Judicial filibusters, then and now: Thomas Jipping has a telling article about Democrats who have, in the past, spoken out against filibustering the President’s judicial nominees (during, of course, the Clinton administration) but who’s actions these days are diametrically opposed to their words, allowing a minority to hijack a Constitutionally-mandated up-or-down vote on the nominees themselves.

This is, of course, no big news; Democrats have been the perennial overall winners in the Situational Ethics category (with Clinton being the “Best in Show”), but now we have (more) statistics.

It’s this sort of behavior that has Republicans (and some Democrats) putting forth what they call the “nuclear” option; reducing the number of votes needed to break the filibuster for executive nominees. Democrats have upped the ante every time a Republican has been in the Oval Office, and now their stonewalling has brought us here; 2 years into the Bush administration, and many of his original nominees are still cooling their heels. Issue litmus tests, stalling in committee and other tactics have been used by them to prevent Republicans from putting people on the bench, and now they’re going further than ever before to get their way, in spite of the will of the people of America who put them in the minority.

And this from Democrats who have (outwardly) eschewed litmus tests for judges in the past and who have been the biggest (outward) detractors of partisanship. Obviously, it’s all been outward. As Jipping says, actions speak louder than words.

Dennis Miller writing in the Wall Street Journal (yes, that Dennis Miller, the “Saturday Night Live” alum, and yes, that Wall Street Journal) has a brilliant deconstruction of Norman Mailer’s general outlook on Bush and Baghdad.

His basic contention is that we went to war with Iraq because with the dominance of white American men in the boxing ring, the office and the home front eroded, George W. Bush thought they needed to know they were still good at something. Mr. Mailer has a degree in aeronautical engineering from Harvard so he had to know that argument wouldn’t fly. But then again, maybe this claptrap is just a grand put-on. The fact that I and many others can’t differentiate anymore does not augur well for Norm’s legend.

Miller, in his typical brand of humor (minus the expletives; it is, after all that Wall Street Journal) gives many reasons, both general and specific, why Mailer and those like him are becoming irrelevant today; they’ve lost touch with reality.

No liberal bias in the media? Not according to long-time journalist Peter Collins, whose career spanned 30 years and many news organizations. According to him:

“[Former ABC News executive producer] Bill Lord had supported me in my coverage of Central America, against the wishes of Peter Jennings,” Collins said. “[Jennings] was unhappy with my coverage because I tried to tell both sides of the story,” he added.

Imagine that; the anchor of a major media news show upset over balanced coverage. Well, no need to imagine, it continues on today.

“Because I presume that Peter Jennings felt that the Sandinista regime, which was a communist regime – no questions about it – were mere benign agrarian reformers … [Jennings] was a believer, was and is,” Collins explained.

Collins doesn’t just cite ABC, but many other organizations, and as far back as the 1930s. But he does see hope in “breaking the monopoly of the establishment news media”,

“If it were not for for Rush Limbaugh, the Washington Times,and Fox News — those organizations, entities, have finally managed to break the dam,” Collins said. “Ph.D. pieces could be written about this subject, dozens of them.”

As Limbaugh has often said, he doesn’t need equal time, he is equal time. Collins would agree.

The Weekly Standard has a graphic of the back page of its May 5th issue on their web site. It’s a parody, showing what “Ye Newe York Times” might have looked like on November 11, 1781, had the current liberal bent of the paper been evident back then. Good for a chuckle.

Remember former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, the guy who claimed that Paula Jones, et. al. were just going after Clinton so they could get lucrative book deals?

He’s got a book deal. (And by the way, Amazon doesn’t list any books by Paula Jones.)

I was out of town on business all last week, hence the dearth of postings. But I’m baaaaack. 🙂

OK, I’ll admit it. I jumped way too fast on reports of WMD’s discovered in Iraq during the war; reports that turned out to be false. I decided from then on to give some time to reports such as those to see if they passed scrutiny before passing them on and commenting on them.

And maybe I’m breaking my rule this time, but the London Telegraph is reporting today (free registration required for reading) that they have documents retrieved from the (former) Iraqi intelligence agency (Mukhabarat) describing from at least February 1998 a close relationship between al-Qaeda (and Osama bin Laden himself) and the Iraqi government. This of course proves what the Bush administration had a tough time proving before the war. They had some circumstantial evidence the Powell presented to the UN, but it wasn’t very convincing. Now, however, they’ve been vindicated to a good degree, and can now more properly claim that the war in Iraq was, at least in part, a portion of the war on terrorism.

My hunch back then, during Powell’s presentation, was that they had other evidence but didn’t want to tip their hand quite as much as they did with the WMD-related photos and recordings. But they believed they had enough evidence that the connection was there, and that documents like these would show up following the war. That was a serious gamble, but it appears to have paid off.

According to Taranto’s Best of the Web Today, the Marines, in their own way, did what they could to protect the museum pieces.

