These kinds of partisan displays of particularist chauvinism always offend enlightened people.

FoxNews points out a not-even-Freudian lapse in Barack Obama’s recent remarks.

To a member in good standing of the community of fashion, like the current president, internalization of a galaxy of liberal perspectives embracing Pacifism, World Government, and Equality, and viewing with distaste anything to do with the military or the use of force, competition, conflict, and above all else any presumption to superiority on the part of the United States is de riguer.

In a little-noticed remark at the close of the two-day nuclear security summit in Washington, D.C., this week, President Obama suggested the United States is somehow burdened by its military might — a comment that drew a stern rebuke from his former rival in the presidential campaign.

Obama was responding to a question Tuesday about how the summit would play into peace-making efforts in the Middle East when he addressed the downsides of — by virtue of America’s world stature — being obligated to intervene in international conflicts.

“It is a vital national security interest of the United States to reduce these conflicts because whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower, and when conflicts break out, one way or another we get pulled into them,” Obama said. “And that ends up costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure.”

In Barack Obama’s ideal mental world, the United States would simply be one more docile and obedient member state of the United Nations, or the Federation, which long ago renounced sovereignty and the use of force and which transferred all its armaments to the Central World Authority. Any particular disagreement with Iran, China, or some minor Pacific atoll would be gravely adjudicated by the wise and disinterested Supreme High Council, a compromise imposed, and universal peace perpetually preserved.

What a pity it is that as enlightened a being as the Chosen One is obliged to conduct a competitive foreign policy based on military force representing a technologically advanced, but morally backward, predominantly Christian and European power that continually asserts its own preeminence in world affairs, in a manner inevitably offending other nations. Naturally, Barack Obama would rather apologize and disarm.

Today’s Day By Day illustrates Richard’s point about the sophistication of Tea Party commentary

Richard Fernandez notes that Tea Parties have taken the political debate to deeper than customary levels of analysis, which may possibly be connected to the recently discovered fact that Tea Party activists are not really the rubes and yokels that the community of fashion inevitably supposed they were.

Perhaps the greatest distinction between the Tea Parties and the televised “debates” between candidates is that issues are raised at fundamentally different levels. In the first the money is for the candidate to dispense. In the second it is about how much he has a right to dispense not at the margins but structurally. The psychological difference is captured perfectly by Barack Obama’s response to the Tea Parties. ABC News reported that

Speaking at a Democratic fundraiser tonight, President Obama touted his administration’s tax cuts and said that the recent tea party rallies across the nation have “amused” him.

“You would think they should be saying thank you,” the president said to applause.

Members of the audience shouted, “Thank you.”

‘Thank you for what?’ the Tea Partiers might respond, ‘it is our money.’ The incendiary potential of that type of conversation may explain the heat which has been generated by the crashers and anti-crashers at these events. The Tea Parties are less a debate than political clash. Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit has a number of links to sites which have promised to infiltrate the Tea Parties and efforts repel boarders. It has the aspect of conflict and consequently generates many of the same emotions. Dana Milbank at the Washington Post was nearly beside himself at the sight of these “faux populists”, only recently described as hicks, but now revealed to have Harvard Degrees.

A CBS News/New York Times poll released on Tax Day found that Tea Party activists are wealthier than average (20 percent of their households earn more than $100,000, compared with 14 percent of the general population) and better educated (37 percent have college or postgraduate degrees vs. 25 percent of Americans ).

Milbank should be careful about opening that can of worms lest it lead to a discussion of whether the half of US households who pay Federal Income Tax so it can be transferred to the other half should have any say on how their money is spent. Because the only thing worse than the narrative that Tea Partiers are the ingrates who should be saying “thank you” to the quality that wisely governs them is the reverse: a narrative where the Tea Partiers are the quality who dare to question the ingrates that govern and write about them. Any idea that threatens to invert the positions of the elite and the peasantry is by definition subversive. The real problem with portraying the rebels as well educated and smart is that it begs the question of what their critics are.

Allee Bautsch and Joe Brown

We heard a great deal from democrats, the dinosaur media, and the punditocracy of the left recently about conservative rhetoric and all sorts of supposititious threats of violence to democrats who voted for the health care bill. No actual violence, of course, ever actually occurred.

