Realpolitik

In 1953, the Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadeh, was overthrown by a CIA-backed coup and

replaced by Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Mossadeh had nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company the previous year, had balked at compensating the British for their losses and then cut off diplomatic relations with the UK while facing a mounting threat from the Tudeh, Iran's Communist party. President Eisenhower understood that if Mossadeh were overthrown by the Communists, the Soviet Union would control Iran's huge oil reserves, threaten commerce through the Persian Gulf, destabilize the Middle East and gain a major strategic advantage, so he authorized an operation that resulted in Mossadeh's ouster and the elevation of the Shah. Dirty and distasteful, yes, but given the circumstances, Ike had little choice: Stand on idealistic principles and suffer a strategic defeat or get his hands dirty and throw a roadblock in front of the Soviets.

Guatemala in 1954 was led by Jacobo Arbenz, a democratically-elected Leftist who had nationalized United Fruit, a US company, the previous year and who had refused to compensate the owners for their losses, and whose political base included a vocal and growing Communist Party. After Arbenz appointed several Communists to positions within his government, President Eisenhower decided that he wouldn't wait for Guatemala to become a Soviet satellite and he authorized a CIA operation to topple Arbenz, Operation PBSUCCESS. With clandestine radio broadcasts and by co-opting an existing anti-Communist guerrilla force, CIA convinced the Guatemalan Army that they faced overwhelming numbers and that the US was about to intervene. The army refused to support Arbenz, the President fled the country and Operation PBSUCCESS was a success, forestalling a Soviet beachhead in Central America.

In 1963, the United States sanctioned a military coup in South Vietnam in which a group of Army and Air Force officers overthrew and executed President Ngo Dinh Diem over his corrupt and autocratic rule, which had included rigging elections and arresting and executing political opponents. Occurring as it did only three weeks before President John F. Kennedy was himself assassinated, this event is tinged with more than a hint of irony given Kennedy's themes of hope and self-determination for post-colonial countries (he did found the Peace Corps, after all), but the United States was locked in a life-or-death struggle in the early 1960's with the international Communist movement. President Eisenhower had involved the United States in Vietnam to prevent a Communist takeover of Indochina based on the "domino theory" - if Vietnam collapsed, then Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma and Indonesia would soon follow - and Kennedy had adopted Eisenhower's policy and the underlying rationale. He held his nose at Diem's corruption but when the opportunity arose to get rid of him and replace him with someone who would hold free elections, respect free speech and the press, release political prisoners and take aggressive action against the Viet Cong, Kennedy didn't hesitate: Diem was killed and US interests were advanced.

The latest crisis in Egypt illustrates once again the Priest-King administration's painful ineptitude in foreign policy. From the 2008 campaign onward, Priest-King has trumpeted a Leftist approach to foreign affairs that included pandering to the Islamic world, the Russians, the Chinese, the Palestinians and the UN, cutting American military power, vacillating during the Arab Spring, retreating from Iraq and Afghanistan, alienating Great Britain and Israel and generally acting as a bystander in global affairs rather than as the world's only true superpower. Leftist dogma holds that an aggressive American foreign policy that gives top priority to American strategic interests is selfish, arrogant, anachronistic and crude, therefore, American interests should be ignored to mollify the bruised egos of other countries, even countries hostile to us. We are the world's oldest and greatest democracy so we must respect the results of democratic elections wherever they are held, even if the results run counter to our long-term interests; to do otherwise is hypocrisy, goes the Leftist fellow-traveler mindset. This approach, as you may have noticed, is characteristic of liberal philosophy on at least three points, namely:

1. America is always to blame
2. A preoccupation with the opinions of other countries
3. Ideology trumps reality

...and has proven wholly inadequate. In January 2006, HAMAS won a majority of seats in the Palestinian parliament in a democratic election. Nouri al-Maliki is the democratically-elected Prime Minister of Iraq. However, HAMAS is dedicated to the destruction of Israel and al-Maliki is an Iranian puppet, so the fact they both won free elections is not enough: We want democracies that also support our strategic interests.

Mohamed Morsi was elected President of Egypt in that country's first free election ever last year but is also a hardcore member of the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the oldest and most extreme terrorist groups in the Middle East. (Ayman al-Zawahiri is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, you will recall.) Since his election in June 2012, the Egyptian economy has tanked while Morsi sacked the most senior members of Egypt's military and intelligence structure, seized all executive and legislative power for himself, declared a state of emergency during which he could take any action he deemed necessary to "protect the revolution," cracked down on free speech and free exercise of religion (Christian churches have been attacked and Christians have persecuted to the point of crucifixion), promoted sharia law and pursued an extreme Islamic agenda. He was able, in only one year, to antagonize every segment of Egyptian society except the Muslim fanatics of his base and - notably - the Priest-King administration, who threw their full support behind him. The $1.5 billion in military aid that we give Egypt every year was confirmed and Hillary Clinton and Priest-King himself both publicly declared their support for Morsi's regime, again solely because he was democratically elected. And now he has been ousted by popular demand and Priest-King is flummoxed, unable or unwilling to grasp that he has bet on the wrong horse ..again.

