KENNEDY: Mr. President, I oppose the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, and I urge the Senate to reject it.
WRIGHT: Mr. President, I oppose HR 3200—or any similar iteration—and I urge the Senate to reject it.
KENNEDY: In the Watergate scandal of 1973, two distinguished Republicans—Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus—put integrity and the Constitution ahead of loyalty to a corrupt President. They refused to do Richard Nixon’s dirty work, and they refused to obey his order to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. The deed devolved on Solicitor General Robert Bork, who executed the unconscionable assignment that has become one of the darkest chapters for the rule of law in American history.
WRIGHT: In the first months of the Obama Administration of 2009, blue dog Democrats have considered putting integrity and the Constitution ahead of loyalty to a corrupt President. They have tried to refuse to do the dirty work of Rahm and Ezekiel Emmanuel and they, so far, are refusing to obey their order to socialize one sixth of the American economy. That deed has devolved on Obama Care, an unconscionable idea that would become the darkest chapter for the rule of constitutional law in American history.
KENNEDY: That act—later ruled illegal by a Federal court—is sufficient, by itself, to disqualify Mr. Bork from this new position to which he has been nominated. The man who fired Archibald Cox does not deserve to sit on the Supreme Court of the United States.
WRIGHT: This act—which would certainly be ruled illegal by any court actually trying to uphold the Constitution—is sufficient, by itself, to disqualify Mr. Obama from the new position to which he has been recently elected. The man who holds in contempt the “negative rights” of the Constitution does not deserve to hold the highest office in this Republic.
KENNEDY: Mr. Bork should also be rejected by the Senate because he stands for an extremist view of the Constitution and the role of the Supreme Court that would have placed him outside the mainstream of American constitutional jurisprudence in the 1960s, let alone the 1980s. He opposed the Public Accommodations Civil Rights Act of 1964. He opposed the one-man one-vote decision of the Supreme Court the same year. He has said that the First Amendment applies only to political speech, not literature or works of art or scientific expression.
WRIGHT: Mr. Obama’s reform desires should also be rejected by the Senate because they—and he—stand for an extremist view of the Constitution and the role of government that places him outside the mainstream of timeless and immutable American constitutional principles. He opposes tort reform. He opposes health savings accounts. He has said that citizens opposing Obama Care are simply political pawns, not genuinely concerned citizens. His beliefs put him in lockstep with the principles of Fidel Castro, who recently called all of us who oppose Mr. Obama and his reforms racists.
KENNEDY: Under the twin pressures of academic rejection and the prospect of Senate rejection, Mr. Bork subsequently retracted the most Neanderthal of these views on civil rights and the First Amendment. But his mind-set is no less ominous today.
WRIGHT: Under the twin pressures of common sense rejection and the prospect of Senate rejection, Mr. Obama has subsequently lied about the most Neanderthal of the provisions and unavoidable consequences of Obama Care, and his mind-set is no less ominous today than it was as he was sleeping through twenty years of Jeremiah Wright sermons.
KENNEDY: Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.
WRIGHT: Barack Obama’s America is a land in which all of us would be forced to pay for any and all abortions, blacks would sit at ACORN voter registration counters, rogue union thugs could break the teeth of conservative black protesters in mid-day raids, school children would be taught to put condoms on bananas, writers and artists getting all “wee weed up” over crucifixes would be subsidized at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of Americans who dared to attempt to exercise their freedom to take care of themselves, their families, and not need government assistance.
KENNEDY: America is a better and freer nation than Robert Bork thinks. Yet in the current delicate balance of the Supreme Court, his rigid ideology will tip the scales of justice against the kind of country America is and ought to be.
WRIGHT: America is a better and freer nation that Barack Obama thinks. Yet in the current imbalance in government, his rigid ideology will tip the scales of justice and government against the kind of country America is and ought to be—and was founded to be.
KENNEDY: The damage that President Reagan will do through this nomination, if it is not rejected by the Senate, could live on far beyond the end of his presidential term. President Reagan is still our President. But he should not be able to reach out from the muck of Irangate, reach into the muck of Watergate, and impose his reactionary vision of the Constitution on the Supreme Court and on the next generation of Americans. No justice would be better than this injustice.