It turns out, on the other hand, that leftwing violence these days is quite real. Last weekend, Allee Bautsch, an aide to Republican governor Bobby Jindal and her boyfriend were savagely beaten in New Orleans and both were seriously injured.

Nola.com:

The news release issued by New Orleans police Tuesday evening… notes that the 25-year-old female victim and the 28-year-old male victim were attacked in the 600 block of St. Louis Street after leaving an event at a restaurant in the 400 block of Royal Street.

Jindal’s office acknowledged on Monday that Bautsch, his chief campaign fundraiser, was recovering from a broken leg after an altercation with a group of people in the Quarter on Friday night. Bautsch was attacked after a fundraiser for the Louisiana Republican Party at Brennan’s Restaurant, 417 Royal Street, the governor’s office said. …

New Orleans police say that the incident began about 10:45 p.m. when a group of three to five men made “derogatory comments” to Bautsch and her boyfriend. When the man described as the male victim “turned toward” the group of men, at least one of the men struck him repeatedly. The woman “fell to the ground and screamed,” the news release said.

Police released a description of one suspect, saying he was in his 20s, looked “dirty,” and wore his hair in an auburn-colored ponytail. The man was 6 feet, 1 inch tall with a thin build, police said. He wore a light-colored T-shirt and dark pants.

Officers in the area responded and requested EMS assistance. The woman used her purse as a pillow while waiting for help. Once she was in the ambulance, the woman realized her purse was missing, the release said.

Kyle Plotkin, a Jindal spokesman, said Bautsch had surgery during the weekend and is facing a recovery time of two to three months. According to the NOPD news release, Bautsch’s friend was treated at the hospital for a mild concussion, broken jaw and broken nose.

The attackers were probably persons involved in a radical protest against a Louisiana State Republican Party fund raising dinner taking place at a local restaurant. The Hayride, a local political blog, describes the protesters.

Michelle Malkin is discounting rumors that the couple was attacked for wearing Sarah Palin pins.

—————————————————–
UPDATE — 4/17:

Several prominent conservative blogs are reporting today that the victims were uncertain about whether their attackers had any connection to the demonstration and did not identify any specifically political insults from their attackers, including both Michelle Malkin and Ed Morrissey.

Human Events talked to the victim’s mother:

Della Burning, mother of Jindal staffer Allee Bautsch, confirmed that her daughter had been savagely beaten. She refused to discuss whether or not politics were involved (although at one point in the interview she did say the report was “accurate” when New Orleans Police Information Officer said slurs hurled at her daughter during the attack were “political in nature”).

Burning confirmed her daughter’s leg is broken in four places and she has five surgical scars and a steel rod now running from her knee to her ankle with seven screws holding it all in place. She did not fall and break her leg as was reported in the lonely and inaccurate story done by the Associated Press.

Burning also confirmed that the attackers did not rob her daughter or her daughter’s boyfriend.

On the other hand, the local blog Hayride (which covered this story in a lot of depth) is still arguing today that the attack was definitely politically motivated.

I wonder exactly how much of the full story is yet to emerge at this point.

August Saint-Gaudens, The Puritan, 1883 – 1886, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Fast cars, smoking, flirting, even eating fast food at Burger King, the puritans of the Left are determined to eradicate each and every one of life’s little pleasures, Dennis Praeger warns.

Just as the Soviets removed Trotsky from old photos, anti-smoking zealots have forced the removal of cigarettes from old photos — from photos of FDR, from the famous Beatles photo — and from movies whenever possible. Torture and murder are ubiquitous in films, but smoking is all but banned — even cigars are now banned from James Bond films.

Smoking has been banned in entire cities, outdoors as well as in. In Pasadena, Calif., one cannot even smoke in a cigar store. …

Virtually every game I played as a child during school recess is now banned because organizations such as the National Program for Playground Safety deem games in which kids are “running into each other” as too dangerous. Someone might get hurt.

Until a few years ago, just about every American boy, and many girls, played dodgeball. No more. This joy, too, has been eliminated from American life. “We consider it inappropriate to use children as human targets,” said Mary Marks, physical education supervisor for Fairfax County, Va. And it may hurt the feelings of kids who are eliminated. For the same reason — potential hurt feelings of those eliminated — musical chairs is no longer played in some schools.

Some might argue that these bans are not because of Leftism but because of fear of lawsuits. But in light of how leftwing the trial bar is, that only reinforces my argument.

Read the whole thing.