Foreign policy is not for ideologues or the faint of heart. In Egypt's case, Hosni Mubarak was a dictator but a dictator that we could work with: He fought on our side in Desert Storm, he honored his treaties with us and with Israel, he kept a lid on Islamic extremists and he was a solid ally for thirty years. Throwing him under the bus in favor of Mohamed Morsi was a strategic mistake and we will pay for it. The Egyptians who protested and risked their lives to oppose Morsi are angry that we supported him and ignored their grievances, they will remember that we did nothing to help them in their hour of need, that the world's champion of freedom sat on its hands in their crisis, and they will never trust us again. The world is the way the world is, Mr. President, not the way you want it to be.

A Rising Tide?

Well, we're there. On 26 June, the Supreme Court overturned the Defense of Marriage Act so homosexuals

can receive Federal benefits and upheld the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision to overturn Proposition 8 in California, clearing the way for statewide recognition of homosexual marriages and setting the conditions for nationally-recognized homosexual marriage throughout the United States. Every warning that conservatives have issued on this subject has come true and every last warning has been ignored. God help our country.

Anthony Kennedy, Ronald Reagan's third choice to replace Lewis Powell in 1987, cast the deciding vote and wrote the majority opinion in the DOMA case, twisting logic to fit the outcome he wanted. He asserted that the definition of marriage had always been left to the States and the Federal government had no right to interfere, and I quote: "The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity." So, as far as the Supreme Court is concerned, DOMA had "no legitimate purpose"? Protecting traditional marriage from being mocked and degraded is "no legitimate purpose"? We're in a new country, my friends, a country in which a law passed by 342 Congressmen and 85 Senators and signed by the President of the United States with strong popular support, with the intent of defining marriage for the Federal government and not the States, may be voided by one man for his purpose, that is, advancing homosexuality in our society. Justice Kennedy arrogantly dismisses the idea that the Federal government might have an interest in the institution of marriage, but the whole point of DOMA was to prevent the very trend that is happening now: Pro-gay marriage States attempting to force conservative States to recognize the unions they have sanctioned, using the provisions in Article IV of the Constitution as their basis (that States must respect each others' laws). In short, DOMA was a constitutional device used to prevent an unconstitutional encroachment, and now has been voided as being unconstitutional itself, all so homosexual marriage may proceed.

Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the coup de grace to the Proposition 8 case on a technical point, specifically, that the people of California who drafted and helped pass the proposition had no standing in Federal court, given that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Prop 8 and the California state government refused to defend it. Although not a direct nullification of Prop 8 on its merits, this decision guts the proposition in effect and the Court covered itself in shame nonetheless. Here we had a lawfully crafted amendment to the California state constitution, approved by a strong majority of the voters, overturned by a notoriously liberal appeals court and a state government, elected to represent the people and enforce the laws faithfully, refusing to do its duty on purely ideological grounds. Given the state's abdication of their duty, what were the people to do but to present their case themselves? If the people's elected officials refuse to enforce the laws impartially, if they refuse to defend the laws and the courts refuse to uphold the laws, then the people are literally at the mercy of their government and that is not democracy but tyranny.

Both cases are defeats for traditional marriage by themselves but together, they signal a sea change for our country. The Supreme Court has decided to reshape American society according to their liberal views much as they did with Roe v. Wade in 1973, steering our country in a dangerous new direction in the face of strong opposition: If most of the people don't want homosexual marriage, then by thunder, we'll just force them to accept it! Or so goes the argument. On the one hand, they insisted that only the States have the right to define marriage and on the other hand, they rejected a State's lawful attempt to do just that. The only thing that mattered was sweeping away all opposition to homosexual marriage by plain judicial fiat and my question is: Then what? Having redefined marriage to suit themselves, how will the homosexual lobby and their liberal friends in the courts respond when polygamists demand equal treatment, or when pedophiles want to marry their victims, or when groups of people want to marry other groups of people? When the supply of desirable children available for adoption is exhausted (so the homosexuals may ape the family), will heterosexual couples be forced to surrender every other child, or every child, to the State for "redistribution"? The institution loses its meaning, becomes irrelevant and fades away, and our society devolves into a confused mass of self-centered dilettantes demanding recognition for their sexuality, however they choose to define it. Marriage, which used to mean only one thing, is then redefined to mean anything, or more correctly, nothing .

