February 25, 2010
Posted by: John
Power Line Blog
While our attention was elsewhere, the Democratic Party launched a disgraceful sneak attack against our intelligence professionals. The Democrats attempted to subject anyone who interrogates a terrorist in a less than gentle manner--for example, by "exploiting the phobias of the individual," which refers to the notorious caterpillar in the cell--to 15 years' imprisonment. As usual, Andy McCarthy blows the whistle on the Democrats' perfidy:
[T]his shows how politicized law-enforcement has become under the Obama Democrats. They could have criminalized waterboarding at any time since Jan. 20, 2009. But they waited until now. Why? Because if they had tried to do it before now, it would have been a tacit admission that waterboarding was not illegal when the Bush CIA was using it. That would have harmed the politicized witch-hunt against John Yoo and Jay Bybee, a key component of which was the assumption that waterboarding and the other tactics they authorizied were illegal. Only now, when that witch-hunt has collapsed, have the Democrats moved to criminalize these tactics. It is transparently partisan.
The good news is that the Democrats' effort failed, perhaps because McCarthy blew the whistle. Congressman Peter Hoekstra says:
That Democrats would try to bury this provision deep in the bill, late at night, when they thought everyone's attention would be focused on the health care summit is a testament to the shameful nature of what they were attempting.
Republicans brought this to the attention of the American people, who were rightly outraged that Democrats would try to target those we ask to serve in harm's way and with a unified push we were successful in getting them to pull the bill.
So the Dems have slunk away for now, but they will come creeping back when they think no one is watching.
The GOP's 'tea party' dance - Will the movement sink or save the conservatives?
February 21, 2010
By Jacob Heilbrunn
In September 1960, several dozen young conservative intellectuals descended on National Review editor William F. Buckley Jr.'s estate in Sharon, Conn., to draft a manifesto. Terse but sweeping, it demanded victory over rather than coexistence with "international communism," and declared that when "government interferes with the work of the market economy, it tends to reduce the moral and physical strength of the nation." Known as the Sharon statement, it helped forge the modern conservative movement.
Half a century later, many of the movement's elders -- including former Reagan administration Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III, Heritage Foundation President Edwin Feulner Jr. and American Spectator publisher Alfred Regnery -- are trying to replicate that success. On Wednesday, they assembled near George Washington's former estate to issue a new epistle called the Mount Vernon statement.
Republican electoral prospects may be looking up with the retirement of Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) and with a host of other Democratic seats up for grabs, but the statement, which appeared on the eve of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, suggests that the establishment right is shivering -- not so much because of the unusually frosty Washington winter but because of the potential threat posed to the GOP by the insurgent "tea party" movement. As a result, conservatives are going into overdrive to attempt to co-opt it.
The Mount Vernon statement, as the Washington Post first reported, is the product of the Conservative Action Project, which is headed by Meese and emerged from the secretive conservative power-broker organization known as the Council for National Policy. The project's website explains that "just as FDR's soak-the-rich policies did not work in the 1930s to end the Great Depression, similar policies by President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats will not work today in restoring to us a vibrant economy." It also features photos of Calvin Coolidge and his Treasury secretary, Andrew W. Mellon, who was an early exponent of supply-side economics, arguing that cutting taxes on the wealthy could directly lead to higher government revenues.
The Mount Vernon statement thus aims to relegate the free-spending George W. Bush era and President Obama to the sidelines and to reinvent the conservative movement in its original small-government image.
At the same time, it tries to paper over the differences between social conservatives, libertarian conservatives and neoconservatives by reminding "economic conservatives that morality is essential to limited government, social conservatives that unlimited government is a threat to moral self-government, and national security conservatives that energetic but responsible government is the key to America's safety and leadership role in the world." In papering over those differences, however, it lacks the fire and energy of the original Sharon statement.
If the Mount Vernon statement represents a lofty attempt to restate conservative principles, the practical blueprint for the right's attempt to assimilate the tea party's adherents is contained in an important article by Ramesh Ponnuru and Kate O'Beirne in the Feb. 22 National Review. Ponnuru and O'Beirne flatly reject the doomsayers such as New York Times columnist David Brooks, who suggests that the tea party could be "the ruin of the [Republican] party." Ponnuru and O'Beirne liken taking the tea partyers onboard to the debates that surrounded allying the GOP with the Christian right during the 1970s. They define the problem out of existence: Some of the tea partyers may be "rough around the edges" but "are not unpopular and their views are not extreme."
The job of the GOP is to form coalitions with the tea partyers, they say, or go out of business. Republican National Committee Chairman Michael S. Steele has been playing footsie with the tea partyers, discussing the November election with about 30 of their leaders Tuesday.
Whether the GOP can permanently harness the energies of the tea party, however, is another matter. The insurgent party may well drive the GOP so far to the right that it proves something of an albatross in November. It's also hard to see how the GOP could deliver on the tea party's demand for cutting federal entitlement programs, which is political suicide. Indeed, Republicans might well prove as ineffectual as Democrats in attacking the deficit, which they compiled in the first place during the Bush presidency.
No doubt third parties such as the Know-Nothings have historically enjoyed a short life span in America. Historian Richard Hofstadter famously observed, "Third parties are like bees: Once they have stung, they die." But the tea party may wield a very potent stinger. Its fortunes likely will be bolstered by the towering federal budget deficits that the administration is accruing.
According to conservative firebrand Patrick Buchanan: "Tea partiers now play the role of Red Army commissars who sat at machine guns behind their own troops to shoot down any soldier who retreated or ran. Republicans who sign on to tax hikes cannot go home again."
As conservative veterans urge the GOP to reclaim the small-government mantle, then, the question hovering over them is whether they will successfully harness the volatile insurgency led by the tea party, or will they themselves be swept aside as part of regime change? It would be no small irony if they were displaced by the very kind of insurrectionist spirit they embodied 50 years ago in Connecticut.
Jacob Heilbrunn is a senior editor at the National Interest and the author of "They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons."
February 19, 2010
He was the lead prosecutor 15 years ago in one of the country’s biggest terrorism trials: a group of men led by a blind Egyptian sheik had plotted to blow up the United Nations, the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels and other city landmarks.
“Are you ready to surrender the rule of law to the men in this courtroom?” the prosecutor, Andrew C. McCarthy, told the jury in Federal District Court in Manhattan in a closing argument. Ultimately, the 10 defendants were convicted.
