Krugman Tries to Save Face

Ed Driscoll, at PJM, wonders if Paul Krugman has not, after the past week, become a millstone around the neck of the NYT and the left. Given his column of today, it would seem that Krugman himself might be getting that message.

For the last six days, the left in general, and Paul Krugman in particular, has experienced a massive push back against the "blood libel" Krugman initiated when he claimed, iu the immediate aftermath of the mass murder in Arizona and in the total absence of any supporting facts, that the right created the climate of hate that drove the mass murder. Today, in his column, this ethically challenged hyper-partisans beats a retreat, still vaguely implying the same about the right, but couching it in a manner that is far less caustic. He appends his implications as an ad hominem to the conclusion of his column, wherein he divides America into two warring camps - those who support the welfare state and those who do not - with the latter being utterly heartless beings willing to see the poor starve. He concludes:

Right now, each side in that debate [about the direction of our country] passionately believes that the other side is wrong. And it’s all right for them to say that. What’s not acceptable is the kind of violence and eliminationist rhetoric encouraging violence that has become all too common these past two years.

This is a face saving - and perhaps job saving - effort if there ever was one. Krugman is trying to morph his libelous accusations into a general condemnation of the current political atmosphere. It won't work. We will have to wait and see, but I think Krugman has done tremendous damage to the progressive brand, at least among any of those in the middle who have been paying any attention.

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Dangerous Maps

Apparently only the Palin map is capable of taking our political dialogue to heretofore unseen levels of militancy in America. Who knew - well, other than Krugman, Faber, Moulitas, the NYT, Rep. Clyburn, Sen. Durbin, etc.

H/T to Rides A Pale Horse, commenting at Flopping Aces.

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Is It Me, Or Does This Sound Like A Campaign Stop?

The lead up to the President's speech, with various politicians and the like stepping to the podium to adoring cheers, seemed deeply out of place. The President's words seemed appropriate enough, but it seemed oddly inappropriate to have a memorial to those murdered and wounded punctuated repeatedly with cheers and applause. That is not the President's fault per se, but it has left me, at least, deeply uncomfortable with how this memorial was organized and executed.

At any rate, the speech seems neutral enough - a lot of platitudes, but how could anyone craft a speech for this occasion that would not be full of platitudes. As could be expected of Obama, he danced around the blood libel of the left, saying that no single thing anyone did caused this mayhem, but that our discourse should become more civil:

The loss of these wonderful people should make every one of us strive to be better in our private lives - to be better friends and neighbors, co-workers and parents. And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their deaths help usher in more civility in our public discourse. let's remember that it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy - it did not - but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation, in a way that would make them proud.

Color me not surprised. As to a call for "civility," the left's calls for "civility" over the past several days have been nothing more than the bare patina on a call to silence conservative speech. I note that Krauthammer thinks otherwise. He believes Obama has ended the blood libel. We disagree.

Given my jaundiced view of this President, I cannot objectively grade his speech beyond saying that it seemed acceptable for the occasion.

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Krauthammer: "The origins of Loughner's delusions are clear: mental illness. What are the origins of Krugman's?"

Charles Krauthammer, in a former life, Chief Resident in Psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital, makes a rare Wednesday appearance in the Washington Post to address the insanity at work in Arizona, and the transparent political gambit using the dead and injured coming out of New York and Washington. Given his perspective both as a former psychiatrist and now, as perhaps the most astute political observer of our time, I quote him in full on this issue.

The charge: The Tucson massacre is a consequence of the "climate of hate" created by Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Obamacare opponents and sundry other liberal betes noires.

The verdict: Rarely in American political discourse has there been a charge so reckless, so scurrilous and so unsupported by evidence.

As killers go, Jared Loughner is not reticent. Yet among all his writings, postings, videos and other ravings - and in all the testimony from all the people who knew him - there is not a single reference to any of these supposed accessories to murder.

Not only is there no evidence that Loughner was impelled to violence by any of those upon whom Paul Krugman, Keith Olbermann, the New York Times, the Tucson sheriff and other rabid partisans are fixated. There is no evidence that he was responding to anything, political or otherwise, outside of his own head.

A climate of hate? This man lived within his very own private climate. "His thoughts were unrelated to anything in our world," said the teacher of Loughner's philosophy class at Pima Community College. "He was very disconnected from reality," said classmate Lydian Ali. "You know how it is when you talk to someone who's mentally ill and they're just not there?" said neighbor Jason Johnson. "It was like he was in his own world."

His ravings, said one high school classmate, were interspersed with "unnerving, long stupors of silence" during which he would "stare fixedly at his buddies," reported the Wall Street Journal. His own writings are confused, incoherent, punctuated with private numerology and inscrutable taxonomy. He warns of government brainwashing and thought control through "grammar." He was obsessed with "conscious dreaming," a fairly good synonym for hallucinations.

This is not political behavior. These are the signs of a clinical thought disorder - ideas disconnected from each other, incoherent, delusional, detached from reality.

These are all the hallmarks of a paranoid schizophrenic. And a dangerous one. A classmate found him so terrifyingly mentally disturbed that, she e-mailed friends and family, she expected to find his picture on TV after his perpetrating a mass murder. This was no idle speculation: In class "I sit by the door with my purse handy" so that she could get out fast when the shooting began.

Furthermore, the available evidence dates Loughner's fixation on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords to at least 2007, when he attended a town hall of hers and felt slighted by her response. In 2007, no one had heard of Sarah Palin. Glenn Beck was still toiling on Headline News. There was no Tea Party or health-care reform. The only climate of hate was the pervasive post-Iraq campaign of vilification of George W. Bush, nicely captured by a New Republic editor who had begun an article thus: "I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it."

Finally, the charge that the metaphors used by Palin and others were inciting violence is ridiculous. Everyone uses warlike metaphors in describing politics. When Barack Obama said at a 2008 fundraiser in Philadelphia, "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun," he was hardly inciting violence.