...which is what the homosexual lobby wants. Traditional marriage involves a moral judgment wherein one heterosexual man commits himself to one heterosexual woman for life, providing the perfect environment for the birth, growth and education of children and the prosperity of the family, and where there is moral judgment, there is God. Homosexuals cannot possibly match this arrangement, they are excluded - or rather they exclude themselves - by the lifestyle they choose, they bristle at the notion that what they are doing is immoral - how dare God judge them? -  they envy traditional marriage and want very much to mimic it, to share in its social and legal benefits, to be validated. The only way to have what they want, then, is to dispense with the moral dimension altogether, to affirm that sexuality is irrelevant, and to claim that by reserving marriage only for heterosexual couples, society demeans them. This claiming of victimhood goes a long way among the Left, it grants a measure of legitimacy for homosexuals that has obviously resulted in dramatic change in their favor, but what do these decisions mean for our democracy?

• Judicial diktat trumps the democratic process. Both DOMA and Prop 8 enjoyed very strong popular support and were passed by overwhelming majorities in the respective legislatures and they were both overturned. The ability of the people to govern themselves, therefore, through their elected representatives and through ballot initiatives, is seriously undermined, and the people's confidence in their government evaporates since the government may choose which laws they will honor and which they won't, at the same time insisting that the people strictly obey every law without exception.  The courts now have power not accorded them under our Constitution and be assured: They will use it as they see fit, and they will use it to gain even more power.

• Federalism will suffer since neither the Federal government nor the States will understand exactly what they may do.  The Defense of Marriage Act was voided in deference to the States and Prop 8 was voided in deference to a Leftist agenda, so where's the line, really?

• Religious freedom, especially for Christians, is diminished and will continue to suffer. What if a Christian wedding planner refuses to serve a homosexual couple? What if a Christian minister refuses to perform a homosexual wedding? Would a Christian church have its property seized for the same reason, would its members be liable for criminal prosecution?

The Left interprets these decisions as great victories for civil rights and they dismiss conservatives' concerns as the usual handwringing when society changes faster than they'd like, but be wary: If they believe they are riding a rising tide, a rising tide can indeed lift all boats but it can also drown everyone.

The Fosbury Flop

He's spent nearly $14 trillion and added $7 trillion to the national debt in barely four years, to no effect, but it's not his fault.

The unemployment rate has been over 7% for his entire administration, over 13 million people are out of work, nearly 3 million people are collecting unemployment benefits, there are more people collecting food stamps than at any other time in our history and over 4 million jobs have been lost during his administration, but it's not his fault.

The $789 billion stimulus plan failed, Obamacare will cost at least twice as much as advertised and will kill as many as 700,000 jobs, his green energy initiative resulted in multiple bankruptcies and no jobs and he hasn't passed a budget in nearly four years, but it's not his fault.

China and Russia refused to support tougher sanctions against Iran, Iran refused his direct appeals to abandon its nuclear weapons program and even accelerated it, he was asleep at the switch during the Arab Spring, Egypt is run by the Muslim Brotherhood, Iraq is falling apart, the Taliban will reconquer Afghanistan after we retreat, Pakistan is in turmoil, AI Qaeda is running loose across North Africa, Syria is a bloodbath, China, Russia and even Ecuador openly mock us over arresting the fugitive Edward Snowden, but it's not his fault.

Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry is dead because Eric Holder allowed known drug traffickers to buy guns in the United States and take them back to Mexico to arm the drug cartels, and Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed by Muslim terrorists in Benghazi, Libya, because all their requests for extra security were denied and their urgent appeals for help during the attack were refused, but it's not his fault.

The EPA and the IRS conduct a campaign of harassment and intimidation against conservative non-profit groups, the Justice Department refuses to prosecute members of the Black Panthers for voter intimidation during the 2008 presidential election, and the same Justice Department obtains the private telephone records of over 100 Associated Press employees as well as Fox News reporter James Rosen in an effort to intimidate the press, but it's not his fault.

Two Gallup polls released recently indicate a 24-point gap between the people's dissatisfaction with the direction of the country and Priest-King's job approval. This phenomenon manifested itself very clearly in the 2012 presidential election when people recognized that the country was in horrible shape but refused to blame Priest-King himself, as if he were only a bystander in his own administration. What could explain this paradox? How can the same people complain about the effect of Priest-King's policies, who may have even lost their job or their business because of Priest-King's policies, but hold Priest-King himself blameless? Here are some ideas that I came up with:

Reason #1: The people polled were mainly Democrats with a natural loyalty to Priest-King.

