Category Archives: Justice

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.”

Update II: The Genius Of Ancient Hebrew Law

Anti-Semitism, Ethics, Hebrew Testament, Ilana Mercer, Judaism & Jews, Justice, Law, Natural Law, Reason

I’m not a religious Jew; I’m a Hebrew—of the civilization that invented equality under the law; a principle that is dictated in Deuteronomy and Exodus centuries before classical Greek philosophy. I believe the passion for justice is in my genes, as transmitted to me by a father—a rabbi—who’d repeat the phrase most repeated in the Hebrew Bible: “Justice, and justice alone, you shall pursue.” (Deuteronomy 16: 18-20)

While the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, “the first written code of laws in human history,” put in place different laws for the aristocrat, the slave, and the commoner; my tribe, commensurate with the ethical monotheism it was instructed to practice, was being hammered about applying the same laws to the king (Samuel advised the people against having one), the commoner, the alien, the orphan, the widow, the slave, the rich and the poor.

One of my favorite injunctions comes from Exodus 23: 2-3. I know you’ll share in my admiration for its unadulterated exhortation of individualism and justice:

“You shall not be led into wrongdoing by the majority, nor when you give evidence in a lawsuit, shall you side with the majority to prevent justice, nor shall you favor the poor man in his suit.”

How wonderful; how brilliant! And how modern-day religious sects—the churches and the Jews—flout the law of immutable justice by demonizing, for example, those who possess the ability to accrue wealth while deifying those who don’t.

Update (May 24): One of the ignoramuses who frequent the site accuses me of “Jewish supremacy.” That, after I wrote a post explicitly extolling the “teachings” of the Torah as a pioneering text—not the Jewish people.

As I commented hereunder to a reader; then, as now, the stiff-necked people did not often heed the classical prophets.

Against Posting Policy, I’ve posted “Dan’s” missive even though he did not provide a valid email address, so you’ve not been spared his post. But let us provide the evidence of my “Jewish supremacy” for the research-averse Dan, in the form of my writings on matters Jewish:

Your Godless Government At Work (The teachings are praised, not the people.)

Jews Against Judaism

Chronicle of Jewish Community Omits Capitalism

Soul and Moral Tradition (Here I am quite scathing about the contribution of Jews to the popularization of psychology.)

More here.

Clever Anti-Semitic writers often point out that Jewish thinkers are chronically critical. I fall into that category, in as much as I find it impossible to refrain from pointing out contradictions and corruptions wherever I see them, irrespective of tribal affiliation.

Dan’s logic works in the Age of the Idiot, where making clear distinctions is obsolete.

Update II (May 25): This is getting a little personal for my taste, however, to reply to my friend, The Judge: I’m not sure I love my own, as you put it. In fact, I very much doubt that. I am not part of a Jewish community, don’t have Jewish friends, and am married to a WASP. What I am positive about— crystal clear, in fact—is that I love, and know a bit about, the Hebrew Bible (is it 39 books?). I can read it in the original prose (Hebrew). And as a writer, I have to agree with historian Paul Johnson’s assessment that very many of the biblical writers were geniuses, with a unique, pioneering creativity.

As for the principles of justice that are found in the early books we’ve been discussing and are developed by the classical prophets: this is the stuff upon which our concepts of justice rest. What else?

I’m not a person of faith, but for those who are: who other than the ancient Hebrews brought into being the “concept of a single non-corporeal God and its ethical and moral commandments”?

When Jews went into the diaspora and became a sickly, disembodied, landless people, the rabbis took over, implementing a faith dominated by particularist, legalistic, ritualistic elements.

Updated: Israelis To Sue NATO For 1999 Air Strikes On Serbia

Europe, Foreign Policy, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Justice, Political Philosophy, War

What a great move, from the only people to have stood by my homeland, South Africa. The tactic taken by the Israelis is aggressive. It accomplishes two things: It makes it a little harder for the hypocrites who monopolize the discourse on justice to get away with murder. It achieves a measure of justice by calling a crime a crime. An added bonus it that an Israeli outfit here is actually bucking American foreign policy.

I can almost sense the bitterness in this BBC News report (sent by john peter maher):

“The Israeli Almagor Terrorist Victims’ Association is about to file a lawsuit against NATO officials who gave the green light for the bombing of Serbia in 1999.

The association elected to take the move in response to the decision by Judge Fernando Andreu of the Spanish Audencia Nacional (National Court) to launch an investigation into Israel’s bombing of Gaza in 2002, when one Hamas leader was killed and 14 people were wounded.

In the suit, Almagor cites the names of a number of high-profile Spaniards, including EU High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy Javier Solana, who was NATO secretary general from 1995 to 1999, as well as the names of certain officials from other European countries and the United States.

Almagor Director Meir Indor told the media in Israel that the lawsuit would be completed shortly.

He confirmed that the Serbian case might open a Pandora’s Box, which could make certain individuals think twice before deciding to accept any lawsuits that the Palestinians filed against Israel.

‘We see this as a case highlighting the double standards of Europeans who are accusing Israel of war crimes, while at the same time, those very same countries, as part of NATO, committed crimes that were a lot worse,’ Indor said.

He stressed that every European NATO member-state would be mentioned and that the suit would be filed in every country that decided to file similar actions against Israel for war crimes recently committed either in the aforesaid case, or, more recently, during the Israeli offensive in Gaza at the turn of the year.

‘Even now Israeli Army generals cannot travel to the UK for fear of being arrested the moment they set foot in the airport,’ said the Almagor president.

The organization’s delegate in Serbia was, he said, a certain Mr. D., an Israeli businessman who was caught in the crossfire when the air strikes began, and who works in Serbia to this day.

Serbian citizens have welcomed the news that Almagor has launched their case, says Mr. D.

Almagor purports to being a humanitarian organization that represents the victims of global terror, not only in Israel, and is endeavoring to obtain authorization from Serbian victims of the bombing to present their case.”

Update: In response to the comment: Sure, this is a self-serving action on the part of the Israelis. Altruism is overrated–and, at times, wrong-headed. You serve others best by serving yourself first and foremost. Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand and all that stuff. Good stuff.

This is why I love this feisty move.