Why? Because fighting and warfare are the most routine of political metaphors. And for obvious reasons. Historically speaking, all democratic politics is a sublimation of the ancient route to power - military conquest. That's why the language persists. That's why we say without any self-consciousness such things as "battleground states" or "targeting" opponents. Indeed, the very word for an electoral contest - "campaign" - is an appropriation from warfare.

When profiles of Obama's first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, noted that he once sent a dead fish to a pollster who displeased him, a characteristically subtle statement carrying more than a whiff of malice and murder, it was considered a charming example of excessive - and creative - political enthusiasm. When Senate candidate Joe Manchin dispensed with metaphor and simply fired a bullet through the cap-and-trade bill - while intoning, "I'll take dead aim at [it]" - he was hardly assailed with complaints about violations of civil discourse or invitations to murder.

Did Manchin push Loughner over the top? Did Emanuel's little Mafia imitation create a climate for political violence? The very questions are absurd - unless you're the New York Times and you substitute the name Sarah Palin.

The origins of Loughner's delusions are clear: mental illness. What are the origins of Krugman's?

I do not think Krugman or any of the others on the left are delusional. They - Krugman, the NYT, Moulitas, Rep. Clyburn and others on the left - seized on this mass murder while the blood of the innocents was still wet on the ground in a transparent effort to delegitimize their opposition. It is so transparent and so outrageous, so outside the bounds of legitimate political discourse - or as WSJ's John Fund puts it, crossing a moral line - that if there is any cosmic justice in the world, this will rebound against them.

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Palin: "Within Hours Of A Tragedy Unfolding, Journalists And Pundits Should Not Manufacture A Blood Libel"

Below is Sarah Palin's video commentary on the mass murder in Arizona. She strikes, I think, the right tone, both in mourning for the losses and responding to her critics and others who have seized on this event to delegitimize their opposition. The text of her speech is here.

Sarah Palin: "America's Enduring Strength" from Sarah Palin on Vimeo.

I imagined that blood libel remark, wholly accurate, would shake the left wing hornet's nest. And yet again, I see it is Rep. Clyburn, the left's leading player of the race card and the man who wants to use this event to shut down right wing talk radio, who is among the first to respond. This from Rep. Clyburn:

"You know, Sarah Palin just can't seem to get it, on any front. I think she's an attractive person, she is articulate," Clyburn said on the Bill Press radio show. "But I think intellectually, she seems not to be able to understand what's going on here." . .

Clyburn said that Palin didn't grasp why such rhetoric was so troubling, regardless of the motivations of the alleged shooter of Giffords. The No. 3 House Democrat referenced the Civil Rights Era, and said that some of the shrill rhetoric in modern politics are reminiscent of that time in history.

"I have some experiences that maybe she does not have," he said. "When I see and hear things today that are reminiscent of that period of time, I am very, very concerned about it, because I know what it led to back then, and I know what it can lead to again."

Let's see, stunning arrogance - yep. Condecension to his political opponents - yep. Race card against all those who oppose the left rather than address the specific issue - yep. It's a Clyburn trifecta. What an absolute scumbag.

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The Intersection of Sharron Angle & The Left's Imputation Of Responsibility For The Mass Murders In Arizona

The left is repeated trotting out two shibboleths to justify their blood libel that the right has created a climate of hate that set the stage for Jared Loughner's mass murder in Arizona. The first, Palin's map, has been addressed ad inifitum. That has mostly been dropped since it has been shown that the left did the same thing with maps, bull's eyeing targets for election contests. The second, however, Sharon Angle's reference to a "Second Amendment solution," is now appearing more and more as the justification for the left's scurrilous attacks

So what precisely did Ms. Angle say that has the left all atwitter? She was asked about the Second Amendment in a radio interview several months ago.

Angle: I feel that the Second Amendment is the right to keep and bear arms for our citizenry. This not for someone who's in the military. This not for law enforcement. This is for us. And in fact when you read that Constitution and the founding fathers, they intended this to stop tyranny. This is for us when our government becomes tyrannical...

Manders: If we needed it at any time in history, it might be right now.

Angle: Well it's to defend ourselves. And you know, I'm hoping that we're not getting to Second Amendment remedies. I hope the vote will be the cure for the Harry Reid problems.

In a second interview, she spoke similarly:

"You know, our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason, and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. And in fact Thomas Jefferson said, it's good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years," Angle said. "I hope that's not where we're going, but, you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying, my goodness, what can we do to turn this country around? I'll tell you, the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out."

So let's break that down. First, did she acurately describe the scope and history of the Second Amendment in both interviews? Going to the Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, that answer is decidedly yes. As the discussion of the history of the Second Amendment in that case makes clear, the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right, and it was a right given in part in order to protect against tyrannical government.

The second portion of Ms. Angle's first statement was inartful at best, but is there anyone who thinks she was calling for revolt in the event she was not elected? Or did she mean that there is no need for armed rebellion so long as we have recourse to the ballot box? Contrast that with Rep. Kanjorski (D-Pa), who actually did call for the outright execution of a Republican - "put him up against a wall and shoot him" - last year.

In the second interview, is there anyone who thinks that she was advocating the murder of Harry Reid? Contrast that with, for but one example, the books and movies during the Bush years discussing his actual assassination.

Sharron Angle was the Republican version of Joe Biden - a cringe worthy gaffe-o-matic. But, to school my left wing readers, there is huge gulf between inartful gaffes and calls for outright assassination.

That said, let me reiterate Ms. Angles statement that a purpose of the Second Amendment was to protect against a tyrannical government. Despite what Ezra Klein may think, the fact that the document is over 200 years old does not vitiate in the least that purpose, embodied in this quote from Thomas Jefferson:

When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.

I can see why the left is upset. That must be a nagging thought for a government that has moved our country far to the left against the will of the people and is now poised to further subvert our democracy by governing through regulatory bureaucracies, having them accrete and wield power that our elected representatives in Congress have refused to authorize. That is a bastardization of our republican form of government and, indeed, does move us incrementally closer to tyranny. I don't think anyone on the left thinks Sharron Angle was advocating armed rebellion, but I do think it struck a cord somewhere deep in the left's psyche. And well it should have.