Reason #2: The people polled were afraid to blame Priest-King in front of the pollster for fear of being called a racist.

Reason #3: The people polled think that Priest-King is trying hard but needs more time to turn things around, his staff are letting him down, circumstances are beyond his control and they want to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Reason #4: The people polled think that Priest-King is trying as hard as he can but they don't want to admit that the first black President is out of his depth.

Reason #2 is certainly valid since everything in the United States is viewed through the prism of race, especially these days. (On Tuesday the 25th the Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that required states of the old Confederacy to submit any changes to their election laws to the U.S. Attorney General for review and approval, infuriating the Left.) Reason #3 is also valid as people, liberally-inclined or not, want to give their elected officials a fighting chance to prove they can do the job, but it also indicates a sort of recognition among those polled that Priest-King really isn't the Messiah the Left thought he was in 2008: If everything has to be perfect in order for his policies to work, then maybe his powers aren't as awesome as advertised. Reason #3 gets us closer but I think Reason #4 hits the nail on the head. With over four years' worth of empirical evidence proving that Priest-King's approach to domestic and foreign policy is an absolute disaster, over 66 million Americans nonetheless voted for his reelection and a plurality still approves of his performance. When Jimmy Carter mangled the Presidency and essentially gave up, the American people showed him the door; likewise when George H.W. Bush broke his famous pledge "read my lips: no new taxes," the voters turned on him and gave us eight years of Bubba. But with Priest-King, job performance isn't tied to job security and I think that reveals an embarrassing trait in those die-hard Priest-King supporters: they've set the bar pretty damned low for him, lower than any other President. For all the soaring rhetoric and imperial bearing and crowds of adoring fans and hope and change and hyperbole, people really don't expect a lot from the Priest-King of the Americas. He can sink us under a mountain of debt, he can raise taxes as high as the sky, he can interfere in every segment of American society (what business is it of the President to appear with Dave Letterman, to inject himself into a local arrest in Massachusetts or to comment on the Trayvon Martin case?) and fumble every foreign policy issue on the table and still be idolized by the masses. Millions of people thrown out of work and kept out of work, businesses ruined, homes and families destroyed, freedom lost, America diminished, yet Priest-King smiles and waves to his adoring fans and they forgive him all. After four years of pandering to the Islamic world, to Russia, to China, after four years of apologizing and bowing to foreign monarchs to prove how humble and contrite he is, what did that get us? When China and Russia had the opportunity to help us arrest the fugitive NSA employee Edward Snowden, they dismissed our appeals out of hand - even Ecuador felt empowered to kick sand in our face - and Priest-King said and did nothing, the President of the United States mocked and humiliated like a pimple-faced teenager in the school cafeteria. If my fellow citizens are satisfied with
mediocrity, failure, bankruptcy, abuse of power, lying, disrespect, criminal neglect and needless death from their Chief Executive, then I urge them to splash some cold water on their faces and wake up: If all they want is an empty suit, then go to Brooks Brothers.

Putting Two and Two Together

Hmm...:

20 January 2009: Priest-King is inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States.

15 April 2009: In protest of Priest-King's massive tax and spend policies, rallies are held across the country, drawing thousands of people and sparking the TEA Party movement.

September 2009: As Congressional politicians return home for the Labor Day recess, they face angry opposition at town hall meetings over their support for the stimulus package, the bank bailout bill, the government takeovers of General Motors, Chrysler, AIG and Goldman Sachs and the entire health care sector and the threatened cancellation of the Bush tax cuts. Public opposition to Priest-King's policies mounts.

November 2009: Republicans Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell are elected to the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia respectively.

January 2010: Republican Scott Brown wins Ted Kennedy's old Senate seat in Massachusetts, the liberal radio network Air America goes bankrupt and the Supreme Court, in the Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission case, decides that private companies have the right to advocate for their political causes the same as labor unions. The TEA Party movement gathers serious momentum.

March 2010: The Internal Revenue Service begins systematic targeting of conservative political and religious groups applying for 501(c)3 tax-exempt status, harassing and threatening them with audits, arrest and prosecution, demanding voluminous, detailed and very private personal information to which the IRS had no legal right, and delaying approval of their applications indefinitely.

November 2010: The TEA Party drives the "shellacking," a massive midterm electoral defeat for the Democrats. The IRS targeting campaign against conservative non-profit groups intensifies.

November 2012: Priest-King is reelected President, in no small part because conservative support for the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, was soft.