And why didn’t America stop such looting as did take place? Lt. Col. Eric Schwartz of the U.S. Army’s Third Infantry Division “said he couldn’t move into the museum compound and protect it from looters last week because his soldiers were taking fire from the building–and were determined not to respond.”

They couldn’t stick around because they were being shot at, and they wouldn’t shoot back with the big guns for fear of destroying things. Time for the carping to cease.
Oh, and not everything was lost. Taranto also quotes a Wall Street Journal article:

Thanks to Iraqi preparations before the war, it seems the worst has been avoided. Donny George, the director-general of restoration at the Iraqi Antiquities Department, Wednesday said his staff had preserved the museum’s most important treasures, including the kings’ graves of Ur and the Assyrian bulls. These objects were hidden in vaults that haven’t been violated by looters.

“Most of the things were removed. We knew a war was coming, so it was our duty to protect everything,” Mr. George said. “We thought there would be some sort of bombing at the museum. We never thought it could be looted.”

Blame the looters, not the Marines.

I’ve been trying to put into words how I feel about the left’s hue and cry about the Baghdad museum that got ransacked and why the Marines didn’t protect it vs. the rescue of children from Saddam’s jails. Not to worry, though. Hugh Hewitt has done a masterful job in pointing out, not just the absurdity of the complaints, but the lack of discernment of the difference between good and evil.

Forced to choose between leaving the museum unharmed and freeing the children from the now infamous children’s jail, which would you choose? On a broader scale, would you prefer the order of Saddam’s regime, including the horrific practices of its jails, or a week of looting and chaos?

Even if there was no specific point in time when the choice between the museum and the jail was required, there are still priorities that need to be followed, and guarding a museum has got to be much farther down on the list than rescuing children.

And if one child died in there while we were guarding the museum, you gotta know that the left would be saying just the opposite. “Why were we guarding bones and pottery when children were dying?” They’d be right, but only by chance, because they’re reflexively anti-military and the military would’ve been wrong to do that.

A good article, with many ramifications.

Assuming

1 – Country A invades Country B.
2 – Country C drives Country A out of Country B.
3 – Country A signs a cease-fire agreement with Country C, contingent on certain conditions that must be met by Country A.
4 – Country A violates those conditions.
5 – Country C resumes hostilities.

Would the action represented by step 5 be considered:

A – As mentioned above, a resumption of hostilities started in step 2.
B – A new war in which Country C is making a pre-emptive strike.

If you answered A, you’d be right. And the fact is, you’d be right regardless of the time spent deciding on whether step 4 had actually occurred. For example, if it took 12 years (due to international foot-dragging) to come to the conclusion that the cease-fire agreement had been violated, you still couldn’t answer B.

Well, I guess you could if you were stridently anti-Bush, or the New York Times…or both. The Times, reporting on their CBS/New York Times poll, said, “But a majority remains opposed to a policy of pre-emptive attack like the one President Bush invoked in invading Iraq…”. However, the way the question is reported in the article suggests the Times was manipulating, not just the results, but the questions themselves.

Amid poll questions about the war with Iraq, the article says this:

And the nation has yet to embrace the tactical doctrine of pre-emption Mr. Bush advanced to justify the war in Iraq and, potentially, an invasion of Syria, North Korea or Iran. For example, 51 percent said the United States should not invade another nation unless it was attacked first.

First of all, the current hostilities with Iraq are the result of Iraq failing to comply with a cease-fire agreement and 18 UN resolutions. That cease-fire agreement was part of a war that was clearly backed by the international community. There was no pre-emption involved.

Further, the question imposes the belief that this war was pre-emptive on the respondent. The Times says the question was whether the United States should invade another nation pre-emptively. A “Yes” answer to this expands to, “Yes, this war was pre-emptive, and we should do it again”, while a “No” answer says, “Yes, this war was pre-emptive, and we should not do it again”. The premise of the question is false, but that one little word “another” no doubt flew by respondents, even those who didn’t think this was a pre-emptive attack. When we’re taking a poll, how many of us spend the time to carefully judge any hidden assumptions made by the question and just answer it quickly? Most, I’m sure. Thus the Times gets to proclaim a falsehood because it manipulated the question.

I really don’t like poll reporting. It’s simply the artificial generation of news, and the whims of people so easily change in these days of the 24-hour news cycle. But that doesn’t stop organizations like these from using them and manipulating them. Granted, most of the rest of the numbers look very good for Bush, making them difficult to downplay. But be careful when reading polling data and look for hidden assumptions. A single word can make the difference.

And I wish journalists would learn a little bit of very recent history on this whole Iraq situation. The whole “pre-emptive” kick they’re on doesn’t stand up in the face of it. Once again (and again, and again), history refutes liberal catch-phrases and assumptions.

I check my web server logs often, and today I noticed that someone came to this site from another conservative site called Anti-Pope. No, he’s not plotting the downfall of Pope John Paul II. You’ll have to read his FAQ to know what he means by that and where he stands on the issues.