That said, as Ms. Angle implied, our first, second, third, and next to last resort is to the ballot box. The penultimate question is not which side wins the election, but that the ballot be fair and free, and that the democratic / republican process be fully respected.

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Hey, NYT & Paul Krugman, About All That Violent Hate Speech . . .

Just One Minute may just have the single best example of the hypocrisy of the left's campaign to tar the right with responsibility for Jared Loughner's mass murder in Arizona:

[This from] the voted-out Rep. Kanjorski (D, PA) last fall:

"Instead of running for governor of Florida, they ought to have him [Rick Scott, the Republican candidate for Florida governor] and shoot him. Put him against the wall and shoot him. He stole billions of dollars from the United States government and he's running for governor of Florida. He's a millionaire and a billionaire. He's no hero. He's a damn crook. It's just we don't prosecute big crooks."

And as Tom goes to point out, this same person who called for the murder of a Republican candidate for governor now appears today as a guest columnist in the NYT pontificating about the need for civility in our political discourse because of "how easily political differences can degenerate into violence."

The cherry on top of this cake of hypocrisy comes when you remember that Paul Krugman, the man who, along with his employer, the NYT, are leading the charge to blame the right for the the acts of Jared Loughner, said in a NYT op-ed the other day:

[T]here isn’t any place [in our democracy] for eliminationist rhetoric, for suggestions that those on the other side of a debate must be removed from that debate by whatever means necessary.

And it’s the saturation of our political discourse — and especially our airwaves — with eliminationist rhetoric that lies behind the rising tide of violence.

Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It’s hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be “armed and dangerous” without being ostracized.

No, NYT, no, Paul Krugman, it's not hard to imagine at all. One merely need take the briefest look at the facts over the past ten years.

On a related note, this from Instapundit:

Mark Halperin, last seen musing that what Obama needed was a “horrendous act of violence” that would save his Presidency, is now advising people on the right that they should turn the other cheek when falsely accused of murder after the hoped-for “horrendous act of violence” occurred. To avoid “escalation,” don’t y’know.

Bull. Now Halperin is throwing bible quotes at us to try and stamp down the backlash against the left for this scurrilous attack. Perhaps he and his commrades should have read the rest of the bible before engaging in this outrageous attack. Proverbs 19:5 - "A false witness will not go unpunished, and he who breathes out lies will not escape."

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Motivations For Murder & Manipulation

"A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on."

- Winston Churchill

Almost three days removed from the horrid mass murder committed by Jared Loughner in Arizona, sufficient information now exists to bring some perspective and clarity to the acts not only of Loughner, but to the acts of the left in the wake of Loughner's killing spree. The former was caused by severe mental illness. The latter, bearing only a tangential relation to the former, arises out of the left's desire to stop conservative speech by any means possible.

As Maggie's Farm puts it, Loughner didn't accompany his killing spree with shouts of "Rush Limbaugh Akhbar!!!" There is not a shred of evidence tying him to Palin, Limbaugh, or the Tea Party movement. He appears to be a paranoid schizophrenic who went under the radar simply because he took no threatening acts in the community prior to his killing spree - or at least none that would cause the Pima County Sheriff's Dept. to react. One of Loughner's few friends, in a recent interview, speculated that Loughner's motive was just to "fuck things up to fuck shit up," adding that Loughner wanted "to watch the world burn."

The far left has not allowed the lack of evidence - or indeed, contrary evidence - to slow them down. Instead, they ascribe responsibility for the murders to the right on the grounds of creating a climate of "hate." The NYT is leading the charge in their editorial today:

It is facile and mistaken to attribute this particular madman’s act directly to Republicans or Tea Party members. But it is legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger that has produced the vast majority of these threats, setting the nation on edge. Many on the right have exploited the arguments of division, reaping political power by demonizing immigrants, or welfare recipients, or bureaucrats. They seem to have persuaded many Americans that the government is not just misguided, but the enemy of the people.

Yet a look over the last decade shows conclusively that the left is light years beyond the right in terms violent rhetoric and political vitriol (See Malkin, Cupp, PJM, Rush, Wash. Examiner, Hot Air, McGuire, and the WSJ on the hisotry of our political discourse). Indeed, if political vitriol were the cause of violence, the MSNBC studios would be knee deep in blood. And as to martial metaphors, there are more examples of that from Obama than from Palin (PJM, Seraphic Secret). That said, such metaphors are, as Charles Krauthammer points out, a regular part of political speech that derive from the days when the path to political power was through military campaigns.

So just what has the right done to cause this "gale of anger." They have fought against massive deficits, over-taxation, and out-of-control spending. They have fought against Obamacare on the grounds that it is unaffordable and an unconstitutional expansion of federal power. In short, they have fought against the radical pull of our government to the left. So what do any of those things have to do with homicidal mania or, more generally, hate? Well, nothing, of course. Those are all very legitimate political arguments.

So there is something else at work here.

Brit Hume, on Monday, noted that:

It has become a habit of the American left to equate disagreement with liberals and liberalism with hate. So convinced do they seem of the virtue of their cause that the only possible explanation for resistance to it must be hatred. In the past week, at least two prominent liberal commentators spoke of the need to resist the right, quote, ‘Obama hate machine.’

George Will in a column today, speculates that blaming the right for an act such as this is literally part of progressive DNA:

A characteristic of many contemporary minds is susceptibility to the superstition that all behavior can be traced to some diagnosable frame of mind that is a product of promptings from the social environment. From which flows a political doctrine: Given clever social engineering, society and people can be perfected. This supposedly is the path to progress. It actually is the crux of progressivism. And it is why there is a reflex to blame conservatives first. . . .

I think that both Hume and Will let the left off far too easy. Will implies unconscious action where there is clearly malice aforethought. Hume postulates what is in essence an insanity defense for the left - that they are mentally incapable of seeing their opponents as having any reasonable basis for disagreeing with them. I think that gives short shrift to the intellectual dishonesty and moral bankruptcy of the left pushing this blood libel.