WRIGHT: The damage that President Obama will do through Obama Care, if it is not rejected by the Senate, will live on far beyond the end of his Presidential term. President Obama is still our President. But he should not be able to reach out from the muck of Chicago pay to play power, reach into the muck of American hating black separatism, and impose his reactionary view of the Constitution on this and the next generation of Americans. No care would be better than Obama Care.
Actually, maybe David Brooks was right. After doing it the Kennedy way, I do feel better. There is something to be said for fighting liberalism exactly the way Ted Kennedy fought Ronald Reagan, Robert Bork, and conservatism. This could be the first good piece of advice Brooks has ever given true conservatives.
YMBAL’S #26
If you are in favor of outlawing cigarettes and legalizing marijuana…
If you are in favor of outlawing guns and legalizing cocaine…
If you believe the NRA helps criminals while the ACLU protects the liberties of the innocent…
If you think Rush Limbaugh caused the Oklahoma City bombing but find no connection between the Gulf drilling moratorium and high gasoline prices…
If you think AIDS is spread by insufficient funding…
If you’ve ever been a Hispanic guy accused of being white while shooting Travyon Martin who was accused of being innocent…
If you find Catholic Bishops noble and idealistic when they oppose welfare cuts and capital punishment but think they are dangerous fanatics trying to legislate their theology when they defend the right to life…
If you find no similarities between a mob of African American youths burning an Asian’s store and white mobs of the Jim Crow era…
If your idea of affirmative action is your willingness to sacrifice someone else’s job or education to assuage your own guilt about being white…
If you find the right to transgender equality in the Constitution, or in the Sermon on the Mount…
If you rail against the Religious Right imposing their morality on you but support big government forcing people to “do the right thing”…
If your idea of diversity is a bunch of people who all look different but who all think alike…
If you are constantly finding rights for folks who are not American citizens in the US Constitution…
If you think oil companies should drill where there is no oil, simply because the area is part of their lease from the government…
If you blame America for using 25% of the World’s resources but ignore the fact that America is providing 90% of the world’s charity…
If you think the 9-11 Attacks were attacks against New York City, and not against the United States…
If you think Al Gore has any intention of living like he insists that the rest of us should…
If you think that inflating your tires and getting a tune up is the right answer for high oil prices…
...you might be a liberal. (YMBAL)
“Guess what this liberal would be all about? This liberal would be about socializing … uh, umm. … Would be about, basically, taking over, and the government running all of your companies.”
—California Democrat Maxine Waters to oil company executives in congressional hearing 2008
“If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.”
—Milton Friedman
27: PASTOR JONES VERSUS THE QUARAN: TO BURN OR NOT TO BURN
If you are obsessed with not inflaming the passions of Islamists who can’t stand you in the first place…
There were all kinds of liberal currents and cross currents running through the various layers of the furor over Terry Jones’ threatened Koran burning exercise. Or is that Qaran? Maybe Quaran?
But I digress. Back to the liberal cross-currents running through this issue. This episode was a decent object lesson on how some malignant soft liberalism creeps into the thinking of some conservatives, which is always very dangerous.
As you might remember, when Jones threatened to have his little ceremony, there was all kinds of faux outrage and perhaps more legitimate threats from the world of Islam were this to actually happen. Now is it just me, or does Islam’s repeated threats of violence and mayhem at every provocation—real or imagined—strike anybody else as the actions of a spoiled child’s tantrums? Come to think of it, if they’re such a religion of peace, what is it we have to fear from their tantrums in the first place?
To put this in perspective, Jones’ threat—which as of this writing was never carried out—was just the notion of some 30 people burning a few books. Meanwhile, at that very same time, we could see the reality of hundreds of Afghans actually burning American flags and actually shouting ‘death to the Christians’ on cable and the internet. Jones’ idea was a tiny threat which paled in contrast to a much bigger actuality. Can we have a little proportionality here?
No.
Our pundit class and political class were jumping all over themselves to be the first to decry Jones and appease the Jihadists. Dittos, sadly, some in our military establishment, though that’s another issue altogether. So I have to ask: Does our continued feckless caving in to this religion of peace’s repeated threats strike anyone else as the misguided actions of a wimpy, enabling parent?
Sure looks that way to me.
