Barack Obama and the Patriotism of Dissent

Don Feder, at FrontPageMagazine, discusses Barack Obama's recent speech on patriotism, as well as Richard Stengel's recent article at Time, "The New Patriotism":

The Left's patriotism-deficit has less to do with dissent than a very real and ingrained hostility toward America.

Its recitation of our national saga runs from slavery to Wounded Knee, to the wartime internment of Japanese Americans, to segregation to My Lai and Abu Ghraib -- excluding everything else. Liberals love America; they just can't find anything positive to say about it, other than Susan B. Anthony and Rosa Parks.

The article also discloses, "The American who volunteers to fight in Iraq and the American who protests the war both express a truer patriotism than the American who treats it as a distant spectacle with no claim on his talents or conscience."

This is a truly weird moral equivalency -- one which equates the young Marine who loses a limb in a Baghdad bombing with the moron Marxist who claims the Marines are the equivalent of the Waffen S.S. and the Iraq war is really about "blood for oil."

In trying to rationalize how the Left can hate our history and heritage while still claiming the mantle of patriotism, Stengel explains: "For liberals, America is less a common culture than a set of ideals about democracy, equality and the rule of law." Toward the end of his Independence speech, Obama informed us: "Patriotism is always more than just loyalty to a place on a map or a certain kind of people. Instead, it is loyalty to America's idea...."

In other words, the Left's loyalty isn't to America as it is, but to an ideal America reflected in certain principles. The problem with this proposition is that leftists have betrayed both America and the ideals on which it was founded....

At the Independence rally, standing in front of not one but four American flags, lapel pin firmly in place, hand over heart -- all that was missing was John Philip Sousa and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir -- Barack Hussein Obama "tried to reassure voters about his patriotism" (in the words of ABC News).

When was the last time a presidential candidate had to reassure voters that he actually liked his country? Do you wonder, then, that the Democrats consider patriotism Obama's Achilles heel?

Just because he refused to wear an American flag lapel pin last year, just because he wouldn't hold his hand anywhere near his heart while the National Anthem played, just because Frau Obama suggested that she never had a reason to feel pride in America until her husband's presidential campaign, just because his minister of 20 years regularly reviled the United States from the pulpit, is that any reason to question Obama's patriotism? That's a rhetorical question.

"At certain times over the last 16 months, I have found, for the first time, my patriotism challenged," Obama disclosed to gasps of astonished outrage from the audience.

But he wasn't about to take it in a supine position. "I will never question the patriotism of others in this campaign," the Democrat promised. "And I will not stand idly by when others question mine." Yeah, like anybody's going to question the patriotism of the candidate with the crippled arm, the result of six years of torture as a POW.

Obama went further, charging that the "question of who is -- or is not -- a patriot all too often poisons our political debate" -- the flag-waving equivalent of the politics of personal destruction.

You can see why left-wingers get antsy when the discussion turns to love of country.

Treason permeates the Left. Its bastions -- Hollywood, academia, the establishment media and the mainline churches -- are nests of treason.

In a world where America fights for its survival against a jihadist threat dedicated to ushering in a new Dark Ages -- in an era when 3,000 Americans died in the bloodiest attack on the continental U.S., another 4,000 died in Iraq and more than 30,000 were wounded in that conflict -- it's not hard to see why the left is frantic to avoid a candid discussion of patriotism.

Last week's Fouth of July was a productive one for faux-patriot America-bashers.

Quaker Dave, who defiantly resists the term "radical," wrote on the Fouth of July, "Why I’m Not 'Patriotic'":

If anything, patriotism should be about devotion to a different set of ideals and actual practices ... It should mean love of one’s fellow human beings, not blind “love” of some notion of “country.” Most “countries” are contained within abitrarily drawn borders, which in most cases were crafted ages ago by folks who are no longer in the picture anyway, usually at the expense of other folks.

The reference to those folks from "ages ago"? These are the "dead white males" the postmodern left's is fond of excoriating. But don't miss this part:

Don’t tell me I don’t love my country unless you can demonstrate your own devotion to making things better for the people around you, and not just to making things more comfortable for yourself.

Aahhh!! ... self-interest is EVIL!!

Don't tell that to the American revolutionaries, who fought simply for egalitarian opportunity, to own a piece of land in the absence of the type of hierarchical and oppressive lord and peasant relationships that had characterized feudal Europe for centuries (Source: Gordon Wood).

And don't forget: Matthew Yglesias laments the defeat of British hegemonic control of the American colonies. Hail to the king!

The lefties just don't get it:

To some degree, patriotism must mean loving your country for the same reason you love your family: simply because it is yours" (Source: Peter Beinart).

See also, "How Obama Is Redefining American Patriotism."

Image Credit: The People's Cube

Obama's Trash Talkin' Opportunity

Jesse Jackson has apologized for his crudely intemperate remarks, after being caught by an open microphone saying he'd like to cut Barack Obama's "n**ts out."

Here's Jackson's statement:

For any harm or hurt that this hot mic private conversation may have caused, I apologize. My support for Senator Obama[s campaign is wide, deep and unequivocal. I cherish this redemptive and historical moment.

My appeal was for the moral content of his message to not only deal with the personal and moral responsibility of black males, but to deal with the collective moral responsibility of government and the public policy which would be a corrective action for the lack of good choices that often led to their irresponsibility.

That was the context of my private conversation and it does not reflect any disparagement on my part for the historic event in which we are involved or my pride in Senator Barack Obama, who is leading it, whom I have supported by crisscrossing this nation in every level of media and audience from the beginning in absolute terms.