What the left has done here is seize on the Arizona mass murder, not because they believe the right somehow created the environment for homicide by their political arguments, but because the left sees it as an opportunity to delegitimize the right. The goal for the left is to create a situation where they won't have to engage in those political arguments that go to the heart of the direction of our country. They are losing those arguments on an epic scale, and they will do anything at all, including using the dead and injured from a psychotic's attack, to try and turn their fortunes around. They are shameless beyond words.

This is, in many ways, nothing more than an extension of throwing the race card, something that the left has relied upon for decades to end debate. Thus it is wholly appropriate that the left's most veteran race card aficionado, Rep. Clyburn (D-SC), would use the mass murder as justification for imposing the Fairness Doctrine, a law that would effectively silence conservative talk radio:

The shooting is cause for the country to rethink parameters on free speech, Clyburn said from his office, just blocks from the South Carolina Statehouse. He wants standards put in place to guarantee balanced media coverage with a reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine, in addition to calling on elected officials and media pundits to use 'better judgment.'

'Free speech is as free speech does,' he said. 'You cannot yell ‘fire' in a crowded theater and call it free speech and some of what I hear, and is being called free speech, is worse than that.' . . .

For its part, Soros mouthpiece Media Matters is calling on Fox to fire both Glen Beck and Sarah Palin. Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders has sent out a fund raising letter asking for donations to allow him to "fight Republicans and other 'right-wing reactionaries' responsible for the climate that led to the shooting." Chris Matthews has cited Mark Levin and Mark Savage as talk radio personalities for particular note in his discussion of the Arizona mass murder.

All of this is despicable. It is intellectual dishonesty and hypocrisy on a grand scale. As Michelle Malkin says today,

The Tucson massacre ghouls who are now trying to criminalize conservatism have forced our hand.

They need to be reminded. You need to be reminded.

Confront them. Don’t be cowed into silence.

And don’t let the media whitewash the sins of the hypocritical Left in their naked attempt to suppress the law-abiding, constitutionally-protected, peaceful, vigorous political speech of the Right.

Update: Legal Insurrection has one ridiculous example of how the left is trying to mine the climate of hate meme . They quote Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Me) writing at HuffPo, who claims that the Obamacare repeal bill must be renamed in the wake for the Gabrielle Giffords shooting:

A good place to start a more civil dialog would be for my Republican colleagues in the House to change the name of the bill they have introduced to repeal health care reform. The bill, titled the "Repeal the Job Killing Health Care Law Act," was set to come up for a vote this week, but in the wake of Gabby's shooting, it has been postponed at least until next week.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not suggesting that the name of that one piece of legislation somehow led to the horror of this weekend -- but is it really necessary to put the word "killing" in the title of a major piece of legislation? I don't think that word is in there by accident -- my Republican friends know as well as anyone the power of words to send a message. But in this environment and at this moment in our nation's history, it's not the message we should be sending.

(emphasis added)

A final thought. In essence, the left now wants to make paranoid schizophrenics the arbiter of appropriate speech in America - at least for those who oppose the left. How's that for an insane idea?

Update: Hot Air brings good news for America, bad news for the left wing slime machine doing their best to use the mass murder to delegitimize its political opposition:

CBS polled almost 700 adults in the wake of the mass murder in Tucson committed by Jared Lee Loughner to determine whether the media spin that the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the murders of six others was a political act had resonated with the public. Perhaps surprisingly, the spin machine seems to have failed. A majority of 57% say that politics had nothing to do with the shooting, and even a plurality of 49% of Democrats agree.

This means our nation is firmly in the "you can't fool all of the people all of the time" leg of Lincoln's tripart theorem. What that likely means is that ever more discordant attempts to delegitimize the right will have a rebound effect. The Krugmaniacal left wing slime machine should proceed with caution.

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A History Of Left Wing Violence & The Cost Of Living In A Free Society

Michelle Malkin has done a superb job of documenting the left wing nuttery over the past decade. S.E. Cupp has a similar article, as does PJM. The true vitriol and eliminationist rhetoric of the left has no analog on the conservative right. The right wants to argue policy; the left wants to delegitimize their political opposition so that they don't have to address their policies.

Trying to explain the acts of the left in response to the Arizona mass murder, George Will makes my point much more eloquently:

A characteristic of many contemporary minds is susceptibility to the superstition that all behavior can be traced to some diagnosable frame of mind that is a product of promptings from the social environment. From which flows a political doctrine: Given clever social engineering, society and people can be perfected. This supposedly is the path to progress. It actually is the crux of progressivism. And it is why there is a reflex to blame conservatives first. . . .

Let us hope that Dean is the last gasp of the generation of liberals whose default position in any argument is to indict opponents as racists. This McCarthyism of the left - devoid of intellectual content, unsupported by data - is a mental tic, not an idea but a tactic for avoiding engagement with ideas. It expresses limitless contempt for the American people, who have reciprocated by reducing liberalism to its current characteristics of electoral weakness and bad sociology.

Update: James Taranto made the following observation on the left's treatment of political violence, penned in light of the left's outrageous defense of Frances Fox Piven's calls for Greece-like riots in America:

America's liberal left is preoccupied with salacious fantasies of political violence. These take two forms: dreams of leftist insurrection, and nightmares of reactionary bloodshed. The "mainstream" media ignore or suppress the former type of fantasy and treat the latter as if it reflected reality. This produces a distorted narrative that further feeds the left's fantasies and disserves those who expect the media to provide truthful information. . .

In other related news, both the New York Times and Michael Tomasky have demonstrated despicable hypocrisy, penning articles now tying the murders in Arizona to the right with not a shred of evidence, yet in response to the Ft. Hood shooting, with evidence piling up left and right about the shooters motives, counciled caution and refused to draw conclusions.

The most sane response to this mass murder has come from the people most injured by it - the parents of Christina Taylor Green, who have described the monstrous event that claimed the life of their child is "the cost of living in a free society."



