Category Archives: America

Updated: Media’s Judicial Jiu-Jitsu For ‘Da Big Man’

America, Barack Obama, Democracy, IMMIGRATION, Justice, Law, Media, Multiculturalism, Race, The Zeitgeist

The excerpt is from my new column, now on Taki’s Magazine, “Big Man Obama and His Diversity Princess”:

“We’ve been ‘spared’ warning of Strongman Obama’s Orwellian overreach because a Big Man has big guns: the menagerie of morons that is the American media.

The Chief is working in the same tradition as The Decider, only with even less scrutiny and far more impunity.

…the media’s judicial jiu-jitsu has been unconscionable. Are the legal writings and judicial rulings of Judge Sotomayor being scrutinized? Not on your life. Right away, the usual menagerie of morons took on the construction of a meta-argument invalidating the GOP’s yet-to-be-made case against Sotomayor, if you get my drift.

An argument against an argument!

From NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell to the lowliest Democratic strategist: all are advising viewers, first, that to oppose Sotomayor is to risk Hispanic ire. And second, that in order to dodge death by demographics, Republicans must continue to court Latinos slavishly.

For example, making too much of Sotomayor’s Wise Latina Woman cretinous comment is unwise for Republicans, the talking twits tell us. Judge Sotomayor suggested in 2001 that ‘a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.’

The consensus among the commentariat is that this is no time for the GOP to come to the defense of paleface: white judges or white firefighters. (Sotomayor washed her hands off the white, New Haven firefighters, and upheld racial discrimination against them.) The so-called incontrovertible truth at which the Obama media minions are getting is this:

The GOP’s powerbase hangs on Hispanics.

Dogged demographer Steve Sailer has been dispelling this manufactured dogma convincingly for close to a decade …”

The complete column is “Media’s Judicial Jiu-Jitsu For ‘Da Big Man.'”

Miss the weekly column on WND? Catch it on Taki’s Magazine, every Saturday.

Update II: Lady La Raza (Sotomayor: Spanish For Racial Set-Asides)

Affirmative Action, America, Barack Obama, General, Justice, Law, Multiculturalism, Pseudo-intellectualism

Update I (May 29): Go Tancredo! “ALL FOR THE RACE; NOTHING FOR THE REST” is how Colorado Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo encapsulated La Raza’s mission. On CNN, Tancredo went on to call La Raza, to which the newly nominated Lady Justice belongs, a Latino KKK. As I write, the heroic Tancredo is hammering David Shuster, an MSNBC hombre—who tried to pin him up against the wall—refusing to back down, backing-up his words impeccably with a tale of La Raza’s honoring of a gentleman whose cri de coeur was “eliminate the Gringo.”

And you know what? When meek WASPs refuse to turn the other cheek, bullies back down. Likewise, Shuster was shushed.

Update II (May 29): Margaret Warner of the PBS’s News Hour talked to legal scholars Emma Coleman Jordan of Georgetown University Law School and Paul Cassell of the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah about Sotomayor’s judicial record. Coleman, an African-American woman, called Sotomayor brilliant. What else? Cassell, who actually could be a candidate for this liberally applied designation, said he had read very many of her decisions and that she “breaks to the Left,” sides with the plaintiff in so-called sexual harassment cases, and has a pedestrian mind that is no match for Antonin Scalia’s. That’s the good news.

As readers have noted in this space, one doesn’t wish for a formidable liberal legal theorist, but, rather, for a plodder; someone who can barely digest the facts of a case, much less find the intellectual wherewithal to apply critical race theory to the facts. You don’t want a woman capable of expansive theoretical formulations. However, it is quite clear that this is a double-edged sword; it portends a gravitation toward group think. I am Latina hear me roar, and all that stuff. Sotomayor is Spanish for racial set-asides. It is quite clear from Staurt Taylor’s stellar coverage (National Journal Online) that Sotomayor thinks racial groups ought to be represented in a society’s institutions commensurate with their percentage in that society. An absence of such representation, in this post hoc illogic, indicates discrimination. A subtle mind indeed.

(May 28): In a previous post I said that Obama, who is married to an intellectual pygmy — a mediocrity who graduated from an Ivy League university — seems wedded to the idea of entrenching her ilk everywhere. Pat Buchanan’s on the same page, although Mr. Buchanan is more positive than I am about the Republican’s capacity to counter Obama:

“The process by which Sotomayor was selected testifies to what we can expect in Obama’s America. Not a single male was in the final four. And she was picked over the three other women because she was a person of color, a ‘two-fer.’ Affirmative action start to finish.

Reading 30 of her opinions, GW law professor Jonathan Turley found them ‘notable’ for ‘lack of depth.’

Liberal law professor and Supreme Court expert Jeff Rosen of The New Republic reports, after talking to prosecutors and law clerks, that Sotomayor covers up her intellectual inadequacy by bullying from the bench.

The lady is a lightweight.

What should Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee do?

Abjure the vicious tactics Democrats used on Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito. Lay out the lady’s record. And let America get a close look at the kind of justice Barack Obama believes in.”

Updated: The Politics Of Torture

America, Barack Obama, Bush, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Homeland Security, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Neoconservatism, Republicans, Terrorism

When I think of a libertarian-leaning patriotic warrior, I think of Michael Scheuer. The chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, Scheuer is also the man behind the enhanced interrogation methods, which the hard-left and their friends on the libertarian left would have you believe are as heinous as the war crime at Hiroshima.

Like myself, Scheuer opposed the invasion of Iraq, opposes the occupation of Afghanistan, the presence of permanent troops across the world, and the nation-building farce. Scheuer, like this classical liberal writer, has excoriated Bush as much as he has Obama (adjusted for time in office).

