politics

The Sad Spectacle of Chris Wallace vs. Jon Stewart

Calvin Freiburger Chris Wallace, conservatism, dishonesty, Fox News, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, hypocrisy, Iraq, Jon Stewart, Left, media bias, politics, PolitiFact

I don’t know which Chris Wallace Moe Lane was watching, but the one the one I saw on “Fox News Sunday” certainly didn’t “school” Jon Stewart. Not even close. He managed a satisfying zinger or two, but by and large, Wallace let the comedian walk all over him with outrageous and uncontested claims about Fox News.
Wallace first challenges Stewart’s claim that Fox News is a “relentless agenda-driven, 24-hour news opinion propaganda delivery system. Well, Wallace doesn’t actually challenge that statement; he instead asks if Stewart’s willing to say the same of the mainstream media. Why on earth would you let that stand? 
It wouldn’t exactly be difficult to refute. First, you could ask for so much as a single example of Fox’s bias, which Stewart doesn’t do at any point in the interview. Second, you could point out that Fox’s mostly conservative commentary programs are separate from its hard news reporting, which is impartial. Third, you could ask Stewart to explain the high number of liberal hosts and paid contributors on Fox, like Andrew Napolitano, Geraldo Rivera, Shepard Smith, Alan Colmes, Ellis Henican, Juan Williams, Marc Lamont Hill, Susan Estrich, Ellen Ratner, Kirsten Powers, or Bob Beckel. Even Bill O’Reilly is hardly a doctrinaire conservative—the guy believes in global warming, routinely bashes oil companies for “price gouging”, and has been known to trash conservative talk radio for being too anti-Obama for his tastes. Can of the competition boast a comparable number of conservative talent?
Anyway, Wallace instead asked if Stewart would be willing to say the same thing about the mainstream media. Predictably, he wasn’t:
WALLACE: You don’t think the New York Times is a liberal organization?
STEWART: No.
WALLACE: Pushing a liberal agenda?
STEWART: The New York Times, no. I think they are to a certain extent. Do I think they’re relentlessly activist? No. In a purely liberal partisan way? No, I don’t.
The entire hour could have been spent listing examples of the MSM’s left-wing bias, and for Stewart to claim he doesn’t see it is phony on its face. Wallace gave him a recent one: the New York Times and Washington Post’s call for their readers to help them go dirt-digging through Sarah Palin’s recently-released emails. Why pull such a stunt, and why didn’t they do the same with the 2,000-page ObamaCare bill?
STEWART: Because I think their bias is towards sensationalism and laziness. I wouldn’t say it’s towards a liberal agenda. It’s light fluff. So, it’s absolutely within the wheelhouse.
So Fox is a partisan propaganda machine, but their competitors’ misdeeds are merely apolitical grabs at juicy headlines. So it didn’t occur to anyone at the NYT or WaPo that there might be a few sensationalistic tidbits in a 2,000-page piece of legislation that many of its supporters didn’t even read? Can’t Fox’s (alleged, unidentified) misdeeds just as easily be attributed to “sensationalism and laziness”? And if sensationalism alone is the lifeblood of the MSM, then how does Stewart explain the MSM’s lack of interest in, say, the John Edwards love child story? What could be more sensationalistic than a man who was almost Vice President fathering a child with a mistress while his wife was dying of cancer?
Next came some arguing about whether Stewart’s primarily a comedian or an activist, which misses the point—lies are lies, no matter who says them. And regardless of what Stewart labels himself, many of America’s youth do turn to him as their primary source for political news.
The diversion did, however, lead to this incredible nugget from Stewart:
STEWART: You can’t understand because of the world you live in that there is not a designed ideological agenda on my part to affect partisan change because that’s the soup you swim in. And I appreciate that. And I understand that. It reminds me of, you know — you know, ideological regimes. They can’t understand that there is free media other places because they receive marching orders.
Here Stewart is using his own lie about Fox as proof Wallace must be wrong about him. Did Wallace call him out for it? Nope.
Wallace next gave another example of liberal MSM propagandizing: Diane Sawyer leading a hard-news story with an outright lie about Arizona’s immigration law. Stewart’s reaction? “That’s sensationalist and somewhat lazy. But I don’t understand how it’s partisan.” Of course.
Perhaps the biggest moment of the whole interview came a bit later, when Stewart—angrily—asked:
STEWART: In polls, who is the most consistently misinformed media viewers, the most consistently misinformed? Fox. Fox viewers. Consistently. Every poll.
How did Chris Wallace respond to such a brutal, direct attack on Fox News Channel’s credibility?
He didn’t.
Not a word about whether it was true. Instead he changed the subject to raunchiness on Comedy Central. Incredible.
Fortunately, PolitiFact decided it was worth checking, and, unsurprisingly, it turned out to be false:
So we have three Pew studies that superficially rank Fox viewers low on the well-informed list, but in several of the surveys, Fox isn’t the lowest, and other general-interest media outlets — such as network news shows, network morning shows and even the other cable news networks — often score similarly low. Meanwhile, particular Fox shows — such as The O’Reilly Factor and Sean Hannity’s show — actually score consistently well, occasionally even outpacing Stewart’s own audience.