In other words, Jackson wants to castrate Obama for not toeing the "blood of martyrs" post-civil rights grievance line, which is a reference to Al Sharpton's speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in which Sharpton attacked President Bush's question to the Democrats on why their leaders have failed blacks in educational outcomes:

Our vote is soaked in the blood of martyrs, the blood of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, soaked in the blood of four little girls in Birmingham, Alabama. This vote is sacred to us. This vote can't be bargained away...given away. Mr. President, in all due respect, read my lips: Our vote is not for sale! (Source: Juan Williams)

For the old-line Democratic Party civil rights leaders, Obama's not genuine - he ain't down with the brothas in da 'hood:

In the eyes of many blacks, Obama departs from past black presidential contenders such as Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun, and Messrs. Jackson and Sharpton. They were readily identifiable, urban-bred, African-Americans who spoke out boldly on civil rights, poverty, and economic injustice. On the other hand, the racially mixed, Harvard-trained Obama, as the so-called postracial candidate, has soft-pedaled these issues. It's no accident that his appeal among whites seems stronger so far than among blacks.

If Obama's shrewd, he'll take this as his opening to break dramatically from the racial grievance masters of the Democratic Party's black-American base. Yo, Sister Souljah!!

He needs to throw the trash talkin' brothas and sistas under the bus. He'll still get the black vote - he's da Democrats' man now, more than Jackson ever was - but if he waits too long, indecision could turn this new flare-up into a Wright-like controversy (more here).

See also, Captain Ed, "Obama Gets Attacked On Race by … Jesse Jackson?"

Chicago-Area Local Coverage: "Rev. Jesse Jackson Caught Bad-Mouthing Obama."

The Inevitability of Socialized Medicine

Elizabeth Scalia, of The Anchoress, argues that government-run health is "essentially a done deal":

The words “socialized medicine” and “universal health care” have very different effects on one’s heart rate, depending on one’s politics.

If you call yourself a “liberal” or a “Democrat” the words create an uptick in the heart rate that feels remarkably like the first giddy surge of middle school amore. Splurp, plup! goes the heart, and the world is a beautiful place. “Every person will be insured! Every medical need will be addressed! Oh, look! Daisies and puppies! Yay!”

If you call yourself a “conservative” or a “Republican” the heart rate still ticks up, but the giddiness comes from a lack of oxygen as one contemplates the hand of Big Brother reaching into the chest cavity and giving the old pumper a good long squeeeeze. “Every person will be insured? Every medical need will be addressed if you survive the waiting list! Oh, look! The Four Horses of the Apocalypse, and politicians riding every one of ‘em! Nooooo!”

Both reactions are extreme, of course, but it is worth noting that the daisies and death-horses are only six months away from becoming permanent fixtures in our lives. It happened without any particular clamoring — yae or nae — on the part of a populace enjoying nearly two decades of essentially full employment, with majority participation in employer-sponsored health insurance programs....

Tell the truth: when you should have been pondering government and private-sector health care proposals in anticipation of this day, you were watching Dancing with the Stars. You can admit it — everyone else was, too — but it might be time to start paying attention, because incoherence coupled with recent feelings of economic insecurity may not translate into a levelheaded vote. Then again, it may not matter. In his column, Tanner gives bare outlines of the proposals being talked up by Senators McCain and Obama and writes:

It’s anybody’s guess how [McCain’s and Obama’s policies will] develop. But as November approaches, voters will reach a fork in the road, and as Yogi Berra says, they’ll take it.

Some time after Labor Day, many Americans will start to focus on the November elections, and they’ll be surprised to learn that while they were at the mall, government-run health care moved from being a vague idea to an essentially “done deal.” In just eighteen weeks Americans will, with every vote, submit to the idea of the government — that master of mismanagement — having a formidable control over their health care. Logic dictates that the common realities of age and illness — which come to us all — will steadily endow the government with ever-increasing authority over life choices and inevitable intrusions into decisions that should be private.

Once the thing is put into motion, there will be no pulling back. American presidents may peacefully surrender their power, but bureaucrats never do.

It may be too late to wonder — at this eleventh hour — if the free markets, local communities, and our elected officials have really done all they could to develop creative insurance alternatives to the super-sized government “solution” that will quickly affect our economy and slowly erode our freedoms. Will we look back and ask, perhaps naively, why citizens lacking work-connected health insurance could not have simply bought into the same or similar plans that covered state employees? If low-income families found the premiums too dear, might they not then have been able to use a tax-credit or deduction to offset that cost?

After taking the intractable step of handing our choices over to lawmakers and legislators who lately get almost nothing right, will we wonder why we did not encourage professionals and organizations to pool their resources and design flexible insurance plans with affordable rates.

Perhaps we’ll look back and realize that our own hobbies or fraternal associations or cottage industries could have organized and crafted insurance policies into which the similarly situated, but under-insured, might have participated....

We cannot say we were not warned. For more than 15 years politicos and media folk have asserted the need for government-managed health care, until their drone became little more than background music to our daily waltzes....

Instead, too late, we’re looking up from Dancing with the Stars just in time to see the Federal Jug Band introduce a new caller, and he’ll be telling us to step lively to their endless tune.

I've written about this myself, in "Money, Quality, and Healthcare."

Just reading Scalia's essay's giving me the willies.

The Left's FISA Orwellianism

As I noted yesterday, there's been an intense reaction by anti-administration extremists to the new FISA bill in Congress, which gained final Senate approval today.