But last Dec. 5, Mr. McCarthy, who is no longer in government, joined a group of speakers outside the same courthouse rallying against the Obama administration’s decision to bring Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to Manhattan for a civilian trial.
“A war is a war,” Mr. McCarthy declared. “A war is not a crime, and you don’t bring your enemies to a courthouse.”
In the debate over how and where to prosecute Mr. Mohammed and other Sept. 11 cases, few critics of the Obama administration have been more fervent in their opposition than Mr. McCarthy, a 50-year-old lawyer from the Bronx who had built a reputation as one of the country’s formidable terrorism prosecutors.
Now he has a different reputation: harsh critic of the system in which he had his greatest legal triumph.
Mr. McCarthy has relentlessly attacked the administration for supporting civilian justice for terrorism suspects. He has criticized the military commissions system and called for creation of a national security court. After the arrest of the suspect in the Christmas bomb plot, he wrote, “Will Americans finally grasp how insane it is to regard counterterrorism as a law-enforcement project rather than a matter of national security?”
To his detractors, he is just another partisan commentator whose views can be easily dismissed. “When I read his stuff, I say, ‘Is he running for office, or does he want a show on Fox?’ ” said Joshua L. Dratel, a defense lawyer who has represented many terrorism defendants. “I can’t figure it out.”
But his supporters argue that his background distinguishes him from pundits on the left and the right. “It certainly adds credibility to what he has to say,” said Michael B. Mukasey, attorney general under President George W. Bush and also the presiding judge in the 1995 trial of the sheik.
Debra Burlingame, an organizer of the December rally, whose brother, Charles F. Burlingame III, was the pilot of the hijacked plane that was crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, said: “He’s done a lot of heavy lifting on our behalf. This fight gets very tiring, and Andy is one of those people that truly inspires and keeps me going.”
Fellow alumni of the United States attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York have mixed views about Mr. McCarthy, who also writes on topics like abortion and overhauling health care. “His critics view him as a right-wing blogger,” said Anthony S. Barkow, a former terrorism prosecutor in the office who now runs a center on criminal law at New York University.
Mr. Barkow said he had stopped reading Mr. McCarthy on topics other than national security. “I have to give him credit for being willing to reject his past a bit,” he said, “and be out there so vehemently against something he was so integrally a part of.”
Through a spokesman, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. declined to comment about Mr. McCarthy. When asked about him during an appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee in November, Mr. Holder replied that he was there “to talk about facts and evidence, real American values, and not the kinds of polemics that he seems prone to.”
“I’m not worried about Mr. McCarthy,” Mr. Holder said.
Mr. McCarthy now writes regularly for National Review. He makes extensive public appearances, and he wrote a 2008 book on terrorism policy called “Willful Blindness.” He said in interviews that the evolution of his views came during his stint as a prosecutor.
A graduate of Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx, Mr. McCarthy, the oldest of six children, was 13 when his father died. After graduating from Columbia College, he attended New York Law School at night while working days as a deputy marshal in the witness protection program. He later became a paralegal in the United States attorney’s office.
Hired as a prosecutor in 1986, he worked on the Pizza Connection heroin trial. He was running the office’s general crimes unit in 1993 when the World Trade Center was bombed and the conspiracy involving the sheik, Omar Abdel Rahman, was uncovered.
Mr. McCarthy said there was no debate then about how to approach the case. “Nobody sits around the table and says, War? Crime? Which is it?” he said. “We say, you know, we have an investigation.”
Because of a lack of effective terrorism laws at the time, he said, he traveled to Washington with the United States attorney, Mary Jo White, and won approval from Attorney General Janet Reno to use the seditious conspiracy statute. The Civil War-era law made it illegal to plot to wage a war against the government.
Mr. McCarthy said they believed that the sheik’s exhortations of his followers to attack the United States could be charged as part of the conspiracy.
“It was his idea — pure and simple,” said Ms. White, who called Mr. McCarthy a thoughtful and creative prosecutor who could “reshuffle the pieces” to come up with “a different way of looking” at a case.
Mr. McCarthy and two other prosecutors — Patrick J. Fitzgerald, now the United States attorney in Chicago; and Robert Khuzami, now chief of enforcement for the Securities and Exchange Commission — successfully tried the case over nine months; the verdict was upheld on appeal.
The trial was an early success for the Southern District’s elite terrorism prosecutors. From 1993 to 2001, they also handled two trials stemming from the 1993 World Trade Center attack, a trial in the plot to blow up a dozen American airliners over the Pacific Ocean and another in the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in East Africa, which killed 224 people.
In addition, the investigations broke up deadly plots before they could be carried out and turned up a wealth of information about Al Qaeda. The trials have been cited by the Obama administration to justify its support of civilian prosecutions of terrorists.
Mr. McCarthy said he understood why the office pursued the prosecutions. “I mean that’s the ethos of the place is that you want to do the cutting-edge case.” But, looking back, he said, he questioned the focus, particularly given that Al Qaeda kept escalating its attacks. He cited the 2000 bombing of the destroyer Cole in Yemen, which killed 17 American servicemen, and Sept. 11.
“We become headquarters for counterterrorism in the United States,” he said. “Not the C.I.A. Not anyplace in Washington. The U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York.”
“From the country’s perspective,” he said, “it’s not a good thing.” A prosecutor’s job, he added, “is not the national security of the United States.”
In June 1998, the office secretly indicted Osama bin Laden. Three months later, Al Qaeda blew up the two embassies.
“I mean, we could go into the grand jury and indict him three times a week,” Mr. McCarthy said. “But to do anything about it, you needed the Marines. You didn’t need us.”
In a November 1998 essay for The Weekly Standard, he offered one of his earliest public pronouncements of where his thinking was going. “In the main, international terrorism is a military problem, not a criminal-justice issue,” he wrote.
Ms. White, who was the United States attorney from 1993 to 2002, declined to discuss Mr. McCarthy’s comments. But in a 2008 panel, Ms. White, who has said she favors military commissions, made clear she agreed with Mr. McCarthy’s view that the prosecutions had not deterred attacks. She said “9/11 happened despite all those cases.”
She cited the indictment her office obtained after the 1998 embassy bombings; it listed Mr. bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahri and other Qaeda leaders. “They were on the Ten Most Wanted List two and a half years or three years before 9/11 happened,” she said.
“I mean, the criminal justice system didn’t succeed even though it proceeded according to the rules. Tough prosecutions. It’s not enough.”
