The 25% Mainstream

The Left saw the effects of the true mainstream on the Senate Democratic caucus this afternoon, as the realists finally decided to put an end to the filibuster lunacy once and for all. Nineteen Democrats split away from twenty-four who took obstructionism to its bitter end, ensuring an end to debate on Judge Samuel Alito’s confirmation to the Supreme Court and a final roll-call vote tomorrow morning:

In the end, only 24 of the chamber’s 44 Democrats went along with the filibuster, a maneuver allowed under Senate rules to block a vote by extending debate indefinitely. It was also supported by the chamber’s lone independent, Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont.
Arguing against cutting off debate, Sen. John Kerry — who spearheaded the filibuster effort with his fellow Massachusetts Democrat, Sen. Ted Kennedy — said Alito’s record during his 15 years on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has given “the extreme right wing unbelievable public cause for celebration.”
“That just about tells you what you need to know,” Kerry said. “The vote today is whether or not we will take a stand against ideological court-packing.”
But Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said the move to cut off debate fulfilled a “very straightforward principle — a nominee with the support of a majority of senators deserves a fair up-or-down vote.”

Some of the more prominent Democrats refused to own up to reality. Every Senator who has either declared an interest in running for President or presumed to have an interest in the office voted against cloture and for a filibuster, including Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Joe Biden, Russ Feingold, and Evan Bayh — the latter who often gets described as a moderate in the Democratic ranks. Their leadership also showed their cluelessness, with Harry Reid and Dick Durbin also supporting the filibuster — and watching as the rest of their party decided to vote for moderation and tradition, not to mention reality.
What will this mean for the Democrats? It exposes a couple of truths, painful realizations that they have willfully ignored for the past three electoral cycles. First and foremost, the rank-and-file Democrats now understand that organizations like PFAW and NARAL do not represent “mainstream” views, but instead belong on the fringes of an increasingly incoherent left wing. Pressed to back up their rhetoric with a groundswell of public opinion, they ranted and raved on television, radio, and through a road show — and wound up with Alito still commanding a 2-1 edge for confirmation despite their smear campaigns. They may have belatedly discovered that their worship of abortion on demand has turned off a large number of voters.
Second, the bloviating of people like Ted Kennedy does not inspire the middle to their ranks, but instead repels more and more centrists through the obvious hyperbole and hypocrisy it demonstrates. The disgusting character assassination that Democrats attempted on the Judiciary Committee, propelled onward by the PFAW/NARAL crowd, alienated many who might have had some sympathy with the Democrats’ agenda otherwise. Extreme tactics and rhetoric denote desperation and a lack of intellectual support, two conditions not known for their attractiveness in politics.
The party may also have lost the radical-left bloggers and the energy they provide, at least in the short term. The outrage on the Daily Kos site threatens to attack half of the sitting Democratic caucus in the Senate, including every Senator who has to run for re-election in a red state. The blogging by Kerry and Kennedy on Kos’ site turned out to be a waste of time, and worse yet, a tease that encouraged the hard Left to energetically campaign for a strategy that half of the Senate didn’t follow. They feel betrayed — and perhaps rightfully so, although John Aravosis at Americablog tried to warn them to back off.
The media predicted a permanent split on the Right over the Harriet Miers nomination, but it might be more likely that the Left will split over the failure of the Alito filibuster. The 2006 election just took an unexpected turn.

The Sad, Pathetic State Of Filibusterers

I don’t know if this site actually has any influence on the Senate Democratic caucus, but when people start imploring politicians to exploit wounded soldiers for partisan gameplaying, they’ve lost all credibility. It’s even worse when they celebrate an opposition Senator’s injuries in a car accident that will keep that member from casting a vote.
If your cause boils down to tactics such as these, then everyone associated with it should be embarrassed by the connection. Hopefully, an intrepid news crew will wait outside of Walter Reed to see any Democrats inclined to endorse methods such as those urged by this blogger.

Hamas: Send Us Money, But Don’t Tell Us What To Do

Hamas made a plea today for continued funding of the Palestinian government it now heads by Western nations, but refused to reconsider its stand on the destruction of Israel:

A Hamas leader asked the international community on Monday not to cut aid to the Palestinian Authority, insisting the money would go toward helping the Palestinian people and Hamas was willing to have its spending monitored. …
He spoke ahead of Monday’s meeting of the so-called Quartet of Mideast mediators — the United States, the
European Union, the United Nations and Russia — to discuss the repercussions of Hamas’ election victory. The United States and European nations have said they will cut off aid to a Hamas-led government unless the group recognizes Israel, renounces violence and adheres to interim peace deals with Israel. …
Haniyeh urged the West to reconsider cutting off aid, saying it must recognize the result of the Palestinian election. He also said the money would be spent to help the Palestinian people in their daily lives and that Hamas was willing to discuss means of keeping the spending transparent.