Meanwhile, the other set of knowledge surveys, from worldpublicopinion.org, offer mixed support for Stewart. The 2003 survey strikes us as pretty solid, but the 2010 survey has been critiqued for its methodology. 

PolitiFact’s look at the findings is worth checking out in full, as are takedowns they link to by John Lott and Brent Bozell, but they actually give too much credit to World Public Opinion. Here’s the gist of the 2003 study:
It asked three questions: “Is it your impression that the U.S. has or has not found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the al-Qaida terrorist organization?” “Since the war with Iraq ended, is it your impression that the US has or has not found Iraqi weapons of mass destruction?” And whether, “The majority of people [worldwide] favor the US having gone to war.”
The obvious problem is that the first two “wrong” answers aren’t actually wrong. The study’s authors can nitpick about what evidence they think respondents should have considered “clear,” but just because people were confident Saddam had terrorist connections and WMDs doesn’t make them “misinformed”; in fact, the evidence of Iraq’s terror ties and WMD pursuits was more likely to actually get covered at Fox, making their viewers better informed than the MSM’s. The only question Fox viewers really do get wrong is the global opinion one—but anyone who remembers Fox’s coverage of the Iraq War at the time (which I do) can tell you that they didn’t try to whitewash anti-American sentiment; in fact, whether America should “go it alone” was a frequent topic of debate.

So the truth behind Stewart’s big, angry beef with Fox was complete garbage, and where a better interviewer could have used it to completely destroy him, Wallace let him get away with it scot-free.

Three Lousy Objections to Susan B. Anthony’s Pro-Life Pledge…and One Real One

Calvin Freiburger 14th Amendment, abortion, Commerce Clause, conservatism, Constitution, GOP, Herman Cain, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, human rights, politics, pro-life, romney, social issues

Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Herman Cain have come under fire for refusing to sign the Susan B. Anthony List’s Pro-Life 2012 Citizen’s Pledge, which reads:
I PLEDGE that I will only support candidates for President who are committed to protecting Life. I demand that any candidate I support commit to these positions:

FIRST, to nominate to the U.S. federal bench judges who are committed to restraint and applying the original meaning of the Constitution, not legislating from the bench;

SECOND, to select only pro-life appointees for relevant Cabinet and Executive Branch positions, in particular the head of National Institutes of Health, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Health & Human Services;

THIRD, to advance pro-life legislation to permanently end all taxpayer funding of abortion in all domestic and international spending programs, and defund Planned Parenthood and all other contractors and recipients of federal funds with affiliates that perform or fund abortions;