After Sept. 11, Mr. McCarthy was one of a group of terrorism prosecutors working from a command post. One former colleague, Edward O’Callaghan, said he was “drafting search warrants, connecting dots; there were few people in the country that had the knowledge base that he did.”
Since Mr. McCarthy left his prosecutor’s job in 2003, some of his assertions have been questioned by former prosecutors and defense lawyers.
Mr. McCarthy has written, for example, about learning that a document he provided in the discovery process in 1995 to defense lawyers in the sheik’s case — a long list of names of potential unindicted co-conspirators — was passed on to Mr. bin Laden, whose name was also on the list.
Mr. McCarthy has cited the episode as an example of how terrorists could use civilian trials as a kind of intelligence gathering tool. But two former Southern District prosecutors who studied the episode noted that the government had not sought a pretrial protective order — a procedure that would have restricted the document’s dissemination.
“We are not aware of any security breaches” in cases where such an order was sought, the authors said in a 2008 report for Human Rights First, which endorsed civilian justice for terrorism cases.
Mr. McCarthy has also criticized the private lawyers who have been assisting detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in challenging the legality of their confinements through habeas corpus petitions in federal court.
“The country’s at war and they’re volunteering their services to the enemy,” Mr. McCarthy said of the lawyers.
Mr. Dratel, a lawyer who represented one such detainee, said: “Is that Andy McCarthy or Joseph McCarthy? It doesn’t merit a response. That form of demagoguery was floated a few years ago and was promptly and roundly rejected by the entire organized bar. Those lawyers he criticizes have done an invaluable service for the United States.”
In the recent interviews, Mr. McCarthy defended his approach. He said that “the country’s at a very bad spot right now” and that he was “doing what I’m supposed to be doing.”
At the December protest rally, he said, he felt a rare sense of camaraderie as he stood with families, firefighters and police officers. “It just seemed to me like since 9/11 we’ve been drifting away and away from the moment of clarity we had,” he said, “and then I was back with the people who got it.”
GOP woos wary tea partiers
By: Kenneth P. Vogel
February 14, 2010 |
Across the country, conservative tea party activists — many new to politics and unaffiliated with, if not averse to, the Republican Party — are increasingly finding themselves the target of intense GOP courting headed into the critical 2010 midterm elections.
Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele plans to meet Tuesday with about 50 tea party leaders. The California GOP chairman recently trained tea partiers on political organizing and is planning a party-sponsored rally. The South Carolina GOP has a resource-sharing agreement with tea party groups. The North Dakota party chairman hosted a tea party-GOP rally Friday and is urging fellow state chairs to do the same.
But for tea partiers, who from the early days of their movement wanted to be heard and taken seriously, it’s a little bit of careful what you wish for.
Some have welcomed the attention, forging tentative alliances or at least opening channels of communication, usually to intense criticism from fellow tea partiers. But most have either proudly spurned Republican advances or approached their suitors apprehensively, keenly aware that while Republican resources and infrastructure could both boost the tea party movement to a new level of effectiveness, the GOP’s tainted brand could also jeopardize the independence that is part of their populist appeal.
Still others have sought to essentially take over local party organizations. Their success has tempered some GOP-tea party outreach and left some Republicans nervous that the tea party affiliation could turn off swing voters or independents, even as others predict the infusion of new blood could reinvigorate the GOP the way Barry Goldwater’s disciples did starting in the 1960s.
“The Republican Party has always been a grass-roots party, and I respect the healthy debate that is going on in the states,” said Steele, who was denied a speaking slot at an April tea party protest (though he said he hadn’t requested one) but has heaped praise on the movement and sought to affiliate the RNC with it.
“It is extremely important to find common ground and fight together for smaller government, lower taxes, free enterprise and the Constitution,” he told POLITICO.
Steele’s planned Tuesday meeting with tea party leaders from at least a dozen states — a meeting organized by Karin Hoffman, founder of a South Florida tea party group called DC Works For Us — represents something of a breakthrough in the GOP’s courting of the tea party. Though Steele and other GOP leaders have occasionally scored meetings with individual leaders of national groups involved in the tea party movement, Tuesday will mark the first large-scale get-together between the national party and grass-roots activists from a wide array of regional tea party groups.
“The whole impetus for the movement was that we were not being heard,” said Hoffman. “This meeting is really a natural outcropping of that — bringing the discussion from the grass-roots movement to the political establishment and having an honest discussion about who we are, what the grass-roots movement has done and what we can do, but also what we want to see,” said Hoffman.
“It is not a melding [of the movement with the GOP],” Hoffman said. “It is not an effort to absorb it. We’re still maintaining our autonomy. It’s just a discussion — and that’s what the grass-roots has wanted to have from the beginning.”
She acknowledged, however, that some tea party leaders have rejected her invitation to the Steele meeting because they don’t want to affiliate too closely with a party they see as having forsaken the fiscal conservatism that is the overriding concern of most tea party activists.
Fordham University political science professor Tom DeLuca, who studies political movements, said tea partiers are facing “a very hard political choice, which is: Do you stay true your base and maintain yourself as a grass-roots, anti-establishment movement?
"Or do you compromise your principles, both in terms of how you organize and how far you can push certain issues, to go the more electoral route in alliance with a major political party that could bear more immediate fruit but will eventually mean you fade away?”
For the GOP, according to DeLuca, there is no choice.
“They’re going to have to accommodate the movement, without becoming the movement, because then they can’t win,” he said, citing as a model the Democratic Party’s absorption of the populist movement in the 1890s, rather than the party’s leftward shift to accommodate anti-Vietnam war protesters in the early 1970s.
“Republicans are going to have to negotiate that in a way that keeps as many of the tea party people on board as possible, though it’s inevitable that they’ll lose some of them,” said DeLuca. “They don’t want to be accused of ignoring it, and they don’t want to be accused of co-opting it.”
After a Monday news conference at which the South Carolina GOP announced what it said was a pioneering partnership between it and tea party groups, the local activist who brokered the arrangement was bombarded by e-mails, text messages and phone calls from tea partiers across the country accusing him of selling out the movement to a Republican Party concerned more with electoral gains than the fiscally conservative principles behind the movement.
“People were just absolutely outraged,” said Harry Kibler, a 42-year-old fitness club manager from Pelzer, S.C., who helps lead the Upstate Coalition of Conservative Organizations, an umbrella structure of 15 South Carolina tea party groups with a combined membership of at least 2,000 activists.
