BeldarBlog

McClellan, Conyers, WaPo, and AP vie for prize for "Most Disingenuous" in Plamegate testimony and "news articles" that never mention the name "Armitage"

You're watching absolutely false conventional wisdom being repeated over and over again, folks, until only us few with more than 50 functioning neurons and the willpower to resist propaganda actually remember the truth.

Without a transcript, I can't be certain that no one mentioned Richard Armitage's name at any point during the hearing. But if neither Conyers, nor McClellan, nor anyone else did, that itself would have been newsworthy!

You cannot write this story with a shred of journalistic integrity without using the name "Armitage." It can't be done.Nevertheless, I firmly expect that by this time tomorrow, most or all of the other members of the mainstream media will have qualified for this particular "Most Disingenuous" prize along with the AP and WaPo.

Question for the weekend: Will Mr. Armitage write the AP and WaPo demanding a correction that gives him due and just credit as the leaker?

Legal, but offensively cocky: Obama rips off official presidential seal for his podium, and adds the motto "Vero Possumus"

Yeah, sure, I'd defend to the death Obama's technical legal right under the First Amendment to mangle national icons, burn flags, yada yada yada. It's a free country, and that freedom includes the right to engage in political expression that is crass, tasteless, and irredeemably cocky.

And one of the perquisites of being an incumbent president who's running for re-election is that, well, you actually are the POTUS, so you're entitled to speak to audiences from behind a podium that bears the official presidential seal. No one meets that description this year, however.

Nevertheless, the junior senator from Illinois, who's yet to complete his first term in the United States Senate, apparently feels entitled to rip off the most familiar elements of the official Seal of the President of the United States for his campaign use — and then to combine it with some of his own campaign artwork:

 

According to the NYT Politics Blog (bold-face mine):

At a discussion with a dozen Democratic governors in Chicago on Friday morning, each of the governors was identified with a small name plate but Senator Barack Obama sat behind a low rostrum to which was attached an official-looking seal no one had seen before....

Just above the eagle’s head are the words “Vero Possumus,” roughly translated “Yes we can.” ...

Us God-loving, bitter, clinging gun-owners in the fly-over country have an expression for the kind of arrogance required to appropriate the seal of a public office to which one hasn't quite yet been elected: "He's dang sure gotten too big fer his britches," we'd say.

In response to which, someone might ask: "Can you folks usually find a way to deal with young fellas who're too big fer their britches?"

To which the answer — which I'm sure is spoken confidently and frequently on at least the West Texas prairies of my own birth, and perhaps elsewhere — is surely: "Vero Possumus!" Which, out here in fly-over land, roughly translates to: "You bet yer road-kill possum butt we can!" (I'll spare you the photographs of the possums, with or without the surrounding seal.)

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UPDATE (Sat Jun 21 @ noonish): Ann Althouse wins this year's award for "pithiest post" on this subject, in which she expresses her own views entirely through subject tags. (And in her comments, she generally agrees with my legal evaluation in the title of this post and in my own comment below.)

Other reporting, this time from the N.Y. Daily News (h/t Power Line):

Asked to explain the new seal, Obama spokeswoman Jen Psaki said, "It's a mix of presidential politics and a call for hope and change."

Snarked John McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds, "I think we can all agree that we need presidential candidates that are serious enough not to play make-believe on the campaign trail."

"It's laughable, ridiculous, preposterous and revealing all at the same time," Bounds said.

Yup.

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UPDATE (Sat Jun 21 @ 11:30pm): I finally remembered what the Great Seal of Obama reminds me of. It's those Royal Delft plates from Holland. Perhaps Michelle can have them make up the new White House china.

 

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UPDATE (Mon Jun 23 @ 6:20pm): The Obama campaign has reportedly consigned the Great Seal of Obama to the same memory hole as Michael Dukakis' tank hat. Good luck to them with that. (H/t: InstaPundit, and thanks for the link, Prof. R.)

