, the point of bringing up the fact that "babies can be born into suffering and certain death" is to say that the state of the fetus' health is relevant, not that it isn't. 

What Douthat wrote makes about as much sense as saying: "The argument for not hitting yourself on the head with a hammer is that it would cause you a whole lot of pain. As a matter of moral philosophy, this makes a certain sense: hitting yourself on the head with a hammer is either right or wrong regardless of how it makes you feel." To which the only possible response is: Huh???

Douthat's column begins with a rather lovely meditation on the hard cases that George Tiller had to deal with: abortions on "women facing life-threatening complications, on women whose children would be born dead or dying, on women who had been raped, on "women" who were really girls of 10." He doesn't actually say much about how we should deal with these cases, other than the part I already quoted: the law "can take account of tragic situations without universalizing their lessons." How it should take these cases into account, and why it shouldn't universalize their lessons, are left shrouded in mystery.

And yet, somehow, he ends up here:

"If abortion were returned to the democratic process, this landscape would change dramatically. Arguments about whether and how to restrict abortions in the second trimester -- as many advanced democracies already do -- would replace protests over the scope of third-trimester medical exemptions.

The result would be laws with more respect for human life, a culture less inflamed by a small number of tragic cases -- and a political debate, God willing, unmarred by crimes like George Tiller’s murder."

Because, as we all know, giving terrorists what they want is the surest way to prevent more terrorism.

There are arguments for making abortion illegal. I don't accept them, but they exist. Douthat should try making them sometime.

Stuart Taylor Goes Through The Looking Glass

by hilzoy

In his column this week (h/t), Stuart Taylor argues that most Americans want racial preferences abolished, and 71% want the Ricci decision overturned. (That's the case in which New Haven threw out a test for promotions when all but one of the candidates who passed were white.) 

Personally, I don't think that judges should decide cases on the basis of polls, especially when the poll questions do not include a summary of the relevant laws and precedents. I would have thought that conservatives who oppose judicial activism might agree. But not Stuart Taylor:

"But is it judicial activism when the justices stretch the Constitution to go over the heads of the political branches -- which are dominated by special-interest lobbies -- not to overrule the voters but rather to give them what they want?

Maybe not. And it's clear that the voters want racially preferential affirmative-action programs abolished.

Scholars have long applauded liberal justices who have stretched the Constitution's meaning to get rid of unpopular laws that had persisted only because of special-interest pressure. One example is the 1965 decision striking down Connecticut's anti-contraception law.

Conservatives could invoke similar logic, as well as several major Supreme Court precedents, to justify curbing unpopular racial-preference programs that -- like that anti-contraception law -- have persisted only because of special-interest pressure."

I'm opposed to judicial activism, though I disagree with a lot of commenters about what counts as 'activism'. I don't think it's activism when courts settle on a specific meaning for a contested term that Congress has not defined, for instance. Much more controversially, I think there's a very interesting argument to be had about what response to the existence of the ninth amendment would count as 'activist'.* In general, I don't think it's always obvious when someone is engaging in "judicial activism", but I do think that it should be avoided.

But I would have thought that if anything counts as judicial activism, "stretching the Constitution" to enact policies that the Congress has not passed would. But apparently I am wrong! I look forward to further articles by Stuart Taylor explaining why it would not be "judicial activism" if the Supreme Court created a program of national health insurance -- after all, a majority of people in the US favor that as well.

In all seriousness: I can't believe that Stuart Taylor wrote this article with a straight face. Of course it's judicial activism when you "stretch the Constitution" to enact new policies. Of course you don't find out how a case should be decided by taking a poll, especially when that case involves the application of some fairly complicated law that there's no reason to think the poll respondents know much about, and double especially when you claim to be concerned about judicial activism.

It's hackery, pure and simple.

***

*The ninth amendment states: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." This plainly implies that the people have rights other than those enumerated in the Constitution, and that these should be respected, but it does not say what these are. Is it more "activist" to try to come up with some such rights, at least in the easiest cases (e.g., the right not to have the government expropriate one of your kidneys, which the framers would surely not have looked kindly on), or to pretend that the ninth amendment does not exist? Isn't it plausible to read the ninth amendment as implying that the courts should protect not only those rights that are enumerated in the Constitution but other unenumerated rights as well, and doesn't this imply that it actually invites "judicial activism"? 

If so, doesn't the ninth amendment force us to choose between the 'activism' of discovering unenumerated rights, and the opposite 'activism' of pretending that there is no ninth amendment? And if you choose the latter on the grounds that granting courts the power to discover new rights in the Constitution is too dangerous, aren't you just disregarding the plain text of the Constitution in favor of producing the consequences that you think are best -- which is judicial activism if anything is?

They Can't Help Themselves

by hilzoy

Even by Republican standards, the Sotomayor meltdown is pretty impressive. Tom Tancredo calls La Raza, which is a pretty ordinary advocacy group, "a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses." Newt Gingrich writes that we cannot accept Sotomayor's rather anodyne remarks about experience being helpful in judging "if Civil War, suffrage, and Civil Rights are to mean anything", which would surely be news to all the African-Americans who are not presently enslaved. 