1880 Frederick Burr Opper Cartoon from Puck, titled: The Bankrupt Outrage Mill (showing bloody shirts, lynchings, and other forms of racial violence)

Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell’s break with political correctness and resumption of the practice avoided by two democrat party predecessors of declaring April to be “Confederate History Month” provoked the American left to open fire with all the batteries of the establishment media and the progressive blogosphere.

The contemporary left enthusiastically identifies with the 19th century radical abolitionist movement (which had so much to do with starting the Civil War) and is determined to ruthlessly suppress any expression of enthusiasm or affection for the Lost Cause.

The theoretical defense of the Southern political perspective and the rights of the states, remembrance of Confederate military victories, admiration for Confederate leaders, and any defense of the Southern Antebellum way of life are all treated as the gravest of thought crimes.

From the point of view of the Left, the politics of Slavery is all. Just as Harry Reid declared opposition to the Health Care Bill to be equivalent to opposing Civil Rights, the liberal commentariat characteristically treats any form of positive perspective on the Confederate Cause as tantamount to racism and an active defense of the Peculiar Institution.

Jon Meacham, in the New York Times, lays down the liberal law, insisting on the absolute centrality of Slavery to any interpretation of Civil War history.

If the slaves are erased from the picture [of the Civil War], then what took place between Sumter and Appomattox is not about the fate of human chattel, or a battle between good and evil. It is, instead, more of an ancestral skirmish in the Reagan revolution, a contest between big and small government.

We cannot allow the story of the emancipation of a people and the expiation of America’s original sin to become fodder for conservative politicians playing to their right-wing base. That, to say the very least, is a jump backward we do not need.

In other words, if the issues of states rights, popular sovereignty, and Constitutional limitations on federal power going back one hundred and fifty years are allowed to be raised, discussed, and argued, there is no telling what might come of it. Who knows? Some more complex interpretation beyond a simple drama featuring wicked slave owners and oppressed darkies might interfere with universal acceptance of the American left’s self-justifying narrative of radical leadership first overthrowing Slavery, then marching on to deliver first Civil Rights, then National Health Care.

It is vital to enforce a politically correct, crudely simplified version of history, so that history can be used as a credential by those who claim to be enforcing History’s will and decrees on the rest of us.

Invoking racial politics and inflaming sectional animosity at the expense of the South is a very old political game, as the 1880 cartoon above testifies. Americans were already tired of the practice in the 19th century. In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the radical Benjamin Butler, then a Congressman, exhibited on the floor of the House of Representative a blood-stained shirt belonging to an Ohio carpetbagger who had been whipped by night riders in Mississippi. This kind of divisive and manipulative politics of accusation came to be referred to derisively as “waving the bloody shirt.”

Bob McDonnell is just the most recent victim of the left’s habit of waving the bloody shirt in order to bully and intimidate its opponents.

Like myself, John R. Guardino had no relatives in the United States at the time of the Civil War. He discusses at some length, quoting Senator James Webb along the way, why the attacks on Governor McDonnell are so dishonest.

And, just for the record, I’d like to note that Virginia obviously did not secede to defend Slavery. Virginia seceded in order to avoid supplying troops to be used to conquer and invade her fellow states. Virginia went to war only to defend herself and other fraternal states from invasion.

Quite a lot, Frank J. Fleming opines:

[B]oth groups employ the strategy of suicide attacks. Terrorists will kill themselves to hurt Americans for the promise of sexy dames in the afterlife. Liberals in Congress appear willing to commit political suicide by cramming an unpopular health care bill down America’s throat for the promise of later living in a utopia where all the smart people like them get to make all the big decisions for everybody — the secular version of paradise.

Read the whole thing.

Retriever asks:

Why do the Democrats always blame America for whatever we did to provoke it when terrorists attack us, but fail to look to themselves when Americans are righteously angry about Democratic policies…

Christopher Demuth explains that, in endeavoring to establish European-style national health care in America, the left is acting upon a core belief: its faith in the calculative power of human reason to perfect the world.

[M]any liberals today are also progressives. They believe that the natural course of history is the emergence of secular rationality as the true way to think about problems and of state power as the effective way to organize society along rational lines. If that is your worldview, then such things as revealed religion, cultural tradition, and the marketplace (whose outcomes are spontaneous, not rationalized) are vestiges of our primitive past, sure to be displaced by the spreading application of human reason. When liberal politicians describe themselves as “progressives,” that is not just because “liberal” has acquired unpopular connotations but because progressive is the more accurate word for their core beliefs. President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid are progressives in this sense; many recent Democratic presidential candidates were as well—John Kerry, Al Gore, and Michael Dukakis.