May 2013: Six months after the election and only hours before the IRS Inspector General releases an internal review, the IRS admits that they had indeed deliberately targeted conservative nonprofit groups for harassment.

It is absolutely laughable that the Priest-King administration expects us to believe that a couple of junior agents at the IRS office in Cincinnati "went rogue" and began targeting conservative groups completely on their own. (The IRS Inspector General released another report today indicating that 292 conservative groups were targeted for harassment vice six liberal groups, blowing up the argument that conservatives and liberals suffered equally.) Using only the timeline above, we can see that serious, determined opposition to Priest-King's socialist agenda was building into a nationwide movement in early 2010. The TEA Party rallies, the bitter, angry town hall meetings with ordinary citizens standing up to their elected officials, the losses in New Jersey, Virginia and gasp! Massachusetts, and especially the Supreme Court's decision to allow corporate political activity on the same footing as labor unions - wiping out 35 years of liberal advantage where that was concerned - were sending shock waves through the White House. If something were not done quickly to stop it, the TEA Party movement would defeat Priest-King in 2012, reverse everything he had achieved and set the socialist agenda back for a generation, and Priest-King was simply not going to allow that. So what happened? The decision was quickly made, likely suggested by then-White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew and approved by Priest-King, to take the wind out of their sails but good, and what government agency inspires more fear than the dreaded IRS? If these dumb flyover country hicks wanted tax-exempt status for their TEA Party groups, then they would have to answer extremely detailed questions by the boatload, provide personal information about themselves, their friends, their colleagues and relatives which would then be handed to Priest-King's loyal Leftist pals to exploit, and the process would be slowed to a crawl. They would be interrogated by Treasury agents, audited and audited again, forced to provide the same information repeatedly, harassed, bullied, intimidated, threatened with prosecution, and a decision would never be made for their application. If everything worked, the TEA Party movement would float in the ocean, engines dead, at the mercy of the waves, powerless - unable to help themselves, much less unseat the Priest-King of all the Americas, and that's what happened.

But there's more at stake than the result of the 2012 presidential election, disappointing as that was. At the core of this scandal is the conscious decision by the Federal government to attack United States citizens for their political and religious beliefs, the 'exact circumstances that drove thousands of people to flee England and seek freedom in the New World. If this scandal isn't investigated to the fullest, if its full scope isn't discovered, if the instigators - whoever they are - aren't arrested, prosecuted and jailed, if the idea behind the scandal isn't crushed into powder, then the American people have no reason to trust the government that serves them and every reason to fear it. Citizens will be afraid to organize, to petition their government, to express contrary opinions, to donate to groups that advocate for their causes, in short, they will be deprived of the free exercise of their Constitutional rights and that is tyranny, pure and simple. So let the Congress investigate, let the grand juries be convened, let the guilty be punished and let the glittering legacies be sullied ...tyranny deserves nothing less.

What Else Would You Like To Know?

AMENDMENT IV: 

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. " 

Last Thursday the 6th we woke up to the news that the National Security Agency has been secretly collecting almost every electronic communication in America - Facebook postings, Twitter feeds, text messages, cell phone calls, credit card purchases, etc. - to compile a massive computer database, in order to detect and hopefully disrupt terrorist attacks against the United States. The operation had been leaked to a British newspaper and the leaker, a guy named Edward Snowden, a contract employee of NSA in Hawaii, announced in a television interview that he felt that the scope of the operation vastly exceeded the spirit and the letter of the Constitution and that he felt compelled to expose it - after he had abandoned his job and his girlfriend in Hawaii for a five-star hotel in Hong Kong, of course, so he's no Jefferson Smith - so the American public would be aware of the government's activities. Now you would think that after years of bitterly criticizing President Bush's use of the Patriot Act and authorizations from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to conduct electronic monitoring of terrorist cells, while he was a permanent campaigner,er, Senator from Illinois, Priest-King would be the last person to defend this sort of wide-ranging drift net snooping, let alone actively use it, but once again, Priest-King defies conventional wisdom. After all, his Department of Justice obtained private telephone records of over 100 Associated Press employees, named Fox News reporter James Rosen as a possible "co-conspirator" in a national security leak investigation and obtained the private telephone records of Mr. Rosen's parents, and the IRS conducted a sustained campaign of harassment and intimidation of conservative advocacy groups during which they demanded volumes of detailed personal information which they then shared with liberal advocacy groups: What a guy!