Rush Limbaugh compares Sotomayor to David Duke. Michael Goldfarb and John Derbyshire's readers are going on about the vast privileges enjoyed by Puerto Ricans who grow up poor in the projects. The Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes thinks her summa doesn't mean much, since "there’s some schools and maybe Princeton’s not one of them, where if you don’t get Summa Cum Laude then or some kind of Cum Laude, you then, you’re a D+ student." (For the record, when I was there, Princeton gave summas to around 5% of its students.)

But really, nothing quite compares to G. Gordon Liddy saying not just that she is a member of La Raza, "which means in illegal alien, "the race"", but this:

"Let’s hope that the key conferences aren’t when she’s menstruating or something, or just before she’s going to menstruate. That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then."

Think of the possibilities. She could get into one of her quaint native costumes, go berserk, and start writing on the walls in menstrual blood with a tampon, like so:

(Yes, of course I know that Quetzalcoatl is an Aztec God, and Aztlan is the mythical home of the Aztecs, and Aztecs are Mexican, and Sonia Sotomayor is Puerto Rican. But I'm channeling G. Gordon Liddy's nightmares here, and do you think he knows the difference?)

Seriously: Obama is a serious student of the civil rights movement, which in turn drew a lot of inspiration from Gandhi. Both Gandhi and the Civil Rights movement made brilliant use of the following method: you do something right, which you suspect might lead your opponents to do something wrong. If you are right about them, they discredit themselves, without your having to lift a finger. If you're wrong, you are pleasantly surprised. But you do not have to do anything wrong or underhanded yourself, nor do you in any way have to hope that your opponents are bad people. 

That's what he's doing now. He has chosen a judge who is by any standard exceptionally qualified, and who has, in addition, a fairly conservative judicial temperament. She sticks close to the law; she follows precedent; having read several of her opinions, if I have any criticism of her, it's that not seen much evidence of an overarching judicial philosophy other than restraint. (To be clear: if a judge has to lack something, I'd rather it be an overarching philosophy than devotion to the law as written. But I'd rather have both.)

But she is also a Puerto Rican woman. If the Republican Party were led by sane and decent people, this would not matter. But they aren't. As a result, they seem to be unable to see anything about her besides her ethnicity and her gender. The idea that she must be a practitioner of identity politics, a person whose every success is due to preferential treatment, etc., is apparently one they absolutely cannot resist. 

All Obama had to do was nominate an excellent justice, and all that is made plain. 

And I hate it. I want to have a reasonable opposition party. I also don't want people of color, and especially kids, to have to listen to all this bigotry. We should be better than this.

Historical Amnesia

by hilzoy

This is a very silly thing to say:

"Judge Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court is a historic milestone for Latinos, but it resonates well beyond Hispanic pride. It is perhaps the most potent symbol yet of a 21st century rapprochement between the U.S.'s two largest minorities, Latino Americans and African Americans, who in the 20th century could be as violently distrustful of each other as blacks and whites were."

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

"One must be clear about what constituted "violent" distrust "between" blacks and whites in the 20th century. It meant thousands of whites, in Atlanta, in 1906, assembling on the streets to randomly murder black people. In Springfield, Illinois, in 1908,  it meant whites pillaging a Jewish businesses for arms, and then proceeding to the black side of town, attacking black business and black homes, and thousands of black people fleeing for their lives. It meant whites--across the nation--in 1910 assembling in mobs and murdering random black people (On the 4th of July!). The cause? Jack Johnson had the temerity to win the championship. It meant whites in East St. Louis, in 1918, perpetrating  a pogrom against the city's black population, and killing over 100 black people because, "southern niggers need a lynching."

I have not known Latinos in the 20th Century to perpetrate a Red Summer. I have not known blacks to lynch Latino veterans, returning from war, in their uniforms. The fact is that there was no violent distrust between blacks and whites in the 20th century. Rather there was a one-sided war waged against black people by white terrorists, which government, in the best cases, failed to prevent, in many cases, stood idly by, and in the worst cases actually aided and abetted. I'm sorry but comparing that to whatever's happening between blacks and Latinos, is a slander against both those groups, and an amazingly naive take on the history of white America in regards to race."

There seems to be a rash of naivete on this subject lately. Here's Rush Limbaugh, quoted in TAPPED:

"If ever a civil rights movement was needed in America, it is for the Republican Party. If ever we needed to start marching for freedom and Constitutional rights, it's for the Republican Party. The Republican Party is today's oppressed minority. It knows how to behave as one. It shuts up. It doesn't cross bridges, it doesn't run into the Bull Connors of the Democrat Party. It is afraid of the firehouses and the dogs, it's compliant. The Republican Party today has become totally complacent. They are an oppressed minority, they know their position, they know their place. They go to the back of the bus, they don't use the right restroom and the right drinking fountain, and they shut up."

Leaving aside the peculiar claim that the Republican Party is non-confrontational at present, the idea that Republicans are being denied their civil rights the way blacks were under Jim Crow -- that they do not have the right to vote, and are beaten up or killed when they try to exercise it, for instance -- is just bizarre beyond belief. 

