Category: The Dish

A reader writes:

It’s not just Bush-Cheney. The Clinton Administration argued in court (1) that the president is exempt from regular legal process while serving in office, and (2) that Secret Service officers are prohibited from testifying about any crimes they may witness in the White House.  I have yet to hear the Democratic front-runner asked whether she agrees with her husband’s views on this.

Fortunately neither argument prevailed in court.  The argument on the first point was that the constitutional provision for impeachment is the sole method by which legal process may touch a sitting president, who otherwise is cloaked with immunity for any actions he may take, whether personal or professional. The argument on the second point was that because the president is the personification of the law, protecting the person of the president outweighed any other obligation that law enforcement officers would have, such as enforcing the law.

But, of course, the president is not above the law, nor is the president the personification of the law — except in Bill Clinton’s and Dick Cheney’s dreams.  And Hillary Clinton’s?  I’d like to know.

One small point. The total secrecy of Dick Cheney’s meetings over energy policy in his first term did have one obvious precedent: Hillary Clinton’s secret meetings about healthcare policy in her first term as co-president. If you are concerned about the abuse of executive power – as in, say, I don’t know, pardons? – then it’s hard to see, given their records, how returning the Clintons to the White House will solve our problems.

Buried beneath the blather, Scott Johnson is clearly accusing Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leadership of raising the Armenian genocide resolution at this time to sabotage the war effort in the Middle East. Charles Krauthammer aired the "stab-in-the-back" meme only to dismiss it – an act of Insta-level passive aggression. But Powerline goes there:

I doubt that stupidity is a sufficient explanation in this case.

Which leaves treason, right?

"In April, a single fundraiser in an area long known for its gritty urban poverty yielded a whopping $380,000. When Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) ran for president in 2004, he received $24,000 from Chinatown." Clinton has enlisted the aid of Chinese neighborhood associations, especially those representing recent immigrants from Fujian province. The organizations, at least one of which is a descendant of Chinatown criminal enterprises that engaged in gambling and human trafficking, exert enormous influence over immigrants. The associations help them with everything from protection against crime to obtaining green cards. Many of Clinton’s Chinatown donors said they had contributed because leaders in neighborhood associations told them to. In some cases, donors said they felt pressure to give," – a commenter on Ben Smith’s blog. For some reason, Smith wants to downplay what will doubtless be one of a series of sleazy stories to come out of the Clinton machine. Does no one remember the 1990s?

He’s opening his heart on abortion:

"My political record and my head were always there, always has been there, but I must say that it took life’s experiences for me to absorb the real importance of it all. I had been blessed early in my life when I was young…and I have been blessed when I was not so young. I’ve had the the ultimate tragedy that a father can have and the ultimate blessing that a father can gave. With regard to Ms. Hayden, I can only say that after the first time in my life, seeing the sonogram of my own child. I will never think exactly the same again. I will never feel exactly the same again. Because my heart now is fully engaged with my head."

A standing ovation.

Kleiman:
 

I understand Mukasey is supposed to be a reasonably good guy, by comparison with the run of Bush appointees.  But if Mukasey won’t say that waterboarding is torture and claims that the President has some undefined power to violate statute law — even criminal laws, such as the ban on torture and other war crimes — under his "Article II powers," then why should the Senate Judiciary Committee even bring his nomination to a vote? If he says he hasn’t read the latest torture memos or decided whether waterboarding is torture, Sen. Leahy ought to tell him to read the memos and observe a waterboarding session and come back when he’s done his homework.

Matt calls him "completely unacceptable." Having read the testimony, I’m afraid I have to abandon my early hopes and agree. An attorney general who believes a president has a permanent right to ignore the rule of law because peacetime is now wartime for ever, is an attorney-general defending the rule of one man over the rule of law. If I were a Senator, (heh, indeed) I’d vote no. This is the faultline of our time. If we are redefining war as a permanent state of being, and redefining presidential authority to give him/her extra-legal and extra-constitutional power to what s/he wants anywhere in the world, including the United States and to its citizenry, then American liberty is in extreme peril. To approve an attorney general who does not dissent from this position is a terrible precedent.

Don’t people see that this is what Cheney is doing? He is setting precedent after precedent for totalist, secret executive power. And with each precedent for unchecked, uncontrollable executive power – including the power to detain and torture within the United States – the America we have known is being surrendered. This is the other war – a constitutional war at home against American liberty and the Constitution – as dangerous in a different way as Islamism. One attacks our freedom from the outside; the other hollows out our freedom from within. The fight against both is the calling of the time.

I think we’re in denial about this. Following Mukasey’s statements with confirmation would set a precedent we may well deeply regret. Think of another terrorist attack. Think of the Cheney precedents. Think of Giuliani in the White House. Now think of what would be left of democracy and the Constitution the day after.

(Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty.)

"Who, of all the powerful women in American politics right now, has inspired the unease, dismay and frank dislike that she has? Condi Rice, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein? These are serious women who are making crucial decisions about our national life every day. They inspire agreement and disagreement; they fight and are fought with. But they do not inspire repugnance. Nobody hates Barbara Mikulski, Elizabeth Dole or Kay Bailey Hutchison; everyone respects Ms. Rice and Ms. Feinstein.

Hillary’s problem is not that she’s a woman; it’s that unlike these women–all of whom have come under intense scrutiny, each of whom has real partisan foes–she has a history that lends itself to the kind of doubts that end in fearfulness. It is an unease and dismay based not on gender stereotypes but on personal history," – Peggy Noonan on She Who Is Inevitable.

They despise him more than the left because he represents a different kind of conservatism. And so Michael Goldfarb argues that I mislabeled the data on military support for Ron Paul in this post, where I touted military donations to Obama and Paul. It’s all donors connected to the military, not active service military members. He’s right. I mislabeled. But as Goldfarb also notes, the data from active service members is basically the same with a twist: Ron Paul comes first among Republicans, but Obama beats him over all. The point stands. It’s staggering to me that military donors are supporting the two clearly anti-war candidates in the race. I know that’s a message The Weekly Standard doesn’t want to hear. For them, war is as much an end as a means. Soldiers don’t always feel that way. Maybe because they see what it actually is.

Are you sitting down? Because if we have a Clinton Restoration, this kind of explanation is going to be coming at us quite often:

I was looking recently at Republican women voters (core Republicans and Republican leaners), and their support for Hillary has doubled in the last few months to 13 percent, from less than 6 percent. Also quite interestingly, "Don’t Knows" surged to 11 percent, so a total of 24 percent would either vote for her or consider voting for her.

How it takes me back …

Another Cheney moment?

Allegations that a Syrian envoy admitted during a United Nations meeting Oct. 17 that an Israeli air strike hit a nuclear facility in September are inaccurate and have raised the ire of some in the US intelligence community, who see the Vice President’s hand as allegedly being behind the disinformation.

A United Nations press release discussing the General Assembly’s Disarmament Committee meeting mistranslated comments ascribed to an unnamed Syrian diplomat as saying that Israel had on various occasions “taken action against nuclear facilities, including the 6 July attack in Syria.”

The UN has since gone through the tape recordings of the meeting and found that there was no mention of the word “nuclear” at all. According to the UN, the error was one of translation, involving several interpreters translating the same meeting.

Eye-tracking technology can reveal some interesting things about what men and women are really looking at at a baseball game. (Update: my husband, who is never wrong, reminds me I already posted about this sans graphic.)