Palin leads Pajamas Media veep poll

As of this moment, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin — whom I've previously written about at length as a potential grand slam home run as a vice presidential nominee for John McCain — leads Mitt Romney by a narrow margin, 19% to 18%, in a straw poll being conducted by Pajamas Media. (H/t: InstaPundit.) Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal are the only two others currently polling in double digits, at 12% and 10% respectively.

Listening to the news this week (including the Dems flailing around with their insistence that "we can't drill our way out of this," and Obama's arguments that what the energy markets really need are a stiff windfall profits tax), and then filling my car this afternoon, I couldn't help imagining Gov. Palin taking Sen. McCain on an cross-Alaskan early-summer tour. It would includes already developed oil and gas properties, to show how that can be done in an environmentally respectful fashion, and then the incredibly remote, incredibly non-scenic mud-flats in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) that have been proposed for exploration and potential drilling. It's the kind of trip that could explain a change in position on the Senator's part. And unless I miss my guess, she's the kind of advocate and leader who might find a way through his stubbornness — and potentially onto the ticket along with him. Hence, I was happy to cast my straw vote for her tonight in this poll.

(Note: There are random prizes. But PJM discloses in the fine print that "[b]y entering into this contest you will be placed on the Pajamas Media email list and will receive the Pajama's Media Daily Digest. You will have the ability to opt-out." I wish there were an opt-out check-box on the voting page itself, but I trust PJM not to sell or abuse my email address — heck, PJM CEO Roger L. Simon has it already anyway, from our prior correspondence — and the inconvenience of opting out later is, for me anyway, justified by my desire to boost Gov. Palin's chances.)

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UPDATE (Thu Jun 19 @ 5:00pm): McCain says he's willing to re-evaluate his position against drilling in ANWR! Gov. Palin, it's time to extend an invitation!

Scratch a liberal, uncover a communist

U.S. Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY), speaking to the press today (my transcription from TIVO'd coverage on the Fox News channel during Neil Cavuto's show, about 10 minutes ago):

So if there's any seriousness about what some of our Republican colleagues are saying here in the House and elsewhere about improving the number of refineries, then maybe they'd be willing to have these refineries owned publicly —  owned by the people of the United States. So that the people of the United States can determine how much of the product is refined and put out on the market. To me, that sounds like a very good idea.

Ah yes, Congress is once again going to invest itself into repealing the laws of world-wide supply and demand. In the name of "the People," we're going to switch to a command economy, wherein Washington will decree that prices will drop, supply will be created out of nothingness, and we'll all live happily ever after.

The Dems are well into the stage of "irrational exuberance" which foretells the pop of their political bubble. When a Congressmen on the House Ways & Means Committee can propose nationalizing the energy industry without realizing that voters may notice that "Hey, that's communism!" then they're well and truly drunk off of their own fumes. If only they will continue down paths like these, it may turn out that John McCain is the luckiest political candidate in the history of the world. I'm sensing more and more parallels between the 2008 campaign and the 1972 campaign.

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UPDATE (Wed Jun 18 @ 5:55pm): AllahPundit has a link to the video along with his own reaction (which roughly parallels mine).

Did Michelle Obama, channeling Rev. Wright's racist paranoia, condemn south Chicago girls and young women to unnecessary and preventable STDs and cervical cancer?

To stem the political hemorrhaging it was causing, Sen. & Mrs. Barack Obama have withdrawn from membership at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. But to what extent did what they heard while they were members affect their activities outside the church over the last several years?

Recall these paranoid, racist statements of Rev. Wright, their former pastor, as he accused the United States government of developing and spreading HIV/AIDS specifically to commit genocide against the black population:

MODERATOR: In your sermon, you said the government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. So I ask you: Do you honestly believe your statement and those words?

WRIGHT: Have you read Horowitz's book, "Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola," whoever wrote that question? Have you read "Medical Apartheid"? You've read it?

(UNKNOWN): Do you honestly believe that (OFF-MIKE)

WRIGHT: Oh, are you — is that one of the reporters?

MODERATOR: No questions...