The grip of progressivism is probably the best explanation for the Democratic Party’s astonishing campaign to nationalize the U.S. healthcare sector by all means necessary. To attempt to enact a radical and unpopular program in a bill that includes many corrupt provisions, on a party-line vote and through a procedural trick (if the “Slaughter solution” is employed) that seems clearly unconstitutional, appears quite mad and self-defeating to the outsider. But it is not mad at all to those who think it natural and obvious and historically inevitable that the government must administer medical care. In this view, the political actor is simply holding history’s coat while it does its work. Political untidiness, even the loss of an election, are transitory considerations. The progressive mindset also explains, as more than populist demagoguery, the contempt that the proponents of ObamaCare exhibit for doctors and pharmaceutical and medical-insurance companies—for they are the practitioners of a benighted form of healthcare that is about to be swept away by a new and higher form.

The best artistic expression of leftist faith is a new world ruled by secular experts is Mozart’s Masonic opera The Magic Flute (K. 620, 1791).

Liberalism/leftism is a secular religion, and the liberal impulse toward federalizing charity stems from a number of consistently present liberal impulses. Liberalism is a cult with the state at its center in which the credentialed intelligentsia is its priesthood. Anything expanding the power and responsibility of the state inevitably also aggrandizes and affirms the importance of its priesthood, so all state enlargement is good. Socializing, regulating, and nationalizing everything is seen as the fulfillment of the promise that the entire universe can be subdued and rationalized by the calculative powers of human reason wielded by the super-enlightened, educated class of experts. Mankind’s destiny and the fulfillment of the telos of History consists in the continual reduction of the natural, free, and disordered condition of mankind, the market and the world into an ordered, regulated, and managed sphere administered by the intelligentsia under the aegis of the state.

“Es lebe Sarastro! Sarastro soll leben! Er ist es, dem wir uns mit Freuden ergeben. Stets mög’ er des Lebens als Weiser sich freun, Er ist unser Abgott, dem alle sich weihn.”

9:28 video

The poor are invaluable to the priesthood of Leviathan, since it is their neediness which allows the most spoiled and privileged element of society to complain bitterly on their behalf and to demand indignantly that ordinary people surrender to them ever-increasing portions of their liberty and wealth. The poor must be assisted and cared for, you see.

The theoretical elimination of poverty by coercive wealth transfer and social engineering is a key goal of the left’s statist agenda. The replacement of the untidy state of Nature with a manicured and properly managed society is expected to demonstrate irrefutably the superiority of human reason over the former. The leveling of social and biological differences, the abolition of tragedy, and the replacement of charity with entitlement will also firmly establish the leftwing ideal of Égalité, it is supposed, as reality.

The implementation of this costly and coercive agenda is, of course, wholly agreeable to the left because each step in the process only enlarges the power, privilege, and importance of mankind’s enlightened new masters, and the entire process was always intended to be funded at the expense of the ordinary citizen, the general population.

Victor Davis Hanson explains who is conducting today’s Revolution in the United States and against whom it is directed.

[T]he present attempt to remake America is the effort of the liberal well-to-do — highly educated at mostly private universities, nursed on three decades of postmodern education, either with inherited wealth or earning top salaries, lifestyles of privilege indistinguishable from those they decry as selfish, and immune from the dictates they impose on others.

Such are basically the profiles of the Obama cabinet and sub-cabinet, the pillars of liberalism in the Congress and state legislatures, the public intellectuals in the universities and foundations, the arts crowd, and the Hollywood elite. Let us be clear about that.

They are all battling on behalf of “them,” the poorer half of America, currently in need of some sort of housing, education, food, or legal subsidy, whom the above mentioned elite, in the way they live, send their children to school, socialize, and vacation so studiously avoid. (The New York Times owners are likely to follow the cut-throat business practices of Wall Street, live in the most refined areas of New York, and assume privileges indistinguishable from other CEOs; the difference is that they so visibly care about those they never see or seek out).