Unfortunately for Haniyeh, cutting off aid comes from a recognition of the Palestinian election, not a rejection of it. The Palestinians made their choice at the polls — and we accept the results as a measure of the desire of the electorate. It does not mean that we will send our money into the hands of bloodthirsty terrorists, no matter how many votes they get from the Palestinians. That result should have been obvious to those who voted for a Hamas victory in last week’s elections. Instead, the voters made their choice, and now they have to live with the consequences of that choice.
It won’t matter where the money goes. We will not support a Hamas-led anything, let alone a government that wants to build its army out of its terrorist ranks. If they go broke for lack of international aid, then perhaps they will rethink their choices in the next election, if Hamas allows for another election after seizing power. (It took Fatah 10 years to hold a second parliamentary election.) The US won’t bolster Hamas’ credibility by sending cash, at least not while it still openly calls for the destruction of Israel.
Elections have consequences, as I noted in another context. Part of those consequences is a clear understanding of what the Palestinians want as a people. They voted for the radical terrorists, and more importantly, never bothered to form a separate political party based on peaceful coexistence with Israel. They left themselves a choice between Fatah and Hamas. Had they been serious about peace, the voters would have formed a third party based on that goal and overwhelmingly supported it.
Now they want our money after handing the reins to Hamas. No, thank you.

The Reluctant Filibusterers

Senate Democrats went to the airwaves yesterday to express their dissatisfaction with Samuel Alito’s nomination, but also with the filibuster that their base has pushed them into attempting. So-called “rock star” Barack Obama of Illinois blamed Democrats for an overreliance on procedural tactics and an inability to convince voters of the erosion of their “values”:

“We need to recognize, because Judge Alito will be confirmed, that, if we’re going to oppose a nominee that we’ve got to persuade the American people that, in fact, their values are at stake,” Obama said.
“There is an over-reliance on the part of Democrats for procedural maneuvers,” he told ABC’s “This Week.” …
Obama cast Alito as a judge “who is contrary to core American values, not just liberal values.”
But Obama joined some Democrats, including Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Charles Schumer of New York, in expressing his unhappiness with the filibuster bid. “There’s one way to guarantee that the judges who are appointed to the Supreme Court are judges that reflect our values. And that’s to win elections,” Obama said.

At least one Democrat understands that elections have consequences, but Obama doesn’t connect the dots all the way. In truth, Alito represents a mainstream school of thought that argues the court has arrogated far too much power to itself over the last several decades, and the only solution for that requires the appointment of judges that will send policy questions back to Congress where they belong. Alito has 2-1 support for confirmation among American voters. Bush won two elections and the Republicans won ever-growing majorities in the Senate based in large part on their views of the judiciary. People want judges like Alito confirmed, and that’s the point of saying that elections have consequences.
Other Democrats remain clueless, pledging to block Alito even as they criticize the use of the filibuster. Joe Biden wants to eat his cake and have it too, as he told CNN that he would vote for a filibuster even though it was unwise to do so:

“I think a filibuster make sense when you have a prospect of actually succeeding,” Biden said on CNN’s “Late Edition.” “I will vote one time to say to continue the debate. but the truth of the matter” is that Alito will be confirmed, he said.

That’s why Delaware sends you to the Senate, Mr. Biden — to participate in stupid, empty gestures. It seems that a number of Democrats feel the same way, but they fail to account for their constituents who believe that engaging in McCarthyite smear tactics does not actually fall within the boundaries of Senatorial privilege. Judge Alito’s record shows him as a superior candidate for the Supreme Court, more qualified than anyone in 70 years on the basis of his long service on the appellate bench, and the obstructionism of the Democrats is the only part of this process that truly lies outside of the values of the American people.