SIDEBAR: ...and this is going on while the Priest-King administration leaked information about the Flame virus, the Predator "kill list," the Osama bin Laden raid, and stonewalls Congress about Benghazi. The theme: Information belongs to Priest-King alone. He can do whatever he wants with it. He wants to know everything about us, who we are, where we live, with whom we associate, what we say, what we eat, where we worship, what we believe, everything. He wants this information so he can control us, he may dispose of this information as he sees fit and anyone who thinks otherwise will be crushed.

SIDEBAR REDUX: The Attorney-General may sign a request to subpoena telephone records, accuse a reporter as a co-conspirator in leaking national security information, shop the request to three different judges until he found a judge who would approve it, lie to Congress that he'd never been involved in such a program, claim that he never intended to prosecute Mr. Rosen so he didn't actually perjure himself, and keep his job. This is a great country, isn't it?

Now coming back to this latest scandal, we are finally hearing the term "probable cause." The Constitution insists that if the government thinks I'm involved with a crime, they must obtain a search warrant based upon a reasonable suspicion and specify what they're searching for and where. That is the essence of that particular protection, that the government is NOT entitled to conduct general searches just to find out as much as they can and they are NOT entitled to keep whatever information they find. After 9/11, President Bush was deeply concerned about preventing future terrorist attacks and used electronic monitoring, authorized by the FISA court, to detect, identify and track communications between terrorists working overseas and their accomplices here in the United States. The Left, including Priest-King, slammed Dubya consistently for this focused, limited monitoring program but now we've gone miles beyond that. The government is sweeping up massive amounts of information on ordinary Americans, not because we are suspected of any crime or because we belong to a terrorist organization but to know as much as they can. I have not been charged with a crime, I have not been arrested, I have not been suspected, I live a fairly dull, ordinary, unexciting life but nonetheless the government wants to know everything about me. We can agree that we need to do everything we can to prevent future terrorist attacks like 9/11 and the Boston Marathon bombing, we can agree that nobody but the terrorists wants Americans to die and that government at all levels has to aggressively detect, pursue and deter terrorist threats, but within the bounds of the Constitution. Mr. Edward Snowden, like PFC Manning of WikiLeaks infamy, signed a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) with the U.S. Government promising to protect the information to which he was granted access. (I'm sure that we'll find out more but it stinks to high Heaven that a) He was only in his job for three months before he leaked this information; b) He fled to China, our arch-rival in the Pacific; and c) He leaked this information the day before Priest-King's summit with new Chinese President Xi Jinping, seriously undercutting our negotiating position as we confront China over their hacking activities and their domestic surveillance program.) If he is extradited, he should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law because the information he leaked did not belong to him, but now that it's out, it's time for a robust public debate about what the American people want and what they're willing to accept. A small, limited, tightly-controlled program focused on telephone calls from overseas to terror suspects in the United States is one thing, sweeping up every electron in America is quite another. The American people are justifiably suspicious of their government for the reasons I provided above as well as Priest-King's failure to enforce immigration law and the Defense of Marriage Act, allowing known Mexican drug traffickers to buy guns in the United States and use them to commit crimes in Mexico and, in Bill Clinton's day, sifting through hundreds of confidential FBI files to compile a White House enemies list. And let's not forget that under Obamacare, the medical records of every person in the United States are to be digitized and stored in a massive government database - the government will know which doctor you see, what medical conditions you have and which medications you take to treat them (and how much they cost), are you overweight, do you have a family history of heart disease or diabetes - so the government will be able to control your behavior. For God's sake, Eric Holder refused to deny, under oath, that the Executive Branch was spying on Members of Congress, so yes, the people have probable cause themselves to mistrust their government and to insist that it be restrained.

Case in point: In Katz v. United States, the U.S. Government suspected Mr. Charles Katz of running an illegal gambling operation across state lines and was using a public telephone to communicate with his confederates. The FBI placed a wiretap on the phone booth in question (they had things like that in 1967) without first obtaining a warrant, reasoning that because it was a public utility, Mr. Katz' conversations weren't protected by the Fourth Amendment. They obtained the evidence they needed, arrested and subsequently prosecuted Mr. Katz but in a 7-1 ruling, the Supreme Court overturned Mr. Katz' conviction on the ground that the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable searches and seizures applies to people, not places, and reminded the government they must operate within the law, especially where information is concerned.

The Federal government may think that because they own the Internet and the airwaves and the telephone lines, they can necessarily monitor - and archive, and exploit - whatever goes over them, but they can't. The Founding Fathers knew that a government that knows everything about everyone can bend the people to its will, and they had just fought a revolution against that kind of tyranny. Let's have this debate, let's vigorously protect against further terror attacks but if the government lacks probable cause, leave me alone.

If It Walks Like a Duck...