FOURTH, advance and sign into law a Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act to protect unborn children who are capable of feeling pain from abortion.
Romney’s instead offered his own pro-life pledge, consisting of good-but-mild promises regarding thinks like opposing Roe and backing the Hyde Amendment, and explaining where SBA goes too far:
It is one thing to end federal funding for an organization like Planned Parenthood; it is entirely another to end all federal funding for thousands of hospitals across America. That is precisely what the pledge would demand and require of a president who signed it. 
I could ask why somebody who claims to understand conservative principles and the original intent of the Constitution is so hung-up on ensuring that hospitals continue to receive federal funding, but here it’ll suffice to echo SBA’s reminder that the pledge doesn’t say anything about defunding hospitals, which “has never been considered by Congress [and] is not part of public debate,” and ask why it would be a bad thing to make abortion so radioactive that hospitals know even tangential dealings with abortion providers could risk their access to the public trough. And frankly, the 5% of hospitals that SBA says do perform abortions should be defunded.
The pledge also unduly burdens a president’s ability to appoint the most qualified individuals to a broad array of key positions in the federal government. I would expect every one of my appointees to carry out my policies on abortion and every other issue, irrespective of their personal views.
Actually, the pledge doesn’t cover a “broad array” of federal posts; merely those “relevant” to life issues, namely “National Institute of Health, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Health and Human Services.” Romney says, “oh, my guys will do what I want, regardless of their own views,” but that’s simply not good enough. For one thing, it’s not enough for the president to have confidence in a public servant; the American people must be able to trust that they’ll execute the law the way we voted for. Can anybody seriously say that they’d be comfortable with a pro-abortion Health and Human Services Secretary, even with a self-described pro-lifer in the White House? For another, abortion is a question of basic liberty, so you can’t just separate someone’s position on abortion from his position on other issues and expect someone who thinks it’s okay to let babies be murdered for convenience to be just fine on everything else.

As someone who strongly supported Mitt Romney last time around (a decision I stand by, as the viable alternatives were still worse), this is the most damning evidence yet that he doesn’t truly take the pro-life cause seriously. (Charles Krauthammer and Bill O’Reilly are full of crap on this issue.)

Herman Cain, meanwhile, says his problem was the wording of point four:
I support right-to-life issues unequivocally and I adamantly support the first three aspects of the Susan B. Anthony pledge involving appointing pro-life judges, choosing pro-life cabinet members, and ending taxpayer-funded abortions. However, the fourth requirement demands that I “advance” the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. As president, I would sign it, but Congress must advance the legislation.
Cain seems to be alluding to the fact that presidents don’t have a constitutional role in the legislative process until a bill reaches their desk, which is true, but come on. Rejecting an entire pledge because of one word that wasn’t quite precise enough for Cain is awfully nitpicky, even for a disgruntled constitutional purist like me. Cain’s pro-life street cred is far better than Romney’s, but this is just the latest in a string of bungles by Cain that convince me he’s not ready for primetime.

Now that we’ve got the candidates’ crappy reasons for rejecting the SBA pledge out of the way, we must unfortunately turn to a real problem with it that few people have touched upon. David Kopel explains why the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act may be constitutionally problematic:
The federal version of PCUCPA is S. 314, introduced by Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.). After the definitions section of the proposed statute, the bill states: “Any abortion provider in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce, who knowingly performs any abortion of a pain-capable unborn child, shall comply with the requirements of this title.”

Federal abortion control under the purported authority of congressional power “To regulate Commerce…among the several States” is plainly unconstitutional under the original meaning of the interstate commerce.

Even under the lax (but non-infinite) version of the interstate commerce power which the Court articulated in Lopez,  a federal ban on partial-birth abortion is dubious, as Glenn Reynolds and I argued in a Connecticut Law Review article. Indeed, in the 5–4 Supreme Court decision upholding the federal ban, Gonzales v. Carhart, Justices Thomas and Scalia, who voted in the majority to uphold the ban as not violating the Casey abortion right, concurred to point out “that whether the Act constitutes a permissible exercise of Congress’ power under the Commerce Clause is not before the Court. The parties did not raise or brief that issue; it is outside the question presented; and the lower courts did not address it.”

In other words, if the attorneys who challenged the federal ban on partial-birth abortions had been willing to raise all plausibile constitutional claims, instead of losing the case 4–5 they probably could have won 6–3, by assembling a coalition of 4 strongly pro-abortion-rights Justices, plus Scalia and Thomas on the commerce issue.
Clearly, using the Commerce Clause for authorization is every bit as invalid as when liberals do it. Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce was meant to prevent the states from placing onerous restrictions on interstate commerce. Using it to justify regulations on abortions that cross state lines violates the spirit of the clause, and using it to justify regulations on abortions that don’t cross state lines violates both the spirit and the letter of the law.

Can the bill be justified on other grounds, though? The Fourteenth Amendment says no state can “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” and empowers Congress to enforce that promise. As Ronald Reagan famously pointed out, the architect of the Fourteenth Amendment, Rep. John Bingham, said the amendment’s guarantee of “life, liberty, and property” would apply to “any human being.” I think a case can be made that the Fourteenth Amendment gives Congress the constitutional authority to prohibit abortion (more on that later), but then we come across another problem: does a measure designed to merely discourage abortion constitute protecting fetuses?

