Bret Stephens has an excellent article in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal on the curious fact that liberals will defend their values against WASP conservatives, but not against Islamofascists. For whatever else distinguishes Islamism from liberalism, both are remarkably self-absorbed affairs, obsessed with maintaining the purity of their own values no matter what the cost. In […]
If you haven't read it yet, check out this piece by the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan.
I'm not good at anniversaries. Or holidays for that matter. Five years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, I don't really want to spend my time looking backward. CNN is streaming that tragic day's coverage over the Internet in real-time, but I've little desire to watch it. I've got the TV tuner card […]
The New York Times resident Fig Tree, public editor Byron Calame, has a piece in today's paper on photographs used during the recent Hezbollah/Israeli conflict. I'm not that interested in the main subject of his column, but this bit at the end got to me. A final thought on morality. Some supporters of Israel, who […]
Andrew McCarthy of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies has an excellent article in The New Criterion ripping the Supreme Court for taking over the other two branches of government. This is why, for example, we have never—at least until Hamdan—had a one-sided treaty with an international terrorist organization, whereby jihadists get to keep killing […]
Before being adopted by some on the loony left to refer half-heartedly to Bush-won red states, the phrase was used to refer to the fight against communism -- aka the red menace. There were people in the West who would rather die than accept a tyrannical nihilist rule. In today's Chicago Sun-Times, columnist Mark Steyn […]
Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth had an op-ed piece published in the Jerusalem Post earlier this week condemning Hezbollah for its "Indiscriminate Bombardment" of civilian areas within Israel using katyusha rockets. Why did so many Lebanese civilians lose their lives to Israeli bombing? The government line is that the IDF was doing the […]
Well, it turns out the judge that ruled the NSA terrorist eavesdropping program unconstitutional, immoral and high in saturated fats has a connection to one of the groups that brought the lawsuit -- the ACLU. Some legal ethicists interviewed said yesterday that while Taylor's role as a trustee at a nonprofit group supporting the ACLU […]
Early on I noted that despite their feelings on the legality of the NSA's terrorist surveillance program, legal scholars almost unanimously panned the opinion as heavy on rhetoric and light on the law. I also thought it was worth noting how two of the nation's most respected newspapers thought about the opinion. Demonstrating once again […]
It should come as little surprise that the ACLU found a district judge -- a Carter appointee -- to ignore previous rulings on Presidential commander-in-chief powers and find the NSA wiretapping program illegal. [PDF of the decision here.] Eugene Volokh over at the Volokh Conspiracy has some more analysis of the ruling, and he doesn't […]