Note well the term “poor.” These are not Dickensian or Joads poor, but largely Americans who by the standards of the 1940s would be considered lucky. Partly because of globalized Chinese consumer goods, and partly redistributive practices of a half-century, our current “underclass” has access to clothes, electronics, entertainment, apartments, cell phones, transportation, etc., undreamed of by the middle class of the recent past. I live in one of the poorest areas of one of the poorest counties in a bankrupt state; and those I see poor are not like those I saw 40 years ago in the same locale.

No, the revolution is not one of the abject poor and starving storming the Bastille, but of the angry and self-righteous well-off— angry as hell that the less well-off are living lives quite differently from the very well-off. (A trodden down poor person today flies standby from San Francisco to LAX; a very rich person gets into his $50 million Gulfstream — but note modernism’s paradox: the poor person’s United Airlines pilots are as good, he gets there as safely and in some comfort, and not much later as well.)

Some of the revolutionaries are guided by genuine noblesse oblige. Others act out of guilt and can justify their own consumption if they “care” for a distant poorer other. Still more explain their own privilege through using government to redistribute income. A few are driven by genuine hatred — stemming from the fact that the highly educated academic or artist makes far less than the doctor, lawyer, CEO, or — heaven forbid — tire store owner, family orthodontist, or owner of a half dozen Little Caesar pizza franchises.

Peter Beinart describes very accurately what has happened to the democrats.

Barack Obama is a representative of the younger, more ideologically-committed, much more naive generation of left-wing democrats, typical of that party’s radical base. He’s the type of democrat who is too young to have seen George McGovern lose 49 states or see Jimmy Carter shredded by Ronald Reagan.

[A] generation of Democrats, which includes Al From, Mark Penn, Joe Lieberman, William Galston, Elaine Kamarck, Dick Morris, Ed Koch, Jane Harman, Evan Bayh, and to some extent Bill and Hillary Clinton, being a liberal is like walking past a bear. Move cautiously and reassuringly and the bear will purr contentedly. But make any sudden or threatening gestures, and you’ll be mauled because, fundamentally, the bear distrusts liberals. As Galston and Kamarck wrote in their famed 1989 essay “The Politics of Evasion”—a document that helped define the “don’t scare the bear” wing of the party—Democrats can pass liberal programs “but these programs must be shaped and defended within an inhospitable ideological climate.” To pretend that the American people are liberal at heart is to evade political reality, with devastating results.

By the late 1990s, “don’t scare the bear” Democrats pretty much dominated Washington. But in the Bush years, a new faction began to emerge. These Democrats were mostly newer to politics. They had never seen a McGovern or Mondale mauled for being too far to the left. What they had seen was the post-1994 Bill Clinton, who shied away from ambitious liberal reform. And they had seen the Iraq War, which DLC types largely supported, partly out of fear that opposing it would allow Republicans to paint Democrats as soft on defense.

By 2003, this new group of Democrats was angry as hell. The Iraq War, which party elders had mostly backed, was proving a disaster, and to make matters worse, Republicans were clobbering Democrats as weak anyway. So these Democrats began fashioning a different theory: Perhaps the problem wasn’t that Democrats looked weak because they were too liberal, perhaps the problem was that Democrats looked weak because they didn’t stand up for what they really believed. In 2005, the historian Rick Pearlstein—who became something of a hero to these folks—published a book entitled The Stock Ticker and the Super Jumbo. Republicans, he argued, were like Boeing: a company that persevered in building a super jumbo airplane even when the market was bad, and thus built a dominant brand. Democrats were like the stock ticker, constantly shifting with the public mood and thus winning momentary victories but failing to build a brand people could identify with.

To change, Perlstein argued, “Democrats need to make commitments, or a network of commitments, that do not waver from election to election.” They must stick with them “even if they don’t succeed” at any given moment because doing unpopular things because you believe in them convinces Americans that you have core beliefs, which in the long term strengthens your brand. …

When Scott Brown won his Senate seat, he made Obama choose. On the one hand, he handed the White House an excuse to abandon comprehensive reform and return to the incremental, small-bore approach that Clinton pursued after 1994. The Brown victory, in fact, seemed to illustrate the “don’t scare the bear” theory perfectly. Obama had passed the stimulus and bailed out the banks and taken over part of the auto industry and for the American people, it was too much liberal activism too fast. Polls not only showed Americans turning against Obama’s health care bill, they showed them turning against big government more generally. Continuing to pursue comprehensive reform in this inhospitable environment, warned former Carter pollster Patrick Caddell and former Clinton pollster Douglas Schoen, in language that echoed “the Politics of Evasion,” would bring political calamity. “Wishing, praying or pretending” that the American people support health care reform more than they do, they insisted, “will not change these outcomes.”