(CROSSTALK)

WRIGHT: No questions from the floor. I read different things. As I said to my members, if you haven't read things, then you can't — based on this Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything.

In fact, in fact, in fact, one of the — one of the responses to what Saddam Hussein had in terms of biological warfare was a non-question, because all we had to do was check the sales records. We sold him those biological weapons that he was using against his own people.

So any time a government can put together biological warfare to kill people, and then get angry when those people use what we sold them, yes, I believe we are capable.

Now consider this segment from today's New York Times, in an article on the campaign's attempt to re-brand Michelle Obama (bold-face mine):

By 2001, Mrs. Obama, married for nine years and the mother of two daughters, had taken a job as vice president of community affairs at the University of Chicago Medical Center. She soon discovered just how acrimonious those affairs were....

She also altered the hospital’s research agenda. When the human papillomavirus vaccine, which can prevent cervical cancer, became available, researchers proposed approaching local school principals about enlisting black teenage girls as research subjects.

Mrs. Obama stopped that. The prospect of white doctors performing a trial with black teenage girls summoned the specter of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment of the mid-20th century, when white doctors let hundreds of black men go untreated to study the disease.

"She’ll talk about the elephant in the room," said Susan Sher, her boss at the hospital, where Mrs. Obama is on leave from her more-than-$300,000-a-year job.

The New York Times reports this without much comment, buried near the bottom of its article, as if it's not particularly revealing or controversial. But it made my jaw drop. Has yours yet?

If not, consider more carefully: Here's the wife of the Great Unifier, the Great Conciliator, the Great Educator who's going to bring America to a post-racial future. She's supposedly a community activist working for the benefit of poor neighborhoods whose teenagers are disproportionately at risk for sexually transmitted diseases. She has an opportunity to reverse, through education, decades of racial distrust and to simultaneously protect her teen-aged female constituents against "cervical cancer and other diseases in females caused by certain types of genital human papillomavirus (HPV)[, a class of viruses] ... which are responsible for 70% of cervical cancers and 90% of genital warts." So Mrs. Obama strikes a mighty blow to promote ignorance, to prevent vacination, and to permit preventable STDs and cervical cancer.

Yes, the Tuskegee Syphillis Experiments were awful. Yes, there is a huge amount of racial mistrust and misinformation lingering because of them, as evidenced by Rev. Wright's pronouncements. But Tuskegee isn't the rule, it's the awful exception from an era in which we no longer live.

What kind of Luddite is this Princeton and Harvard educated lawyer and mother of two young girls? All such modern vaccination programs are voluntary — there's at least an opt-out provision, even when legislation has been proposed to add this vaccine to the mandatory list of vaccinations for public school attendance — and they require the genuinely well-informed consent of the participants. Surely someone like Michelle Obama and her husband (with his commitment to community education, in coordination with people like Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn) could ensure that accurate information was provided in a meaningful format to promote informed choices. Indeed, it seems to me that she was uniquely positioned to strike a blow against bigotry, against ignorance, and in favor of education, science, and both racial and medical healing.

So: Why choose not to educate? Why not at least allow an opportunity for this scientific breakthrough to protect the health and the very lives of these at-risk girls and young women?

This is shameful behavior. I can't understand or explain it, other than as a function of the exact sort of racist paranoia that Rev. Wright has been preaching. It sounds as though Michelle Obama bought big-time into the very worst of Rev. Wright's screed — and that she actively practiced what he preached, to the detriment of the very people they were purportedly helping and protecting. I'm aghast.

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UPDATE (Wed Jun 17 @ 6:00pm): Tom Maguire's reaction is very much like mine:

In a different and better world the community affairs director for a hospital would use her college education and neighborhood roots to educate and reassure the community that her hospital was not actually interested in recreating ghastly medical misadventures from the past. In this world, it looks like the Sister Grim is less interested in resolving these grievances and more interested in nursing them.

Tom also links this RAND news release from 2005 regarding the extent of conspiracy paranoia among blacks and its resulting deterrence of condom use and promotion of STDs.

