By Nicholas Stix
When I first saw the link to the above headline, I said to meself, “There goes Tiki Barber again.” But it turns out it’s some mope from Philadelphia, name of Herbert Alex Simpson.
Although he is close in age to Barber, Simpson never played for Tom Coughlin, and thus was never saved by Coughlin from a career-threatening case of fumbleitis. However, both men share an irrational hatred for Coughlin, and both tried to ruin him. But Coughlin prevailed in both cases. And now, one man is on his way to prison, while the other went from being a guy with a great stat sheet who quit, just to spite his coach (the latter of whom had the last laugh, by winning the Super Bowl), to a highly paid media bore.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Friday, November 27, 2009
“The Wilding of Sarah Palin”: Platitudinous Piffle, Censorship and Liberalism, at The Republican Thinker
By Nicholas Stix
(First published on Friday at 5:57 a.m., under a slightly different title, which failed to show up on Google, except under my name. Let’s see how this title does.)
What do you think, when you see a writer provide an essay with a climax, in the form of a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.? Say, the following:
And then the writer adds her own powerful conclusion:
In these dark times, upon reading the foregoing passages, rational people reach for the nearest vessel, and spew their guts into it.
The essay is entitled, “The Wilding of Sarah Palin,” and the Web site is called “The American Thinker,” but the writer hides behind the anonymity of the moniker, “Robin of Berkeley.” That’s right, she anonymously quotes MLK! Excuse me, she anonymously calls him, “Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” Never mind that he’s been dead over 41 years, his doctorate was obtained via fraud, and that no one, outside of a student or employee, is obligated to call a living Ph.D. (or in this case, a D.D.) “Doctor,” anyway.
The writer describes herself as “a psychotherapist and a recovering liberal in Berkeley.”
She may or may not be a psychotherapist, live in Berkeley, or be named “Robin,” but this much I can tell you: “A recovering liberal,” she ain’t. She’s a liberal Republican! (This type is also known as a "neocon.")
How did I even encounter this dangerous individual? Glad you asked. The truth of the matter is, it was all Larry Auster’s fault. Larry Auster is linked to liberal Republicans! To Auster, I say this: You did it, you did it!
I decided to post a comment on the liberal Republican's essay, which entailed writing and re-writing it a few times. After all, if you’re not going to put any care into a comment, why write it, in the first place?
At the time I posted it, a couple of days ago, the essay had 187 comments. In the meantime, it carries 295, but it doesn’t carry mine. Comment 291, by an Andrew Evanko, argues:
Amen, Brother! And so Brother Evanko goes on for 287 words. I enjoy nothing so much as a politically correct Republican excoriating leftists for “Political Correctness,” don't you?
I wonder how many other critical comments the editors censored.
Nothing gets my Irish up quicker than someone trying to shut me up, whether it’s a socialist/communist/whatever (aka “liberal”), or a “to the right of Attila the Hun conservative” (i.e., liberal Republican/neocon).
I took a closer look at MLK’s anonymous follower. Her Palin essay contained this passage:
What sort of “derelicts and hoodlums” might these raceless miscreants have been? As for “minority kids enraged about forced busing,” is “Robin from Berkeley” perhaps a pseudonym for Jonathan Kozol?
The “forced busing” line linked to another essay from the anonymous MLKer, “Why White America Chose Obama.”
There is nothing at all ironic about what the writer described. Blacks aren’t obsessed “with evil deeds carried out by citizens long dead,” and it is not the case that “The vast majority of Blacks are law abiding citizens, and they are preyed upon in disproportionate numbers.” The vast majority of blacks are bone-chillingly racist (also here; their talk of white racism of yore is just a cover story for their racism. Most blacks who obsess over the imaginary past also obsess over the imaginary present of “racial profiling,” and promote the black race hoax du jour.
It’s the racism, stupid!
“White America” didn’t vote for the John Doe calling himself “Barack Obama” for the reasons Dr. Fraud/Miss MLK-GOP cited. Half or more of the 43 percent of whites who voted for “Obama” were variously socialists and communists. Of the young white voters, mostly college kids, who voted for him who weren’t socialists or communists, most were idiots who thought it would make them look cool, i.e., for social status. The same was true of the Republican, libertarian, and independent suburban, middle and upper-middle-class soccer moms and their husbands who voted for “Obama.” They wanted to simultaneously appear morally superior to, and stick it to whites with less money. And I would guess that 10-20 percent of the whites who voted for “Obama” did so, thanks to being duped by the MSM’s propaganda campaign on his behalf, which consisted of refusing to vet his and his monstrous wife’s background; their genocidal, black supremacist views; and black supremacist and communist associates; lying, in calling him a “moderate”; condemning all of his critics, even the Clintons, as “racists”; and presenting the “Obamas” in warm, soft focus as cuddly and warm.
Conversely, the “forgiveness” trope was nonsense 40 years ago, and has not improved with age. During the 1960s, blacks rioted, and white leaders of both parties bled the white middle and working classes dry, in order to pay them off. Blacks responded by demanding ever more, preying ever more on whites, and embracing genocidally racist beliefs that differ little from one black social class to another.
In countless urban black neighborhoods today, the majority of black men 20-29 are convicted felons. I once lived in a black neighborhood—Far Rockaway, Queens—where you hardly ever SAW a black man that age, because most of them were in jail. And the ones you did encounter were invariably parolees, had completed their sentences, or active felons who had yet to go to jail (e.g., in some cases, it was their 20th birthday).
But it wasn’t just the professional felons who were criminals; the so-called “law-abiding,” “respectable” blacks not only rabidly encouraged the thugs, but routinely committed crimes on their behalf—accessory after the fact, conspiracy to obstruct justice, filing false police reports, etc.—in order to help them escape arrest for assaulting whites: School principals, postal managers, subway motormen, even black policemen.
And blacks are not “preyed upon in disproportionate numbers” by black thugs, law-abiding whites are. Despite the fact that most blacks live in black neighborhoods, despite crime stats that are falsified, in order to make black crime appear less pervasive than it is, and despite police and prosecutors doing everything possible to discourage whites from reporting black-on-white crime, including threatening, arresting, and imprisoning white crime victims simply for defending themselves from racist black attackers, every year since 1987, blacks have committed more crimes against whites than they have against other blacks.
Consider some more pearls of wisdom from Dr. Fraud/Miss MLK-GOP:
There’s the ultimate smoking gun: The liberal Republican always blames black racism on white “liberals.” Wrong, lady: It was the black kids’ fault. They were the vicious, racist hoodlums. The black kids weren’t “traumatized,” their white victims were. This headshrinker, Dr. Fraud, is a nihilist.
Is liberal Republican psychobabble in place of socialist/communist/whatever psychobabble supposed to represent progress?
People like Dr. Fraud/Miss MLK-GOP and her standard-bearer, John McCain, are the reason I made my undervote count in the 2008 election. If it had been 1968, instead of 2008, lesser-evilism might have made sense. But like John McCain, Dr. Fraud/Miss MLK-GOP is 40 years late, and $10 trillion short. White americans must not be fooled out of facing up to contemporary racial reality by politically correct, liberal Republicans, because not only will we pay, but so too will our children and our children’s children—possibly with their lives.
(First published on Friday at 5:57 a.m., under a slightly different title, which failed to show up on Google, except under my name. Let’s see how this title does.)
What do you think, when you see a writer provide an essay with a climax, in the form of a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.? Say, the following:
Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.
And then the writer adds her own powerful conclusion:
In these dark times, with spiritually bankrupt people at the helm, thank God we have bright lights like Sarah Palin to illuminate the darkness.
In these dark times, upon reading the foregoing passages, rational people reach for the nearest vessel, and spew their guts into it.
The essay is entitled, “The Wilding of Sarah Palin,” and the Web site is called “The American Thinker,” but the writer hides behind the anonymity of the moniker, “Robin of Berkeley.” That’s right, she anonymously quotes MLK! Excuse me, she anonymously calls him, “Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” Never mind that he’s been dead over 41 years, his doctorate was obtained via fraud, and that no one, outside of a student or employee, is obligated to call a living Ph.D. (or in this case, a D.D.) “Doctor,” anyway.
The writer describes herself as “a psychotherapist and a recovering liberal in Berkeley.”
She may or may not be a psychotherapist, live in Berkeley, or be named “Robin,” but this much I can tell you: “A recovering liberal,” she ain’t. She’s a liberal Republican! (This type is also known as a "neocon.")
How did I even encounter this dangerous individual? Glad you asked. The truth of the matter is, it was all Larry Auster’s fault. Larry Auster is linked to liberal Republicans! To Auster, I say this: You did it, you did it!
I decided to post a comment on the liberal Republican's essay, which entailed writing and re-writing it a few times. After all, if you’re not going to put any care into a comment, why write it, in the first place?
This essay was pretty good, if overwrought, until the Martin Luther King Jr. quote at the end. What a let-down.
The quote itself is a load of platitudinous piffle, which we are supposed to bow down to, because it comes from St. Martin. Well, I don’t worship Martin. I used to, but then I learned what a monster he was. (Particularly towards women, thus making him an especially bad choice for a closing quote for such an essay.) Not worshiping any man is also part of reaching one’s mental majority.
I read the first 30-40 comments, and they sound as mindless as the sort of stuff one gets from the Obamatons. Sarah Palin is not the second coming of Ronald Reagan, and she is not headed for the White House. She is personable, physically attractive, I sympathize with what she has been put through, and I appreciate her symbolic function for those who hate her. With that said, someone who quits halfway through her first term as governor of Alaska is not presidential timber, and when so many right-of-center voters focus their hopes and energies on her, it can only help the John Doe calling himself “Barack Obama” maintain power.
As for those who praise “her” book, she did not write it, and may not even have read it.
I fail to see how the Republic can be saved from Obamatons by GOPbots.
At the time I posted it, a couple of days ago, the essay had 187 comments. In the meantime, it carries 295, but it doesn’t carry mine. Comment 291, by an Andrew Evanko, argues:
The single greatest threat to Our Democracy is Political Correctness. It has ebbed into all areas of our life….
Amen, Brother! And so Brother Evanko goes on for 287 words. I enjoy nothing so much as a politically correct Republican excoriating leftists for “Political Correctness,” don't you?
I wonder how many other critical comments the editors censored.
Nothing gets my Irish up quicker than someone trying to shut me up, whether it’s a socialist/communist/whatever (aka “liberal”), or a “to the right of Attila the Hun conservative” (i.e., liberal Republican/neocon).
I took a closer look at MLK’s anonymous follower. Her Palin essay contained this passage:
As time went on, I had many experiences that should have made me rethink my certainty. But I remained nestled in cognitive dissonance -- therapy jargon for not wanting to see what I didn't want to see.
One clue: the miscreants who were brutalizing me didn't exactly look Reagan-esque. In middle and high schools, they were minority kids enraged about forced busing. On the streets of New York City and Berkeley, they were derelicts and hoodlums.
What sort of “derelicts and hoodlums” might these raceless miscreants have been? As for “minority kids enraged about forced busing,” is “Robin from Berkeley” perhaps a pseudonym for Jonathan Kozol?
The “forced busing” line linked to another essay from the anonymous MLKer, “Why White America Chose Obama.”
In the 60's, liberal policy makers conceived of forced busing so that deprived kids could enjoy tonier surroundings. The utopians envisioned the dazzling spectacle of ethnic bonding. [NS: Not “deprived kids,” but black, or as they were then known, Negro kids! None of this was designed for deprived white kids, whom the white socialists and communists despised.]