Here's some of today's outrage:

First, there's "The FISA Capitulation Vote, Barack Obama, and These Orwellian Times," from Tennessee Guerilla Women:

Barack Obama promises that his vote to shred the Bill of Rights is not about politics but rather about his sincere belief that shredding the Bill of Rights is a wise and necessary move in order to protect we the people!

Big Tent Democrat, goddess love him, calls the presumptive nominee on the orwellian bulls**t...

Glenn Greenwald's also pissed with the Obamessiah:

I've written many times over the last two weeks ... beyond the bill itself are the pure falsehoods being spewed to the public about what Congress is doing -- and those falsehoods are largely being spewed not by Republicans. Republicans are gleefully admitting, even boasting, that this bill gives them everything Bush and Cheney wanted and more, and includes only minor changes from the Rockefeller/Cheney Senate bill passed last February (which Obama, seeking the Democratic Party nomination, made a point of opposing).

Rather, the insultingly false claims about this bill -- it brings the FISA court back into eavesdropping! it actually improves civil liberties! Obama will now go after the telecoms criminally! Government spying and lawbreaking isn't really that important anyway! -- are being disseminated by the Democratic Congressional leadership and, most of all, by those desperate to glorify Barack Obama and justify anything and everything he does. Many of these are the same people who spent the last five years screaming that Bush was shredding the Constitution, that spying on Americans was profoundly dangerous, that the political establishment did nothing about Bush's lawbreaking.

It's been quite disturbing to watch them turn on a dime -- completely reverse everything they claimed to believe -- the minute Obama issued his statement saying that he would support this bill. They actually have the audacity to say that this bill -- a bill which Bush, Cheney and the entire GOP eagerly support, while virtually every civil libertarian vehemently opposes -- will increase the civil liberties that Americans enjoy, as though Dick Cheney, Mike McConnell and "Kit" Bond decided that it was urgently important to pass a new bill to restrict presidential spying and enhance our civil liberties. How completely do you have to relinquish your critical faculties at Barack Obama's altar in order to get yourself to think that way?

Once again, Greenwald's railing against the entire the non-Glenn-Greenwald power structure!

But he's got some help, from Rachel Maddow and Jonathan Turley, who says he's "completely astonished by Senator Obama's position":

Jeff at Protein Wisdom puts some perspective on the left's outrage at Obama and the "evisceration of the Fourth Amendment." Obama's apparently a mere mortal in the centrist politics of the general election:

Of course, the irony here is that conservatives long suspected Obama would act in just such a way: after all, he has the cult vote locked up by virtue of his otherworldly luminescence (which, if certain anonymous sources high in the government are to be believed, is clearly visible from space — like a kind of magical negro version of the Great Wall of China), and really, what are the disappointed progressive Dems who “haven’t been listening” to his nuances going to do come election time, vote for McCain?

No, it was a veritable given he would act just as he’s been acting since securing the Democratic nomination — and today’s vote will likely prompt a special squealing from the leftest regions of the blogosphere and media, whose penchant for eating their own was evident in the primaries. But in the end, they’ll vote for a guy who they see as abandoning his principles — either by rationalizing his tacking to the center as a cynical and necessary ploy to get himself elected, at which point he’ll then move leftward (progressives can call this the “wink and nod” general election campaign strategy; classical liberals / conservatives / honest folk can call it the “opportunistic, dissembling, do anything to gain power strategy”), or by forgiving him all his broken promises if only so that the left can have at least nominal control of the entirety of government, which is what they are after, anyway. Policy is always secondary to power — and policy talk is generally geared toward telling people what they want to hear in order to gain that power.

Just know that the whole FISA debate, for all the sound and fury, is a massive defeat for the netroots hordes and their extremist ideology of surrender.

The Constitution is not a suicide pact.

See also, Jake Tapper, "Obama's FISA Shift."

The One-Dimensional Demonology of the Left

I've written much on the left's response to the death of Jesse Helms, but I'd be remiss not to post Jeff Jacoby's essay, "Dancing on the Grave of Jesse Helms":

LIBERALS DIDN'T think much of Jesse Helms when he was alive, and their feelings didn't soften with his death.

"Jesse Helms, you rat bastard, burn in hell," announced a headline at Daily Kos, the hugely popular left-wing blog; "Please excuse me while I dance upon his grave," gloated another.

In The Nation, the former North Carolina senator was memorialized as "Jesse Helms, American Bigot." For its online audience, The Washington Post resurrected a column David Broder produced when Helms announced his retirement: "Jesse Helms, White Racist."

The invective streamed in from across the pond as well. "There seemingly wasn't a right-wing, retrograde social issue Helms met that he didn't like," wrote Melissa McEwan in a savage essay on the Guardian's website. "It was . . . his unmitigated intolerance toward people of color that will define his legacy.

Well, hating Helms is nothing new. More than 16 years ago, the scholar Charles Horner observed in Commentary that for many people Helms had become a "symbol of the evil against which all enlightened people are automatically ranged." As with the poisonous rhetoric of today's pathological George W. Bush-haters, the point of the virulence expressed toward Helms was typically character-assassination, not contention - it was aimed at demonizing the man rather than debating or disproving his ideas.

For some liberals, Helms's death had long been a fantasy. "I think he ought to be worried about what's going on in the Good Lord's mind," NPR's Nina Totenberg said in 1995, "because if there is retributive justice, he'll get AIDS from a transfusion. Or one of his grandchildren will get it."

What the left despised most about Helms varied with the seasons. There was his unyielding anticommunism. His visceral opposition to homosexuality. His war on government funding of obscene art. His blackball of William Weld's nomination as ambassador to Mexico. His staunch support of the tobacco industry. And, of course his segregationist past.

