I will echo what Andy McCarthy and others have been saying on this site: The Obama administration’s decision to give Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other 9/11 plotters a civilian trial in New York is both alarming and depressing. We sometimes speak of “the 9/10 mentality”: and this is a perfect expression of that mentality. George W. Bush said he wished to banish the days of treating Islamofascist terrorism as a law-enforcement problem; John Kerry campaigned in 2004 signaling a desire to return to those days; he was defeated; but the next Democratic nominee was elected — and here we go.
I quickly thought of something that Judge Michael Mukasey told me in an interview last summer. He was Bush’s last attorney general, as you remember. Years before that, he was a federal judge in New York — and he handled some of the early terror trials. In our interview, I asked him about the role of law enforcement in the War on Terror (as we used to call it). And he mentioned one of those early terror trials, though not one he was presiding over. He said, “I was walking back from lunch with one of my colleagues, the late John Sprizzo. And there were all of these marshals with their long arms, vests, and so on. And Sprizzo says, ‘What the hell are we doing here? This isn’t a law-enforcement problem, this is a military problem.’ . . . I thought this was a stunning insight.”
Um, yes.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
ADVERTISEMENT
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
George W. Bush used to mock mercilessly the idea of taking Islamofascists to court. He’d say things like, “They didn’t know what they were getting into, those terrorists. They probably thought we’d take ’em to court!” On one occasion, he said, “See, they thought we’d probably just file a lawsuit or two!”
Well, I guess that’s what Americans do: file lawsuits. Long ago, it passed baseball as the national pastime.
On the Corner a few days ago, Jack Pitney had a zesty and zinging
post about one of President Obama’s typically self-aggrandizing statements: “
As America’s first Pacific president, I promise you that this Pacific nation will strengthen and sustain our leadership in this vitally important part of the world.” Pitney spoke of Nixon (born in California in 1913) and quite a few other presidents.
This reminded me of Bill Clinton’s laughable claim that he was the first president to know anything about agriculture. No wonder Jimmy Carter has such fondness for him. And what would Thomas Jefferson say?
It was a bit confusing when the position of national intelligence director was established. Who was in charge? some of us wondered. Was the NID our intelligence chief? Was the DCI (director of Central Intelligence) now small potatoes? I thought of this when seeing this headline: “CIA said to have won turf war against intel chief.” Amusing headline, in a way. And the article began, “The CIA has won a turf battle over which government agency controls U.S. intelligence operations around the world.”
Anyway, interesting to some of us . . .
This is too. A reader sent me a
column from the
Detroit News by Manny Lopez, who is the paper’s auto editor. It seems that two Democrats in the Michigan state legislature have “introduced a bill that would mandate environmental activism into the curriculum”: the curriculum of driving schools. Lopez explains:
“Students learning to drive would be forced to spend some of their time in class learning about ‘the importance of carpooling and using public transportation,’ as well as ‘identifying the attributes of a fuel-efficient vehicle,’ and ‘recycling vehicle parts and fluids,’ among other secondary lessons that have nothing to do with captaining a two-ton machine down the freeway.”
More Lopez (and buckle your seatbelt):
“. . . though the state oversees driver’s education curriculum, elected officials have no place specifying exactly what should be taught, particularly so-called environmental mandates that have nothing to do with driving. Additionally, since these courses aren’t in the schools and parents have to pay for them out of their own pockets, they shouldn’t have to pay for someone else’s religion — and trust me, environmental activism is a religion.”
How you like them apples?
Lopez’s conclusion:
“If [legislators] really want to make the roads safer for student drivers and the rest of us, they should allocate their time and our resources to ensuring that the potholes on the road get fixed the first time instead of cracking open every year and forcing us to dodge them like we do student drivers.”
I imagine you’re with me in appreciating the guy’s spirit.