Compare the more libertarian yet scientific and compassionate position of Dr. Ken Alexander of the Pediatrics Department of the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine:

Dr. Alexander, a proponent of the HPV vaccine in young women, cautions lawmakers about proposed legislation that would require the HPV vaccine in the sixth grade. While stating that he does believe that teenaged girls should be immunized, he expresses his belief that this view is one that should not be forced upon the public but rather decided on the family level.

Regardless of whether you support mandatory vaccination (with opt-out rights) or merely more widely publicizing the vaccination option to families, it's hard to deny that here, Michelle Obama, who's dogmatically pro-choice on abortion rights, acted to take away choices from these girls and young women and their families.

The question in my mind is: Does she believe Rev. Wright's paranoid, racist fantasies? Or is she simply exploiting and continuing their currency among her constituents? Either is unacceptable, but the latter would put her on, or at least very near, a moral plane with the initiators of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments themselves.

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UPDATE (Thu Jun 19 @ 5:15pm): When I picked up my middle two teens today, Sarah and Adam, I confirmed that both were familiar with the HPV vaccine, and that Sarah has been inoculated. I then told them the sad, sordid tale of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments, a story they hadn't heard before, and that they reacted to with appropriate revulsion. But then I told them — as neutrally as I could — about what the NYT has reported on Michelle Obama's involvement in the HPV vaccination program at the University of Chicago hospital. My daughter's immediately reaction — unprompted by me — is that Michelle Obama's denial of medical prevention and treatment options to her hospital's patient population is as outrageous as the decisions made by the sponsors of the Tuskegee experiments. (Sarah will be a high school senior next year, and her politics in general much more closely match her mom's than mine: They were both Hillary Clinton supporters, for example.)

Barack Obama specifically pointed to Rev. Wright's comments about HIV/AIDS and Tuskegee when he disassociated himself from Rev. Wright, and he acknowledged that his pastor's views on those subjects were a legitimate topic of political interest. So what about his wife's views and actions on these subjects?

Ironically, the June 2 cover of TIME magazine is devoted to an article entitled "The Truth About Vaccines: Worried about autism, many parents are opting out of immunizations. How they're putting the rest of us at risk." (That story focused on childhood vaccines, not specifically on the HPV vaccine.) But another article touted on the cover is: "Will Michelle Obama hurt Barack in November?"

So when will the mainstream media put two and two together and realize that these questions are perhaps linked?

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UPDATE (Thu Jun 20 @ 5:15pm): James Taranto'sBest of the Web column today includes some statistics on the dangers that the HPV vaccine can prevent, and also reads the facts reported in the NYT article as "suggest[ing] that girls in Chicago were denied potentially lifesaving vaccinations because Michelle Obama pandered to racial paranoia instead of standing up for the truth."

Beldar on Yoo on Boumediene; and related thoughts on Obama's preference to rely on criminal prosecutions to fight international terrorists

I respectfully concur, without reservation, with Prof. John Yoo's observations on Boumediene.

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Sen. Barack Obama, meanwhile, has put himself squarely back into a 1993-style, early-Clinton Administration mode of considering our conflict with radical Islamic fundamentalists as being just another exercise in crime-fighting. Crank up the grand juries. Maybe we ought to hire some extra lawyers, whot whot?

War? What war? Why, we'll litigate those barbaric bastards until they cry "Uncle!" That'll show 'em.

Our enemies are at war with us. They want to hack off our heads and show the video on the internet; failing that, they'll be content with blowing us to smithereens by the tens of thousands. And for our part, in response? Well, I believe Sen. Obama is deadly serious in threatening our enemies with potential black marks on their respective permanent records. Saith the Obamasiah:

And, you know, let's take the example of Guantanamo. What we know is that, in previous terrorist attacks — for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center, we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in U.S. prisons, incapacitated.

And the fact that the administration has not tried to do that has created a situation where not only have we never actually put many of these folks on trial, but we have destroyed our credibility when it comes to rule of law all around the world, and given a huge boost to terrorist recruitment in countries that say, "Look, this is how the United States treats Muslims."