At my elementary school, the black kids arrived each day by bus while whites walked or rode bikes. When the kids exited the bus, they looked scared to death, dazed into silence. Walking into school together must have felt like a walk of shame.
Notwithstanding the Kumbaya vision of the races mixing and matching, we each stayed in our racial groups. The only girl I remember is Sheila Smith, the lone black girl in my class. She wore crisply ironed dresses, her wavy hair adorned with pretty bows and clips.
I was a sensitive and observant child. [Thanks for telling us, in case we failed to get the point.] I recall gazing into Sheila's eyes and witnessing a fright I'd never witnessed before. Sitting in the back of the class, Sheila was mute the entire year.
Several elementary schools converged together in middle school. That's when all hell broke loose. Reunited, hordes of black kids charged defiantly down the hallways, mowing down anyone who got in their way.
They had suffered horribly through those lonely, humiliating, seven years. And now it was time for revenge.
[“Revenge” against whom, and for what? How had they “suffered horribly”? Had they been “assaulted, knifed, robbed, molested on a regular basis”? (See her later paragraph.) The writer provides not a single example of black suffering. And what of white kids who were bused into black schools? I know of no stories of them later exacting “revenge” on black kids in junior high or high school, of white kids “assault[ing], knif[ing], robb[ing], molest[ing]” black kids “on a regular basis.”]
Sheila Smith let her hair thicken into a wild afro and became one of the meanest girls. I averted my eyes when I saw her because her furious visage frightened me.
[In other words, when Sheila Smith was the only black kid in class, she had felt that she had to behave herself. That was her “fright.” She was scared straight.]
Middle school was like living in a war zone. The white kids were called every name in the book. There were few of us who weren't assaulted, knifed, robbed, molested on a regular basis. I developed physical problems for fear of using the bathroom, where many of the attacks happened….”
[I believe that “molested” is an all-purpose euphemism for “raped,” “sodomized,” and “fondled.”]
Many liberals voted for Obama in the hopes that all would be forgiven. That if whites handed over some power, finally we can move on and get along. We'll be safe.
Had someone like General Colin Powell or former Congressman Harold Ford Jr. been elected, we probably would not have a foreboding, fearful atmosphere. Though they lean left, both men are patriotic, experienced leaders who may have facilitated racial healing.
[Racial healing? Did she just use the phrase, “racial healing”?!]
Ironically, White America envisioned forgiveness, a letting go of old wounds. Instead we have emboldened people obsessed with evil deeds carried out by citizens long dead.
And not only whites are affected by the hostile environment. The vast majority of Blacks are law abiding citizens, and they are preyed upon in disproportionate numbers.”
There is nothing at all ironic about what the writer described. Blacks aren’t obsessed “with evil deeds carried out by citizens long dead,” and it is not the case that “The vast majority of Blacks are law abiding citizens, and they are preyed upon in disproportionate numbers.” The vast majority of blacks are bone-chillingly racist (also here; their talk of white racism of yore is just a cover story for their racism. Most blacks who obsess over the imaginary past also obsess over the imaginary present of “racial profiling,” and promote the black race hoax du jour.
It’s the racism, stupid!
“White America” didn’t vote for the John Doe calling himself “Barack Obama” for the reasons Dr. Fraud/Miss MLK-GOP cited. Half or more of the 43 percent of whites who voted for “Obama” were variously socialists and communists. Of the young white voters, mostly college kids, who voted for him who weren’t socialists or communists, most were idiots who thought it would make them look cool, i.e., for social status. The same was true of the Republican, libertarian, and independent suburban, middle and upper-middle-class soccer moms and their husbands who voted for “Obama.” They wanted to simultaneously appear morally superior to, and stick it to whites with less money. And I would guess that 10-20 percent of the whites who voted for “Obama” did so, thanks to being duped by the MSM’s propaganda campaign on his behalf, which consisted of refusing to vet his and his monstrous wife’s background; their genocidal, black supremacist views; and black supremacist and communist associates; lying, in calling him a “moderate”; condemning all of his critics, even the Clintons, as “racists”; and presenting the “Obamas” in warm, soft focus as cuddly and warm.
Conversely, the “forgiveness” trope was nonsense 40 years ago, and has not improved with age. During the 1960s, blacks rioted, and white leaders of both parties bled the white middle and working classes dry, in order to pay them off. Blacks responded by demanding ever more, preying ever more on whites, and embracing genocidally racist beliefs that differ little from one black social class to another.
In countless urban black neighborhoods today, the majority of black men 20-29 are convicted felons. I once lived in a black neighborhood—Far Rockaway, Queens—where you hardly ever SAW a black man that age, because most of them were in jail. And the ones you did encounter were invariably parolees, had completed their sentences, or active felons who had yet to go to jail (e.g., in some cases, it was their 20th birthday).
But it wasn’t just the professional felons who were criminals; the so-called “law-abiding,” “respectable” blacks not only rabidly encouraged the thugs, but routinely committed crimes on their behalf—accessory after the fact, conspiracy to obstruct justice, filing false police reports, etc.—in order to help them escape arrest for assaulting whites: School principals, postal managers, subway motormen, even black policemen.
And blacks are not “preyed upon in disproportionate numbers” by black thugs, law-abiding whites are. Despite the fact that most blacks live in black neighborhoods, despite crime stats that are falsified, in order to make black crime appear less pervasive than it is, and despite police and prosecutors doing everything possible to discourage whites from reporting black-on-white crime, including threatening, arresting, and imprisoning white crime victims simply for defending themselves from racist black attackers, every year since 1987, blacks have committed more crimes against whites than they have against other blacks.
Consider some more pearls of wisdom from Dr. Fraud/Miss MLK-GOP:
It wasn't the black or the white kids' fault. High minded liberals were culpable for hatching up grand plans without an iota of thought about how it would play out in real time: that if you create a nightmare situation for black children by removing them from their neighborhood and their friends, you traumatize them. And if you then turn them loose and give them carte blanche, some will be out for blood.
There’s the ultimate smoking gun: The liberal Republican always blames black racism on white “liberals.” Wrong, lady: It was the black kids’ fault. They were the vicious, racist hoodlums. The black kids weren’t “traumatized,” their white victims were. This headshrinker, Dr. Fraud, is a nihilist.
Is liberal Republican psychobabble in place of socialist/communist/whatever psychobabble supposed to represent progress?
People like Dr. Fraud/Miss MLK-GOP and her standard-bearer, John McCain, are the reason I made my undervote count in the 2008 election. If it had been 1968, instead of 2008, lesser-evilism might have made sense. But like John McCain, Dr. Fraud/Miss MLK-GOP is 40 years late, and $10 trillion short. White americans must not be fooled out of facing up to contemporary racial reality by politically correct, liberal Republicans, because not only will we pay, but so too will our children and our children’s children—possibly with their lives.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Monday, November 23, 2009
“Nix eine Hitler”: “Obama’s” Plan to Try KSM in a Civilian Court is Treasonous, but He Had Help
By Nicholas Stix
Last updated Tuesday, November 24, 2009, 10:05 a.m.
Did Eric Holder Get His Law Degree from the University of Phoenix?
The more I see of Attorney General Eric Holder, the more convinced I become that the average Tuscaloosa traffic cop knows considerably more about the criminal law, constitutional law, military law, scientific laws and Burke’s Law—not to mention traffic law—than he does. The only area in which I would trust Holder’s expertise, is in answering the crucial question of where one would go, in order to purchase a snazzy suit in the D.C. area. One must stipulate that the man has good taste in suits.
But as the above video and the following transcript from the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Justice Department oversight hearing last Wednesday show, he’s not even a talented b.s. artist. Why, my nine-year-old could have done a better job of talking himself out of the corner Holder painted himself into, with the latter’s manifest ignorance of the law!
In “Would U.S. Need To Read Bin Laden His Miranda Rights?,” even writer Frank James at socialist NPR granted that Holder was “stumped” by questioning from mushy moderate Sen. Lindsey Graham (Chameleon-SC).
In one of the highlights of Wednesday's Justice Department oversight hearing by the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, attempted to put Holder on the spot with the question: would U.S. officials need to Mirandize Osama bin Ladin if it [sic] captured him, including telling the al Qaeda leader that he had the right to remain silent?
Holder essentially said no, not necessarily. It would depend on the tack the U.S. government decided to take after [emphasis mine—NS] capturing the terrorist leader. Graham clearly wasn't persuaded by Holder's answer.
The exchange started with Graham stumping Holder with a question one would have thought the attorney general would have been prepared for:
GRAHAM: “Can you give me a case in United States history where a (sic) enemy combatant caught on a battlefield was tried in civilian court?”
Holder’s fumbling answer betrayed his incompetence. In effecting a criminal arrest, you must Mirandize someone immediately; otherwise, you will be guilty of violating his rights, and the judge will set him free. Holder said that the decision on how to try bin Laden would only be made later, which would either make it impossible to Mirandize bin Laden, requiring that he not be tried in a civilian court, or mean that prosecutors would lose the case against him, right out of the gate.
Lindsey Graham Remembers That He’s a Man, and Catches Eric Holder Without His Script
Although he is a former U.S. attorney and D.C. superior court judge, Holder talks like someone who has never tried, let alone presided over a criminal case. (I say “tried,” as in litigating a trial, as opposed to simply abusing the power of the state, in order to coerce a defendant into accepting a plea bargain, thereby saving himself the inconvenience of prosecuting an actual trial.)
David Axelrod sent little Eric to Congress on Wednesday, without packing his lunch and his script, and didn’t realize that Lindsey Graham wasn’t always going to bend over for the “Obama” posse.
SEN. GRAHAM: Can you give me a case in United States history where a enemy combatant caught on a battlefield was tried in civilian court?
ATTY. GEN. HOLDER: I don't know. I'd have to look at that. I think that, you know, the determination I've made—
SEN. GRAHAM: We're making history here, Mr. Attorney General. I'll answer it for you. The answer is no.
ATTY. GEN. HOLDER: Well, I think—
SEN. GRAHAM: The Ghailani case—he was indicted for the Cole bombing before 9/11. And I didn't object to it going into federal court. But I'm telling you right now. We're making history and we're making bad history. And let me tell you why.
If bin Laden were caught tomorrow, would it be the position of this administration that he would be brought to justice?
ATTY. GEN. HOLDER: He would certainly be brought to justice, absolutely.
SEN. GRAHAM: Where would you try him?
ATTY. GEN. HOLDER: Well, we'd go through our protocol. And we'd make the determination about where he should appropriately be tried.
SEN. GRAHAM: Would you try him—why would you take him someplace different than KSM [Khalid Sheik Mohammed]?
ATTY. GEN. HOLDER: Well, that might be the case. I don't know. I'm not—
SEN. GRAHAM: Well, let—
ATTY. GEN. HOLDER: I'd have to look at all of the evidence, all of the—
SEN. GRAHAM: Well—
ATTY. GEN. HOLDER: He's been indicted. He's been indicted already. (Off mike.)
SEN. GRAHAM: Does it matter if you—if you use the law enforcement theory or the enemy combatant theory, in terms of how the case would be handled?
ATTY. GEN. HOLDER: Well, I mean, bin Laden is an interesting case in that he's already been indicted in federal court.
SEN. GRAHAM: Right.
ATTY. GEN. HOLDER: We have cases against him. (Off mike.)