I’m not sure. (UPDATE: Here’s my first stab at the issue.) As much as I want Republicans to fight abortion harder, I also want them to do it constitutionally. At the very least, pro-life policymakers cannot justify exploiting chinks in the Constitution’s armor first made by the Left. And that the trickier legal issues involved can be vexing even among pro-lifers is all the more reason to support the Human Life Amendment.

Of course, any progress on that front would require statesmen of a higher caliber than Mitt Romney and Herman Cain.

UPDATE II: Ramesh Ponnuru has another, more substantive beef with the pledge: 

But this pledge, taken seriously, would preclude me from voting for Mitt Romney against Barack Obama in 2012 — which is to say, that given these entirely imaginable options, it would preclude me from doing what I can to advance the pro-life cause. (It would have precluded me from supporting Bush over Gore in 2000, too, since Bush made no such commitment on personnel.) It would preclude me from voting for Romney in the primaries even if I believed he offered pro-lifers our best shot at replacing Obama with someone who would appoint good justices to the Supreme Court.

GOP Debate Reaction

Calvin Freiburger Bachmann, conservatism, Gingrich, GOP, Herman Cain, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Pawlenty, politics, primary, RINOs, romney, Ron Paul, Santorum

The following rankings are based strictly on their performance last night, not their overall merit as candidates.

First Place: A tie between Michelle Bachmann and Newt Gingrich. I was surprised to see Bachmann at all, simply because she hadn’t made her intentions to run official before last night, and I didn’t expect to be as impressed with her performance as I was (I’ve always liked her passion for conservatism, but she has had a few foot-in-mouth issues). Bachmann was clear, polished, passionate, and generally delivered a performance that stood in stark contrast to the Left’s caricature of her as an unserious nut. Gingrich, unsurprisingly, delivered a performance that showcased his unmatched command of the details and a no-nonsense attitude that I think would have taken him far if…well, if he wasn’t Newt Gingrich, weighed down by all the baggage that entails.

Second Place: Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney. Solid performances, but more or less interchangeable in my view. Romney may have been a little more polished, though he’s lucky nobody forced him to get too specific about health care. Speaking of which…

Third Place: Tim Pawlenty. He would have been in a tree-way tie for second with Santorum and Romney, were it not for chickening out when given a chance to back up his attacks on RomneyCare. Tim does realize that, if he wins the nomination, he’ll have to say uncomplimentary things about Obama to his face, right?

Fourth Place: Herman Cain. I never expected to be as disappointed as I’ve been in Cain. Despite being able to speak with great confidence and clarity on economics, it’s clear he hasn’t made any effort to improve his foreign policy credentials. He also stumbled badly when trying to explain his remarks on the loyalty of Muslims, and I was disappointed to learn he wouldn’t support the Federal Marriage Amendment.

Fifth Place: Ron Paul. His delivery is so terrible that I can’t fathom how this guy managed to develop a cult of personality around himself. He comes across as the crazy uncle you’re constantly praying won’t embarrass you in front of dinner guests.

Guns Don’t Kill People, Political Correctness Does

Calvin Freiburger children, education, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Left, liberalism, military, police, political correctness, politics, public schools, society, UK, values, violence
Teachers reprimanded two seven-year-old boys for playing army games – because it amounted to ‘threatening behaviour’.
The youngsters were disciplined after they were spotted making gun-shapes with their hands.

Staff at Nathaniel Newton Infant School in Nuneaton, Warks., even told the boys’ parents to ‘reprimand’ them.

A father of one of the boys said: ‘This is ridiculous. How can you tell a seven-year-old boy he cannot play guns and armies with his friends.
‘Another parent was called over for the same reason.

‘We were told to reprimand our son for this and to tell him he cannot play “guns” anymore.

Obviously, it must be made perfectly clear to kids that guns aren’t toys, and if a teacher sees signs that someone doesn’t get that, then intervention in what he’s doing during recess is probably in order. But you don’t need to crack down on perfectly innocent and natural children’s fantasies to get that message across, any more than teaching them auto safety by keeping them from pretending to be NASCAR drivers

What prevents kids from misusing either is instilling in them a much broader ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy, as well as a basic respect for human life. The likelihood of misusing a gun isn’t an isolated issue that pops up in a vacuum. It’s either symptomatic of, or enabled by, broader problems that telling kids what they can’t play at recess just isn’t gonna solve, such as bad parents who don’t safely lock up their weapons or don’t teach their kids morality and responsibility.