Hyperbole is one thing, but complete distortion of history is another. I don't expect better from Limbaugh -- John Cole wrote that "the right wing apparently spent the last eight years combining the highly successful tactics of Code Pink and the comedic stylings of Hee Haw!", and he's right -- but the first paragraph I quoted appeared in Time. And Time's columnists should know better than to confuse friction between members of two groups with a government-enforced regime of terror that lasted for centuries.

Sotomayor: Reactions

by hilzoy

Sen. James Inhofe on Sotomayor (h/t):

"In the months ahead, it will be important for those of us in the U.S. Senate to weigh her qualifications and character as well as her ability to rule fairly without undue influence from her own personal race, gender, or political preferences."

Strange to say, Senator Inhofe had no such concerns about Samuel Alito. He didn't wonder whether Alito's personal race or gender -- or even his impersonal race or gender, whatever those might be -- would weigh too heavily with him, or prevent him from ruling fairly. I wonder why not?

Meanwhile, Paul at PowerLine headlines his post "Che Guevara In Robes". I've been trying to think of something Sotomayor and Che have in common besides being Hispanic, but I'm coming up dry. But that's nothing compared to Mike Huckabee thinking her first name is Maria. Any moment now, I suppose someone will ask how we know she's in this country legally.

Of course, none of these responses really compares to John "No law can prevent the President from crushing the testicles of a terrorist's child" Yoo informing us of the real meaning of the Sotomayor nomination: that despite his best efforts, empathy has triumphed -- and that this is a bad thing.

Yikes.

Just Shoot Me Now

by hilzoy

I liked most of Obama's speech. If it weren't for that one little bit about preventive detention, I'd be as happy as a clam. But there it was:

"But even when this process is complete, there may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, in some cases because evidence may be tainted, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States. Examples of that threat include people who've received extensive explosives training at al Qaeda training camps, or commanded Taliban troops in battle, or expressed their allegiance to Osama bin Laden, or otherwise made it clear that they want to kill Americans. These are people who, in effect, remain at war with the United States.

Let me repeat: I am not going to release individuals who endanger the American people. Al Qaeda terrorists and their affiliates are at war with the United States, and those that we capture -- like other prisoners of war -- must be prevented from attacking us again. Having said that, we must recognize that these detention policies cannot be unbounded. They can't be based simply on what I or the executive branch decide alone. That's why my administration has begun to reshape the standards that apply to ensure that they are in line with the rule of law. We must have clear, defensible, and lawful standards for those who fall into this category. We must have fair procedures so that we don't make mistakes. We must have a thorough process of periodic review, so that any prolonged detention is carefully evaluated and justified.

I know that creating such a system poses unique challenges. And other countries have grappled with this question; now, so must we. But I want to be very clear that our goal is to construct a legitimate legal framework for the remaining Guantanamo detainees that cannot be transferred. Our goal is not to avoid a legitimate legal framework. In our constitutional system, prolonged detention should not be the decision of any one man. If and when we determine that the United States must hold individuals to keep them from carrying out an act of war, we will do so within a system that involves judicial and congressional oversight. And so, going forward, my administration will work with Congress to develop an appropriate legal regime so that our efforts are consistent with our values and our Constitution."

Let's start with the good part. If we have to have preventive detention, it ought to be subject to the kind of oversight Obama is talking about. There should be rules. There should be checks and balances. I like that part.

But that's like saying: if we have to have censorship or prohibitions on particular religions, they ought to be subject to judicial oversight. Yay for judicial oversight. Hurrah for explicit legal frameworks. Whoopee. That said:

Preventive detention????????

No. Wrong answer. 

If we don't have enough evidence to charge someone with a crime, we don't have enough evidence to hold them. Period. 

The power to detain people without filing criminal charges against them is a dictatorial power. It is inherently arbitrary. What is it that they are supposed to have done? If it is not a crime, why on earth not make it one? If it is a crime, and we have evidence that this person committed it, but that evidence was extracted under torture, then perhaps we need to remind ourselves of the fact that torture is unreliable. If we just don't have enough evidence, that's a problem, but it's also a problem with detaining them in the first place. 

What puzzles me even more is this, from a New York Times story about this:

"The two participants (...) said Mr. Obama told them he was thinking about "the long game" -- how to establish a legal system that would endure for future presidents."

The long game? If we have a need for preventive detention, which I do not accept, it's a short-term need produced by Messrs. Bush and Cheney. The long game is the preservation of our republic. It is not a game that we can win by forfeiting our freedom.

People seem to be operating under the assumption that there is something we can do that will bring us perfect safety. There is no such thing. We can try our best, and do all the things the previous administration failed to do -- secure Russian loose nukes, harden our critical infrastructure, not invade irrelevant countries, etc. -- but we will never be completely safe. Not even if we give up the freedom that is our most precious inheritance as Americans.

Freedom is not always easy, and it is not always safe. Neither is doing the right thing. Nonetheless, we ought to be willing to try. I wish I saw the slightest reason to believe that we are.