To be clear, I had no interest in—nor did I support—Pastor Terry Jones’ Quran burning exercise. My opposition had nothing to do with any high-minded reasons of political correctness. The whole thing just bored me. It was like the balloon boy stunt, only not as cute. Conversely, I did get queasy when so many of our opinion makers and political leaders felt the incessant need to line up and make sure that they denounced this action the first, the loudest, and with the most self-righteousness. There was quite a competition going on for this, yet none of them breathed a peep about what the Afghan protestors had just done at the time of Jones’ threatened ceremony. This is the soft liberalism that is creeping into normally conservative minds I was referring to.
Truth be told, the only part of this story that was newsworthy is how it illustrated a continued Neville Chamberlain-style appeasement policy on the part of our leaders towards Islam (that well-known religion of peace). It was nauseating and self-defeating. The faux outrage was nothing more than an extension of the American left blaming us for the attacks of 9-11. And when conservatives buy into this race to the outrage summit, they are buying into dangerous leftist thought processes.
This is right in line with this whole idea that we must have some sort of Oprah-like journey of self-discovery to see what it is that is so bad about us that provokes this religion of peace to lash out in such ghastly actions. To the liberal, all of this just must be our fault. This logic goes hand in hand with Barack Obama’s numerous apology tour speeches and the idea that we have to prove how good we are by allowing a mosque at Ground Zero.
Whatever the issue is, when it comes to Islam’s war on America, the burden of proof regarding moral standing is always on the United States. Murderous acts from followers of the religion of peace are legitimately provoked by something “the great Satan” is doing or has done, and everything that the “great Satan” is doing must be filtered through the prism of whether it is a provocative or not.
It is childish and ridiculous and obviously counterproductive.
We have shed much blood and treasure all across the globe in defense of others, and in return, the only real estate we have asked for was enough soil with which to bury our dead soldiers. Were we the imperialists that many claim, most of the world would be ours by now. In the name of freedom, we have captured much of it at one time or another.
That we are not perfect is merely an obvious fact that joins us to every other society in world history, including the Soviet Union and every Muslim nation. If one of the imperfections of our freedom is that people have the legal right in our country to be grossly inappropriate, so be it. So we have an aberrant preacher and a handful of followers in Florida who plan to burn a few Qurans? Big deal. The entire church congregation wouldn’t fill up the underwear aisle at a single small town Wal-Mart.
Meanwhile, we have a President who spent twenty years in a Chicago mega-church, led by a pastor running down our very own nation, and yet claiming to be a Christian at the same time. Our free society allows that, and it allows for Terry Jones to do what he will do, too.
This does not excuse any retaliation on the part of any Muslims for whatever does or does not transpire at Terry Jones’ church on any anniversary of 9-11. Moreover, it does not excuse the continued cowering in fear of this peaceful religion from any of our political or opinion leaders. Yet that continues.
Nothing guarantees the continued and increasing tantrums of a spoiled child like scared, enabling parents and their refusal to stand up to the child. If our leaders continue to play the part of the pusillanimous, scared parent, the religion of peace is guaranteed to continue their tantrums and threats of violent retaliation for every imagined provocation.
This is a terrible cycle, and if we don’t break it, they will, in fact, become our masters. It has already happened to a great degree in Europe and the U.K. And to me, this is the story of the proposed Koran burning and what it says about us. This is how soft liberalism can creep in and infest normally conservative folks. Spoiled children and enabling parents are by-products of liberal thought. These tendencies must be avoided by those who claim to lead us.
YMBAL’S #27
If your car is held together by Peace and Coexist bumper stickers…
If you want the American government to be feared by the American people but laughed at by Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad…
If you agree with John Kerry that Americans were stupid, distracted and uniformed in the 2010 mid term elections…
If you did not see “Passion of the Christ” and do not know anyone who did…
If you like the fact that people who actually know the Constitution get laughed at by people who are ignorant of it…47
If you fear the United States Chamber of Commerce more than you do the Ground Zero Mosque…
If you think liberalism (socialism) has done a great job managing the incredible resources of California and Cuba…
If you want a government bureaucrat who can access your voter registration to determine whether or not you get that hip replacement or cancer treatment…
If you want to pay six dollars per gallon for gasoline…
If you think America deserved what it got on 9-11, and that we can “handle another attack”…
If you are more worried about “why” they hate us than “that” they hate us…
If you think an economy will boom when government bureaucrats who take no risks make twice what folks who take all the risks of the private sector make…
If you voted for Jerry Brown again, even after he admitted that, the last time he was governor, he “had no plan” for California’s budget…
You Might Be a Liberal Page 21