Kids have always pretended to be cops or soldiers, and, the simple truth is that their primary purpose and characteristic of these institutions is protecting the rights of the community through lethal force, so if children are going to play army or police, then guns are going to be an unavoidable part of that scenario. And that’s not a bad thing. Because in the hands of the people these kids were emulating, guns aren’t intended to kill, but to protect. Children fantasizing about fighting fire with fire and standing up to genuine bad guys is not only natural, but healthy. 
Free societies need to pass a certain degree of fighting spirit, of warrior ethos, from one generation to the next – to venerate the fighting and punishing of evil, the willingness to fight and die if need be, etc. I’m not talking about anything close to Sparta-like indoctrination, but at the very least we shouldn’t be coming down on kids when their imaginations are captured by our society’s best and most vital role models.

Indeed, in their zeal to end “threatening behaviour” wherever it arises, the practical effect of such rules is more likely to be the message that military and police service aren’t something children should emulate or look up to, because they’re inherently “threatening” professions.

A Short Post on Anthony Weiner – UPDATED

Calvin Freiburger Anthony Weiner, Boehner, Democrats, dishonesty, GOP, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Internet, Left, politics, RINOs, scandal, sex, sexual harassment, Twitter

The Case of Anthony’s Weiner seems to be pretty open and shut. Liberal apologists are trying to muddy the water with talk of fabricated evidence and web hacking, but it’s all crap for one simple reason: Anthony Weiner will not deny that he’s the one in the picture. In fact, word is that he privately admits he’s taken such pictures in the past. Just watch the spectacular trainwreck of an interview the Congressman had with Wolf Blitzer and tell me he’s not lying.

What makes this story relevant, though, is the glaring inconsistency between Weiner’s version of events (someone framed me) and his reaction (it’s no big deal, let’s let bygones be bygones). Contrary to Weiner’s spin, a lewd photo sent unsolicited to a college girl isn’t an innocent prank – it’s sexual harassment. Let’s state it bluntly: Anthony Weiner, a prominent United States Congressman, sexually harassed one of his young female supporters. And even if you buy Weiner’s story, then he’s essentially saying that someone who sexually harassed one of his young female supporters – and framed Weiner in the process – shouldn’t be punished.

Either way, it’s the conduct of a scumbag. How Weiner’s House colleagues, the voters of New York, and liberals across the country react will tell us all we need to know about them.

UPDATE: John Boehner refuses to comment on the issue, or whether the House Ethics Committee should weigh in. Not surprising that the Republican Speaker of the House doesn’t have the courage or the integrity to speak simple truths, but it is disgraceful. It’s stories like this that make me think the GOP has a political death wish.

How Not to Discredit Pro-Choicers

Calvin Freiburger abortion, conservatism, dishonesty, health care, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Jill Stanek, lying, politics, pro-choice, pro-life, Salon, social issues

Pro-life blogger Jill Stanek has been critiquing a Salon blogger, Mikki Kendall, who claims she almost died because of a doctor who refused to perform an abortion. Stanek raises some good, important questions about the credibility of Kendall’s story, but she undermines her own work by claiming to have found a smoking gun that’s anything but.

Stanek first highlights this quote from Kendall’s original piece:

I don’t know if his objections were religious or not; all I know is that when a bleeding woman was brought to him for treatment he refused to do the only thing that could stop the bleeding. Because he didn’t do abortions. Ever.

Then Kendall’s follow-up quote:

Some say I should name and shame the doctor that refused to do the procedure. If I knew why he refused I might have done just that, but since I know that there are many possible reasons that he did not do it? I’ve left him to deal with the internal procedures in place.

Stanek’s reaction:

Excuse me? Kendall’s entire Salon story was built upon her accusation that a heartless, negligent, anti-abortion doctor was willing to let her hemorrhage to death rather than provide a life-saving abortion.

And she has now admitted her story was a big, fat, fabricated lie.

Except the quote shows nothing of the sort. At most, Kendall’s latest words admit she doesn’t know the doctor’s motives, whereas she earlier implied that she knew the doctor had personal objections to abortion. That “inconsistency” is shaky enough, but the main problem is that it does nothing to show Stanek’s allegation that Kendall’s story “was a big, fat, fabricated lie.” It doesn’t change any of the much more germane details of the story, like what Kendall’s condition was, whether the doctor did in fact refuse, or whether the incident occurred at all.