FROM THE CRIME DESK: Dr. Kermit Gosnell has been convicted of murder and sentenced to life in

prison without parole. A jury found him guilty of killing a poor Bhutanese immigrant woman and three infants who were born alive at his Philadelphia abortion mill, which as I have noted in this space, hadn't been inspected for seventeen years and was operated more like a butcher shop than anything else. (The judge dropped three other counts of murdering infants because nobody actually witnessed those particular crimes, so apparently physical evidence - the dead children - wasn't enough.) We are told that the jury agonized over the case for eight days before rendering their verdict, which we might expect after forty years of liberal indoctrination, but they eventually came to the right and natural conclusion: Murdering helpless children is wrong. I guess there's still hope for you, America.

IRS USED TO ATTACK HIS POLITICAL ENEMIES, PRIEST-KING SHOCKED: The Internal Revenue Service has targeted dozens of conservative groups applying for 501(c)3 tax-exempt status, requiring especially burdensome paperwork and detailed, intrusive information to which the agency is not entitled, and extending the approval of such status from weeks to years. We've also been informed that the IRS lied to Congress last year when they stated that no such program was underway, that the effort was not the work of low-level employees in one office (Cincinnati) but was created and managed from Washington, that the IRS was goaded by Democrat politicians on Capitol Hill to target conservative groups, that even Billy Graham Ministries received special scrutiny because of their opposition to gay marriage, that the information the IRS obtained was shared with the left-wing advocacy group ProPublica, and that aside from the acting Commissioner who was pressured to resign Wednesday, absolutely nobody has been disciplined for this criminal activity. Priest-King, for his part, hem-hawed on the subject at his press conference on Monday, trying to acknowledge the severity of the scandal without taking responsibility for it, but let's get real: The guy who fired the CEO of General Motors when he had no authority to do so wouldn't blink at using the IRS to bludgeon his political enemies. THIS IS SERIOUS, PEOPLE. An agency of the Federal government was directing its fearsome powers against American citizens because of their political and religious beliefs, denying them equal protection, collecting extremely private and detailed information to which it had no right, which it then shared with Priest-King's left-wing allies, lying to Congress and the public as to the existence and scope of its efforts, and breaking the law. The Left usually associates this sort of conduct with its favorite bogeyman, Richard Nixon, but they shouldn't be surprised that a man weaned on bare-knuckle Chicago politics would resort to it. For the sake of the American people, Darrell Issa should climb into the IRS with a proctoscope, find everyone involved with this mess and show them what it feels like.

NEWS SERVICE TELEPHONE RECORDS SEIZED, PRIEST-KING SAYS THEY DESERVED IT: We are informed that the Justice Department has obtained telephone records of at least a hundred Associated Press employees in an effort to find out the source of a national security leak that was reported last year (a plot to blow up an American airliner from Yemen to New York that was foiled). Although the intent of the DOJ's investigation was laudable and routine methods had failed, DOJ went waay over the line by casting such a wide net, especially against a news agency so friendly to the Left. Agitating the press, treating them like an enemy, is another hallmark of the Nixon administration but also of authoritarian regimes generally, and this scandal reminds us that Priest-King is an authoritarian of the first order. He demands absolute obedience, permits no disagreement or dissent and will go after anyone who gets in his way. (Remember how Obama refused to appear on Fox News for such a long time, how he demonized conservative figures like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly, and urged his supporters during the campaign last year to take "revenge" on his opponents?) Pursuing national security leaks is a worthy goal but in this case, Priest-King is trying to freeze the American press, terrorize it and bend it to his will. The Left went ape over W.'s Patriot Act and FISA wiretaps when terrorists were the quarry; let's see how far when their outrage extends when their ox is being gored.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE: The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee heard testimony from three witnesses, all experienced State Department diplomats, who directly refuted the Priest-King Administration's account of the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, last year and their characterization of it as a public protest gone terribly wrong. These three men - Gregory Hicks, Eric Nordstrom and Mark Thompson - risked their careers by naming names, times, and specific events that exposed Priest-King's
efforts to suppress the truth and mislead the American people as to the dea~hs of our consular personnel in Libya, as well as the threats they have received from their superiors in an attempt to intimidate them from testifying. The Priest-King Administration will smear these men as disgruntled hacks motivated by the desire for fame, fortune and the opportunity to humiliate their bosses, abetted by the Republicans in the House, but that will fall flat. What we have to remember is that we have four dead Americans, left to die in a lonely outpost in a dangerous part of the world, abandoned to their fate for no other reason than Priest-King's political fortune. For months leading up to the election, he had repeated the mantra, "Al Qaeda is on the run," had trumpeted the deaths of Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders, had waved his campaign of Predator drone attacks and the retreats from Iraq and Afghanistan as trophies of his inspired leadership. To admit that the attack on Benghazi was a coordinated, sustained, deliberate terrorist attack would contradict everything he had been saying, would call into question his strategy of disengagement and jeopardize his re-election, so Ambassador Chris Stevens and his brave colleagues were abandoned to a storm of fire and bullets not from an Al Qaeda affiliate but from a protest gone haywire. Nothing was done to help them. The consulate was physically relocated to an unstable part of an unstable country. Every request for extra security was denied. After the attack began, fighters weren't scrambled and the DoD ready team in Croatia wasn't deployed. (They would have arrived too late to save Ambassador Stevens but in time to save his embattled comrades in the consulate annex, which was attacked later.) The State Department's own counterterrorism bureau was excluded from the case and every reference to Al Qaeda and terrorism was deleted from official communications. Susan Rice parroted the Administration's phony version on every Sunday talk show, to the point of contradicting the Libyan President who immediately preceded her on CBS' Face the Nation. (The President was so insulted that he refused to cooperate with the FBI investigation, delaying the truth yet again.)