Forgetting The Lessons

Debra Burlingame, the sister of one of the pilots murdered on 9/11, writes in today’s OpinionJournal about the way we have changed our attitude about 9/11 and the failures of law enforcement and intelligence to “connect the dots” that could have prevented part or all of the terrorist plot. She rails against the politicization of the PATRIOT Act and the NSA intercept program, which the 9/11 Commission not long ago called on the administration to provide:

The Senate will soon convene hearings on renewal of the Patriot Act and the NSA terrorist surveillance program. A minority of senators want to gamble with American lives and “fix” national security laws, which they can’t show are broken. They seek to eliminate or weaken anti-terrorism measures which take into account that the Cold War and its slow-moving, analog world of landlines and stationary targets is gone. The threat we face today is a completely new paradigm of global terrorist networks operating in a high-velocity digital age using the Web and fiber-optic technology. After four-and-a-half years without another terrorist attack, these senators think we’re safe enough to cave in to the same civil liberties lobby that supported that deadly FISA wall in the first place. What if they, like those lawyers and judges, are simply wrong?
Meanwhile, the media, mouthing phrases like “Article II authority,” “separation of powers” and “right to privacy,” are presenting the issues as if politics have nothing to do with what is driving the subject matter and its coverage. They want us to forget four years of relentless “connect-the-dots” reporting about the missed chances that “could have prevented 9/11.” They have discounted the relevance of references to the two 9/11 hijackers who lived in San Diego. But not too long ago, the media itself reported that phone records revealed that five or six of the hijackers made extensive calls overseas.
NBC News aired an “exclusive” story in 2004 that dramatically recounted how al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, the San Diego terrorists who would later hijack American Airlines flight 77 and fly it into the Pentagon, received more than a dozen calls from an al Qaeda “switchboard” inside Yemen where al-Mihdhar’s brother-in-law lived. The house received calls from Osama Bin Laden and relayed them to operatives around the world. Senior correspondent Lisa Myers told the shocking story of how, “The NSA had the actual phone number in the United States that the switchboard was calling, but didn’t deploy that equipment, fearing it would be accused of domestic spying.” Back then, the NBC script didn’t describe it as “spying on Americans.” Instead, it was called one of the “missed opportunities that could have saved 3,000 lives.”
Another example of opportunistic coverage concerns the Patriot Act’s “library provision.” News reports have given plenty of ink and airtime to the ACLU’s unsupported claims that the government has abused this important records provision. But how many Americans know that several of the hijackers repeatedly accessed computers at public libraries in New Jersey and Florida, using personal Internet accounts to carry out the conspiracy? Al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi logged on four times at a college library in New Jersey where they purchased airline tickets for AA 77 and later confirmed their reservations on Aug. 30. In light of this, it is ridiculous to suggest that the Justice Department has the time, resources or interest in “investigating the reading habits of law abiding citizens.”

Do I fear the FBI more than al-Qaeda and Islamofascist terrorists? That’s the question that Americans have to ask themselves. Before answering, they should also ask themselves which organization do Americans have more control over — and which organization must answer to elected officials of the US government. In a time of war, I’m inclined to offer my trust to fellow Americans who have tried to operate under the law to protect us than I am inclined to err on the side of potential terrorists. Be sure to read Burlingame’s entire essay.

Why Don’t We Just Give Each Other A Big Hug?

John Arquilla, identified as a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Post-Graduate School in Monterey, CA, demonstrated an almost childlike naiveté in the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday. He argues that Osama bin Laden sincerely offered us a truce, and that we should have gladly accepted it:

When the audiotaped proposal was made 10 days ago, the White House dismissed it out of hand. That was a politically logical move, given the need to appear tough on terror at all times. An image of strength and determination may be particularly important in the months ahead because Republican Party leaders have put security issues at the heart of their 2006 congressional election campaign strategy.
But there are reasons why bin Laden’s overture should be carefully weighed and thoughtfully debated.
The moral imperative that should drive us is a sincere desire to end the long suffering of the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. Official figures suggest that 30,000 innocent noncombatants have been killed since March 2003 in Iraq alone. Many respected sources believe that this figure is grossly underestimated.
So if bin Laden were to call off his dogs of war, it would be a very good thing, saving lives by removing major elements in the insurgencies in both countries. Such al Qaeda withdrawals would sharply reduce the need for our forces to remain in these sad lands.
Peace would also prove a boon to our standing, both in the Muslim world and throughout the international community, where, after initial agreement with our attack on terrorists in Afghanistan, serious fissures erupted over the propriety (and legality) of our invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq.