SEN. GRAHAM: Right, well, where would—where would you put him?
ATTY. GEN. HOLDER: It would depend on how—a variety of factors.
SEN. GRAHAM: Well, let me ask you this. Okay, let me ask you this. Let's say we capture him tomorrow. When does custodial interrogation begin in his case?
If we captured bin Laden tomorrow, would he be entitled to Miranda warnings at the moment of capture?
ATTY. GEN. HOLDER: Again I'm not—that all depends. I mean, the notion that we—
SEN. GRAHAM: Well, it does not depend. If you're going to prosecute anybody in civilian court, our law is clear that the moment custodial interrogation occurs the defendant, the criminal defendant, is entitled to a lawyer and to be informed of their right to remain silent.
The big problem I have is that you're criminalizing the war, that if we caught bin Laden tomorrow, we'd have mixed theories and we couldn't turn him over—to the CIA, the FBI or military intelligence—for an interrogation on the battlefield, because now we're saying that he is subject to criminal court in the United States. And you're confusing the people fighting this war.
What would you tell the military commander who captured him? Would you tell him, "You must read him his rights and give him a lawyer"? And if you didn't tell him that, would you jeopardize the prosecution in a federal court?
ATTY. GEN. HOLDER: We have captured thousands of people on the battlefield, only a few of which have actually been given their Miranda warnings.
With regard to bin Laden and the desire or the need for statements from him, the case against him at this point is so overwhelming that we do not need to—
SEN. GRAHAM: Mr. Attorney General, my only point—the only point I'm making, that if we're going to use federal court as a disposition for terrorists, you take everything that comes with being in federal court. And what comes with being in federal court is that the rules in this country, unlike military law—you can have military operations, you can interrogate somebody for military intelligence purposes, and the law-enforcement rights do not attach.
But under domestic criminal law, the moment the person is in the hands of the United States government, they're entitled to be told they have a right to a lawyer and can remain silent. And if we go down that road, we're going to make this country less safe. That is my problem with what you have done.
(A more complete transcript is posted here.)
Eric Holder got both his B.A. and J.D. from Columbia University, while Lindsey Graham only attended the University of South Carolina in Columbia for his undergraduate and law degrees. How could Graham have so whipped Holder?
His frequent lack of political spine notwithstanding, where the law is concerned, Graham is the real deal, a colonel in the U.S. Air Force reserves, veteran USAF Staff Judge Advocate, and teacher of Air Force lawyers, while Holder is just another well-dressed, affirmative action fraud.
Holder appeared clueless regarding the role of legal precedent. He emphasized that we have captured thousands of unlawful enemy combatants on the battlefield, while Mirandizing only a few, as if that will matter, once he turns prosecutions of terrorists into domestic criminal affairs, and leaves military personnel in a state of battlefield confusion. Likewise, his overconfidence regarding the purported strength of the federal case against KSM is not only folly in the extant case, but in addition to destroying our intelligence work, may lead to acquittals and dismissals of charges in cases that are less solid, due to procedural protections that have no place in the prosecution of unlawful foreign combatants and which, so abused, may make such prosecutions impossible. He may also bring about the death of some of our hard-won intelligence assets.
In order to protect themselves from “Obama” and Holder’s incompetence and malevolence, field commanders would probably develop the CYA maneuver of immediately Mirandizing all unlawful combatants captured in battle. This would give us the worst of all possible worlds: We would not be able to interrogate the terrorists, and thus would gain no intelligence from them; meanwhile, they would still be able to manipulate the legal system and get intelligence from us; and all at a cost of billions to the American taxpayer. This is a lose-lose-lose proposition for the American people, but win-win-win for America’s enemies, which includes Holder and the John Doe calling himself “Barack Obama.”
Pat Buchanan has enumerated many of the follies of Holder’s position.
Hell, Holder’s nonsensical answer regarding whether we’d have to Mirandize bin Laden, showed that he was clueless regarding the logical consequences of his own just uttered words. He has so far shown himself incapable of giving a logical or even a legal argument for any of his positions.
Holder is giving foreign terrorists (unlawful enemy combatants) luxurious and legally unjustifiable privileges, at the same time that he is robbing white Americans of their Constitutional rights, e.g., through the recently passed, unconstitutional, Hate Crimes Bill that I skewered in June.
During the quickie two-hour Congressional hearing held on the Hate Crimes Bill in late June (see video below), senators Jeff Sessions (R-AL) and Tom Coburn (R-OK) exposed Holder as a legal know-nothing, in terms similar to his performance last Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Holder’s argument on behalf of treating crimes against members of certain protected groups as legally more important than the same acts committed against white, heterosexual Christian males, was that the protected groups had historically been targeted. That argument is thoroughly incompatible with the legal protections anchored in the First, Fifth, and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Holder evinced himself as completely ignorant of the Constitution and its history, hostile towards the very idea of giving legal arguments, and where groups he hates—white, heterosexual, conservative Christian males—are concerned, sees the protections that the Constitution provides the citizen against the state as obstacles to surmount.
(It’s not just Holder, of course. Last spring saw the scandal over the Department of Homeland Security’s phony report on “Right-Wing Extremism,” which was based on SPLC and ADL propaganda, presenting all constitutionalist white patriots, including returning servicemen, as potential terrorists. DHS is run by Janet Napolitano who, like Eric Holder, works for the genocidal, black supremacist-in-chief.)
The dual development of granting legal luxuries to foreign terrorists, while legally impoverishing white American citizens is no coincidence. Since the terrorists seek to destroy America, “Obama” and Holder see them as allies who must be helped; since patriotic white Americans seek to save their country, the racist, biracial (but passing for black) traitors “Obama” and Holder see them as enemies who must be destroyed, by any means necessary.
“Nix eine Hitler”
I wish I could simply blame all of our problems on Eric Holder and “Barack Obama,” but they had help.
As former U.S. Attorney Andy McCarthy and former federal prosecutor John Soo have recounted, it was Bill Clinton who, following the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, initiated the practice of trying unlawful foreign combatants in criminal court. The terrorists were able to demand that the prosecution provide its evidence against them; it was thus forced to hand over “an intelligence bonanza” to them—which they forwarded to Al Qaeda—thus destroying years of hard-won intelligence. Thus, Soo, building on McCarthy:
Whether a jury ultimately convicts KSM and his fellows, or sentences them to death, is beside the point. The treatment of the 9/11 attacks as a criminal matter rather than as an act of war will cripple American efforts to fight terrorism. It is in effect a declaration that this nation is no longer at war.
KSM is the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—and a "terrorist entrepreneur"… Together with Osama bin Laden, he selected the 9/11 terrorists, arranged their financing and training, and ran the whole operation from abroad….
Now, however, KSM and his co-defendants will enjoy the benefits and rights that the Constitution accords to citizens and resident aliens—including the right to demand that the government produce in open court all of the information that it has on them, and how it got it….
This is not hypothetical… During the 1993 World Trade Center bombing trial of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (aka the "blind Sheikh"), standard criminal trial rules required the government to turn over to the defendants a list of 200 possible co-conspirators.
In essence, this list was a sketch of American intelligence on al Qaeda. According to Mr. McCarthy, who tried the case, it was delivered to bin Laden in Sudan on a silver platter within days of its production as a court exhibit.
Bin Laden … could immediately see who was compromised [and] start figuring out how American intelligence had learned its information and anticipate what our future moves were likely to be.
Even more harmful to our national security will be the effect a civilian trial of KSM will have on the future conduct of intelligence officers and military personnel. Will they have to read al Qaeda terrorists their Miranda rights? ...secure the "crime scene" … take statements from nearby "witnesses"…. ...gather evidence and secure its chain of custody for transport all the way back to New York? All of this while intelligence officers and soldiers operate in a war zone, trying to stay alive, and working to complete their mission and get out without casualties.
The Obama administration has rejected the tool designed to solve this tension between civilian trials and the demands of intelligence and military operations. In 2001, President George W. Bush established military commissions, which have a long history that includes World War II, the Civil War and the Revolutionary War…. [and] could guarantee a fair trial while protecting national security secrets from excessive exposure.
The Supreme Court has upheld the use of commissions for war crimes. The procedures for these commissions received the approval of Congress in 2006 and 2009.
Hence, even if we win every trial held in an American courtroom, the price in the destruction of our intelligence capabilities will be prohibitive.
Some readers will respond, “But Bill Clinton was a traitor, from Jump Street.”
So, let’s look at George W. Bush.
Very early in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Treason Lobby—the
New York Times, the George Soros-funded Open Society Institute, etc.—demanded that the Bush Justice Department grant the protections of the Geneva Conventions to terror “suspects.”
The scare quotes are because the very usage referring to most of the folks who at any point have been detained at Gitmo as “suspects” requires a misrepresentation of the Laws of War and the Geneva Conventions.
When you catch a combatant in a war zone fighting without uniform or any clear signification that he is a combatant, or who is not openly brandishing his weapon, he is therefore an unlawful combatant (spy, saboteur, terrorist) who can, and in most cases should be shot right there. The military authorities may choose to grant him a military trial at their pleasure, but are under no obligation to do so. (Bush’s provision for “military commissions” may or may not have made this obligatory, in which case, so much the worse for Bush.) Unlawful combatants do not enjoy the presumption of innocence, or the right to habeas corpus, Miranda warnings, counsel, or any of the other procedural protections that Americans and resident legal aliens have come to take for granted.
The very idea of “procedural rights” comes from civilian courts dealing with a nation’s own citizens (giving such rights to resident legal aliens came later). The problem here is that the Treason Lobby has worked for generations, sowing confusion about the law, and often in practice getting the law turned upside down, in order to confer on foreign terrorists luxurious legal privileges, while robbing patriotic (white) American citizens of their fundamental legal rights.
As I wrote six years ago, in “Do Terrorists Have Rights?,” which was based on the unambiguous wording of the Geneva Conventions, and on the work of legal scholar Jeremy Rabkin (here and here), the Conventions are not universally binding, but rather a treaty providing conditional rights limited to the signatories (“Contracting Parties”). They clearly distinguish between those who do and those who do not enjoy their protections.
On no less than five points, does the 1949 Geneva Convention explicitly support the Bush Administration’s [initial] position that the Guantanamo detainees are unlawful combatants, and thus not protected as prisoners of war, because:
1. They are not fighting for a Contracting Party to the Convention;
2. They are not “commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates”;
3. They wear no uniforms or the equivalent (“a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance”), identifying them as combatants;
4. They fail the test of “carrying arms openly”; and
5. They fail the test “of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.”
The Geneva Conventions implicitly recognize principles of reciprocity, the right of national self-defense, and enlightened, national self-interest; the New York Times does not – at least, not in the case of the U.S. And yet, since the Geneva Conventions have for many liberals a sacrosanct status, instead of saying that he held them in contempt, the Times editorialist chose to lie about what the Conventions say.
The Times was echoing a strategy which was established, after 911, by influential humanitarian organizations, including the Red Cross/Red Crescent and the Open Society Institute (OSI).
The Treason Lobby asserted that, according to the Conventions, their protections applied to unlawful combatants, which was a boldfaced lie.
All George W. Bush had to do was say, “You lie!,” tell the American people the truth, and uphold the Conventions. Instead, he caved in, and gave America’s enemies what they demanded.
In extending the Conventions’ protections to those whom they expressly excluded from protection, Bush vitiated the Conventions, and proved himself an imbecile, a coward, or a nihilist.