But Kibler said state Republican Party Chairwoman Karen Floyd exaggerated the extent of the original agreement, which called for a liaison to foster communication between the tea party groups and the GOP, as well as an understanding that the tea partiers would work during next year’s precinct re-organization to gain GOP committeemen seats “so that we could have a voting voice inside of the party.”
Floyd told POLITICO that it was all a misunderstanding. “We have these common overlapping beliefs and ideologies,” she said, “but there was no bleeding of lines."
Nationally, too, tea partiers have pushed back against Republican groups wrapping themselves in the movement’s flag. Jenny Beth Martin, a founder of the umbrella group Tea Party Patriots, remembers asking the Republican Governors Association to drop the “tea party” name from a tele-town hall effort with governors popular in the tea party crowd.
“We pushed back so hard, that they really kind of backed down and understood that they needed to let us focus on our core values,” she said.
In Colorado, tea party activists raised a ruckus when a Republican gubernatorial candidate in December appeared on Fox News Channel as the “Tea-Party-backed candidate,” prompting state Republican party Chair Dick Wadhams to begin a series of ongoing meetings with tea party activists across the state to encourage tea party activists to get involved in the party.
“Prior to that, we hadn’t heard anything from him,” said Lu Ann Busse, the state chair of a coalition of tea party-esque entities known as 9/12 groups. Even now, she says “there is not a great deal of cooperation. On the Democratic side, they want to fire up their base and cause even more divisions between conservatives. And Republicans are trying to use the tea party movement. They see it as a way to get elected by combining the Republican base with the tea party activist base, which includes a lot more independents.”
Wadhams said his message to Colorado tea partiers has been: “Join the Republican Party, participate in our process and help us nominate candidates.”
In North Dakota, some Republicans have become uneasy with efforts to bring tea partiers into the party, said state Republican Party Chairman Gary Emineth, who gave a presentation to other state party chairs at the RNC winter meeting last month in Hawaii on engaging with tea partiers.
“I told them they will catch some flak within the party because not everyone is in support of bringing this whole process together. It’ll change the some of the way that our party looks” — possibly by resulting in more conservative candidates, Emineth told POLITICO. Tea partiers, too, have been suspicious, he said, adding, “I have felt heat on both ends of it. But I kind of felt it was important in this election cycle to really reach out and bring them into our party.”
Vernon Brossart, a leader with the Williston, N.D., Tea Party, said he knows of no one from his group who attended a Friday night GOP-Tea Party rally organized by Emineth in Bismarck, which drew 1,000 people, because the Williston Tea Party is planning their own event for Saturday, at which they expect between 300 and 600 people. He said his goal isn’t to join the GOP but to take it over. He said the local GOP “had been basically dormant for years, and we have pretty much energized them.”
Ron Nehring, chairman of the California Republican Party, which is planning what it’s billing as a tea party rally at its state convention next month, said tea party activists “have a natural home in a broad-based yet principled Republican Party,” and that “American history shows us that as movements grow, they’re eventually incorporated into one of the two major parties.”
Nehring spoke about building grass-roots organizations and coalitions at a gathering of tea party activists in Nashville last weekend billed as the first National Tea Party Convention. Justin Phillips, the activist who organized the convention, said there’s a new recognition that the GOP can help achieve the movement’s goals.
“The tea party folks who got started last year have reconsidered affiliation with the GOP,” he said. “I think many are realizing exactly what it takes to put on an election.” |
State of the Union: Right-Leaning
Voters are skeptical of big government and hostile to the current health-care legislation.
January 27, 2010
By: Ramesh Ponnuru
President Obama will be delivering his State of the Union address tonight to an increasingly conservative electorate. A new poll of 1,000 likely voters, done by John McLaughlin and Associates for the National Review Institute, finds voters skeptical of big government, hostile to the health-care legislation being considered on Capitol Hill, and interested in conservative alternatives.
The poll finds that 50 percent of voters approve of Obama’s job performance and 46 percent disapprove — but there the good news for Democrats ends. Republicans lead Democrats by five points on the generic congressional ballot, and are behind by only four among Hispanics.
On ideological questions this electorate leans right. Self-identified liberals have more confidence that government spending and intervention will improve the economy than that free enterprise and individual initiative will. The electorate disagrees, 65 to 25 percent. Self-identified liberals worry more about big business than big government; again the electorate disagrees, 57 to 25 percent. Likely voters do not believe that this administration knows how business works or how to help it succeed by 53 to 42 percent; independents and people who own small businesses were even more skeptical. Seventy-nine percent of voters agree that Congress has lost sight of its constitutional limits; 53 percent of them “strongly” agree.
The health-care polling spells disaster from start to finish for liberals. Likely 2010 voters believe that the health-care legislation being considered will make health care worse rather than better (56 to 29 percent) and that it will increase costs rather than lower them (62 to 24 percent). These worries are not confined to typically Republican demographic groups. A majority of Hispanics thinks that the bill will make health care worse, as do 56 percent of those who are undecided about their congressional vote and 27 percent of those who approve of Obama’s job performance. Eighty-one percent of voters say they are concerned about the bill’s effect on the deficit, with 54 percent characterizing themselves as “very” concerned.
Likely voters were asked whether Congress should consider the current bill or an alternative that took “a few more modest steps” such as “allowing the purchase of insurance across state lines to improve competition, creating a risk pool to help people with pre-existing conditions afford coverage, and curbing lawsuits against doctors.” Given these alternatives, 61 percent favored them and only 21 percent the current bill.
This conservative health-care reform attracts bipartisan support. Democrats favor the alternative over the current bill by 47 to 34 percent, liberals by 44 to 39 percent, and Obama approvers by 46 to 33 percent. Independents favor it by 61 to 21 percent.
The poll holds out little hope that an anti–Wall Street “populist” turn by the Democrats will help them. Likely voters were asked which statement came closest to their own opinion, that “we should impose a new tax on banks because they have benefited so much from bailouts and need to be reined in” or that “bank customers would end up paying the tax and the economy would suffer.” The pro-bank-tax line got 38 percent agreement while the anti-bank-tax line got 52 percent. Independents broke 50 to 33 percent against the bank tax. Perhaps surprisingly, union households, which are supposed to be a stronghold for this sort of populism, were almost exactly in line with the electorate as a whole in opposition. In this poll, the popular form of populism is conservative: 88 percent of voters want to make it easier to fire government workers for substandard performance.
This conservatism has its limits: Voters are still averse to cutbacks in Social Security and Medicare. Voters also believe that the deficit makes tax cuts unaffordable, although particular tax-cut proposals often draw high support, and voters strongly oppose tax increases.