And lastly, this from Instapundit:

As I think about it, the mental process seems to be something like this:
Lefty: Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement encourage hatred and violence!

Questioner: How do you know?

Lefty: Because whenever I think about them, I’m filled with hate and a desire to do harm!

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Yet More on The Left's Mission To Tie The Arizona Mass Murder To Sarah Palin & The Tea Partiers

Prof. Glen Reynolds, writing at the WSJ, asks "where is the decency in blood libel?"

To paraphrase Justice Cardozo ("proof of negligence in the air, so to speak, will not do"), there is no such thing as responsibility in the air. Those who try to connect Sarah Palin and other political figures with whom they disagree to the shootings in Arizona use attacks on "rhetoric" and a "climate of hate" to obscure their own dishonesty in trying to imply responsibility where none exists. But the dishonesty remains.

To be clear, if you're using this event to criticize the "rhetoric" of Mrs. Palin or others with whom you disagree, then you're either: (a) asserting a connection between the "rhetoric" and the shooting, which based on evidence to date would be what we call a vicious lie; or (b) you're not, in which case you're just seizing on a tragedy to try to score unrelated political points, which is contemptible. Which is it?

I understand the desperation that Democrats must feel after taking a historic beating in the midterm elections and seeing the popularity of ObamaCare plummet while voters flee the party in droves. But those who purport to care about the health of our political community demonstrate precious little actual concern for America's political well-being when they seize on any pretext, however flimsy, to call their political opponents accomplices to murder.

Where is the decency in that?

This from Victor Davis Hanson at NRO:

For every apparently right-wing Timothy McVeigh there is a left-wing Ted Kaczynski; both exhibited a sort of mental derangement in their braggadocio about extreme politics. The Sixties culture of drugs, permissiveness, national liberation, radical politics, and environmentalism no more made the Palestinian extremist Sirhan Sihran assassinate Bobby Kennedy, or Charles Manson follower Squeaky Fromme try to kill President Ford, or pop socialist and cult preacher the Rev. Jim Jones order the execution of Rep. Leo Ryan, or Arthur Bremmer shoot the “segregationist dinosaur” George Wallace, than right-wing politics drove on the equally deranged Jared Lee Loughner.

At PJM, for the apparent benefit of Paul Krugman, Roger Kimball has amassed a short history of left-wing "hate speech," including the use bull's eyes to target Republicans. And I would be remiss indeed if I did not mention this post from Dr. Sanity, discussing the sickness in the mind of Jared Loughner as well as the sickness in the soul of a leftwing nutjob who, in the wake of Loughner's mass murder, e-mailed Dr. Sanity to say "This is what comes of spewing hate, you fascist pig!." Talk about irony.

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Obama Past His Shelf Life

Johns Hopkins Prof. Fouad Ajami has a scathing critique of Obama in the WSJ, pronouncing him obsolete. Here are a few snippets:

. . . [Obama's] fall from political grace has been as swift as his rise a handful of years ago. He had been hot political property in 2006 and, of course, in 2008. But now he will campaign for his party's 2010 candidates from afar, holding fund raisers but not hitting the campaign trail in most of the contested races. Those mass rallies of Obama frenzy are surely of the past.

The vaunted Obama economic stimulus, at $862 billion, has failed. The "progressives" want to double down, and were they to have their way, would have pushed for a bigger stimulus still. But the American people are in open rebellion against an economic strategy of public debt, higher taxes and unending deficits. We're not all Keynesians, it turns out. The panic that propelled Mr. Obama to the presidency has waned. There is deep concern, to be sure. But the Obama strategy has lost the consent of the governed.

. . . There was no hesitation in the monumental changes Mr. Obama had in mind. The logic was Jacobin, the authority deriving from a perceived mandate to recast time-honored practices. It was veritably rule by emergency decrees. If public opinion displayed no enthusiasm for the overhaul of the nation's health-care system, the administration would push on. The public would adjust in due time.

The nation may be ill at ease with an immigration reform bill that would provide some 12 million illegal immigrants a path toward citizenship, but the administration would still insist on the primacy of its own judgment. It would take Arizona to court, even though the public let it be known that it understood Arizona's immigration law as an expression of that state's frustration with the federal government's abdication of its responsibility over border security. . . .

. . . The country has had its fill with a scapegoating that knows no end from a president who had vowed to break with recriminations and partisanship. The magic of 2008 can't be recreated, and good riddance to it. Slowly, the nation has recovered its poise. There is a widespread sense of unstated embarrassment that a political majority, if only for a moment, fell for the promise of an untested redeemer—a belief alien to the temperament of this so practical and sober a nation.

I share the professor's diagnosis, though I am less sure of his long-term prognosis. People are spitting blood today, but 2012 is still too far away to judge the likely public mood. I look upon this as the ultimate test of Lincoln's hypothesis, you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people of the time, but not all of the people all of the time.

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You Have Got To Be Kidding - Arizona's Law Gutted By Federal Judge

Federal judge Susan Bolton has accepted the Obama DOJ argument that Arizona's law regarding illegal aliens is preempted by federal law. She has, for all practical purposes, wholly gutted the Arizona law with respect to illegal aliens. (You can view the Court's Order here) And in doing so, the judge has realized my worst fears. When I analyzed the federal law suit several weeks ago, I wrote:

Invoking preemption in the present context is a dangerous game indeed. It is critically important to note that the Arizona law is little more than a codification of federal law as regards illegal aliens, . . . Thus the DOJ's argument must be that any state laws predicated on the status of an individual as a citizen or an illegal alien are preempted by federal law.

Think about that for a moment. If the DOJ wins this lawsuit, only the federal government will be able to enforce laws based on illegal aliens. We will become, in essence, a sanctuary country with states, for all intents and purposes, constitutionally prevented from inquiring into the citizenship status of people within their states. As a nation, our ability to address the problems of illegal aliens, already bad now, would be compounded exponentially.

That is now where we stand today. This from Legal Insurrection confirms my assessment:

States have been left helpless to deal with the anarchy created by the failure of the federal government to enforce border security. Whereas yesterday it was unclear how far states (such as Rhode Island) could go, today states are powerless.