From 1980-1985, I attended college in West Germany on what I like to call a “Daimler Scholarship.” I supported myself working most holiday seasons building the world’s finest mass produced automobile on the assembly line at Daimler-Benz—that’s “Mercedes-Benz,” to you civilians.
Although I rapidly attained fluency in German, most of my colleagues were foreign guest workers (“Gastarbeiter”), who spoke only the eponynmous pidgin German. During my first hitch in early 1981, a huge, generally quiet Yugoslavian named Josef once said to me, “Nix eine Hitler.”
Translated from the Gastarbeiterdeutsch, Josef was saying, “Hitler didn’t do it alone.” He had lots of help.
(Tripartisan tips ‘o the hat to traditionalist conservative Larry Auster, the Republican Web sites Newsbusters (Noel Sheppard) and Hot Air, and socialist NPR.)
Claire, the Lean, Mean, Killing Machine: This Woman’s Army
By Nicholas Stix
Toogood Reports/A Different Drummer
May 3, 2003
(The U.S. military’s recent outbursts of diversity at Fort Hood and the U.S. Naval Academy reminded me of, and inspired me to reprint this 2003 article.)
A Few Good Persons
If you’re goin’ to fight for freedom,
Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair,
If you go to fight for freedom,
April time will be a love-in there.
Remember the song, “San Francisco”? As written by John Phillips and sung by Scott McKenzie, it was a big hit in 1967, a time when the city by the bay was famous for “flower children.”
“If you’re going to San Francisco,
Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair,
If you’re going to San Francisco,
You’re gonna meet some gentle people there,
For those who come to San Francisco,
Summertime will be a love-in there.”
Well, the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof, his bosses, and folks at places like NOW apparently think we can now fight wars with flower children.
Meet Claire. As Kristof described her last Friday,
The only time I saw Iraqi men entirely intimidated by the American-British forces was in Basra, when a cluster of men gaped, awestruck, around an example of the most astoundingly modern weapon in the Western arsenal.At the risk of sounding arrogant, because I wasn’t there and Kristof was, that’s a lot of Barbra Streisand, if you’ll pardon my French. The only Iraqi male who might have been intimidated by Claire, would have to have had eyes so bad he could just make out the gun, but not the sex of its bearer, and was probably wheelchair bound. Those men weren’t intimidated; they were shocked.
Her name was Claire, and she had a machine gun in her arms and a flower in her helmet.
“I’m a bit of a novelty here,” she said, laughing. The Iraqis flinched.
Kristof’s arguments for why we should have women at the front lines are:
- They will cause the most bloodthirsty enemy troops to show compassion, and perhaps not bomb vehicles occupied by both women and men;
- They can pat down women;
- And hey, female journalists function fine at the front lines, so why not infantrypersons?
“There’s this whole mommy-at-war feeling, which tells me that the critics have given up on the women-can’t-do-it argument. They’re backing off the old arguments and have come up with a new one.”
Oh, Captain, My Captain
The problem with the Lory Mannings of the world, is that they split their time between peeing on people’s legs and telling them it’s raining, and giving interviews to pc journalists and academics who themselves spend much of their time peeing on folks’ legs, and telling their victims that it’s raining. Critics of the feminized military haven’t given up on “the women-can’t-do-it-argument”; since when do you give up on the truth? Mainstream journalists and tenured academics, however, have largely succeeded at silencing that argument in their respective workplaces. And Manning knew she was talking to just such a newspaper, whose virulently pc publisher, Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., is as hostile to the military ethos as they come.
Give any indication that you believe in biological differences between men and women, and you will never get hired as a staffer at the New York Times, or as a humanities or social science professor at, say, Columbia University. Express such blasphemy after being hired there, and the feminists will see to it that you’re fired, if not sued for creating a “hostile work environment.” And the alleged males of the species will help them.
Lory Manning’s a liar, but who’s going to call her on it? No one at the Times, certainly. And not CBS “reporter” Jane Clayson, who used an 1 April, 48 Hours “investigation,” “Waiting on Women Warriors,” which was supposedly a report on POW Jessica Lynch, as a pretext to give Manning a soapbox.
[B]ut ex-Navy Captain Lory Manning says much of the American public is still struggling to accept women as warriors, especially after hearing the news of MIAs Jessi Lynch and Pvt. Lori Piestewa and seeing the video of POW Shoshana Johnson.Thus did Manning equivocate on the difference between a woman serving, say, as a clerk at headquarters, and serving in the infantry. And Clayson helped her, by retiring from journalism, to serve as a cheerleader for feminist gender politics, national defense be damned.
“We have this idea that women stay at home and men go to war,” says Manning.
Her initial reaction to seeing Shoshana’s pictures as a POW, “Was oh my gosh, you know, let’s start praying for her right now. I could feel the fear.”
She hopes it won’t change the way America thinks about the role of women in the military.
“We have women POWS now, women missing. But we also have hundreds and thousands of women over there doing extraordinary heroic work,” says Manning.
Jessica Lynch, Lori Piestewa, and Shoshana Johnson were not warriors. Period. That we have had women POWs and women missing, is due to mischief by Clinton Administration officials who eliminated rules prohibiting women from serving in all manner of risky capacities in war zones. Now they may serve in any unit but the infantry, artillery, armored divisions and special forces, a move that anyone familiar with combat knew would result in women becoming involved in battle. As my colleague Paul Scates has observed, in places like Afghanistan — and, with tragic results, Iraq — often there are no clear front lines or “rear areas.”
The Media Declare War on the Truth
In William McGowan’s excellent book, Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism, McGowan tells of the Pentagon’s corruption of military standards during the 1990s, in order to meet quotas for female officers and fliers, and of the corruption of journalistic standards that not only permitted the military corruption to occur, but celebrated it.
If you relied on the New York Times for information, you would never have heard of Coloring the News. The Times refused to review it, and a search I did of their archives for this article, showed that the alleged newspaper of record has never so much as mentioned the most important book on media bias in recent years. That might have something to do with McGowan’s having taken the Times out to the woodshed, for its relentless propagandizing and dishonesty.
McGowan beat up on many other big-name, “legitimate” news organizations, as well, for systematically misrepresenting as “sexism” problems integrating women into the armed forces. In particular, he cited the incompetent, politically compromised reporting of the Washington Post’s Tamara Jones and Dana Priest, respectively, 60 Minutes’ Morley Safer, NBC Dateline’s Gary Matsumoto, Martha Raddatz (then of NPR, now with ABC News) and ABC News’ John McWethy.
None of the above “reporters” or outlets will tell you, that according to a 1992 Pentagon study, men have 81.8% more upper-body strength than women, that women are much slower than men, get winded more easily, and can’t carry a wounded comrade to safety. And so, instead of real basic training, women get a sex-normed Mommy-track, with a fraction of the rigorous exercises the men do, lighter packs, and only having to practice hand-to-hand combat against other women. That training regimen ought to come in handy, for when America fights an army of women.
Last year, my colleague Fred Reed, a Vietnam veteran (USMC) who has covered the military, among other beats, discussed sex differences as they relate to the military in graphic detail, in the sort of article – published by Toogood Reports – that you’ll never see in the New York Times, or if Lory Manning had anything to say about it, anywhere. In Reed’s article, which is must reading for anyone who wants to understand the reality of a sexually-integrated military, he quoted from the 1992 Pentagon report:
“Women’s aerobic capacity is significantly lower, meaning they cannot carry as much as far as fast as men, and they are more susceptible to fatigue.Reed quoted from a conversation with his friend, Catherine Asby, a Harvard graduate who enlisted in the Army in 1995.
“In terms of physical capability, the upper five percent of women are at the level of the male median. The average 20-to-30 year-old woman has the same aerobic capacity as a 50 year-old man....
“Using the standard Army Physical Fitness Test, [Lt. Col. William Gregor, U.S. Army] found that the upper quintile of women at West point achieved scores on the test equivalent to the bottom quintile of men.
“Only 21 women out of the initial 623 (3.4%) achieved a score equal to the male mean score of 260.
“On the push-up test, only seven percent of women can meet a score of 60, while 78 percent of men exceed it.
“Adopting a male standard of fitness at West Point would mean 70 percent of the women he studied would be separated as failures at the end of their junior year, only three percent would be eligible for the Recondo badge, and not one would receive the Army Physical Fitness badge.”
“The Army was a vast day-care center, full of unmarried teen-age mothers using it as a welfare home. I took training seriously and really tried to keep up with the men. I found I couldn’t. It wasn’t even close. I had no idea the difference in physical ability was so huge. There were always crowds of women sitting out exercises or on crutches from training injuries.With rare exceptions, the mainstream media have steadfastly suppressed such stories. Instead, they quote silly coeds, er, G.I.s, who insist, as did Marine recruit Vanessa Jenkins, in getting the last word of a 1997 Dateline propaganda piece cited by William McGowan in Coloring the News, “A woman can do anything a man can do, and lots of times a whole lot better.”
“They [the Army] were so scared of sexual harassment that women weren’t allowed to go anywhere without another woman along. They called them ‘Battle Buddies.’ It was crazy. I was twenty-six years old but I couldn’t go to the bathroom by myself.”
Many women also end up sleeping with their fellow soldiers, their superiors, their subordinates, and in the case of Lt. Kelly Flinn, soldiers’ husbands. You can blame women for that, you can blame men, or like Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, you can blame the biggest offender of all—“human nature.” The mixing of the sexes within units has destroyed military discipline. (At any given moment, ten percent of military women are out on “disability,” due to pregnancy.) Sending women into battle would result not only in dead women, but in many men dying, trying to protect the weaker sex.
Cases like that of Kelly Flinn, an officer and B-52 bomber pilot who flaunted her superior rank in the face of the enlisted woman whose husband she stole, and who lied to her superiors, are examples of human malevolence that were encouraged by sexual integration which served no military purpose.
The insistence on promoting, for political reasons, incompetent females to highly technical, dangerous positions such as fighter and bomber pilot, has not only unnecessarily endangered soldiers (Lt. Carey Lohrenz), caused deaths (Lt. Kara Hultgreen), and destroyed precious military hardware, but has “empowered” female personnel, aware of the support they enjoy from politicians and the media, to shower military rules with contempt, as in the cases of pilots Carey Lohrenz and Kelly Flinn.
In feminizing their coverage, the media have also misrepresented the role that physical strength can play in piloting a plane. We are told that in today’s high-tech military, the need for brute strength has been neutralized. But on April 1, 2001, when a Chinese pilot deliberately collided with a EP-3E U.S. spy plane, Navy pilot Lt. Shane Osborn, a bull of a man who appeared to weigh over 220 pounds, had to use every ounce of his strength to pull back on the aircraft’s yoke, in order to help get the plane “nose up” (in fact, the plane had lost its nose), in order to land without losing any of his crew. Had a woman been at the controls, there can be no doubt that all 24 crewmen would have been lost.
Nicholas Kristof instructs us that “wars these days are less for territory than for hearts and minds, and coed military units appear less menacing.”
You know what you call an army that fails to appear menacing? 1. The vanquished; 2. the Dutch.
The New Matriarchy
The Pentagon surrendered to the matriarchy even before Bill Clinton became commander-in-chief. During the past twenty-odd years, a number of females have undermined the services, using those weapons of mass destruction, the lawsuit and the sexual harassment claim. Militarily incompetent females have worked their way up the officer corps, by playing politically correct media and politicians like fiddles. Pols like former Rep. Patricia Schroeder and Sen. Olympia Snowe, seek to turn military men into gender slaves. Women who couldn’t fly have been certified as fighter pilots, and women who couldn’t lead, have been promoted all the way to general officer.