The likely voters of 2010 are not in the market for business bashing, for big government, or for Obamacare, and they favor conservative policies to address their concerns. They do not hate the president — again, more of them approve of his job performance than disapprove of it — but they are not interested in what he is selling.
Why did Congressman Joe Wilson need to apologize for calling Obama a liar?
By: James Delingpole
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Andy McCarthy on DOJ, "Torture" and the Demjanjuk Contradiction
The Rush Limbaugh Show
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| May 6, 2009 |
RUSH: Now, let me be clear about something here regarding the situation with the extradition of John Demjanjuk and this whole Eric Holder business. On one day, certain kinds of torture are okay; certain days, they're not. I didn't mean to mislead and say that the Germans want to use the same tactics on Demjanjuk that they used on Al-Qaeda detainees. I don't want you to think that the Germans are going to waterboard Demjanjuk. What the Department of Justice is saying is that regardless what tactics the Germans may use, even if the Germans cause Demjanjuk to feel severe pain and suffering, this can't be torture because the Germans don't intend to torture Demjanjuk. That is, you can't have torture unless there's an evil motive to torture, and the Germans are saying, "We're not going to torture him," which is an adoption of the reasoning from John Yoo and Bybee.
Where they said the CIA should not torture Al-Qaeda guys, unless they had a motive to cause them severe pain and suffering. If they didn't have this motivate it would be a complete defense to any claim of torture. So even if you inflict severe pain and suffering on someone, which is the statutory definition of torture. There is no "torture" unless the government agent is deliberately trying to inflict torture. And that was the position in the memos from John Yoo and Bybee, and it's now the Obama DoJ's position. Now, their memo said we didn't torture these guys. Our intention was not to torture them. Here, we've got Andy McCarthy who has done some great research work on this. He's on the air to explain this and clarify this, 'cause I did not mean to say that the Germans are going to waterboard Demjanjuk. Hey, Andy. Explain this to people in a way they can understand.
McCARTHY: Sure, Rush. The whole idea behind the Yoo-Bybee memos from 2002 was to avoid torture. The idea was to avoid having a situation where severe pain and suffering was inflicted on these guys, and what Yoo and Bybee point out in the memo when they discuss the state of mind that you have to have for a torture offense is that when Congress passed this torture statute and when the United States ratified the torture treaty, what they tried to do was make it a very narrow crime. And in doing that what they said was, "You can't have torture unless you specifically intend to commit the crime of torture," which means you specifically intend to inflict on somebody severe pain and suffering.
RUSH: Now, did they write that to give anybody cover who was engaged in these interrogations?
McCARTHY: Well, that's the allegation from the left. My view is they wrote it because they were asked, "What is the legal outline, the legal contours of torture?" and be sure he couldn't outline what the legal contours of torture are without saying that. And I think there's a lot of support for that view in the fact that only a year ago, the Third Circuit court of appeals -- which obviously was not to create cover for the CIA -- in a case that involved an allegation of violation of torture under the torture treaty, the Third Circuit court of appeals came up with the same analysis that Yoo and Bybee came up with. They said that even if by sending this fellow who brought the suit back to his home country, and even if he had severe pain and suffering and even died from the fact that he couldn't get correct medical treatment in the place where he was going to be sent, that wouldn't be torture because the government didn't intend for him to feel severe pain and suffering. That wasn't the point of what the extradition was.
RUSH: Okay. So where we are here is that in terms of extraditing Demjanjuk, he's subjecting because the Germans going to torture him, our DOJ is saying, "No, they don't intend to torture him so they're not going to torture him." They're using the same reasoning that they're rejecting in the Yoo-Bybee memos? |
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McCARTHY: Exactly right. And basically what they're saying is even if Demjanjuk does inadvertently suffer severe pain and suffering from however he's treated by the Germans, our government is satisfied that that wouldn't be torture. Even if he's in exactly the pain he'd be in if they were trying to torture him, as long as they don't intend to do it. When Yoo and Bybee said that, the left went crazy and said, "They're trying to green light torture," but yet this is exactly the position the Obama administration has taken only about ten days ago.
RUSH: So now we have the story in the New York Times saying that (paraphrased), "Ah, we've looked at this. The DOJ has looked at this. We really don't think we ought to prosecute or investigate Bybee and Bradbury and John Yoo," but they really would encourage state bar associations where they practice to disbar them because we still want to ruin their livelihood.
McCARTHY: Well, that certainly looks like the way it's going. No one's actually seen what this direct report says, and obviously, according to these reports, there's a lot going on behind the scenes to try to affect the outcome here. But you do have to worry that all of this blather about criminal prosecutions under circumstances where there's obviously no torture case here legally, could be a big feint in order to make them look magnanimous if all they do is refer these guys for bar discipline. And yet it would destroy these guys' lives professionally.
RUSH: Well, what are the odds that the bars in these states would follow through on this and issue any discipline? I mean, are they afraid of the DOJ as well? Is everybody afraid of Washington now to the point that cover comes out of Washington in terms of a suggestion or request is considered a demand?
McCARTHY: I think, Rush, that that's something to be profoundly worried about, if they can manipulate the Justice Department process in this direction. You know, the bar associations tend to be left of center to begin with.
RUSH: This, if I might remind people about last week, this is specifically why you wrote the letter to the Attorney General Eric Holder declining the invitation to participate in some bipartisan task force going forward, right? Because, among many other reasons, one of the reasons was your opinion is going to disagree with theirs and you don't want to be prosecuted down the road because you think they already had their process written, and inviting you and others that may not agree with them was just a show?
McCARTHY: Yeah, especially given that the attorney general last week in a speech in Germany basically said that the position I hold -- which is that people should be held under the laws of war in Guantanamo Bay until the end of hostilities -- is a violation of the rule of law. So I'm already on notice that he thinks my opinion is a law violation. So for me to go into a meeting as a lawyer and advise the Justice Department to do something that he already has decided is against the law would imperil me just the way that these Bush administration lawyers have been basically put in the crosshairs by giving a good-faith piece of advice about what they think we should do on these national security matters.