Jill Stanek, as well as the folks at NewsBusters who re-posted her piece, simply can’t afford to be so careless when it comes to ensuring the evidence backs up their arguments.

New on NewsReal – Obama Discovers Flip Side of Identity Politics as Muslim Groups Give Him Failing Marks

Calvin Freiburger Democrats, Islam, Left, liberalism, NewsReal, Obama, political correctness, politics

My latest NewsRealBlog post:

It seems another demographic group Democrats once took for granted is snapping out of Obama fever. At the Daily Beast, David Graham reports that American Muslims don’t think the president’s actions match his pro-Islam rhetoric. Aside from insisting that Islam is a religion of peace and appointing a few Muslims to important positions, Obama hasn’t met enough with American Muslim groups or “remade the political landscape for Muslims”:

“Just like the last time, we’re quite happy if any president offers positive rhetoric toward the Muslim world or Islam, but it really needs to be backed up with concrete policy initiatives,” says Ibrahim Hooper, communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a leading American Muslim group. “We’re still in Afghanistan, we’re still in Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian situation has gone south. We’re not there—we’re just continuing with the previous policies.”

It’s not just foreign policy. Across the board, Muslims are expressing disappointment with Obama’s progress on issues relevant to them in the domestic policy realm. What they express is not so much anger as disillusionment, a recognition that the president hasn’t remade the political landscape for Muslims. (American Muslim opinions mirror international opinions. A Pew survey released Tuesday finds that citizens in majority Muslim countries remain skeptical of Obama.)

[…]

Exhibit A is the Park51 project, the proposed mosque and Islamic center in Lower Manhattan that opponents dubbed the “ground zero mosque”. After delivering what appeared to be a full-throated defense of the project, he walked back his comments the next day, saying, “I was not commenting, and I will not comment, on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there.” It was a crucial litmus test for many American Muslims—and one that Obama failed. “He’s still missing the political courage to stand up for communities, and not just Muslim communities,” says Shireen Zaman, the executive director of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, a think tank on Muslim issues.

As the Left always does when discussing different ethnic groups, it’s simply assumed at the outset that the positions cited are intrinsically anti-Muslim.

Whatever you think of the wisdom of starting or continuing the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, both conflicts were waged against specific governments the United States determined to be enemies, not against Muslims generally; indeed, both wars liberated their Muslim populations from nightmarish despots and gave them a genuine shot at liberty, so one could just as easily call a premature withdrawal from either theater anti-Muslim for enabling a descent back into totalitarianism.

Read the rest at NewsRealBlog.

New on NewsReal – What Does the Bin Laden Takedown Mean for Obama’s 2012 Prospects?

Calvin Freiburger bin Laden, Democrats, foreign affairs, GOP, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, NewsReal, Obama, politics, War on Terror

My latest NewsRealBlog post:

Democrats were understandably thrilled that it was their guy, Barack Obama, who finally nailed Osama bin Laden, who has for the past decade been as elusive as he was hated. But just how much of a political boon is the victory for the president? That’s the question asked today by the Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky, who sees it as a major shift away from the Democrats’ dovish image:

But now, the killing of Osama bin Laden is changing this equation dramatically. Alleged Muslim Barack Obama did in two and a half years what Bush couldn’t do in seven and a half. It wasn’t just the result. The nature of the operation is still breathtaking, weeks later, and the risk Obama took, which he conveyed with masterful cool in his 60 Minutes interview, is mind-blowing (imagine if bin Laden hadn’t been there!). You can call the president who oversaw the operation many things, but weak isn’t one of them.

To talk as if there were two separate hunts for bin Laden is an astoundingly dishonest oversimplification. The truth is that American intelligence officials spent years following the key intelligence trail:

Some time after Sept. 11, detainees held by the U.S. told interrogators about a man believed to work as a courier for bin Laden, senior administration officials said. The man was described by detainees as a protégé of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and “one of the few Al Qaeda couriers trusted by bin laden.”

Initially, intelligence officials only had the man’s nickname, but they discovered his real name four years ago.

Two years ago, intelligence officials began to identify areas of Pakistan where the courier and his brother operated, and the great security precautions the two men took aroused U.S. suspicions.