Years ago, a feminist ex-girlfriend of mine had a name for men like the sort of generals you increasingly find in this woman’s army: “pussy-whipped.”
Shortly after 911, CNN interviewed gender warrior, U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Claudia Kennedy, ret., the highest-ranking woman in Army history.
CNN: How has the military environment changed for women in the last ten years?Among civilians, Lt. Gen. Claudia Kennedy’s claim to fame is for having destroyed the career of Maj. Gen. Larry Smith. In 1999, when Smith was about to be promoted to lieutenant general, and to Deputy Inspector General of the Army, an office which, among other things, investigates sexual harassment claims, Kennedy claimed that Smith had groped and tried to kiss her three years earlier. The official charge was that Smith had “kissed [Kennedy] against her will in her office.”
KENNEDY: I think the military environment is a more open one for women. Two things have happened. One is the number and diversity of jobs increasing. And, I think that we have all grown more confident of the ability of women to perform not only the traditional women’s jobs, but those that are new and unusual for women to fill. The reason more jobs have been opened to women is that women have done so well in each field as it opens up to them.
The Army concluded that the charge was “substantiated.” What that really meant was, that in such “he said, she said” situations, the Pentagon always takes the word of the female officer.
I’ll have more to say on Claudia Kennedy at another time, but for now, all you need to know is that: 1. Her statement on women in the services is manifestly untrue; and 2. Her goal has long been to emasculate the military, and install a matriarchy, rather than to prepare soldiers, sailors, and airmen to defend America against her enemies.
Reading the likes of Nicholas Kristof and Claudia Kennedy, you wonder how the military functioned for thousands of years without women.
The military has one job: To win wars. Winning wars means killing the enemy, and seizing real estate. And you don’t do that while protecting coeds with flowers in their helmets.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
The Death of a President
By Nicholas Stix
In Dallas 46 years ago today, Communist and dishonorably discharged ex-Marine Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated 46-year-old President John F. Kennedy, shooting him from a window in the Texas School Book Depository building, as the President’s motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, b. May 29, 1917, d. November 22, 1963.
R.I.P.
Commemorative Essay from 2006
Forty-three years ago yesterday, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States of America, was felled in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald, a communist, dishonorably discharged, ex-marine. For most of my life, November 22 was always commemorated as one of the darkest days in American history. In recent years, such commemoration seems to have been fading.
President Kennedy was riding that day in a motorcade with his wife, Jackie, Texas Gov. John Connally and the latter’s wife, Idanell (1919-2006), and Texan Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Kennedy had come to Texas to shore up a rift among Texas Democrats.
As soon as she saw her husband had been hit with gunfire, Mrs. Kennedy showed herself willing to sacrifice her own life, to save her husband’s. She threw herself across her husband, to shield his body from further gunfire with her own, as if she were a secret service agent, rather than America’s First Lady. Alas, it was too late.
Gov. Connally also was wounded, and his wife, Idanell Brill "Nellie" Connally (1919-2006), helped save his life by “pull[ing] the Governor onto her lap, and the resulting posture helped close his front chest wound (which was causing air to be sucked directly into his chest around his collapsed right lung).”
Later that day, aboard Air Force One, Vice President Johnson was sworn in as America’s 36th President.
On April 11, Oswald had attempted to assassinate rightwing Army Gen. Edwin Walker; one hour after assassinating the President, he murdered Dallas Patrolman J.W. Tippit, before being arrested in a Dallas movie theater. Two days later, Oswald was himself murdered by Jack Ruby, as lawmen sought to transfer Oswald from police headquarters to the Dallas City Jail.
Jack Kennedy has become, like his ersthwile fling, Marilyn Monroe, a Rohrschach Test, onto which people (particularly leftists) project their preoccupations. Thus do conspiracy obsessives project the notion that the President’s assassination had issued out of a conspiracy so immense, including at least two assassins, with the identity of the specific participants – the Cosa Nostra, the CIA, Fidel Castro – depending on the imaginings of the obsessive in question.
Likewise has Kennedy’s presidency been fetishized by leftwing obsessives and family retainers, who have turned him into a socialist demigod, who supported massive economic redistribution and radical “civil rights.”
The best way of summing up the real JFK versus the fantasy version propagated by the Left and Kennedy courtiers since his death, is by comparison and contrast to President Richard M. Nixon, Kennedy’s opponent in the 1960 election.
Kennedy has been portrayed as a leftwing saint and Renaissance man, who gave us or supported (or would have, had he lived) the War on Poverty, civil rights for blacks, and utopia. Nixon, by contrast, was a rightwing Mephistopheles (“Tricky Dick”), and a crude, racist, fascist warmonger.
Politically, Kennedy and Nixon actually had much in common. Both were unapologetic anti-communists in matters domestic and foreign. Nixon successfully prosecuted for perjury the traitor and Soviet spy, Alger Hiss (which inspired the Left to work tirelessly thereafter for Nixon’s destruction), while Kennedy (“Ich bin ein Berliner.”) was an unequivocal supporter of West Berlin against Soviet imperialism, and risked nuclear war, when he faced down the Soviets during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. (Due to the statute of limitations, Nixon could not prosecute Hiss for treason or espionage.) On the negative side of the ledger, Kennedy betrayed the Cuban insurgents who carried out the Bay of Pigs invasion, by withholding promised air support, thus turning the invasion into a fiasco.
Domestically, at least in fiscal matters, Kennedy was considerably to the right of Nixon. Early in Kennedy’s administration, he signed off on what was then the biggest tax cut ever, and which set the economy on fire. In light of Kennedy’s fiscal conservatism and belief in self-reliance (“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”), it is highly unlikely that he would have signed off on a program for massive government welfare programs. The War on Poverty was the idea of Lyndon Johnson, who exploited the nation’s mourning for JFK to ram his programs through Congress.
By contrast, Nixon introduced price and wage controls, a move that was far to the left economically of the Democratic Party, even after Kennedy. And it was Nixon, the hated “racist,” not Kennedy or even Johnson, who institutionalized affirmative action. Note that over 30 percent of blacks voted for Nixon for president, over three times as high a proportion than ever would vote for George W. Bush for president.
For over thirty years, leftist Democrats have sought to tar and feather Nixon as a “racist” for his “Southern Strategy” of appealing to Southern whites with promises of “law and order.” The presuppositions of the leftist critics are: 1. If one is not a leftist, one may not campaign for the votes of groups that may potentially vote for one, but rather must hopelessly chase after the votes of people who will never vote for him, thereby guaranteeing his defeat; and 2. Because the explosion in crime was primarily the fault of blacks, no politician may ever campaign on behalf of “law and order” (in other words, see #1).
Since leftists have long controlled the media and academia, no successful counter-movement has ever been waged against the Democrat Northern Strategy that continues to this day inflaming and relying on racist blacks for their votes and their violence.
If anything, Nixon was a stronger supporter of “civil rights” than Kennedy. When Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested during the 1960 presidential campaign, Nixon wanted to call King’s parents in support, but let his advisers talk him out of it. Conversely, Kennedy let his adviser, future senator Harris Wofford, talk him into calling “Daddy” King, which resulted in Kennedy winning the black vote.
In August 1963, the Poor People’s March, in which Martin Luther King Jr. would give his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, was almost shut down by the Kennedy Administration without King even getting to speak.
The march had been organized by A. Philip Randolph, the legendary socialist founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the nation’s first successful black labor union. Randolph was planning on giving a radical leftwing speech written by Stanley Levison, a communist advisor to both Randolph and King, but as historian David Garrow tells in his biography, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the President’s brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, acting in his brother’s name, threatened literally to pull the plug on the demonstration, were Randolph to deliver the planned speech. Randolph relented, and gave a considerably toned-down speech.
There is no record, to my knowledge, of Nixon ever censoring a political speech, much less one by a civil rights leader.
As for Southeast Asia, Kennedy got us involved in the War in Vietnam; Nixon got us out.
Kennedy repeatedly jeopardized national security, both as a naval intelligence officer during World War II, and while President, due to his obsessive womanizing. By contrast, even Nixon’s sworn enemies have failed to find any evidence of his cheating on his beloved wife, Pat.
And as for the two men’s intellectual status, Nixon was clearly superior. The notion that Kennedy was an intellectual the planned product of a PR campaign engineered and financed by the future president’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.. The elder Kennedy got his son’s undistinguished, pro-appeasement (echoing the elder Kennedy, who was a Nazi sympathizer) Harvard senior thesis, Why England Slept, published as a book, after having it rewritten by erstwhile family retainer, New York Times columnist Arthur Krock (whom JFK would later stab in the back, using future Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee as his tool of choice); later, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Profiles in Courage, was ghostwritten for JFK by another family retainer, Theodore Sorensen, in order to give the young senator the “gravitas” necessary for a run at the White House. Working on behalf of JFK and Joe Kennedy, Arthur Krock campaigned relentlessly on behalf of the fraudulent work, and succeeded in gaining it the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for biography, yet another fraudulent Pulitzer that has never been rescinded.
Nixon, on the other hand, really did write a series of important books on politics. But although Nixon was a true Renaissance man, he was a Republican, and so while the Kennedy hagiography of the press, Hollywood, and academia would slavishly promote the myth of Kennedy as Renaissance man, in the same parties’ corresponding demonography of Nixon, the last thing they were going to do was to give Nixon due credit for his very real intellectual accomplishments.
So, where does that leave us? Must we choose between the fictional but pervasive image of JFK as Renaissance man, socialist, and compassionate civil rights supporter, or Garry Wills’ revised version, in which Kennedy appears as a ruthless, pathologically lying sociopath?
If we jettison our illusions about the political leaders we support being compassionate, kindly, fatherly (or insert your romanticized cliché of choice) types, and admit that the ruthless, pathologically lying sociopath has been a frequent Oval Office type, that still does not free us from the obligation of weighing the virtues of this sociopath against that one.
While it is ludicrous to speak of a man who inhabited the office for only two years and ten months as a “great president,” John F. Kennedy had his moments. He gave us a tax cut of historic dimensions, stood up to the Soviets, founded the Peace Corps, and started the race to the moon that culminated in 1969, with Neil Armstrong’s world historical walk.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Lindsey Graham KOs Eric Holder: Who’d a Thunk It?
Parental Content Advisory: This video has explicit content of one man beating another so brutally, that the latter doesn’t even realize the severity of the beating.
Transcript, via NPR—of all sources—of Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (Chameleon-SC) pummeling of Attorney General Eric Holder (ZANU PF) on Wednesday, during the Justice Department oversight hearing held by the Senate Judiciary Committee.
SEN. GRAHAM: Can you give me a case in United States history where a enemy combatant caught on a battlefield was tried in civilian court?
ATTY.. GEN. HOLDER: I don't know. I'd have to look at that. I think that, you know, the determination I've made—
SEN. GRAHAM: We're making history here, Mr. Attorney General. I'll answer it for you. The answer is no.
ATTY. GEN. HOLDER: Well, I think—
GRAHAM: The Ghailani case—he was indicted for the Cole bombing before 9/11. And I didn't object to it going into federal court. But I'm telling you right now. We're making history and we're making bad history. And let me tell you why.