Superjumbo Democrats, by contrast, argued that the public wasn’t so much anti-reform as they were anti-the legislative process that had produced reform. But more fundamentally, they argued that the American people would respect Democrats for not backing down in the face of adversity. The party might still lose seats this fall, but over time health care reform would prove popular, and the party’s willingness to fight for it would strengthen the Democratic brand.

Why exactly Obama—advised by David Axelrod, Rahm Emmanuel and Valerie Jarrett—decided to double down on health care remains unclear. But it’s a good bet that President Hillary Clinton—advised by Mark Penn—would have acted differently. And in acting the way he did, Obama has turned himself into a superjumbo Democrat. For the foreseeable future, he has forfeited any chance of bridging the red-blue divide. Prominent Republicans have already announced that if Democrats try to pass health care via reconciliation, they will not work across the aisle to pass anything major this year. Conversely, Obama has cemented his bond with the netroots. It doesn’t really matter that the health care reform bill he is fighting for isn’t particularly left-wing. For the netroots, a politicians’ ideological purity has always been less important than his willingness to resist pressure from the other side, which is exactly what Obama has just done.

Whether health care reform passes or not, Obama has embraced polarization over triangulation. He has chosen Karl Rove’s politics of base mobilization over Dick Morris’s politics of crossover appeal, with consequences not merely for how he campaigns for Democrats in 2010, but for he campaigns for himself in 2012. And that’s a disaster for “don’t scare the bear” Democrats whether Obamacare passes or not. The reason is that the DLC wing of the party is much more top-down than the MoveOn wing. It has always wielded influence primarily through elected leaders rather than grassroots activists. But today, Obama is the only leader in the Democratic Party who really matters. As the retirement of Evan Bayh illustrates, there are few nationally prominent DLC-aligned politicians left. (The one person who could have rallied that faction of the party against Obama is now his secretary of state). The DLC wing’s best hope for relevance, therefore, was that Obama himself would restrain the party’s base, that his White House would nurture a new generation of centrist candidates.

That hope is now gone. From top to bottom, Democrats have decided to bet the party’s future on the belief that Americans prefer bold liberals to cautious ones. Now it’s up to the bear.

Neal Katyal celebrates the decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld

Andrew C. McCarthy rebuts misleading editorial claims that certain attorneys now employed by the Department of Justice were “only doing their job” and following the conventional ethical obligations of the Bar in pursuing various kinds of innovative litigation on behalf of War on Terror detainees.

The fictional premise of these wayward complaints is that the Justice Department’s al Qaeda lawyers stand in the same shoes as criminal-defense lawyers. The latter must represent even unsavory characters because the Constitution guarantees counsel to those charged with crimes.

To the contrary, the Justice Department’s al Qaeda lawyers were volunteers, just as Mr. Holder volunteered in the Heller case. Unlike the British soldiers represented by John Adams, the Gitmo detainees are not entitled to counsel. They are not criminal defendants. They are plaintiffs in offensive lawsuits, filed under the rubric of habeas corpus, challenging their detention as war prisoners. The nation is at war, and the detainees are unprivileged alien enemy combatants. By contrast, the United States was not at war with England at the time of the Boston Massacre, and the British soldiers were lawful police, not nonuniformed terrorists.

There is no right to counsel in habeas corpus cases. Thousands of American inmates must represent themselves in such suits—there is no parade of white-shoe law firms at their beck and call. Until 2004, moreover, enemy prisoners were not permitted to challenge their detention at all. The Supreme Court rejected such claims in the 1950 Eisentrager case, precisely because they damage the national war effort. Yes, left-leaning lawyers have convinced the Supreme Court’s liberal bloc to ignore precedent and permit Gitmo habeas petitions. That neither makes these suits less damaging, nor endows the enemy with a right to counsel.

Advocating for the enemy is a modern anomaly, not a proud tradition. Defense lawyers representing accused criminals perform a constitutionally required function. Not so the Department of Justice’s Gitmo volunteers. They represented al Qaeda operatives because they wanted to, not because they had to. The suggestion that they served a vital constitutional function is self-adulating myth. Their motive was to move the law in a particular direction.