RUSH: I'm talking with Andrew McCarthy, who is a writer-editor at National Review and National Review Online and a former prosecutor for the US attorney's office -- Southern District of New York, which is Manhattan -- and Andy led the prosecution team that convicted the blind sheik, Omar Abdel Rahman. For people just turning in, I want them to know the voice that they were listening to. So Andy, as a lawyer and as somebody who's worked in the Justice Department, you're very much aware of it power US attorneys offices have: the attorney general, the DOJ. You look at these people from Holder down and the way that they're conducting business, what are your fears? This just seems like the tip of the iceberg here with the dichotomy or the feint, if you will, with the way Demjanjuk might be treated. And yet we want to destroy the lives of American lawyers who authored the very same belief system that they're going to use to extradite Demjanjuk. What else is going on that people may not know about? |
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McCARTHY: Well, my biggest fear, Rush, is that we're having a repeat of what we saw in the 1990s, particularly with the "wall" regulations, which were a set of internal Justice Department guidelines that prevented the national security side of the FBI's house from communicating with criminal investigators and prosecutors like me. Those regulations created an ethos, a philosophy within the government that there were things that were more important than the national security of the United States, and making sure the left hand knew what the right hand was doing so that we could figure out what the threats were against us. And the feeling that it put in people throughout the government was that if you tried to do your job -- if you tried to push the envelope, if you tried to protect the American people, if you tried to go the extra mile to figure out what the threats against us were -- that could be professionally ruinous for you. And we saw where that led on 9/11. I don't, frankly, think it should have taken until 9/11 to figure it out because we were attacked repeatedly from 1993 going forward. And I think in terms of... You know, look. What difference does it make to somebody like me or to John Yoo or to Bybee? You know, you can ruin one lawyer or three lawyers or however many lawyers. The important thing to those of us who care about the country is, we need to have the government, as we've seen, given the threat that we're up against, moving heaven and earth to figure out what the threats are against us, to figure out where the next place we might get hit is.
RUSH: Excuse me. I get the distinct impression this administration does not think of that threat as serious at all.
McCARTHY: Well, they rhetorically suggest that it's serious but certainly if you look at what they're doing compared to what they're saying, I have to agree that you're right.
RUSH: Well, I don't know how you... That's the whole point with Obama. He says all these wonderful things, like we're going to have a chance to track every dollar of the stimulus bill, at Recovery.org. Then we learn today that the site's not going to have any worthy data until next year, and it's not even going to have to it then. It's all a joke! While he talks about protecting the country and so forth, he's making deals with Hamas, selling Israel out. He's got John Kerry out saying to Iran, "Hey, look, we're going to change our policy on regime change. We'll accept you; we'll tolerate you -- if you guys just get rid and suspend your nuclear program." These are fools. They have to know that Ahmadinejad, the Iranians, are not going to accept this, even if they said they would.
McCARTHY: Well, you make a great point, and you raised before the letter that I sent last week. Another reason that I didn't want to go to this confab on Monday was because I thought essentially it's a charade. It's sort of the difference between what they're doing and what they're saying that you've just outlined. They're contending, or they're telling people, that they're studying carefully all the issues about detainees. And yet what we're finding is that they're actually releasing detainees. About four weeks ago they released a guy outright named Binyam Mohamed who was sent back to England. He's the collaborator with Jose Padilla, the guy that was the so-called dirty bomber. He was actually planning mass murder attacks in American cities. He was held as an enemy combatant for about six years by the Bush administration. The Obama administration has just released him to England. So for all this arguing about, you know, "Should we do it in the criminal justice system or should we do it in the military system?" You could argue that all day long but I don't think anybody thought we should be releasing these guys, and yet that's what they did with him and it's what they're planning to go with these guys, the Uighurs, who they're actually talking about releasing into the United States.
RUSH: Yeah, I got this story today -- and I've got a couple minutes here and I have to go -- but it's being reported at Politico that Harry Reid is demanding specifics on where the prisoners will go and what's going to be done with them. So this story makes it seem like Harry Reid is saying to Obama, "Where exactly are these yahoos going to be placed?" Is there some resistance in Congress to this?
McCARTHY: I think right now there's building resistance. Particularly in the House, I think Representative [Pete] Hoekstra (R-MI) and Frank Wolf (R-VA) have been pushing hard on this. I expect that other people are going to be pushing hard on it as well. It's important that people know, Rush, that we actually passed some law in 2005 that makes it illegal to bring aliens into the United States if they've had terror training or been affiliated with a terrorist organization. The Uighurs are excludable on both grounds.
RUSH: Eh, that's a Bush law. It was unjust and immoral.
McCARTHY: (laughs)
RUSH: We're not going to pay any attention to it.
McCARTHY: Right.
RUSH: Andy, I gotta run. I appreciate your calling. Thanks.
McCARTHY: My pleasure, Rush. Thanks.
RUSH: Andrew McCarthy. |
Claremont Review of Books
Volume IX, Number 2, Spring 2009
http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1613/article_detail.asp#
Riddle of the Sands
A review of A Path Out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East, by Kenneth M. Pollack;
The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East, by Olivier Roy;
and Beyond Terror and Martyrdom: The Future of the Middle East, by Gilles Kepel
By Andrew C. McCarthy
None of George W. Bush's alleged treacheries more riles leftists than that, on the international stage, he was one of them. For his dreamy Wilsonian trouble, he was savaged mercilessly, the Left having ceased to see the wisdom in democracy evangelism, military adventures, and edgy security tactics once the Clinton Administration closed shop.
Bush's exodus was marked by historically low approval ratings, his party ejected from power after successive electoral routs. Yet, as the heat of campaign cant gave way to the cold reality of governing, President Barack Obama retained his predecessor's defense secretary while filling other top posts with Iraq invasion supporters and democratization devotees. "Progressives" are painting new lipstick on the enlightened interventionism they've spent the last several years deriding as a pig. And so the rush is on to reclaim Woodrow Wilson from the Bush legacy. The problem, it turns out, was not the ambitious project to remake the Muslim Middle East. It's just that the noble effort was horribly implemented by incompetent, moralistic dullards who never really believed in it and who, in their arrogant disregard for the rule of law, came to mirror the terrorists they were fighting.
That is the collective story of three new books addressing post-Bush Middle East policy. Of these, the most comprehensive is Brookings Institution scholar Kenneth Pollack's A Path Out of the Desert—an ironic title given the author's plea that Americans take up permanent residency in the desert ... and bring along their wallets.
For years, Pollack was a Persian Gulf analyst at the CIA and the Clinton-era National Security Council. His oeuvre includes The Threatening Storm (2002), which meticulously laid out the case for regime change and democracy promotion in Iraq. The ensuing misadventure has not changed his mind. But as a thoughtful, self-described "liberal internationalist," he appreciates the deep economic, political, and social dysfunction of the Middle East. He admits his new "grand strategy," called "enabling reform," will be the work of decades. His great regret is that Bush's missteps have sapped the national will required for so daunting a commitment.