If bin Laden were caught tomorrow, would it be the position of this administration that he would be brought to justice?
ATTY. GEN. HOLDER: He would certainly be brought to justice, absolutely.
SEN. GRAHAM: Where would you try him?
ATTY. GEN. HOLDER: Well, we'd go through our protocol. And we'd make the determination about where he should appropriately be tried.
SEN. GRAHAM: Would you try him—why would you take him someplace different than KSM [Khalid Sheik Mohammed]?
ATTY. GEN. HOLDER: Well, that might be the case. I don't know. I'm not—
SEN. GRAHAM: Well, let—
ATTY. GEN. HOLDER: I'd have to look at all of the evidence, all of the—
SEN. GRAHAM: Well—
ATTY. GEN. HOLDER: He's been indicted. He's been indicted already. (Off mike.)
SEN. GRAHAM: Does it matter if you—if you use the law enforcement theory or the enemy combatant theory, in terms of how the case would be handled?
ATTY. GEN. HOLDER: Well, I mean, bin Laden is an interesting case in that he's already been indicted in federal court.
SEN. GRAHAM: Right.
ATTY. GEN. HOLDER: We have cases against him. (Off mike.)
SEN. GRAHAM: Right, well, where would—where would you put him?
ATTY. GEN. HOLDER: It would depend on how—a variety of factors.
SEN. GRAHAM: Well, let me ask you this. Okay, let me ask you this. Let's say we capture him tomorrow. When does custodial interrogation begin in his case?
If we captured bin Laden tomorrow, would he be entitled to Miranda warnings at the moment of capture?
ATTY. GEN. HOLDER: Again I'm not—that all depends. I mean, the notion that we—
SEN. GRAHAM: Well, it does not depend. If you're going to prosecute anybody in civilian court, our law is clear that the moment custodial interrogation occurs the defendant, the criminal defendant, is entitled to a lawyer and to be informed of their right to remain silent.
The big problem I have is that you're criminalizing the war, that if we caught bin Laden tomorrow, we'd have mixed theories and we couldn't turn him over—to the CIA, the FBI or military intelligence—for an interrogation on the battlefield, because now we're saying that he is subject to criminal court in the United States. And you're confusing the people fighting this war.
What would you tell the military commander who captured him? Would you tell him, "You must read him his rights and give him a lawyer"? And if you didn't tell him that, would you jeopardize the prosecution in a federal court?
ATTY. GEN. HOLDER: We have captured thousands of people on the battlefield, only a few of which have actually been given their Miranda warnings.
With regard to bin Laden and the desire or the need for statements from him, the case against him at this point is so overwhelming that we do not need to—
SEN. GRAHAM: Mr. Attorney General, my only point—the only point I'm making, that if we're going to use federal court as a disposition for terrorists, you take everything that comes with being in federal court. And what comes with being in federal court is that the rules in this country, unlike military law—you can have military operations, you can interrogate somebody for military intelligence purposes, and the law-enforcement rights do not attach.
But under domestic criminal law, the moment the person is in the hands of the United States government, they're entitled to be told they have a right to a lawyer and can remain silent. And if we go down that road, we're going to make this country less safe. That is my problem with what you have done.
You're a fine man. I know you want to do everything to help this country be safe, but I think you've made a fundamental mistake here. You have taken a wartime model that will allow us flexibility when it comes to intelligence gathering, and you have compromised this country's ability to deal with people who are at war with us, by interjecting into this system the possibility that they may be given the same constitutional rights as any American citizen.
And the main reason that KSM is going to court apparently is because the people he decided to kill were here in America and mostly civilian, and the person going into military court decided to kill some military members overseas. I think that is a perversion of the justice system.
ATTY. GEN. HOLDER: What I said repeatedly is that we should use all the tools available to us: military courts, Article III courts. The conviction of Osama bin Laden, were he to come into our custody, would not depend on any custodial statements that he would make. The case against him, both for those cases that have already been indicted—the case that we could make against him for the—his involvement in the 9/11 case—
SEN. GRAHAM: Right—
ATTY. GEN. HOLDER: —would not be dependent on Miranda warnings—
SEN. GRAHAM: Mr. Attorney—
ATTY. GEN. HOLDER: no—would not be dependent on custodial interrogations. And so I think in some ways you've thrown up something that is—with all due respect, I think is a red herring.
SEN. GRAHAM: Well—
ATTY. GEN. HOLDER: It would not be something—(inaudible)—
SEN. GRAHAM: With all due respect, every military lawyer that I've talked to is deeply concerned about the fact that, if we go down this road, we're criminalizing the war and we're putting our intelligence-gathering at risk. And I will have some statements from them to back up what I'm saying.
SEN. LEAHY: Senator Graham, I—
SEN. GRAHAM: My time is up. I look forward to talking to you.
ATTY. GEN. HOLDER: Sure.
SEN. LEAHY: And I—
SEN. GRAHAM: We can—there are some issues we can agree on.
ATTY. GEN. HOLDER: One thing I would say: that, with regard to those people who are captured on the battlefield, we make the determinations every day as to who should be Mirandized, who should not. Most are not Mirandized. And the people who are involved in that decision involve not only lawyers and agents but also military personnel who make the determination as to who should be Mirandized.
But again, the notion that a conviction of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would depend on his getting Miranda rights is simply not accurate.
(Tripartisan tips ‘o the hat to traditionalist conservative Larry Auster, the Republican Web sites Newsbusters (Noel Sheppard) and Hot Air, and socialist NPR.)
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Most of the Vance Jury Favored Death—Except Three
By Nicholas Stix
On the night of November 13, I got the following note and link from my reader-researcher, David in Tennessee, regarding the trial in which Curtis Lavelle Vance was convicted on all counts of burgling, raping, and murdering Anne Pressly, but was sentenced only to “life without [read: until] parole.”
Nicholas,
This is an account of what happened. You can read between the lines. Remember there were 4 black women on the jury.
David
Arkansas Blog
Vance jury favored death
Fox 16 has done some jury research work and finds that the jury leaned in favor of the death penalty for Curtis Vance, convicted of capital murder in the beating death of Anne Pressly. But as many as three might have been reluctant, even though verdict forms indicated the jury agreed unanimously that aggravating circumstances outweighed mitigating circumstances in the sentencing decision. [In other words, they were legally obligated to sentence Vance to death.]
Friday afternoon one of the jurors in the Curtis Vance murder trial called into Dave Elswicks radio show on our content partner KARN. The man does not want his name released but says both the prosecution and defense put on strong cases. He also says there were a few mild arguments during deliberations and that the toughest decision came at the end.
"I don't mind...telling you I wasn't for just staying in prison. I wanted the capital punishment I wanted him to face his charges," the juror said. "But there were a few that wouldn't let us do that and they stopped us and there wasn't anything we could do. We tried to talk to them, they had their reasons and we had our reasons and we just had to go on. Nothing saying bad about them at all."
This is in line with what a juror told a law enforcement source of ours -- that one, perhaps, two jurors stood firmly against the death penalty, when a unanimous verdict was required. Defense testimony in mitigation was critical -- about Vance's tough childhood, about his possible brain damage from abuse, about his children (who played outside in a court hallway while their mother pleaded that their father be spared). That verdict was not unexpected, by either Pressly's family or prosecution.
Posted by Max Brantley on November 13, 2009 06:11 PM Permalink
Comments
I would be interested to know if the holdouts were African-American; my gut tells me it is likely that at least one was. If so, I'd love to know why they did what they did; did they identify with Vance or his monster of a mother, or could they not identify sufficiently with the white victims.
If they "stood firmly" against death simply because they're anti-death penalty, then they lied during jury selection; they were ringers for the defense. The whole thing is sickening.
The interesting thing is that I bet anything the Plumerville cop-killer (who will be tried in Conway County) will get death, even though his crime, while also abhorrent, is in a way more excusable; he was in a stolen car, panicked when pulled over, and shot the officer. That is nothing compared to the vermin Vance who, after Anne fought back (unlike the Marianna lady) instead of submitting to rape/sodomy, decided to beat her brains in.
Posted by: FromThePines | November 13, 2009 07:24 PM
After that, the socialists took over, and even the poster above backed off from his obvious point.
On the night of November 13, I got the following note and link from my reader-researcher, David in Tennessee, regarding the trial in which Curtis Lavelle Vance was convicted on all counts of burgling, raping, and murdering Anne Pressly, but was sentenced only to “life without [read: until] parole.”
Nicholas,
This is an account of what happened. You can read between the lines. Remember there were 4 black women on the jury.
David
Arkansas Blog
Vance jury favored death
Fox 16 has done some jury research work and finds that the jury leaned in favor of the death penalty for Curtis Vance, convicted of capital murder in the beating death of Anne Pressly. But as many as three might have been reluctant, even though verdict forms indicated the jury agreed unanimously that aggravating circumstances outweighed mitigating circumstances in the sentencing decision. [In other words, they were legally obligated to sentence Vance to death.]
Friday afternoon one of the jurors in the Curtis Vance murder trial called into Dave Elswicks radio show on our content partner KARN. The man does not want his name released but says both the prosecution and defense put on strong cases. He also says there were a few mild arguments during deliberations and that the toughest decision came at the end.
"I don't mind...telling you I wasn't for just staying in prison. I wanted the capital punishment I wanted him to face his charges," the juror said. "But there were a few that wouldn't let us do that and they stopped us and there wasn't anything we could do. We tried to talk to them, they had their reasons and we had our reasons and we just had to go on. Nothing saying bad about them at all."
This is in line with what a juror told a law enforcement source of ours -- that one, perhaps, two jurors stood firmly against the death penalty, when a unanimous verdict was required. Defense testimony in mitigation was critical -- about Vance's tough childhood, about his possible brain damage from abuse, about his children (who played outside in a court hallway while their mother pleaded that their father be spared). That verdict was not unexpected, by either Pressly's family or prosecution.
Posted by Max Brantley on November 13, 2009 06:11 PM Permalink
Comments
I would be interested to know if the holdouts were African-American; my gut tells me it is likely that at least one was. If so, I'd love to know why they did what they did; did they identify with Vance or his monster of a mother, or could they not identify sufficiently with the white victims.
If they "stood firmly" against death simply because they're anti-death penalty, then they lied during jury selection; they were ringers for the defense. The whole thing is sickening.
The interesting thing is that I bet anything the Plumerville cop-killer (who will be tried in Conway County) will get death, even though his crime, while also abhorrent, is in a way more excusable; he was in a stolen car, panicked when pulled over, and shot the officer. That is nothing compared to the vermin Vance who, after Anne fought back (unlike the Marianna lady) instead of submitting to rape/sodomy, decided to beat her brains in.
Posted by: FromThePines | November 13, 2009 07:24 PM
After that, the socialists took over, and even the poster above backed off from his obvious point.
A Juror's Account of the Davidson Trial
Although I received the following note regarding the Lemaricus Davidson trial from my reader/researcher David in Tennessee on the night of November5, my procrastination has failed to diminish its significance.
Nicholas,
The liestoppers forum about the Duke lacrosse hoax copied an account by a juror at the Davidson trial from a Knoxville-based sports forum. Here is the thread.
David
Zetaboards
Viewing Single Post From: Blog and Media Roundup - Thursday, November 5, 2009
Nov 5 2009, 07:55 AM (posted by “ABB”)
http://www.smashsouthsports.org/forums/showthread.php?t=23117
What you all need to know regarding the Davidson Trial
I have not posted here in some time. I have been very busy in many ways.