Ironically, a number of Republican and conservative lawyers have written editorials and signed letters expressing the same specious analysis that equates the proactive defense of the enemy by the members of the treasonous community of fashion with the conventional acceptance of an assigned duty to provide representation to an unpopular or controversial client. You do not find Mr. Katyal, Mr. Holder, or certain representatives of Shearman & Sterling volunteering to defend the marines charged with murder or the Navy seals who gave the leader of a mob that murdered and mutilated Americans a fat lip.

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and former Solicitor General Theodore Olson, I suppose, deserve some special appreciation for their highmindedness and inclination to bend over backward in order to refrain from pointing fingers at members of their own profession in the opposing camp, but their insistence on placing the best interpretation on the motives of opponents seems more than a little naive in a world in which the democrat party left endeavors to criminalize policy differences as frequently as possible.

There is the difference between Republicans and democrats, between the American right and the American left in a nutshell. Mukasey and Olson are found hastening to defend Neal Katyal’s efforts to utilize American law for the benefit of those making war against it and the Geneva Convention to protect illegal combatants who routinely flout it, while the left is enthusiastically trying to claim that Bush Administration attorneys deserve prosecution for violations of international law as well as sanctions for professional misconduct.

What we have here is the successful application by the left of Saul Alinsky’s radical technique of “making your opponent obey his own rules” on two levels. Leftwing attorneys have successfully compelled the United States government to accord constitutional protections and the privileges of domestic legal process to armed enemies captured overseas and effectively contrived to have the Supreme Court enforce Article 75 of Protocol I (1977) of the Geneva Convention which the United States never signed. Meanwhile, the left accuses and makes strong efforts to punish Republican attorneys for legal and ethical violations on the basis of ultra-partisan and highly strained interpretations. Yet, prominent Republican legal figures shrink from criticizing, even from accurately identifying, enthusiastic advocacy on behalf of the enemy in time of war as what it really is.

Stupak’s Anti-Abortion bloc of votes is coming under intense pressure from democrat leadership, and is beginning to fragment.

Fire Dog Lake is counting Health Care Bill votes. Well-informed opinion within the left-side democrat base believes the count is currently 191 Yes votes and 202 No votes with the rest undecided, and is optimistic about picking up a sufficient number for passage.

The raw totals, on the flip:

Definite YES:
191 Democrats.

Definite NO:
177 Republicans.

Definite NO:
25 Democrats.

19 Democrats who voted No in November:
Bobby Bright, Mike McIntyre, Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, Walt Minnick, Artur Davis, Chet Edwards, Frank Kratovil, Mike Ross, Dan Boren, Gene Taylor, Larry Kissell, Dennis Kucinich, Collin Peterson, Ike Skelton, Jim Marshall, Mike McMahon, Charlie Melancon, Tim Holden, Ben Chandler.

6 Democrats & Republicans who voted Yes in November (confirmed Stupak bloc):
Bart Stupak, Marion Berry, Dan Lipinski, Kathy Dahlkemper, Joe Donnelly, Joseph Cao (R).

18 potential Democratic No-Yes flip votes:

15 possible:
Jason Altmire, Bart Gordon, Glenn Nye, Brian Baird, John Tanner, Rick Boucher, Allen Boyd, John Boccieri, Suzanne Kosmas, Betsy Markey, John Adler, Scott Murphy, Lincoln Davis, Jim Matheson, Harry Teague.

3 less possible:
Travis Childers, Heath Shuler (severe lean no), John Barrow.

20 potential Yes-No flip votes:

4 additional Stupak bloc (Stupak-curious):
Steve Driehaus, Brad Ellsworth, Marcy Kaptur, Jerry Costello.

16 other wary Democrats:
Mike Arcuri, Zack Space, Chris Carney, Mike Doyle, Paul Kanjorski, Ann Kirkpatrick, Alan Mollohan, Nick Rahall, Dan Maffei, Bill Owens, Dennis Cardoza, Baron Hill, Solomon Ortiz, Gabrielle Giffords, Earl Pomeroy, Tim Bishop.

Democrats need 25 of a combination of the 18 potential No-Yes flip votes and the 20 potential Yes-No flip votes. So they need 25 out of the remaining uncommitted 38.

Read the whole thing.