In the one-dimensional demonology of the left, Helms comes across as an unreconstructed racist who dreamed of Jim Crow every night and whose first words each morning were "Segregation forever!" The truth was considerably different - and more admirable.

Readers can finish the essay at the link.

I'll just reiterate Jacoby's notion of "one-dimensional demonology."

Some will say "but both sides have the fringe elements," except it's not just the extremists in the Democratic Party who have mounted this campaign of recrimination. Folks at Kos and elsewhere, not to mention those in the media establishment, are the mainstream.

See also, "The Competitive Demonization of Jesse Helms."

Would Iran Kill Americans?

Via the News Buckit, here's Matthew Yglesias on John McCain's joking statement about increasing cigarette exports to Iran:

If a major Iranian political leader were to repeatedly joke about bombing the United States and killing Americans, you can just imagine the s**t-storm about how Iran isn't a normal country with normal interests, that it's run by irrational fanatics, appeasement won't work, etc.

Actually, it turns out an Iranian leader has called for killilng Americans, and he's not joking:

See News Buckit's post for more.

Recall too that Yglesias just last week argued essentially against American independence in 1776, and in a debate at Bloggingheads TV, James Kirchik hammers Yglesias' total hypyocrisy: "I have never taken you as someone who was an enthusiast for empire," snarks Kirchick.

Yglesias anti-patriotism is in the first two minutes, and worth a look, especially the incredibly nervous body-language

Note further that Yglesias offered a ham-handed retraction of his "no-independence-for-America" post, where he updates, arguing that it "was unfortunate that the course of events" led the Americans to push for freedom from the British yoke.

Talk about Heads in the Sand!

The Left's Fundamental Dishonesty

I've commented on the lack of "divine soul" on the left recently, for example, when writing about the radical demonization campaigns against Tim Russert and Jesse Helms.

One aspect found among many left-wing activists and commentators is a blatant disregard for the ideals of truth and fair play. It turns out that Daily Kos is applauding the underhanded tactics of Code Pink operatives in forging fake press passes to gain access to President Bush's 4th of July citizenship ceremony:

Here's how the Kos author describes his collaboration with Medea Benjamin, a Code Pink co-founder:

Early this morning I found an unusual email from Medea Benjamin waiting for me in my inbox. It seems that last week when she was arrested in Florida, they confiscated her Global Exchange press pass, and could I make her another one?

Ever since I figured out how to duplicate Medea's press pass for other members of CodePink, I have been doing so with her blessing.

A look at the Global Exchange website reveals the group as a progressive action lobbying organization, not a news media outlet. That's probably close enough to "journalism" for the postmodern nihilists in our midst.

Hat Tip: LGF

Left-Wing Media Refuses to Identify Disgraced Democrat by Party

Via Don Surber, the news that leftist journalists refused to identify disgraced former Central California congressman Gary Condit as a Democrat should come as no surprise, although the scope of story is noteworthy:

The Associated Press went all the way as to report Condit as a former GOP member of Congress:

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit by former Congressman Gary Condit claiming author Dominick Dunne slandered him over the death of a young female intern....

Condit, a former Republican congressman from California's Central Valley, has denied any involvement in or knowledge of Levy's May 2001 disappearance at age 24, or her death. However, he acknowledged to investigators that they had an intimate relationship.

The situation cost Condit his House seat in 2002.

Condit's case is one of example of congressional scandal in my classes on the legislative process, but perhaps I'll add this latest development to my lectures on media bias as well.

Note that McClatchy refused to identify Condit's party identification altogether.

Communist Party Backs Obama

Joelle Fishman, an executive of the Communist Party USA, recently announced her party's endorsement of Barack Obama for the presidency (via Accuracy in Media):

The yearning in our country for a new direction and new priorities has taken hold in the 2008 elections. Voters turned out in record numbers for the primaries, propelled by economic necessity and determination to end the war, and inspired by the historic breakthrough of a woman or an African American as a major party candidate for president.

Voters of all races and nationality backgrounds and all walks of life, young and old, women, men, union members and unorganized, flooded the polls, undeterred by the constant corporate media barrage of racism, sexism and divisive tactics which might have suppressed the vote.

When Barack Obama surpassed the 2,118 delegates required for nomination, his unity appeal and outreach to Clinton supporters deeply touched the country and was greeted around the world.

Unity — especially unity of African American, Latino and white voters, women and men — will have to be fought for and forged anew, broadened out and deepened in this new phase of the battle to defeat McCain and the corporate ultra-right in Congress.

The choice is clear — stay with the Bush-McCain race to the bottom or come together and raise up the whole country with a landslide defeat of the Republican ultra-right....

Big political shifts are under way....

The Communist Party USA’s emergency program to repair, renew and rebuild America is a contribution toward this effort.

I reported previously on the activities of "Revolutionary Communists for Obama."

What's significant now is the increasingly deep documentation of Obama's early affinity and indoctrination to Marxist-Leninist ideology.

For more, see "What Barack Obama Learned From the Communist Party."

Don't "Hope" for a Better Life ... Vote for One: McCain

John McCain's new campaign spot is hard hitting:

Captain Ed offers his take:

The imagery and the text make clear that McCain believes in the classic values of sacrifice and honor, especially in service to the nation. That sacrifice extends to his political career, which he has risked for issues he felt important to the country. Nowhere has that been more true than on Iraq. While Barack Obama continues to waffle and hedge his bets on withdrawal, McCain staked his presidential campaign on victory — and proved himself right and Obama wrong on the surge and the stabilizing effect it has had on Iraq.