I have sent this email to this close to me only. This trial CHANGED my life in many ways. You all recognize me as a cocky, smart-ass bastard. The Bottom-Line is that we NEVER, EVER know when and where we will leave this earth. THAT was the PAINFUL YET HONEST MESSAGE I took from my civil duty...
When I was first summoned to court at the end of August, I felt that I was picked for a reason. At that point, without even answering the first question of more than 120 that we had to initially do, I felt like my semi-ignorance to the issues involving the case were a part of why I was there. I simply answered honestly and was brought back for another round of questioning. Ultimately, I do not feel like I was "chosen" for jury duty: I feel like I was part of a group that was meant to be together, as we all felt after just a very, very short time together.
There was a mixture on the jury: Conservative, Liberal, Male, Female, Black, White, Religious, Non-religious, Old, Young, Rich, Poor. I am not sure if it was fate or good judgment, but both attorneys nailed it regarding a jury that meshed. We had viewpoints from every angle of life.
For almost 2 weeks, we were isolated but very well taken care of. The county did a very good job of NOT jeopardizing the case in any way while respecting our needs/lives. At no point did we feel threatened in any way EXCEPT for when we arrived back at our hotel after our verdict to see a TV reporter with a microphone and a cameraman. They were quickly dispersed
We listened for almost 2 weeks to every single angle of testimony that exists. For those that haven't seen the evidence in this case, it's absolutely overwhelming regarding Davidson's involvement. Davidson/his accomplices ended up at Washington Ridge Apartments on that night to see Ethel Freeman, a woman Davidson owed money to for furniture she'd let him have. He met her through her son. She agreed to let him take some of it upon the belief that he would pay her back once every 2 weeks. According to Ethel, KUB contacted her on the Friday before Chris and Channon were abducted to tell her they would turn her power off that coming Monday IF she didn't have their money to them by that day. That is how and why Davidson and his accomplices ended up seeing Chris and Channon: They had traveled there to pay that debt. Chris and Channon were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
They car-jacked Chris and Channon at that point. This was around 9:30. We don't know for sure. They took them back to Chipman Street.
What we do know:
- Channon called her father at 12:33 AM to tell him everything was ok and that they would be home in a couple hours. At this point, they had been kidnapped and Chris had been raped. We know he had been raped by the amount of neutrophils presents in the area that was torn. He was raped around 2 hours before he was shot, which was 1:45 AM.
- Chris was first shot in the lower back, which paralyzed him as it severed his spinal cord. Then he was shot in the shoulder. He was then finished off execution-style. He walked there barefoot, pants removed, feet bound with his own belt, mount gagged with his socks. His hands and feet were tied with fabric from Davidson's home. He was left there, dead.
- After Chris was shot dead at 1:45, Davidson made a phone call to a friend of his girlfriend, Daphne Sutton, from Chris's PHONE at 2:00, hoping she wouldn't recognize the number, as she'd ignored his calls that day.
- Channon Christian was RAPED at least once between 2:00 and around 5:00 AM, when SOMEONE went BACK to the train tracks to set Chris's body on FIRE to conceal evidence.
- Channon Christian died sometime between the middle of the day on Sunday and Monday. The medical examiner could only isolate it to 24 hours.
Channon Christian died with her eyes OPEN. She suffocated to death. Davidson's handprints were on the 3 outermost bags of 5 she was put in. Why she was left in a trashcan on Chipman Street we will never know. Maybe Davidson thought those that fled to Kentucky were going to dispose of her body? Maybe they meant to place that trash can on their street somewhere for Waste Industries to pick up, mixing it with the rest of the trash cans?
When we went back for initial deliberation on the 45 counts the state presented, we deliberated for around 8 hours. We spent about half of those on whether or not Davidson was responsible for Chris Newsom's rape. I believed, as did all the men on the jury, that he was criminally responsible, as he had a chance to take action at any point before that to stop it from happening and did not. The women on the jury did not feel so, as they didn't want to/could not place that blame on him, as they felt he could not have known that Chris would be raped, believing that he wasn't there. My argument was that, if we can convict Davidson on the Murder of Chris Newsom without knowing he was there, how could we not believe he knew about/was responsible for the rape? I/we were right, but, ultimately, we conceded on this count. It hurt me badly to not hold Davidson responsible for the TORTURE of Chris Newsom on this count, but that is exactly what we did.
When we got to the charges of Murder for Davidson in this phase, it took us about 20 minutes to run through the 16 charges. There were no objections. There were no questions. There was no doubt. We all believed beyond any shadow of any doubt that he was guilty for both murders and all underlying actions.
We went back to court on Thursday fully prepared to give a decision of Death or Life in Prison. We went to bed on Wednesday night with that on our minds and hearts. None of us slept well. We were disappointed when Judge B told us on Thursday around 4 that we would need to come back the next day. We had voted and we were prepared to stay until midnight to reach a verdict. We did not want to go back to our hotel and think about that another night.
When we arrived at the Courthouse on Friday, before (and after) hearing closing arguments, we were split 8-4 as to Davidson's fate. Eight of us believed he should receive death. Four of us were not sure. We did as we were instructed to do, voting on Aggravating factors vs. Mitigating factors. The aggravating factors were overwhelming BUT we are all human: Our jury had mothers and sisters. Out of the 5+ hours we deliberated, about 4 of them were spent in prayer and in reading the Bible and reaching the Moral Certainty called for by Law. This was the deciding and ultimate factor in our decision. We obeyed both God's law and Man's law.
When we layed out our arguments for or against death, mine were:
- Davidson had 2 C's: Choice and Chance. This man had MORE chances than his siblings that DIDN'T become killers/rapists. And he had a CHOICE. The "psychiatrist" Peter Brown laid out 8 factors for us that he made sound INEVITABLE that Davidson would become a violent offender. Out of those 8, guess who had, without question, 4 of them? President Barack Obama.
- A death sentence to him is MORE MERCIFUL than what he gave those he killed. He will NOT be tortured. He will get say say goodbye to his family.
- He should have to live each and every day knowing that what he did to those 2 young adults will lead to his death. The thought of them every single day and what happened to them is exactly what he left for their family.
We, the Jury, absolutely did the right thing in this case. It was the hardest thing I believe any of us have ever done, but we held true to each other and to justice. There are NO WINNERS in this incident. It's all sad and unfortunate, for all sides involved. We only hope that our doing what Tennessee State Law asked us to will lead to another step towards some sort of closure for all of those involved.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Do Terrorists Have Rights?
by Nicholas Stix
November 11, 2003
Toogood Reports/Front Page Magazine
(I'm reprinting this today, due to the November 13 decision by the John Doe calling himself "Barack Obama" and his chief officer of lawlessness, Eric Holder, to turn the laws of war upside down, on behalf of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, and give him a traditional jury trial in New York City, as if the latter had been caught plotting to kill his wife for insurance money.
Via Larry Auster, as Lucianne.com commenter “fed-up” asked, “Question for the next Administration: can Holder and Obama now be considered “enemy combatants”?)
Is the U.S. a terrorist state? Are al Qaeda fighters the good guys? That's what you might think, to read the New York Times editorial page, and some of the humanitarian bureaucrat-activists who, though largely unknown to the general public, have tremendous clout with the Times.
An October 16 New York Times editorial (“The American Prison Camp”) attacked the Bush Administration for maintaining its detainee camp for terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Citing criticism of the Bush Administration by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the editorial claimed that Administration justifications for the camp “miss the point,” are “unpersuasive,” and have “no foundation in the Geneva Conventions,” and demanded, in the name of “justice,” that unlawful combatants (in this case, terrorists) be granted civil rights that the U.S. in previous wars had not granted even to lawful combatants. Traditionally, unlawful combatants have been considered not soldiers, but criminals, spies or saboteurs, and executed or imprisoned for lengthy sentences.
Note that the Red Cross—which also calls itself “the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement”—has barred groups at post-911 Red Cross events in the U.S. from singing “God Bless America,” lest they offend Muslims; has barred the Israeli Magen David ambulance service (which has an unblemished record of aiding the wounded, regardless of religion or politics, and having never aided terrorists) from joining; and has let its ambulances repeatedly be used by Palestinian terrorists in Israel—some of whom proved to be Palestine Red Crescent Society employees in good standing!—for the transportation of homicide bombers and weapons under humanitarian cover. And as scholar Jeremy Rabkin has noted, an official at the Red Cross/Red Crescent’s Geneva headquarters circulated the heinous blood libel, that claimed that Israel had orchestrated the 911 attacks.
As the example of the Red Cross/Red Crescent shows, humanitarianism is a sometime thing. And yet, as the murderous, October 27 attack on the Red Cross/Red Crescent’s Baghdad headquarters showed, even supporting terrorists fails to protect an organization from their wrath.
Like the Red Cross/Red Crescent, the U.N., Doctors Without Borders, and other “humanitarian,” “non-governmental” organizations are also hostile to America’s right to self-defense.
The New York Times insists that “The justifications offered by the administration are equally unpersuasive. The argument that the detainees are not prisoners of war because they are not uniformed members of a regular armed force has no foundation in the Geneva Conventions.”
That, simply, is a lie. On no less than five points, does the 1949 Geneva Convention explicitly support the Bush Administration’s position that the Guantanamo detainees are unlawful combatants, and thus not protected as prisoners of war, because:
1. They are not fighting for a Contracting Party to the Convention;
2. They are not “commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates”;
3. They wear no uniforms or the equivalent (“a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance”), identifying them as combatants;
4. They fail the test of “carrying arms openly”; and
5. They fail the test “of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.”
The Geneva Conventions implicitly recognize principles of reciprocity, the right of national self-defense, and enlightened, national self-interest; the New York Times does not – at least, not in the case of the U.S. And yet, since the Geneva Conventions have for many liberals a sacrosanct status, instead of saying that he held them in contempt, the Times editorialist chose to lie about what the Conventions say.
The Times was echoing a strategy which was established, after 911, by influential humanitarian organizations, including the Red Cross/Red Crescent and the Open Society Institute (OSI).
(OSI was founded and is funded by billionaire socialist George Soros, a Hungarian-born Jewish financier, who thinks that worldwide anti-Semitism is caused by … Jews! OSI’s president, Aryeh Neier, was the executive director of the ACLU and Human Rights Watch, respectively. During his time at the ACLU, Neier helped subvert the nation’s premier civil liberties group, transforming it into an anti-civil liberties, civil rights organization. Thus it is that the ACLU, an organization that in the past routinely sued to defend people’s First Amendment right to freedom of religion, now routinely sues to suppress people’s freedom of religion, under the complaint that others’ free exercise of religion “offends” the ACLU’s clients. A judiciary that recognizes a plaintiff’s—or certain plaintiffs’—right to be offended cannot also recognize civil liberties, because the right to take offense will not tolerate civil liberties. The right to take offense implies an unlimited prerogative on the part of certain plaintiffs to circumscribe other parties’ speech and action.)
As Aryeh Neier expressed them in a September, 2002 article, “Did the Era of Rights End on September 11?,” in Crimes of War magazine, his foreign policy ideas amount to the belief that ‘International law is a suicide pact – at least, for America.’ Based on a highly partisan notion of “rights,” which accrue to political allies, but are denied to political enemies, Neier advocates for the rhetorical fiction of international “humanitarian law,” which he insists is unilaterally binding on all nations. But in the case of the War on Terror, for Neier, such unilateral law is binding only on the U.S. That’s unilateralism, leftwing style.