He is right to worry. For all the considerable energy he expends cataloguing small distinctions, Pollack's enabling reform is not all that different from Bush's democratization gambit. Like Bush, Pollack strains to absolve Islam from any relation to terrorism—though he admits the threat has an Islamic "flavor," inasmuch as it is driven primarily by Salafi "Islamists" who "create a superficial impression" of a connection to Islam. He recommends that terrorism and the sometimes related (and sometimes not) Islamism be addressed by better governance in authoritarian states. So, the thinking goes, security in America hinges on democratic reform in the Middle East. Because the unpopularity of Bush initiatives predicated on just these assumptions is so palpable, Pollack is at pains to distance his "reform." Alternately, he denies the "myth" that democracy promotion played "a dominant role in Bush policy," and then disparages the former president's "forward strategy of freedom" as though it were central to the whole mess.
Bush, who campaigned against Clintonian nation-building in 2000, is described as having reluctantly hijacked the strategy under duress. Democratization, Pollack recounts, was really the brain-child of Clinton "neoliberals." Though it inspired a few well-meaning Bush "moderates," the administration's real insiders—the "radical Right"—were not brought around until weapons of mass destruction failed to materialize in Iraq and they found themselves in need of a justification for the mounting casualties. At sea with a good idea they didn't really grasp, Bush operatives blew it—failing to live up to the second inaugural's "magnificent" rhetoric of reform, rushing elections prematurely to the advantage of terrorist groups like Hamas (in the Palestinian territories) and Hezbollah (in Lebanon), and so forth.
One would never know it was Pollack's old boss who midwifed the first Palestinian elections, turning Clinton White House fixture Yasser Arafat into a "democrat" just in time for the second intifada. Pollack is right that democracy promotion assumed greater urgency when the principal rationale for invading Iraq cratered. But as those of us who never bought the strategy can attest (and as Norman Podhoretz, a strong proponent, has documented in the pages of Commentary), democratization was an arrow in the post-9/11 quiver from the start: a core component, albeit not the top goal, of the plans in both Afghanistan and (over a year later) Iraq.
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Quibbles about the depth of bush's conviction aside, Pollack's main complaint is that the policy was pursued incompetently and "on the cheap." This, too, rings hollow after years of relentless Democratic caterwauling about Iraq's exorbitant costs: over $700 billion in direct expenditures (recently estimated by another former Clinton adviser, Joseph Stiglitz, to top $3 trillion in real costs). Obama spent the 2008 campaign wailing that this spending should have gone to education, health care, New Orleans, and countless other higher priorities. Even if the author is right that Bush was ham-handed, and some profligacy is thus chalked off to erratic implementation, one shudders at what Pollack must think funding levels ought to be.
And make no mistake, Pollack is talking about an enormous financial commitment. His strategy would invest government's full run of resources—including the armed forces if necessary—in the hope of very gradual transformation in the Mideast. The plan would provide financial aid to create diverse markets and entrepreneurship, and it envisions a dramatic overhaul of the region's woeful education systems. It calls for increased foreign aid to places like Egypt, where our $2 billion annual ante has not been upped in 20 years. (Even as he recommends more funding for Hosni Mubarak's dictatorship, Pollack suggests withholding a slice to create human-rights pressure—but such sticks, as the Bush Administration learned, turn brittle the second we need the Egyptians to do something, which is often.)
Pollack forthrightly asks, "Is all of this really necessary?" His argument presumes that the Muslim Middle East is amenable to real democratization and that such reform there would translate into security here. On these points he is unconvincing. He is adamant that "Islamists," the "political Islam" they purvey, and the terrorists with whom many of them make common cause must be distinguished from "Islam," the belief system of the world's 1.2 billion Muslims. Fair enough. But he ignores reality in portraying Islam as an exclusively positive force, fully compatible with democracy.
Along the way, he indulges multiple misconceptions. Contrasting America's government with Japan's (among others), he deduces that because democracy comes in many forms its fundamentals must be endlessly malleable. He then lists those fundamentals—"speech and assembly, representative government, transparency, accountability, rule of law, checks and balances within government, and limits on governmental power...." Noticeably absent are freedom of conscience and legal equality between sexes and between sects. As our own national experience shows, these principles are a sine qua non of real democracy, and they run decidedly against the grain of Islamic culture. On this Pollack is silent, or he falls back on the familiar cop-out that because most Muslims are moderate, Islam must also be. He clings to the fallacy that because millions of Muslims live in democracies, Islam must be democracy-friendly—even though it has no democratic tradition, Muslims are minorities in most democracies he mentions, and where they are the majority (in Indonesia and Turkey) freedom is currently under assault.
This cheery view leads the author to the still more tenuous claim that Islamists are largely benign and should be drawn into the electoral process despite what he admits is the danger that, once in power, they might well undermine the political reforms that got them there. Pollack certainly does his credibility no favor by his astounding reliance on condemnations of the 9/11 attacks by such Islamic authorities as Muslim Brotherhood mouthpiece Sheikh Yussef al-Qaradawi ("one of the most well-known religious scholars in the Arab world"). Pollack airbrushes from his portrait Qaradawi's fatwas approving the murder of Americans in Iraq and suicide bombings in Israel, as well as his role as chief agitator in the notorious global rioting over Danish cartoons depicting Mohammed.
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In The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East, renowned French scholar Olivier Roy provides a more detached critique of the Bush policy. A short volume, it is long on hyperbole—e.g., that Iraq is a hopeless, neoconservative-driven catastrophe that has left American counterterrorism in tatters. The argument seems more ill-considered with the passage of time: quite apart from the fact that many highly knowledgeable, non-neocon experts (like Kenneth Pollack) supported removing Saddam Hussein, Iraq has receded from controversy precisely because al-Qaeda has been thoroughly routed there and Baghdad's fledgling government is ambling, fitfully, toward stability (though obviously one can debate whether the final product will justify the cost).