The inability of a state to implement a policy of checking the immigration status even of people already under arrest for some other crime is remarkable.

We are in serious trouble. True, what the judge issued today was a Temporary Restraining Order and not a final judgment. But based on the Judge's reasoning, I see no reason to suspect that she will rule otherwise after a full hearing. Let's get that over with and get this thing up to the Supreme Court.

Update: Several people have weighed in with good legal analyses of the Judge's order, and I can't improve upon them. See Andrew McCarthy, Peter Kirsanow, and Mark Levin.

Take Away Question: Why the hell is our federal government siding with illegal aliens?

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Obama's Lawsuit Against Arizona (Updated)

Obama's Department of Justice (DOJ) is set to file its lawsuit against Arizona, seeking to have Arizona's recently enacted state law dealing with illegal aliens held unconstitutional. According to the Washington Post, the DOJ's argument will be two-fold, that the Arizona law is "preempted" by federal law and that "the Arizona law would lead to police harassment of U.S. citizens and foreigners." It is enough to make one's skin crawl.

The "harassment" claim is a non-starter. To win on this challenge, DOJ must show that there is no possible way the Arizona law could be lawfully applied. But, as William Jacobsen at Legal Insurrection has previously pointed out, the Arizona law "does not authorize unlawful stops, but only permits verification of immigration status once a lawful stop has been made. . . . Nothing in the law authorizes stopping people because of their skin color. The law simply provides guidelines as to what is permissible in accordance with federal law, and the procedures that should be used." Clearly there is nothing on the face of the Arizona law that would make it amenable to a challenge on equal protection grounds. The fact that the law might be misapplied does not come anywhere near the standard a Court would need to find in order to hold the Arizona law facially unconstitutional.

But then there is the DOJ's other grounds - the legal theory of "preemption." That theory derives from the Art. VI of the Constitution, wherein it provides that federal law shall be the "supreme Law of the Land." Thus, state laws are preempted and held unconstitutional when there is a conflict between state and federal law or when the federal law in a particular area is all-encompassing and was intended, expressly or by implication, to supplant all state laws on the topic.

Invoking preemption in the present context is a dangerous game indeed. It is critically important to note that the Arizona law is nothing more than a codification of federal law as regards illegal aliens, with the only addition being instructions on when the police can pursue suspicions that a person may be an illegal alien. Thus the DOJ's argument must be that any state laws predicated on the status of an individual as a citizen or an illegal alien are preempted by federal law.

Think about that for a moment. If the DOJ wins this lawsuit, only the federal government will be able to enforce laws based on illegal aliens. We will become, in essence, a sanctuary country with states, for all intents and purposes, constitutionally prevented from inquiring into the citizenship status of people within their states. As a nation, our ability to address the problems of illegal aliens, already bad now, would be compounded exponentially.

And all for what? To protect the rights of Americans? Hardly. Michael Ramierez, in his cartoon at the top of the page, hits the nail on the head. It is so the left can gain more votes.

But Obama is not courting the entire Hispanic population for votes. He is courting the "La Raza" element of the Hispanics - radical separatists who, on the basis of race, would like to see the U.S. deconstructed. It is they who are vociferously challenging the enforcement of our immigration laws. Of course, they are aided and abetted by their far left allies, Obama and the ACLU chief among them. No surprise really. The same thing has been going on in Europe for decades as the borders have been thrown open to immigration from Muslim countries for the purpose of increasing the far left's voter base. The fact that this process is changing the fundamental nature of many European countries, Britain in particular, matters not a wit to the Euro-left. It is clear that our far left is equally unconcerned with similar problems in America.

We have seen the far left prioritize their raw desire for political power over our country's national security as they attempted, between 2006 and 2009, to legislate Iraq into a defeat for our military, winning for al Qaeda and Iran what neither could win on the battlefield. The ramifications, had our far left succeeded, would have been devastating. And now we see the far left pursuing a course as to illegal aliens that has nearly as much potential for adverse long term consequences to our nation. God help us but 2012 can't come quick enough.

Update: The law suit has been filed. You can find the Complaint here. Interestingly, it is, for all practical purposes, entirely predicated on the preemption argument. The Obama DOJ has omitted any argument that the Arizona law is facially unconstitutional on equal protection grounds - i.e., the "harassment" / civil rights argument. That is not exactly a surprise. They would have been laughed out of Court on that one.

Do read the Complaint - and in particular, paragraph number 4, which states the bases upon which the DOJ claims that Arizona's law conflicts with federal law. These bases are breathtaking in part for their arrogance, in part for their frivolousness. The bases include:

1. The DOJ states that it does not want to have to deal with illegal aliens as a group since the federal government is focused on those "aliens who pose a threat to national security or public safety." So illegal immigration laws under the Obama administration are superfulous as, absent something more, the DOJ claims that enforcing those laws will be a misuse of their time and will detract from their 'focused' efforts. It is a ludicrous argument on multiple levels. For one, the federal government has a duty to enforce the laws - not to pick and choose which laws to enforce and when. Two, nothing that the Arizona police do to arrest, investigate and hold an individual for being an illegal alien implicates in the slightest any federal resources. Three, perhaps the simplest of all criminal matters is to determine whether a person is in America legally. Our government controls all of the relevant databases. Four, how does the federal government identify an illegal alien as a high priority? If a foreign national slips into the U.S. illegally, they are by definition below the radar and no one is looking for them specifically. If they come up on the radar for national security or public safety concerns, then it is not federal immigration searching for them, but the police and FBI, just as with any criminal suspect. I eagerly await to see what facts the DOJ dreams up to support this red herring.

2. The DOJ asserts that the Arizona law will result in people being arrested simply for failing to carry their documentation. The law requiring people in the U.S. on a passport or a green card to carry their "papers" with them at all time is federal law. Arizona's law merely mirrors the federal law. In other words, the DOJ is now arguing that a federal law is prima facie of no effect and should be ignored. This argument is jaw dropping.