Taking all of these scandals together, we have an administration that is paranoid, obsessed with itself, out of control. Priest-King will resort to anything to protect himself, advance his socialist agenda and destroy his enemies, leaving our consular personnel to die, covering up his role therein, attacking American citizens for their political and religious beliefs and digging into the private communications of a free press. He and his cronies lie, steal, cheat and break the law, they deserve to be turned out into the snow and I pray that my fellow Americans snap out of whatever spell they've been under: If he walks like a crook, talks like a crook and acts like a crook, he's probably a crook.

The News of the Day

Jason Collins of the Boston Celtics comes out of the closet as the first openly homosexual active player in a major U.S. team sport and is congratulated by the President of the United States. Another nail is driven in our national coffin.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell is on trial for murder in Philadelphia, accused of deliberately killing a woman and seven infants who somehow survived his clumsy attempts to abort them. Apparently, the horror chamber he operated as an abortion mill hadn't been inspected for seventeen years and he regularly overdosed his "patients" before butchering their helpless children, so he may have killed thousands of babies before the death of an adult forced the D.A.' s hand. As benumbed as our country may be to the routine slaughter of our most helpless citizens, the legacy media is only too aware of the effect diligent reporting of this disgusting episode would have on the general public, so they have consciously avoided the story, hoping it would just go away. But I'd like to point out something that Dr. Gosnell, the left-wing media and my fellow Americans would do well to understand: The Lord God of the universe, the Maker of everything that ever was and everything that ever will be, sees and hears and understands everything. He will not hold guiltless those who murder innocent children. As the great orator said, their " ...hands are stained with blood and soiled with corruption. " The blood of two generations of American children, murdered on the altar of radical feminism, slaughtered because they were inconvenient, cries out from the earth and the Lord hears. Dr. Gosnell, repent while you can.

A study released by Careerbuilder.com indicates that 82% of health care workers would leave their jobs right now if the right opportunity were available, due to the increased pressure of Obamacare. Coupled with the statement of Senator Max Baucus (who ironically drafted the bill) two weeks ago that implementing Obamacare was going to be a train wreck, the mounting number of companies dumping their private health insurance because of rising costs, and Democrat pals like the unions and AARP desperately seeking exemptions from the law (the Dems on the Hill were sniffing for a way to avoid using Obamacare to cover themselves and their staffs), we are watching unfold the most accurately predicted, easily avoided financial disaster in our history. Conservatives like me warned and warned against this hot mess of a law but the American people, in a drunken stupor, lusted for universal health care, it was a civil right, it would help the poor and create jobs and lower costs and it was just the right thing to do, and even though nobody knew what was in the law or what would really happen after it was passed or how it would work or how much it would cost, we passed it anyway, crossed our fingers and hoped for the best. And like Wile E. Coyote, lighting the fuse for a bomb he's sitting on, we're about to be blown up by our own hand. I would've thought that the home mortgage meltdown, also caused by well-meaning but comically inept Democrats - ahem, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd - would've inoculated the American people to falling for such nonsense again, but obviously I was wrong. So we'll go through the agony of higher unemployment, fewer options, longer waiting times, epic waste, massive taxes and spending and impenetrable bureaucracy until Obamacare dies of its own inertia, we'll wonder how it all happened and then we'll build a massive Presidential library for Priest-King somewhere in Chicago, because if there's one thing we like more than celebrating success in America, it's celebrating failure.