There's more at the link.

Cases in Lieberman Derangement

The netroots has launched a public campaign to depose Senator Joseph Lieberman from his committee chairmanships and seniority ranking in Congress.

The group, "Lieberman Must Go," has created a video of the Connecticut Senator's alleged apostasies, and the group's got a petition circulating:

We CANNOT tolerate a leader of the Senate Democratic Caucus who supports George Bush and McCain's War in Iraq. We CANNOT tolerate a Democratic chairman of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee who endorses and stumps for McCain. We call on the Senate Democratic Steering Committee to strip Joe Lieberman of his chairmanship and his leadership role.

Here's the YouTube:

From the current comments at the petition page:

Lieberman belongs in jail along with the rest of the Bush Junta.

For partisans who claim to be more enlightened and tolerant, on the question of Joseph Lieberman these folks are anything but...

See also, "Netroots Move (Again) Against Lieberman."

Understanding the Debate on Domestic Surveillance

There's a significant development on the left of the spectrum on the FISA legisation that's pending in Congress.

Firedoglake and Glenn Greenwald have posts up trumpeting the big netroots push to demonize Members of Congress for the passage of domestic surveillance legislation that allegedly violates America's tradition of the rule of law. The leftists have taken out a full-page ad in today's Washington Post, which states:

The radicalism and lawlessness of the last seven years began with extremist theories of power adopted in secret by the Bush administration. It will culminate this week when the 2008 Congress formally embraces those theories and makes clear that the rule of law is only for common Americans, not for the Washington elite.

However, if there's truly any radicalism on this issue, it resides in the administration's opponents on the left. Notice how, really, the bulk of the federal government - both the executive and the legislative branches - is under indictment by the hardline FISA opponents.

Interestingly, just last Saturday, Nancy Soderberg, a former deputy national security advisor in the Clinton administration, argued that the FISA bill was good law, not perfect, but a decent compromise considering the stakes involved and the political volatility of the issues:

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, the White House directed telecommunications carriers to cooperate with its efforts to bolster intelligence gathering and surveillance -- the administration's effort to do a better job of "connecting the dots" to prevent terrorist attacks. In its review of the effort, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that the administration's written requests and directives indicated that such assistance "had been authorized by the president" and that the "activities had been determined to be lawful."

We now know that they were not lawful. But the companies that followed those directives are not the ones to blame for that abuse of presidential power.

The bill passed by the House will prevent any repeat of that wrong, but it also lets those companies off the hook for past actions. While that's tough for many of us to swallow, the compromise still strikes the right balance between protecting our rights and our national security.

It would force an administration to use FISA courts (FISA refers to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which set up these courts in the 1970s) to obtain a court-approved, individual warrant for spying activity directed at an American citizen. The government would have to show "probable cause" that that person was engaged in terrorist activities or espionage against the United States.

These are strong measures to protect American civil liberties. More controversial is the bill's provision to allow in an emergency -- such as the aftermath of a terrorist attack -- the attorney general and the director of national intelligence to begin a surveillance project without a FISA warrant as long as they seek FISA approval within seven days....

Clearly, the intelligence community cannot succeed in the war on terrorism -- cannot really connect the dots -- without help from the private sector. Congress must protect those companies so they can and will help, when it's necessary.

Without such protection, phone and Internet companies, if they cooperated at all, would do so on a case-by-case basis, with their own lawyers exercising lawyer-like caution. In the words of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the "possible reduction in intelligence that might result from this delay is simply unacceptable for the safety of our nation." That was a conclusion that reached across party lines, as does the compromise bill.

As Soderberg notes, the legislation represents "a rare bit of common sense" that furthers the goal of securing our nation while restoring the appropriate balance on surveillance and law enforcment between the president and Congress.

Indeed, public opinion bears this out, for example in 2006, after the surveillance program was first revealed, the public supported the administration's position:

"As you may know, starting in 2001 the FBI was given additional authority in areas like surveillance, wiretaps and obtaining records in terrorism investigations. Supporters said this was necessary to fight terrorism. Opponents said it went too far in compromising privacy rights. Do you think this additional FBI authority should or should not be continued?"
						.
		Should	Should Not	Unsure
		%	%	%
	3/2-5/06	62	37	1
	6/2-5/05	59	39	2

The public also considered the surveillance program a legitimate exercise of governmental power:

"As you may know, the National Security Agency has been investigating people suspected of involvement with terrorism by secretly listening in on telephone calls and reading e-mails between some people in the United States and other countries, without first getting court approval to do so. Would you consider this wiretapping of telephone calls and e-mails without court approval as an acceptable or unacceptable way for the federal government to investigate terrorism?"
						.
		Acceptable	Unaccep- table	Unsure
		%	%	%
	3/2-5/06	54	46	-
	1/23-26/06	56	43	1

Folks like Firedoglake, Glenn Greenwald, and others, routinely present themselves as representing the true mainstream of public opinion, but as these data show, the public found the administration's surveillance to be non-controversial.

Indeed, recent polls find the country "fairly evenly divided" on the appropriate balance between national security individual rights.

The fact is that it's the netroots hordes who are out of the mainstream. In reality, the antiwar left has very little interest in "peace" and "domestic liberties," and instead is determined to mount a radical struggle against "oppression" and imperialism" by distorting the issues at hand and by painting legitimate governmental participants of the executive and legislative processes as "above the law."
The folks speaking out against telecom immunity today are the same radicals who cheer the growing military successes of enemy terrorist organization such as Hezbollah.