First, Professor Arquilla uses the “30,000” figure incorrectly. That estimate included all Iraqi casualties, including security forces and “insurgents” as well as civilians. Even were that so, however, the best estimates of casualties by groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for the containment policy on Saddam Hussein came to 5,000 civilian deaths every month, meaning that doing nothing except maintaining the failing status quo ante would have meant 180,000 civilian deaths by the end of next month. In this case, war saved lives, and lots of them. It also liberated an oppressed people from one of the worst dictatorships in recent memory. In the end, war turned out to be by far the most moral of the two choices between containment and liberation.
But that’s not really Arquilla’s point. He wants to have the US negotiate with Islamist terrorists for a truce, and he never even gives one indication that he understands the Muslim tradition of truce, or hudna. He says that we can always re-engage if the Muslims turn out to have given their word falsely, but in fact history shows that a hudna is always a false truce, a space in which the Muslim can rebuild his strength until he is ready to go back to war against the infidel. A radical Islamic fundamentalist would only offer a truce in the tradition of the Prophet, who used it as a ruse to ultimately capture Mecca.
Does Arquilla know this? He never even mentions hudna in his op-ed. Instead, he says that we should accept Osama’s offer to build our standing in the Muslim world. Falling for a ruse would not build our standing with Muslims; it would make us look like illiterate fools and have them wondering if anyone in the United States ever bothered to study the Qu’ran before going to war against bn Laden and his band of radical Islamists. Someone should remind Professor Arquilla that we went to war on several fronts to protect Muslims from genocidal Serbs in the mid-1990s, and Muslims rewarded us with 9/11. They’re not interested in the friendliness of infidels. They see us as a threat to be destroyed; they saw us that way long before 9/11, and they will continue to see us that way until we completely surrender or they die.
Arquilla looks at this conflict through the eyes of Western liberalism and expects both sides to have similar goals: peace, freedom, and friendship. The Islamists do not share those goals, and they never will. They only want total victory for Islam and are willing to martyr themselves and any Muslim in the vicinity to get it. The only reason Osama offered the hudna is because he’s losing the fight and he needs breathing room to regather his strength and reorganize his network. Only an idiot would allow an enemy at war the opportunity to do that, and it seems rather disturbing that a professor at a military school would preach that as a desirable military strategy.

Munich Mastermind: ‘I Regret Nothing’

One of the first terrorist attacks to achieve global attention came in 1972 at the Munich Olympics, when Palestinian terrorists held 11 Israeli athletes hostage for two days, trying to pressure Israel into freeing captured comrades. The incident ended tragically, with all 11 Israelis murdered by their captors at the airport during a botched attempt to rescue them. The man who organized the terrorist attack, Mohammad Oudeh, told a German that he doesn’t have any remorse for his acts:

A former Palestine Liberation Organization guerrilla who was one of the masterminds of the 1972 terrorist attack on the Munich Olympics in which 11 Israeli athletes were killed said he “regrets nothing” about the incident.
Speaking to Germany’s Spiegel TV in an interview released Saturday, Mohammed Oudeh, better known as Abu Daoud, said it was up to Palestinians to “fight as long as it takes Israel to recognize our rights.”
“I regret nothing,” of the Munich attacks, he said, according to a transcript of the interview released ahead of its broadcast. “You can only dream that I would apologize.”

Abu Daoud, as he is also known, tried to tell the Germans that they never intended on killing the Israelis, but that seems at odds with the known facts of the attack. They opened fire on them in the Olympic compound, and at the airport they had ample opportunity to release the athletes instead of shooting them point-blank while restrained. Oudeh also claimed that the people killed later by the Mossad for their complicity in the attack were all innocent. One suspects that truth and Oudeh are not exactly close company.
It does shine a different light on the Spielberg film Munich, which struggled to portray the terrorists as troubled human beings. Oudeh reminds us that Spielberg missed by a mile in his analysis.

If It Walks Like A Duck …

The Arlington police department has a strange idea of what terrorism means, according to this report from the Star-Telegram. Police found two “sophisticated” pipe bombs in a hotel room rented by a man who died in an Arlington hospital, but deny that the man was a terrorist. CQ readers can make up their minds from this description:

Management at the InTown Suites, an extended-stay hotel in the 1700 block of Oak Village Boulevard, called 911 about 6 p.m. Friday to report a duffel bag filled with ammunition and two pipe bombs in the room of a man who died at an Arlington hospital about two days ago, Deputy Fire Marshal Darin Niederhaus said. …
The pipe bombs were about 15 inches long, about 3 inches in diameter and connected to each other by 10 to 12 feet of wire. The bombs were filled with black powder, gunshot pellets and enough bullets to create a spray of shrapnel if exploded, investigators said. …
“The purpose of this was to create as much havoc as possible, so that innocent bystanders are hurt,” he said. “We were lucky.”