So that, I think, is an example of something that was unnecessary. We could have done the exact same thing, but done it in a way that was consistent with our laws.

I pray tonight for the continued vigilance of the host of angels who, together, are struggling to keep Andrew McCarthy's head from exploding. If you don't already know what the co-lead prosecutor from Obama's "model case" has to say about Boumediene in particular, and using the civilian justice system to fight terrorism in general, start with this essay; then this; then read a review or three of his new book, or better still, the book itself, which is aptly titled (in description of people like the junior senator from Illinois): Willful Blindness: Memoir of the Jihad. Suffice it to say, McCarthy's first-hand experience proves Obama to be a spectacular, mind-boggling fool on this entire subject.

Obama is already living in a fantasy world, one in which cold-hearted dictators will swoon in his presence like the hyperventilating fans at his rallies. But at this rate, I expect Obama to suggest, come October in one of the presidential debates, that if we'll just modify some of our spotlights to project a giant bat-image against the clouds, Commissioner Gordon will be able to mop up what's left of the war in Afghanistan within a fortnight. 

Ask yourself this: Can you imagine a serious political candidate for any office saying such a thing in October 2001? Can you imagine a Supreme Court so intruding itself into military and national security affairs then?

But these idiots have completely forgotten 9/11. They've willed it down the memory hole, because they're so damned focused on condemning George W. Bush, who of course is the preeminent source of evil in the world today.

I don't question their patriotism. I question their sanity.

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UPDATE (Tue Jun 17 @ 4:25pm): Here's Mr. McCarthy's interim reaction to Obama's comments, as well as to a remarkably silly George Will column that's partly sympathetic to the Boumediene majority opinion.

Lest you think there might possibly be precedents to support Boumediene, consider Justice Kennedy's admission: There aren't any!

Often it's very difficult for lay readers, or even insufficiently motivated lawyers, to figure out whether there really is or isn't strong precedent from prior cases to support a particular Supreme Court decision. The majority opinions almost always say, "Oh, yes, rest assured that this is just one more in a long, straight line of decisions; our result today was practically compelled by them, lest we violate the rules of stare decisis." The dissent typically quibbles over that assertion and argues that the prior precedents are being misread, or that others were more on point.

Not so with last week's decision in Boumediene v. Bush. You don't have to slog through the many dozens of pages of Justice Kennedy's torpid prose, nor even glance at either Chief Justice Roberts' or Justice Scalia's dissents, to find out just how much support this decision actually has in the prior case-law of the U.S. federal courts. Instead, consider this remarkable paragraph (at page 49 of the .pdf file; italics in original; boldface mine):

It is true that before today the Court has never held that noncitizens detained by our Government in territory over which another country maintains de jure [i.e., formal legal] sovereignty have any rights under our Constitution. But the cases before us lack any precise historical parallel. They involve individuals detained by executive order for the duration of a conflict that, if measured from September 11, 2001, to the present, is already among the longest wars in American history. See Oxford Companion to American Military History 849 (1999). The detainees, moreover, are held in a territory that, while technically not part of the United States, is under the complete and total control of our Government. Under these circumstances the lack of a precedent on point is no barrier to our holding.

You could not possibly seek a more candid admission that Justice Kennedy is making up not just law, but constitutional law, out of thin air. And a more conspicuous or egregious example of "legislating from the bench" would be hard to imagine, particularly since this time, the Court is not only legislating itself, but sweeping aside as unconstitutional the legislation actually passed by Congress and signed by the President.

(If, nevertheless, you actually do go on to read the dissents — and if you're wondering why Hermann Göering and his crew weren't permitted to assert their supposed Fourth or Fifth Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution at Nuremberg — you'll find that Justice Kennedy and the majority also disingenuously disregarded contrary precedent that is on point, most particularly Johnson v. Eisentrager, 339 U.S. 763 (1950), which quite sensibly held that such foreign nationals who acted, and were captured and tried, entirely on foreign soil, had no rights under the U.S. Constitution, and could not use habeas corpus to claim any.)