3. The DOJ claims that enforcing the Arizona law will conflict with federal law regarding "the registration, smuggling and employment" of aliens. They do so without a hint of explanation. Given that Arizona's law is a codification of federal law, it is tough to tease a logical argument out of this contention, let alone a legally valid one.

4. DOJ claims that Arizona, in enforcing their law, will "ignore humanitarian concerns . . ." The DOJ cites to the case of an individual who is seeking asylum on the grounds that they are threatened with harm by their home government for political reasons. This is ridiculous. Any illegal can make a claim for asylum on this basis after arrest and prior to deportation, thus making this argument a nullity in any case. That aside, the DOJ argument, taken to its logical conclusion, would mean that we should no longer arrest illegal aliens, as we should presume that they all have valid arguments for asylum.

5. The DOJ claims that enforcement of Arizona's laws "will interfere with vital foreign policy and national security interests by disrupting the United States' relationship with Mexico and other countries." How much is wrong with that claim? We can't control our border or it will upset Mexico? We can't enforce our own immigration laws - ones that are far less draconian than Mexico's - for fear of upsetting Mexico? Is Obama's DOJ actually making the argument that Mexico has a valid foreign policy interest in the U.S. maintaining an open border? This is beyond belief. Does anyone in the Obama administration put America and its citizenry first in any of their calculations?

Bottom line, if this is all the DOJ has, they should be tossed out of Court for failing to state a case and the DOJ sanctioned for filing a frivolous law suit.

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Picking & Choosing When To Enforce The Law

This from John Morton, Obama's head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement:

Echoing comments by President Barack Obama and others in the administration, Morton said that Arizona's new law targeting illegal immigration is not "good government." The law makes it a crime to be in the state illegally and requires police to check suspects for immigration paperwork.

Morton said his agency will not necessarily process illegal immigrants referred to them by Arizona officials. The best way to reduce illegal immigration is through a comprehensive federal approach, not a patchwork of state laws, he said.

"I don't think the Arizona law, or laws like it, are the solution," Morton said.

This administration is nothing if not a thugocracy. This is also ripe for a law suit requiring Morton to perform his job - but how screwed up does this administration have to be for it possibly come down to that. The other option is to let Morton release just one illegal alien referred by Arizona and then have him or her involved in the murder of Americans, then let's watch what happens. I don't think even the MSM, in full Obama lust, could spin or repress that one, not when a significant majority of Americans support the Arizona law.

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Arizona, Mexico, Two Presidents & A Race Card

Under Arizona's new law, if you are stopped for reasonable suspicion of breaking a law, you can be asked for your identification. In the rest of the United States, if you are stopped for reasonable suspicion of breaking a law, you will inevitably be asked for your identification. The only modification Arizona's law makes in practice is to give its law enforcement agencies the authority to then pursue further whether the individual is also in compliance with federal laws on illegal immigration. That is subsumed in asking for one's identificaiton.

Yet the La Raza crowd who advocate sesesion, the Democrats who see them as a special interest group to be seduced, and the Mexican government who benefit from illegal immigration to their north are all busting at the seems over Arizona's attempt to address the influx of illegal aliens that are severely hurting their state. And yesterday we were treated to President's Obama and Mexico's President Felipe Calderon jointly

First from Obama:

. . . I want everyone, American and Mexican, to know my administration is taking a very close look at the Arizona law. We're examining any implications, especially for civil rights. Because in the United States of America no law-abiding person, be they an American citizen, a legal immigrant or a visitor or tourist from Mexico, should ever be subject to suspicion simply because of what they look like.

Okay, what are the first clues that a person might be an illegal alien - its what they look like. That is reality that no amount of wishful thinking will change. And given that we have between 12 and 20 million illegal aliens in this country, of course the fact that a person looks Mexican of South American and speeks accented English raises enough supicion to follow up. But what the Arizona law does not allow for are stops simply based on that suspicion. Obama, if he has read the law, of course realizes this. But why allow reality to stand in the way of demagougery aimed at placating a special interest voting block.

And then Obama stands by while President Calderon chides Arizona and America for having the temerity of taking a stand against illegal immigration from Mexico.

In Mexico, we are and will continue being respectful of the internal policies of the United States and its legitimate right to establish, in accordance to its Constitution, whatever laws it approves. But we will retain our firm rejection to criminalize migration so that people that work and provide things to this nation will be treated as criminals. And we oppose firmly the S.B. 1070 Arizona law given unfair principles that are partial and discriminatory.

For one, the hypocrisy displayed by Calderon is breathtaking. Mexico's treatment of illegal aliens is far more draconian than that of the U.S., including up to ten years in jail for multiple violations of its immigration law. Two, what Calderon is arguing for is that the U.S. explicitly adopt an open boder with Mexico. This is insanity. One of the most basic functions of government is to control its border. Three, there is nothing discriminatory about enforcing the border. Having a foreign official come to the U.S. and play the race card is a bit too much to stomach. That Obama stood by, listening to this, and in essence, seconded it is utterly outrageous.

Update: From Hot Air: Democrats give Mexican president standing ovation for dumping on Arizona.

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Misplaced Presidential Humor

Arizona's Governor has a message for President Obama:



(H/T Instapundit)

Well said, Governor.

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Obama's War

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Arizona Takes A Big Step Against The Left's Sins & Grievance Politics

Arizona, which lit a fire under the left and the radical Latino seperatists with its passage of a law authorizing police to arrest illigal immigrants, has now taken a another big step sure to inflame the them both further. This from Fox News:

. . . After making national headlines for a new law on illegal immigrants, the Arizona Legislature passed a bill Thursday that would ban ethnic studies programs in the state that critics say currently advocate separatism and racial preferences.

. . . The new bill would make it illegal for a school district to teach any courses that promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or "advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals."
The bill stipulates that courses can continue to be taught for Native American pupils in compliance with federal law and does not prohibit English as a second language classes. It also does not prohibit the teaching of the Holocaust or other cases of genocide.