And yet Niederhaus also told the Star-Telegram that there was no evidence that the man was a terrorist. They do know that the unnamed ‘plumber’ only came to Arlington a month ago and took a job at a local business. He drove a car with Louisiana plates, but had driver’s licenses from Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. He lived out of a motel and spent his money on explosives, and used his spare time building sophisticated pipe bombs that were designed to “create as much havoc as possible”, maximizing injuries to innocent bystanders.
But he wasn’t a terrorist … according to Arlington’s finest.
A word of advice to Arlington authorities: one does not have to have an Arabic surname to be a terrorist. Domestic lunatics that want to kill doctors for performing abortions, nutcases who attack researchers who use animals for developing medicines, and environmental psychotics who blow up car dealerships in order to protect Gaia all qualify as terrorists. In fact, anyone who produces pipe bombs designed to inflict maximum carnage on explosion meets the definition of terrorist on the face of the evidence at hand. Unless the Arlington police department has some other application for such explosive devices, I’d say they’d be better off assuming that this drifter was a full-fledged terrorist for some purpose rather than assume he just liked the smell of gunpowder in the morning. (h/t: CQ reader Gregg G.)

Gifts From The Left

Apparently, Dianne Feinstein’s reversal on the filibuster of Samuel Alito didn’t pacify Cindy Sheehan enough. The former Bush gadfly now wants to take on the California Senator in a primary fight for her re-election:

Cindy Sheehan, the peace activist who set up camp near President Bush’s Texas ranch last summer, said Saturday she is considering running against Sen. Dianne Feinstein to protest what she called the California lawmaker’s support for the war in Iraq.
“She voted for the war. She continues to vote for the funding. She won’t call for an immediate withdrawal of the troops,” Sheehan told The Associated Press in an interview while attending the World Social Forum in Venezuela along with thousands of other anti-war and anti-globalization activists.
“I think our senator needs to be held accountable for her support of George Bush and his war policies,” said Sheehan, whose 24-year-old soldier son Casey was killed in Iraq in 2004.

Feinstein has always enjoyed a lock on her seat, and even the GOP hasn’t focused as much of their energy on her as they have on the more-radical Barbara Boxer. Feinstein’s relatively centrist approach has made her a tougher target for Republican opponents in liberal California. The state Republican party has been in disarray for several years and mostly unable to mount serious challenges for state-wide seats for the last decade. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger’s surprise election as governor has done little to build party credibility.
A primary challenge to Feinstein might give Golden State Republicans an opening to reverse that trend. With Sheehan attacking Feinstein from the leftist base, Feinstein will have to move towards Sheehan to head off the Senator’s traditional Bay-area support from abandoning her for the new radical on the block. That will leave Feinstein vulnerable in teh general election, especially if the GOP can find a well-known, credible challenger for her seat.
It will probably prove a long shot for the GOP, but it might turn out that Sheehan could be an unexpected gift for GOP hopes of reinvigorating the party on the West Coast.

…And Generalissimo Franco Is Still Dead

The AP updates us on the process of moderation that Hamas has undertaken:

Following their resounding election victory, the Islamic militants of Hamas met the question of whether they will change their stripes with a loud “no”: no recognition of Israel, no negotiations, no renunciation of terror.
But the world holds out hope that international pressure can make them more moderate. At stake is the future of Mideast peacemaking, billions of dollars in aid and the Palestinians’ relationship with Israel, the United States and Europe.
Hamas’ victory — winning 76 of 132 parliament seats in Wednesday’s election — has created a dizzying power shift in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, overturning certitudes and highlighting the failure by Palestinian leaders, Israel and the international community to ease growing desperation in the Palestinian territories.

The AP gets its editorial voice into a news report with that last paragraph, blaming Israel and the West for the Palestianian selection of Hamas as its government. That will apparently be the left-wing meme for the collapse of the illusion of a peace process that involved one party that would only accept the peace of annihilation. Israel coughed up Gaza without any return gesture from the Palestinians, and the West has poured billions of dollars into the territories through the organization that Europe and liberals insisted was the only one that truly represented Palestinian interests. Now the rejection of that corrupt organization for an explicit supporter of genocide and terrorism somehow translates to a failure of the West?
Perhaps the only failure that can be blamed on the West comes from trusting people like Jimmy Carter for advice and analysis. The Palestinians, however, have spoken clearly about what they want, and they want a government committed to the destruction of Israel and not to a two-state solution. Any other analysis not only ignores the obvious choice open to the Palestininans, it also transforms Palestinians into idiots who voted without understanding that Hamas supports terrorism as its main strategy for change.
I’m taking the Palestinians at their word. They want terrorism over negotiation, and war over peaceful coexistence with Israel. Let them have it — and let them handle it without the moderating influence of the entire West restraining Israel’s response to Palestinian provocations. Let the Palestinians feel the full consequences of the choice they have made. Only when they realize that the world will allow them to lose the war against Israel, and lose the land they have, will they start to form political parties that advocate for peaceful coexistence instead of two parties advocating for annihilation on two different schedules.