Conversely, in the article, “After Guantanamo: The War Over the Geneva Convention,” in the Summer, 2002 issue of The Public Interest, Jeremy Rabkin, a Cornell University professor of international law, emphasized that the Geneva Convention is a contract or treaty, regulating conduct only between the parties to it. It is not a transcendent or universally binding law.
(Neier also misrepresented Rabkin’s views, maintaining that Rabkin had argued that under the principle of reciprocity, one Contracting Party to the Conventions may breach the Conventions, while justifiably engaging in savage reprisals against the uniformed soldiers and civilians alike of an enemy Contracting Party to the Conventions, in response to the enemy’s breaches of the Conventions. Since Rabkin had explicitly condemned such reprisals, this was yet another lie on the part of Aryeh Neier, who would seem to lack any capacity for honest debate. It is Neier’s propagandistic modus operandi, apparently, to misrepresent the views of any document or thinker with whom he disagrees.)
Whereas under the laws of war, including the Geneva Conventions, terrorists have traditionally been treated as criminals, the Red Cross/Red Crescent and OSI’s insistence on treating terrorists as lawful combatants, legitimizes terrorism, and turns the laws of war upside down.
Although the “humanitarians” clearly do not confront this consequence, their way of thinking would ultimately also destroy the moral foundations of medical neutrality. Red Cross/Red Crescent units would have to be looked upon as mixed-use military units, which engage both in killing and saving lives.
(Due to repeated abuses of medical neutrality by the Palestine Red Crescent Society, Israeli soldiers have already been forced to take such a position. The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) has refused to accept responsibility for, or at least apologize for terrorist acts committed by its personnel using its vehicles, or take steps to protect against the abuse of its ambulances as terrorist delivery vehicles. Instead, the PRCS has taken the rhetorical offensive, using propaganda identical to that of Yassir Arafat, in seeking to organize “the World Community and Governments” to intervene on its behalf against Israel, and prosecute Israeli soldiers as “war criminals.”
The PRCS is a terrorist organization. That it also engages in humanitarian work is beside the point; Hamas also engages in humanitarian work on behalf of Arab Muslims, when it is not murdering Jews. The PRCS beckons as the future face of humanitarianism.)
Working under a cloak of feigned neutrality, “humanitarians”—aided and abetted by the New York Times—seek to disarm the U.S. in the War on Terror. They would usurp control from the U.S. over such matters as the determination of who is a lawful combatant, and grant civil rights—which rightfully attach only to citizens—to foreign terrorists. The humanitarian groups and the Times seek to give terrorists a platform in the American judicial system, politicize every aspect of the War on Terror, and bury the federal courts under an avalanche of terrorism cases.
As Jeremy Rabkin observed, “This episode should warn the wise that ambitious new versions of international law are likely to become a continuing source of mischief in the world, and much trouble to the United States.”
November 11, 2003
Toogood Reports/Front Page Magazine
(I'm reprinting this today, due to the November 13 decision by the John Doe calling himself "Barack Obama" and his chief officer of lawlessness, Eric Holder, to turn the laws of war upside down, on behalf of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, and give him a traditional jury trial in New York City, as if the latter had been caught plotting to kill his wife for insurance money.
Via Larry Auster, as Lucianne.com commenter “fed-up” asked, “Question for the next Administration: can Holder and Obama now be considered “enemy combatants”?)
Is the U.S. a terrorist state? Are al Qaeda fighters the good guys? That's what you might think, to read the New York Times editorial page, and some of the humanitarian bureaucrat-activists who, though largely unknown to the general public, have tremendous clout with the Times.
An October 16 New York Times editorial (“The American Prison Camp”) attacked the Bush Administration for maintaining its detainee camp for terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Citing criticism of the Bush Administration by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the editorial claimed that Administration justifications for the camp “miss the point,” are “unpersuasive,” and have “no foundation in the Geneva Conventions,” and demanded, in the name of “justice,” that unlawful combatants (in this case, terrorists) be granted civil rights that the U.S. in previous wars had not granted even to lawful combatants. Traditionally, unlawful combatants have been considered not soldiers, but criminals, spies or saboteurs, and executed or imprisoned for lengthy sentences.
Note that the Red Cross—which also calls itself “the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement”—has barred groups at post-911 Red Cross events in the U.S. from singing “God Bless America,” lest they offend Muslims; has barred the Israeli Magen David ambulance service (which has an unblemished record of aiding the wounded, regardless of religion or politics, and having never aided terrorists) from joining; and has let its ambulances repeatedly be used by Palestinian terrorists in Israel—some of whom proved to be Palestine Red Crescent Society employees in good standing!—for the transportation of homicide bombers and weapons under humanitarian cover. And as scholar Jeremy Rabkin has noted, an official at the Red Cross/Red Crescent’s Geneva headquarters circulated the heinous blood libel, that claimed that Israel had orchestrated the 911 attacks.
As the example of the Red Cross/Red Crescent shows, humanitarianism is a sometime thing. And yet, as the murderous, October 27 attack on the Red Cross/Red Crescent’s Baghdad headquarters showed, even supporting terrorists fails to protect an organization from their wrath.
Like the Red Cross/Red Crescent, the U.N., Doctors Without Borders, and other “humanitarian,” “non-governmental” organizations are also hostile to America’s right to self-defense.
The New York Times insists that “The justifications offered by the administration are equally unpersuasive. The argument that the detainees are not prisoners of war because they are not uniformed members of a regular armed force has no foundation in the Geneva Conventions.”
That, simply, is a lie. On no less than five points, does the 1949 Geneva Convention explicitly support the Bush Administration’s position that the Guantanamo detainees are unlawful combatants, and thus not protected as prisoners of war, because:
1. They are not fighting for a Contracting Party to the Convention;
2. They are not “commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates”;
3. They wear no uniforms or the equivalent (“a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance”), identifying them as combatants;
4. They fail the test of “carrying arms openly”; and
5. They fail the test “of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.”
The Geneva Conventions implicitly recognize principles of reciprocity, the right of national self-defense, and enlightened, national self-interest; the New York Times does not – at least, not in the case of the U.S. And yet, since the Geneva Conventions have for many liberals a sacrosanct status, instead of saying that he held them in contempt, the Times editorialist chose to lie about what the Conventions say.
The Times was echoing a strategy which was established, after 911, by influential humanitarian organizations, including the Red Cross/Red Crescent and the Open Society Institute (OSI).
(OSI was founded and is funded by billionaire socialist George Soros, a Hungarian-born Jewish financier, who thinks that worldwide anti-Semitism is caused by … Jews! OSI’s president, Aryeh Neier, was the executive director of the ACLU and Human Rights Watch, respectively. During his time at the ACLU, Neier helped subvert the nation’s premier civil liberties group, transforming it into an anti-civil liberties, civil rights organization. Thus it is that the ACLU, an organization that in the past routinely sued to defend people’s First Amendment right to freedom of religion, now routinely sues to suppress people’s freedom of religion, under the complaint that others’ free exercise of religion “offends” the ACLU’s clients. A judiciary that recognizes a plaintiff’s—or certain plaintiffs’—right to be offended cannot also recognize civil liberties, because the right to take offense will not tolerate civil liberties. The right to take offense implies an unlimited prerogative on the part of certain plaintiffs to circumscribe other parties’ speech and action.)
As Aryeh Neier expressed them in a September, 2002 article, “Did the Era of Rights End on September 11?,” in Crimes of War magazine, his foreign policy ideas amount to the belief that ‘International law is a suicide pact – at least, for America.’ Based on a highly partisan notion of “rights,” which accrue to political allies, but are denied to political enemies, Neier advocates for the rhetorical fiction of international “humanitarian law,” which he insists is unilaterally binding on all nations. But in the case of the War on Terror, for Neier, such unilateral law is binding only on the U.S. That’s unilateralism, leftwing style.
Conversely, in the article, “After Guantanamo: The War Over the Geneva Convention,” in the Summer, 2002 issue of The Public Interest, Jeremy Rabkin, a Cornell University professor of international law, emphasized that the Geneva Convention is a contract or treaty, regulating conduct only between the parties to it. It is not a transcendent or universally binding law.
A treaty, as The Federalist (No. 64) explained in 1788, “is only another name for a bargain.” At the heart of the Geneva Conventions is this bargain: fight according to these professional rules and we will treat you with professional respect.Aryeh Neier cited Red Cross/Red Crescent criticisms of the Bush Administration, and the organization’s dubious interpretation of the Geneva Conventions, as part of his own misrepresentation of the Conventions.
The main rules for defining combatant status go back to The Hague Convention of 1899. They are not based on ancient ideas of rank and courtesy. Rather, the rules were drawn up at conferences at which military officers were not merely present as observers, but constantly at the elbow of the diplomats and lawyers as full participants for what they could provide by way of practical advice. The rules thus rest pre-eminently on practical considerations.
(Neier also misrepresented Rabkin’s views, maintaining that Rabkin had argued that under the principle of reciprocity, one Contracting Party to the Conventions may breach the Conventions, while justifiably engaging in savage reprisals against the uniformed soldiers and civilians alike of an enemy Contracting Party to the Conventions, in response to the enemy’s breaches of the Conventions. Since Rabkin had explicitly condemned such reprisals, this was yet another lie on the part of Aryeh Neier, who would seem to lack any capacity for honest debate. It is Neier’s propagandistic modus operandi, apparently, to misrepresent the views of any document or thinker with whom he disagrees.)
Whereas under the laws of war, including the Geneva Conventions, terrorists have traditionally been treated as criminals, the Red Cross/Red Crescent and OSI’s insistence on treating terrorists as lawful combatants, legitimizes terrorism, and turns the laws of war upside down.
Although the “humanitarians” clearly do not confront this consequence, their way of thinking would ultimately also destroy the moral foundations of medical neutrality. Red Cross/Red Crescent units would have to be looked upon as mixed-use military units, which engage both in killing and saving lives.
(Due to repeated abuses of medical neutrality by the Palestine Red Crescent Society, Israeli soldiers have already been forced to take such a position. The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) has refused to accept responsibility for, or at least apologize for terrorist acts committed by its personnel using its vehicles, or take steps to protect against the abuse of its ambulances as terrorist delivery vehicles. Instead, the PRCS has taken the rhetorical offensive, using propaganda identical to that of Yassir Arafat, in seeking to organize “the World Community and Governments” to intervene on its behalf against Israel, and prosecute Israeli soldiers as “war criminals.”
The PRCS is a terrorist organization. That it also engages in humanitarian work is beside the point; Hamas also engages in humanitarian work on behalf of Arab Muslims, when it is not murdering Jews. The PRCS beckons as the future face of humanitarianism.)
Working under a cloak of feigned neutrality, “humanitarians”—aided and abetted by the New York Times—seek to disarm the U.S. in the War on Terror. They would usurp control from the U.S. over such matters as the determination of who is a lawful combatant, and grant civil rights—which rightfully attach only to citizens—to foreign terrorists. The humanitarian groups and the Times seek to give terrorists a platform in the American judicial system, politicize every aspect of the War on Terror, and bury the federal courts under an avalanche of terrorism cases.
As Jeremy Rabkin observed, “This episode should warn the wise that ambitious new versions of international law are likely to become a continuing source of mischief in the world, and much trouble to the United States.”