Schools that fail to abide by the law would have state funds withheld.

State Superintendent for Public Instruction Tom Horne called passage in the state House a victory for the principle that education should unite, not divide students of differing backgrounds.

"Traditionally, the American public school system has brought together students from different backgrounds and taught them to be Americans and to treat each other as individuals, and not on the basis of their ethnic backgrounds," Horne said. "This is consistent with the fundamental American value that we are all individuals, not exemplars of whatever ethnic groups we were born into. Ethnic studies programs teach the opposite, and are designed to promote ethnic chauvinism."

Horne began fighting in 2007 against the Tucson Unified School District's program, which he said defied Martin Luther King's call to judge a person by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Horne claimed the ethnic studies program encourages "ethnic chauvanism," promotes Latinos to rise up and create a new territory out of the southwestern region of the United States and tries to intimidate conservative teachers in the school system. . . .

It is far beyond time that the majority of Americans of all backgrounds fight back against the identity and grievance politics of the left. My hats off to the Arizona state government for leading the way.

(H/T Joshua Pundit)

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Obama Folds On Immigration As Polls Sharply Support Arizona Law

AP is reporting that Obama has announced that immigration reform is off the table for 2010. For all the hyperventelating about the Arizona immigration reform bill in the left wing MSM, it would appear that the majority of people see things differently:

Seven in 10 U.S. adults support arresting people who can't prove they're in the United States legally, a poll about Arizona's new immigration law
indicated. . . .

Seventy-one percent of poll respondents said they'd support requiring their own police to determine people's U.S. status if there was "reasonable suspicion" the people were illegal immigrants, the poll found.

An equal percentage supported arresting those people if they couldn't prove they were legally in the United States.

Almost two-thirds, or 64 percent, said they believed immigration hurt the United States, with nearly six in 10, or 58 percent, saying illegal immigrants took jobs away from American workers, the poll found. . .

And as Instapundit observes, apparently the Democrats "own polls must have showed something similar. And with blue-collar dems facing layoffs and recession, and black dems not so hot on amnesty, there wasn’t any percentage in bucking the sentiment, I guess, even in terms of shoring up their own base."

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Illegal Immigration, Arizona & The Constitution

There are two very good essays on the Constitutionality of the recently passed Arizona law aimed at illegal aliens. The first, from, an attorney who helped to draft the law, Kris Kobach, writing in the NYT:

. . . The arguments we’ve heard against [the Arizona law] either misrepresent its text or are otherwise inaccurate. As someone who helped draft the statute, I will rebut the major criticisms individually:

It is unfair to demand that aliens carry their documents with them. It is true that the Arizona law makes it a misdemeanor for an alien to fail to carry certain documents. “Now, suddenly, if you don’t have your papers ... you’re going to be harassed,” the president said. “That’s not the right way to go.” But since 1940, it has been a federal crime for aliens to fail to keep such registration documents with them. The Arizona law simply adds a state penalty to what was already a federal crime. . . .

“Reasonable suspicion” is a meaningless term that will permit police misconduct. Over the past four decades, federal courts have issued hundreds of opinions defining those two words. The Arizona law didn’t invent the concept: Precedents list the factors that can contribute to reasonable suspicion; when several are combined, the “totality of circumstances” that results may create reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed. . . .

The law will allow police to engage in racial profiling. Actually, Section 2 provides that a law enforcement official “may not solely consider race, color or national origin” in making any stops or determining immigration status. In addition, all normal Fourth Amendment protections against profiling will continue to apply. In fact, the Arizona law actually reduces the likelihood of race-based harassment by compelling police officers to contact the federal government as soon as is practicable when they suspect a person is an illegal alien, as opposed to letting them make arrests on their own assessment.

It is unfair to demand that people carry a driver’s license. Arizona’s law does not require anyone, alien or otherwise, to carry a driver’s license. Rather, it gives any alien with a license a free pass if his immigration status is in doubt. Because Arizona allows only lawful residents to obtain licenses, an officer must presume that someone who produces one is legally in the country. . . .

In sum, the Arizona law hardly creates a police state. It takes a measured, reasonable step to give Arizona police officers another tool when they come into contact with illegal aliens during their normal law enforcement duties.

And it’s very necessary: Arizona is the ground zero of illegal immigration. Phoenix is the hub of human smuggling and the kidnapping capital of America, with more than 240 incidents reported in 2008. It’s no surprise that Arizona’s police associations favored the bill, along with 70 percent of Arizonans. . .

The second is from Prof. Jacobsen at Legal Insurrection, adding a bit of the nuance to the argument:

There is a fundamental disconnect in the arguments being mounted against the Arizona immigration law. What many of the critics want to say, but do not, is that they view all immigration laws as inherently racist because most illegal immigrants are non-white.

There are some legitimate civil liberties concerns regarding the standard by which police can require someone to produce identification or other information. These concerns are not unique to the Arizona immigration law. Much of the history of our criminal laws is an attempt by the courts to set forth standards for police conduct regarding searches and seizures, and questioning of suspects.

But a point I have made before is that a law which may end up being tossed by the courts on civil liberties grounds does not make the law racist. Issues such as random DWI checkpoints have posed serious legal issues for reasons completely unrelated to race.

That a racially neutral law may be enforced in a racially discriminatory manner also does not make the law, or supporters of the law, racist. Our traffic laws are a prime example.

Police often are accused of singling out minorities for traffic stops based on race, but that does not mean we stop enforcing traffic laws altogether, or accuse proponents of speed limits and stop signs of being racist. Rather, we implement policies which prohibit racial profiling and do our best to enforce such policies.

I realize that this may be too nuanced for some. But the distinction is important because of all the hyperventilated charges that Arizona now is a Nazi, Communist and Apartheid state (quite a combination). . . .

Having reviewed the Arizona law, I will be surprised if it is overturned. The radical left and that portion of the Latino community that quite literally wants to secede are coupling with Democrats seeking the Latino vote to wholly misrepresent both the Arizona law and its purpose. Race cards are flying - and as usual, with no basis in fact.

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