So, yes, the American public should have real concerns about the scope of governmental power, but when the main opponents to domestic surveillance legislation are the same ones praising our enemies, it's good to keep the motives of these self-appointed "patriots" in mind.

**********

RELATED: "Online Movement Aims to Punish Democrats Who Support Bush Wiretap Bill."

**********

UPDATE: Morton Halperin, whose "home phone was tapped by the Nixon administration — without a warrant — beginning in 1969," indicates his support of the new FISA bill.

Obama on Spending: Iraq Funding "Wasteful and Low-Priority"

Barack Obama has over-promised on various campaign spending proposals, and as president he'll either break his pledges or break the budget, the Los Angeles Times reports:

In more than a year of campaigning, Barack Obama has made a long list of promises for new federal programs costing tens of billions of dollars, many of them aimed at protecting people from the pain of a souring economy.

But if he wins the presidency, Obama will be hard-pressed to keep his blueprint intact. A variety of budget analysts are skeptical that the Democrat's agenda could survive in the face of large federal budget deficits and the difficulty of making good on his plan to raise new revenue by closing tax loopholes, ending the Iraq war and cutting spending that is deemed low-priority.

Like predecessors who also had to square far-reaching promises with inescapable budget realities, they say, a President Obama might need to jettison pieces of Obama-ism.

"I don't think it all adds up," Isabel Sawhill, an official in President Clinton's Office of Management and Budget, said of Obama's spending plans....

"In remarks he had intended to deliver in North Carolina, Obama said his plan would "not only ensure the economic security of middle-class families in the long term, but also the need to give them a chance for some relief in the short term, to make sure that Americans aren't just getting by but getting ahead."

Among other proposals during the course of the campaign, Obama has said he would strengthen the nation's bridges and dams ($6 billion a year), help make men better fathers ($50 million a year) and aid Iraqis displaced by the war ($2 billion in one-time spending). Last week, he pledged to give religious and community groups $500 million a year to provide summer education to low-income children.

Other proposals are more costly. Obama wants to extend health insurance to more people (part of a $65-billion-a-year health plan), develop cleaner energy sources ($15 billion a year), curb home foreclosures ($10 billion in one-time spending) and add $18 billion a year to education spending.

It is a far different blueprint than McCain is offering. The senator from Arizona has proposed relatively little new spending, arguing that tax cuts and private business are more effective means of solving problems.

The total price tag of Obama's plans, according to his campaign, is $130 billion a year. On top of that, Obama is proposing a middle-class tax cut of about $80 billion a year.

Obama's campaign says the new spending would be more than offset by cuts to existing federal programs and other savings.

I've highlighted that last sentence in bold.

One of those "federal programs" is the war in Iraq. Obama's economic policy director, Jason Furman, lumps in Iraq funding with other "wasteful and low-priority government programs."

Here's the quote, in bold:

"His plan reallocates what we're spending today on the war in Iraq and wasteful and low-priority government programs into higher-priority investments in our future," said Jason Furman, Obama's economic policy director.

For all the talk of Obama moving to the center, the truth is that within the campaign oganization - in planning and top-level talking points - the Obama camp clearly demonstrates no real committment to funding our troops in the field, or to the long-term security of the Iraqi people: Iraq funding is not a"high-priority" item.

The bottom line: Don't believe the hype. Barack Obama is nothing special. He's got no "hope and change," just more of the same campaign bluster, policy legerdemain, and left-wing interest group favoritism.

Americans will get a traditional tax-and-spend liberal taking the office next January in the event of a Democratic victory. The added bonus will be the White House's open-door policy to the most radical elements on the poltical spectrum, groups that will continue to pull Obama's administration toward out-of-control policy largesse and unprincipled diplomatic appeasement internationally.

Obama's budget may not add up, but the potential shape of Washington politics in 2009 is clear as a bell.

Graphic Credit: Los Angeles Times

Iraq Medic Dies After Homecoming Struggle

I cannot know what it's like to be in combat. I cannot know the stresses endured from having survived the fighting, and for some, having returned home a hero from battle.

Perhaps all of this was too much for Army Spc. Joseph Patrick Dwyer, famous for his heroism at Al Faysaliyah, Iraq, on March 25, 2003, pictured here:

Sadly, Dwyer died of an accidental overdose on June 28, as reported by the Army Times.

Never likely to miss a chance to demonize the war, and victimize the troops, Firedoglake had this to say upon the news of Dwyer's death:

With all the negative news coming from Afghanistan and Pakistan lately -- including deadly bombings on Friday and Sunday in which the Americans claims "insurgents" were killed, while the Afghan authorities claim the victims were civilians -- the McCain surrogates are trying hard to keep the media and voters focused on Iraq and not the consequences of their Iraq policies everywhere else.

It's the same misdirection McCain advocated when he and the Bush regime misled the country into the disastrous Iraq war in the first place. To obscure that strategic blunder, he's doubling down in Iraq, hoping US and NATO forces in Afghanistan can hold on just long enough for McCain and Bush to avoid taking responsibility for both mistakes.

And he's hoping the public will not notice our invasion essentially destroyed much of Iraq and continues its tragic toll on American troops.

My hopes, prayers, and deepest thanks go out to Dwyer's family.

For information on PTSD, see the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

See also, Robert Kaplan, "Modern Heroes: Our Soldiers Like What They Do. They Want Our Respect, Not Pity," and Jeffrey Schmidt, "For Liberals, Soldiers Are Victims."