Last August, intelligence officials tracked the men to their residence in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a relatively wealthy town 35 miles north of Islamabad where many retired military officers live […]

President Obama was made aware of the compound when it was discovered last year. By mid-February, the intelligence was solid and since mid-March, Obama led five meetings with the National Security Council regarding the issue.

Intelligence officials worked with the U.S. military to plan the operation and a small team accepted the risk and began to train for it.

On April 29, this past Friday, Obama gave the final go ahead.

Read the rest on NewsRealBlog.

New on NewsReal – Obama Puts Post-Racial America on Hold, Brings Racist, Anti-Cop Rapper to the White House

Calvin Freiburger bigotry, culture, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, NewsReal, Obama, police, politics, pop culture, race, racism, society

My latest NewsRealBlog post:

Barack Obama is a man of many talents. Some presidents might be content to wreck the nation’s finances and display confused impotence to our enemies, but Obama also takes the time to needlessly poison America’s cultural well. Last night, Sean Hannity took the president to task for including Lonnie Rashid Lynn, Jr., AKA rapper/poet “Common,” on the docket of a White House celebration of American prose.

Common’s prose covers all the bases of lefty thug culture, including railing against supposed warmongers:

Burn a Bush cos’ for peace he no push
No button
Killing over oil and grease
No weapons of destruction
How can we follow a leader when this a corrupt one

And resentment of the law as the mortal enemy of blacks, who might want to consider packing heat, just in case:

Tell the law my Uzi weighs a ton
I walk like a warrior, from them I won’t run
On the streets they try to beat us like a drum
In Cincinnati another brother hung

Common is also a friend and defender of Obama’s old pal Jeremiah Wright—in 2008 he claimed what he “picked up from the pews…was messages of love.” Why, even love for the “US of KKK-A,” and those in the CIA who cooked up AIDS to decimate the black population! I don’t know about you, but I can certainly feel the love!

Read the rest on NewsRealBlog.

New on NewsReal – Pathetic: Peter Beinart Uses Bin Laden’s Death to Declare War on Terror Over

Calvin Freiburger appeasement, Beinart, bin Laden, Islamofascism, Left, liberalism, NewsReal, politics, victories, War on Terror

My latest NewsRealBlog post:

We knew this was coming. No American victory in this day and age, not even the long-overdue death of terror mastermind Osama bin Laden, is safe from political hijacking by the useful idiots of the Left.  Within hours of hearing the good news, left-wing Daily Beast flunky Peter Beinart took to the keyboard to declare that the War on Terror is finally over.

Wow, what a relief! So that means Iran’s nuclear program is kaput? Er, no. Well, maybe it means the UN Security Council has stopped playing nice with Middle Eastern thug regimes. Wait, that didn’t happen, either. I know – peace between Israel and the Palestinians is finally in sight! Nope, try again. Um, then maybe anti-American sentiment among Muslim populations is waning? Uh-uh.


If none of that’s the case, then what does Beinart mean?

I don’t mean that there is no threat of further jihadist attack. In the short term, the threat may even rise. I don’t mean that we should abandon all efforts at tracking terrorist cells. Of course not. But the war on terror was a way of seeing the world, explicitly modeled on World War II and the Cold War. It suggested that the struggle against “radical Islam” or “Islamofascism” or “Islamic terrorism” should be the overarching goal of American foreign policy, the prism through which we see the world […] It made East Asia an afterthought during a critical period in China’s rise; it allowed all manner of dictators to sell their repression in Washington, just as they had during the Cold War; it facilitated America’s descent into torture; it wildly exaggerated the ideological appeal of a jihadist-Salafist movement whose vision of society most Muslims find revolting.

Bin Laden’s death is an opportunity to lay the war on terror to rest as well. Although President Obama avoids the phrase, its assumptions still drive our war in Afghanistan, a crushingly expensive adventure in nation building in a desperately poor country whose powerful neighbor wants us to fail. Those assumptions fuel anti-Muslim racism in the United States, where large swaths of the Republican Party have decided they are at risk of living under Sharia law. And they blind us to the differences among Islamist movements, allowing Glenn Beck and company to depict Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood as al Qaeda’s farm team.

Instead, we can now take on real problems, like debt and China. Because Barack Obama has been such a crusader on those issues so far.

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