Roy diagnoses what he regards as the fatal flaws of neoconservatism: it is "universalist, Wilsonian and anti-culturalist." He infers that neocons perforce reject Samuel Huntington's clash-of-civilizations theory. Though they surely do, his premises are counterfactual as applied to Iraq and Afghanistan. So sensitive to Iraqi culture was the State Department's democracy-promotion effort that the new Iraqi constitutions were permitted to establish Islam as the state religion and enshrine sharia as a principal source of law—and were adopted only after the ardently sought approbation of religious authorities (such as Ayatollah Ali Sistani). The author has a point, though, when he argues that such cultural solicitude remains at a competitive disadvantage against Islamists and "neofundamentalists" (Roy's term, comprising the Taliban and Somalia's Islamic Courts Union). These groups are rooted in the local culture, address tribal conflicts by appealing to sharia, have a better reputation for fighting corruption than do more secular factions, and appeal to the locals' virulent anti-Americanism (which Roy, correctly, sees as a major neocon blind spot).
Like Pollack, Roy has a nuanced view of Islamists. Islamism, he pronounces, is merely the "political ideologisation of Islam...which has nothing to do with terrorism." Thus he construes Islamist Hamas and Hezbollah, despite their mass-murder tactics, as regional, political movements—as distinguished from the "pure" terrorism of al-Qaeda, which by his lights is essentially anarchist: targeting the "system" but bereft of "concrete objectives."
But Roy's analysis is blind to al-Qaeda's jihadist doctrine, which has very concrete objectives (viz., to end American hegemony and establish a regional, expanding, and ultimately global caliphate), and the charters and rhetoric of Hamas and Hezbollah, who self-identify with global jihadism and whose designs transcend Lebanon and "Palestine." Only by downplaying their resort to terror can he rationalize negotiating with Hamas and Hezbollah (we need their help against al-Qaeda, he says), and chastise Americans for childishly "moralizing" counterterrorism, allegedly at the expense of strategic thinking.
Finally, Beyond Terror and Martyrdom is a time-warped contrivance of the French Arabist Gilles Kepel. His overarching concept is that Bush's quest for "universal democracy" was a "transformative fiction" mirroring al-Qaeda's dream of a "universal Islamist state." The two sides have even pursued their respective utopias through violent force, all the while betraying their core principles—al-Qaeda traducing the true Islam, Bush shredding American values.
Here the reader finds the angry Left's Bush mythology in full, beginning with the "original sin" of Guantanamo Bay, the legal black-hole where innocents are consigned without due process. In actuality, obsessed with keeping life-saving intelligence under wraps, the Bush Administration failed, to its great disadvantage, to highlight Gitmo's positive security contribution. In the void, human-rights activists dictated the narrative and the public was left in the dark about the jihadist training and connections of the detained combatants (until the diligent work of journalists Thomas Joscelyn and Benjamin Wittes brought the information to light). Yet in Kepel's fevered imagination, Gitmo was deliberately designed for a very public role: "to symbolize the defeat of terrorists worldwide." Kepel doesn't let the facts interfere with a good story.
Like Roy's readers, Kepel's will be left clueless about the turnaround in Iraq over the last two years. Stuck in 2006, the author is still pining about Bush's rejection of the ballyhooed Iraq Study Group report, which proposed negotiations with Iran and pressure on Israel as keys to success—and was rendered instantly irrelevant by the successful "surge" in combat forces. (The name David Petraeus does not appear in Kepel's opus.)
More edifying is the author's commentary on the European scene. He offers an interesting analysis of the controversy over Pope Benedict's 2006 speech at Regensburg. In urging the galvanizing role of reason in faith, the pontiff cited a 14th-century Byzantine emperor's castigation of Mohammed, the warrior prophet, for having spread Islam by the sword. Kepel uses the incident to sketch, with cautious optimism, a current in moderate Islamic thought: 38 ulema who undertook to rebut the Holy Father in a congenial reply that assumed shared principles and was expressed logically.
Kepel is effective, moreover, in deconstructing multiculturalism and the social "pillarization" to which it leads. He contends that France has been successful in assimilating Europe's largest immigrant Muslim population, while Britain, Spain, and the Netherlands have lagged behind in integrating their Muslims, who are therefore prone to support terrorism. To carry this argument, Kepel must go to great lengths to interpret rioting by Muslims in the French banlieues as an exclusively economic, rather than even partially religio-cultural, phenomenon.
He has convinced himself, at any rate, that Islam will go Europe, not the other way around. For Kepel, the combination of human capital drawn from across the Mediterranean and European expertise is driving "an ever changing process of fascination and rejection, where friendship and enmity mingle in the register of intimacy." His prediction is that this emerging economic dynamo will be the "alternative to the failed narratives of jihad and the war on terror." It's a happy ending, but is it true?
After Detention, Where Can the Uighurs Go?
By Andrew C. McCarthy
"NRI senior fellow Andrew C. McCarthy debates the relocation of detainees in the New York Times. He argues that the “Uighur saga nicely captures all the irrationality and hypocrisy of our counterterrorism approach. That policy foolishly holds that we can focus on terrorist activity without focusing on the jihadist ideology that motivates it.”" [read full article]
Conservatives mull their political future
By Alexander Burns
“As [National Review Institute] conference attendees worked to define the future of conservative policy, new signs emerged that the Obama administration may be thinking of pushing an aggressive legislative strategy in the spring.” [read full article]
Reasons aplenty to run right
By Jonah Goldberg
“Economically conservative social liberals are the ‘jackalopes of American politics,’ in the words of National Review’s Kate O’Beirne. The press keeps telling us they exist, but when you go looking for them, they refuse to emerge from the bushes.” [read full article]
Scapegoating the Social Right
A fact-free distraction
By Ramesh Ponnuru
“At a recent National Review Institute conference in Washington, Maggie Gallagher pointed out that social conservatives have two models of politics: the mass uprising or the secular Messiah who will put everything right. The patient and endless work of politics fits neither model.” [read full article]
Thoughtful Warriors
Conservatives get back to work.
By Mona Charen
“The National Review Institute…hosted a daylong conference in Washington, D.C., to examine where conservatives need to go from here. It was a very clarifying day.”
[read full article]
Ideology Aside, This Has Been the Year of the Woman
By Lois Romano
“There are really a lot of us out there," said Ponnuru, the executive director of the National Review Institute and the mother of a 3-year-old. "We are vastly underrepresented in politics, and she's the first truly national politician to make a strong statement about being a pro-life woman -- and that's very appealing." [read full article]
NRI’s Andrew McCarthy debates the treatment of suspected terrorists
NRI’s Andrew McCarthy appears in Orange County
NRI hosts Jonah Goldberg in Colorado Springs
NRI and AEI co-host: On the Ropes: What William F. Buckley Jr. Can Teach Today’s Conservatives
Judicial Nominations in the New Administration
Whither Conservatism?