The Competitive Demonization of Jesse Helms

My initial post on Jesse Helms death (where I cite the left's tremendous disrespect of the North Carolina Senator), generated this from Whisky Fire:

The numbnut at the American Power blog says this post is "among the most disrespectful" posts about Helms' death in the Left Blogosphere. The devil you say! This is at least one of the top two most disrespectful posts in the Left Blogosphere on the subject of this particular expired bigot, as it features the word "motherf**ker." Martini Revolution says "good f**king riddance," and Comments from Left Field remarks that he was a "racist, homophobic assbag," which are both accurate and morally unexceptionable, but do not rise to the level of "motherf**ker." I'm not sure we've surpassed TBogg's observation that Senator Helms is currently getting ass-f**ked by Roy Cohn in Hell, however.

These are crucial distinctions and it is important to get them right.

What can I say? Maybe the lefties find competitive demonization funny?

I can note that a number of other commentators noticed the depths of Whiskey Fire's depravity, for example, in Noel Sheppard's, "Netroots Celebrate Helms's Death With Vulgar Attacks:"

Apparently devoid of ... human decency, the folks in the Netroots, within minutes of Friday's announcement concerning the death of Jesse Helms, began publishing virulent and vulgar epithets directed at the former senator, with some actually voicing a desire to dance on his grave.

Devoid of human decency pretty much sums things up. Indeed, not to be outdone, Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings, sought this morning to have the last word on Helms' alleged evil, starting with an obligatory moral qualifier:

I haven't written anything about Jesse Helms' death, since I don't like speaking ill of the dead. However: every so often, conservatives wonder: why oh why do people think that the Republican party, and/or the conservative movement, is bigoted? I think that the conservative response to Helms' death ought to settle that debate once and for all.

Hilzoy's post is one long chronicle of Helms' statements on the controversial issues of the day, with not a shred of countervailing information to provide some balance.

It's clear that left and right are not going to agree on how to treat the legacy of someone as polarizing as Jesse Helms.

But for the record, here are some additional thought for consideration, first, from Marc Thiessen:

With the passing of Sen. Jesse Helms, the media have demonstrated one final time that they never fully understood the power or impact of this great man. Consider, for example, The Post's obituary of Helms; here are some things you would not learn about his life and legacy by reading it:

As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Helms led the successful effort to bring Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into the NATO alliance. He secured passage of bipartisan legislation to protect our men and women in uniform from the International Criminal Court. He won overwhelming approval for his legislation to support the Cuban people in their struggle against a tyrant. He won majority support in the Senate for his opposition to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. He helped secure passage of the National Missile Defense Act and stopped the Clinton administration from concluding a new anti-ballistic missile agreement in its final months in office -- paving the way for today's deployment of America's first defenses against ballistic missile attack. He helped secure passage of the Iraq Liberation Act, which expressed strong bipartisan support for regime change in Baghdad. He secured broad, bipartisan support to reorganize the State Department and bring much-needed reform to the United Nations, and he became the first legislator from any nation to address the U.N. Security Council -- a speech few in that chamber will forget.

Watching this record of achievement unfold, columnist William Safire wrote in 1997: "Jesse Helms, bete noire of knee-jerk liberals . . . is turning out to be the most effectively bipartisan chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee since Arthur Vandenberg. . . . Let us see if he gets the credit for statesmanship that he deserves from a striped-pants establishment." This weekend, we got our answer.

What his critics could not appreciate is that, by the time he left office, Jesse Helms had become a mainstream conservative. And it was not because Helms had moved toward the mainstream -- it was because the mainstream moved toward him.

But note the discussion of Helm's in William Link's preface to, Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism:

Although Jesse had earned a fearsome reputation for his slash-and-burn political tactics, there was also a softer side. Within his political circle, Helms was compassionate and caring; his Senate staffers uniformly remembered him warmly. By the late 1980s, Helms was well known for his personal style and his conscious rejection of the imperiousness of some of his colleagues. In 1998, when the Washingtonian surveyed 1,200 staffers and Capitol Hill employees, Jesse was rated among the nicest senators. Garrett Epps, a columnist for the liberal Independent Weekly, published in Durham, interviewed Helms in 1989. He was surprised at what he found. “The Helms I expected,” he recalled, “was a sizzling-hot, angry, defensive ideologue.” The person he found instead was “relaxed, friendly, funny and genuinely curious about ideas and people.” Don Nickles, one of Helms’s closest allies in the Senate, later reflected that the common caricatures of Helms as mean and vindictive were “misplaced.” Nickles described him as “probably the nicest person serving in the Senate,” certainly “the most gentlemanly of any of the senators,” and a person who “epitomized the Southern gentleman.” In his dealings with other senators he was “always very pleasant, never disagreeable.” He was also unpretentious, according to Nickles. During Reagan’s inauguration in January 1981, Nickles recalled, Helms objected when police stopped traffic so that a bus with senators could pass through.

Helms’ personal warmth extended beyond senators. The third floor of the Dirksen Office Building, where Jesse’s Senate offices were located, contained two public elevators, which were old and slow, and three private elevators reserved only for senators. Staffers and visitors that snuck on the senators’ elevator were routinely evicted. The public elevator, located just outside of Helms’s office, was often crowded with tourists. If he noticed them waiting, Helms delighted in gathering tourists and taking them on the senators’ elevator, or for a ride on the Senate subway shuttle that ran between Dirksen and the Capitol, even when votes were about to occur and the shuttle was reserved for senators. Sometimes, on the spur of the moment, Helms ushered tourists to the family gallery, on the third floor of the Senate, and provided seats for them to watch the proceedings. The Senate guards were so used to Jesse’s routine with visitors that they often chuckled when they saw him coming with an entourage in tow. He considered himself a sort of unofficial host of Capitol Hill, and he personally felt that it was his duty to ensure that tourists enjoyed their visit.