Scheuer told Glenn Beck (May 21) that the Clinton administration practiced exactly the same interrogation methods with terrorists—including rendition and water boarding — methods he had a hand in devising. Both Republicans and Democrats, said Scheuer, are playing politics with the security of Americans, and that includes Mr. Hannity’s hero: Dick Cheney.

I wrote this about the hysteria: “The two parties are exchanging fusillades over ten interrogation techniques deployed with fourteen ‘high value al-Qaida detainees,’ three of whom endured the most controversial method of all, because they were purported to possess ‘credible intelligence of an imminent terrorist attack,’ as well as ‘actionable intelligence’ to ‘prevent, disrupt or delay an attack.’ …
there is a vigorless, extinction-courting quality to those who squeal about placing a bug in the bug-phobic Abu Zubaydah’s ‘confinement box.’ These are just the type of insects the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would delight in squashing.”

Scheuer nails it in a Washington Post op-ed: This “episode of political theater [is] another major step in the bipartisan dismantling of America’s defenses based on the requirements of presidential ideology. George W. Bush’s democracy-spreading philosophy yielded the invasion of Iraq and set the United States at war with much of the Muslim world. Bush’s worldview thereby produced an enemy that quickly outpaced the limited but proven threat-containing capacities of the major U.S. counterterrorism programs — rendition, interrogation and unmanned aerial vehicle attacks.”

And this important insight as to the self-righteous, reality averse Utopianism which unites neoconservatives, liberals and libertarians:

“Obama now stands alongside Bush as a genuine American Jacobin, both of them seeing the world as they want it to be, not as it is. Whereas Bush saw a world of Muslims yearning to betray their God for Western secularism, Obama gazes upon a globe that he regards as largely carnivore-free and believes that remaining threats can be defused by semantic warfare; just stop saying ‘War on Terror’ and give talks in Turkey and on al-Arabiyah television, for example.”

“Incorrigibly anti-American” all.

Update (May 23): Andrew C. McCarthy (via reader Robert Glisson) raises a perfectly good point about ex post facto prosecutions, which the Constitution prohibits for obvious reasons.
The point about the Democrats conducting a political fishing expedition is true too. For, the invasion of Iraq, as I’ve said, repeatedly, not the dunking of the unlovely KSM and Abu Zubaydah, is the real issue here. You’re following the wrong scent, and I have no idea why:
“The torture kerfuffle is secondary to—and subsumed within—the broader category of an unjust war, waged by George Bush with Democratic assent.”
Given that the jack-ass Democrats welcomed the opportunity to “lug an army across the ocean to occupy a third-world country that was no danger to us and had not threatened us,” it behooves them to focus on bubkiss, minutia.
That our friend Myron is following the scent of the females and pacifists is, well, baffling. The greatest sin of all is pacifism.
I’d trust the patriotic and moral Scheuer, who knew a thing or two about the capabilities of al-Qaida, to protect me, over the Pussy Brigade (PB).
If someone suggests prosecuting Bush and the gang for invading Iraq, they’ll get my full attention. Until such an unlikely day, please spare me the self-righteous fussing over what the PB decries as torture and the loss of Our Values (what values?).

Update III: A Cow Is Born (About The Title)

America, Ann Coulter, Film, Intelligence, John McCain, Pop-Culture, Relatives, The Zeitgeist

“Ann Coulter could have easily dispatched of the ding-dong, as she did Keith Olbermann. A couple of masterful syllogisms mixed in with a few devastating facts, and that would be it. Alas, by denying Meghan McCain the satisfaction, Annie Orkin has left us with a pest-control problem.”

The excerpt is from “A Cow Is Born,” my latest WND column. You can catch it now on Taki’s Magazine, where the weekly column appears each Saturday. The current column is titled deliciously, “Media Discovers Woman Even Dumber Than John McCain.” Here’s more:

“… Just as you thought American pop-politics could go no lower, a woman with real curb appeal appears on the political scene. Meghan McCain might just be the greatest ditz to date to emerge from that big tent Republicans keep touting.

… Ms. McCain is not working with much—and is eminently qualified to dim debate in the Age of the Idiot. …

Yes, idiots have come into their own in a big way, courtesy of depraved consumers, and complicit TV producers and publishers, of pixel and paper alike. The duller you are and the louder you crow in contemporary America, the better you do. …

The housing house-of-cards was not the only ‘bubble in search of a pin’ in the modern-day USA. The intellectual bubble is also begging to be burst.

As for Republicans, if they don’t stop their love affair with idiots, it’s not a bigger tent they’ll be seeking, but a giant tin-foil hat.”

Read the complete column, “Media Discovers Woman Even Dumber Than John McCain,” now on Taki’s.

Update I (May 8): ABOUT THE WND TITLE. The original column came with an asterisk near the title and the following explanation and link:

*Title: “A Star Is Born” was a 1976 film starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, about a love affair between two rock stars; one a has-been, the other a wanna-be.

Ira, a reader (and BAB resident composer), was the only one to date who was familiar with the reference. I see that Free Republic has a lengthy thread about the title, asserting that the reference is to the heft of the heifer discussed.

An email to me would have clarified the matter, but, hey, this is the Age of the idiot. Complete knowledge is assumed. Conjecture soon morphs into assertion and certainty, and no one is the wiser. Curiosity can kill.

Incidentally, I owe the Age of the Idiot concept to my father, Rabbi Ben Isaacson. He truly captured the Zeitgeist with that one.

Update II: My dear WND editor added the original asterisked title explanation. I’ll have to avoid esoterica; it dates me. My editor at Taki’s simply chose to improve the title. Good call.