There's more at the link.

Helms was also apparently unsurpassed at constituency service, a quality even Pam Spaulding noted in her otherwise critical obituary (which she updates here).

Other leftists were also respectful (here and here, for example), but overall I think the whole episode largely confirms the secular demonology of contemporary far left-wing ideologues on matters of life and death.

See also, Little Green Footballs, "RIP, Jesse Helms," and Ross Douthat, "The Case of Jesse Helms."

Douthat says Helms should not be a model:

If Ronald Reagan and Helms had similar positions on countless issues, that doesn't prove that Helms was good for conservatism; it only suggests that conservatives should look for more Reagans, and fewer Jesse Helms. I'm happy to defend Helms' views on a variety of issues, but the man himself has no business in the right-wing pantheon, and the conservatives who have used his death as an occasion to argue that he does are doing their movement a grave disservice.

That's not the key issue from my perspective (and Douthat might underestimate Helms' impact), but see the whole thing.

There's an interesting reaction at Village Voice as well, "Post Racial: Rightbloggers Shade Helms' Civil Rights History."

Photo Credit: New York Times

Highway 33: A Good Road for Seeking California

In "A Workaday Road That Cuts Through California's Back Story," Peter King re-inaugurates his "On California" column today at the Los Angeles Times:

California is laced with fabled roadways: Highway 1, the Golden State, El Camino Real, Route 66 and many others. Some follow the footpaths of padres, the trails of wagon trains. And some are monuments to the Freeway Age and California's bearhug embrace of Car Culture. ¶ State Highway 33 will not be confused with any of these asphalt icons. Nobody's likely to write a song about Highway 33, although in one stretch it does cut through Buck Owens country. Nor will a literary anthology be built around it, as was done not long ago with the Central Valley's Highway 99. ¶ Still, to travel this two-lane from top to bottom -- a 300-mile drive that begins just below the San Francisco Bay delta, passes through the San Joaquin Valley's west side, crosses steep coastal mountains and ends at Ventura, where Highway 33 disappears into the 101 -- is to tour what might be called the real California.

If you've got a few minutes be sure to read the whole thing.

King wrote the "On California" column in the 1990s, and I always enjoyed the articles, especially for their wistful stories of the San Joaquin Valley, a place at the heart of traditional California that is quintessentially American.

Obama Opens Up Convention as Protesters Prepare Direct Action

There's an almost incredible incongruity to the politics of the Democratic National Convention today.

On the one hand, Democrats plan to "throw open the doors of the convention" by holding Barack Obama's acceptance speech at INVESCO Field at Mile High in Denver; while on the other hand, hardline activists in the party base intend to hold protest rallies outside of the convention, apparently in the hope of holding Obama's feet to the radical fire:

Every four years, liberal activists follow political power brokers and the world media to the Democratic and Republican party conventions, filling the streets with spirited protest against war, corporate domination and environmental destruction.

This year there's a twist: Many protesters will demonstrate outside a convention that will nominate the first black major-party presidential candidate in history, who is opposed to the Iraq war and was once a community organizer and activist in Chicago.

But Barack Obama will not get a pass from demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention. Activists say they are wary of his shift to the center since he secured the nomination last month.

"We're hoping he can remember his roots and, through these mass rallies and protests, we can move him," said Glenn Spagnuolo, a spokesman for an umbrella group coordinating the Denver protests, provocatively named Re-create '68.

For more on Recreate 68, check here and here.

These folks are hardine leftists of the first order.

So far Obama's pretty much thrown them under the bus - they most likely won't be in attendance at Mile High - but the public spectacle of radical protests throughout the convention will be a reminder of Obama's very real ties to prominent nihilist cohorts of an identical stripe.

See also, "Obama Picks 75,000-Seat Stadium for Convention Speech."

Left-Wing NGOs: Terrorist Propagandists for FARC

Via Prairie Pundit, don't miss Mary Anastasia O'Grady's analysis of left-wing NGO support for FARC:

As we learn more about the Colombian military's daring hostage rescue last week, one detail stands out: In tricking FARC rebels into putting the hostages aboard a helicopter, undercover special forces simply told the comandantes that the aircraft was being loaned to them by a fictitious nongovernmental organization sympathetic to their cause called the International Humanitarian Mission.

It may have taken years for army intelligence to infiltrate the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, and it may have been tough to convincingly impersonate rebels. But what seems to have been a walk in the park was getting the FARC to believe that an NGO was providing resources to help it in the dirty work of ferrying captives to a new location.

I am reminded of President Álvaro Uribe's 2003 statement that some "human rights" organizations in his country were fronts for terrorists. Connecticut Sen. Christopher Dodd got his back up over Mr. Uribe's statement, and piously lectured the Colombian president about "the importance of democratic values."

But as the helicopter story suggests, Mr. Uribe seems to have been right. How else to explain the fact that the FARC swallowed the line without batting an eye?

This warrants attention because it adds to the already robust evidence that left-wing NGOs and other so-called human rights defenders, including Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and Colombian Sen. Piedad Cordoba, are nothing more than propagandists for terrorists.

O'Grady's the best journalist writing on Latin America.

See also, "The Ingrid Betancourt Rescue."

Related: Gateway Pundit, "DEM SHOCKER!!... Speaker Pelosi Was Sending Messages to FARC Terrorists While Undermining Colombian Government!"