And It Begins

Bush-era Attorney General Michael Mukasey wastes no time today calling the Boston Marathon bombing "jihad" as the Islamophobic ghouls from the last administration offer their unsolicited advice.  Above all YOU MUST BE AFRAID OF MUSLIMS.

But if your concern is over the larger threat that inheres in who the Tsarnaev brothers were and are, what they did, and what they represent, then worry—a lot.

For starters, you can worry about how the High-Value Interrogation Group, or HIG, will do its work. That unit was finally put in place by the FBI after so-called underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up the airplane in which he was traveling as it flew over Detroit on Christmas Day in 2009 and was advised of his Miranda rights. The CIA interrogation program that might have handled the interview had by then been dismantled by President Obama.

At the behest of such Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated groups as the Council on American Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America, and other self-proclaimed spokesmen for American Muslims, the FBI has bowdlerized its training materials to exclude references to militant Islamism. Does this delicacy infect the FBI's interrogation group as well?

Will we see another performance like the Army's after-action report following Maj. Nidal Hasan's rampage at Fort Hood in November 2009, preceded by his shout "allahu akhbar"—a report that spoke nothing of militant Islam but referred to the incident as "workplace violence"? If tone is set at the top, recall that the Army chief of staff at the time said the most tragic result of Fort Hood would be if it interfered with the Army's diversity program.

Mukasey, his hatred for Islam (and Democratic presidents, with not much space between them apparently) is saying torture and waterboarding could have saved lives.  He dares to say this a mere week after an independent report and review of Bush-era "enhanced interrogation" confirmed that yes, we did torture suspects for information and no, it got zero useful intelligence.

As a result of the Bush administration’s green-lighting of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the report says, “U.S. forces, in many instances, used interrogation techniques on detainees that constitute torture. American personnel conducted an even larger number of interrogations that involved ‘cruel, inhuman, or degrading’ treatment.”

“Both categories of actions violate U.S. laws and international treaties. Such conduct was directly counter to values of the Constitution and our nation,” The Constitution Project report said.

To recap, we committed war crimes under Bush, and not only are the people responsible for that running free, they are writing op-eds in the Wall Street Journal complaining we're not committing more war crimes.

Let that sink in for a bit while we have FOX News trolls suggest we should be bugging all mosques.



It's 2003 all over again for these idiots any always will be.

Nemesis Is Clearly Off Getting A Mani/Pedi

Of the list of people who are not allowed to complain about President Obama’s “executive overreach” in yesterday’s directive involving undocumented students being allowed to apply to work permits, the absolute top of that list consists of two, maybe three people.  One of them is former Dubya legal “ace” John “Of Course We Can Waterboard” Yoo, who promptly calls down the wrath of Nemesis herself upon his doomed soul with this observation over at NRO.

President Obama’s claim that he can refuse to deport 800,000 aliens here in the country illegally illustrates the unprecedented stretching of the Constitution and the rule of law. He is laying claim to presidential power that goes even beyond that claimed by the Bush administration, in which I served. There is a world of difference in refusing to enforce laws that violate the Constitution (Bush) and refusing to enforce laws because of disagreements over policy (Obama).

This is pretty much the equivalent of the Mouth of Sauron proclaiming that Gondor is violating Middle Earth’s OSHA laws by having all those dangerous, pointy swords everywhere, and won’t somebody please think of the children.  I’m hoping dark Nemesis has some pretty sturdy Doc Martens, because certain asses are in dire need of having boots inserted in them and rotation will probably be necessary.  Yoo’s own theories on the plenary executive are phenomenally daft, but claiming that the President has the authority to declare unending bloody war on tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan citizens but doesn’t have the authority to direct enforcement procedures of executive branch agencies is so absolutely douchetronic that Yoo probably needs to waterboard himself for a while just to balance the scales of the universe.

And yet, Nemesis is off getting an all-day mani/pedi or something because Yoo continues on without several million Olympian arrows magically appearing in his chest.

Imagine the precedent this claim would create. President Romney could lower tax rates simply by saying he will not use enforcement resources to prosecute anyone who refuses to pay capital-gains tax. He could repeal Obamacare simply by refusing to fine or prosecute anyone who violates it.

The funny part is everyone at NRO who read this sentence said “Shut!  The Front!  Door!   That’s a brilliant idea!  We’ll just refuse to enforce the crap we don’t like!  John Yoo, you’re a genius!”  Because that’s exactly what President Romney would do, simply stop enforcing things.  Hell, it’s what Bush did with Wall Street.  It’s not like the Bush-era Securities and Exchange Commission or the Food and Drug Administration or practically any other government regulatory body in the executive branch actually enforced laws.  They decided their job was not in fact regulation but to help the industries they were supposed to be checks upon get around regulation.  Yoo had no problem with that, or the whole “Hey, Congress Schmongress!” thing with Afghanistan, Iraq, and detainees getting fake drowned and all that jazz either.  Using the executive’s enforcement directives to not deport kids?  That’s worth putting POTUS in the dock, yo.

Yoo’s big finish:

So what we have here is a president who is refusing to carry out federal law simply because he disagrees with Congress’s policy choices. That is an exercise of executive power that even the most stalwart defenders of an energetic executive — not to mention the Framers — cannot support.

How his hands were able to type that sentence without automatically wrapping themselves around his own throat only proves that I need more psionic training.

And then Alberto Gonzales chimes in proving that after getting her nails done, Nemesis is getting sloshed on Caramel Appletinis at Chili's rather than making with the whole justice thing.

“To half through executive order the deportation of some undocumented immigrants looks like a political calculation to win Hispanic votes,” Gonzales told the crowd at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference in Washington, D.C. Saturday, “and subjects him to criticism that he is violating his oath of office by selectively failing to enforce the law.”

These guys are trolling.  Period.

The Walrus, The Walrus's Mustache, And The Carpenter

John Bolton, John Bolton's mustache, and John Yoo think enough American nukes to fry every microbe on Earth hundreds of times over isn't enough, and it's one chunk of government spending we can't afford to cut.  The three of them take to the NY Times to explain to the hippies about force multiplication or deterrent gamesmanship theory or...something.  Anyway, the point is that the Declaration of Independence was all about smaller government that the Founding Fathers would want, and also to nuke Russia and stuff.  WOLVEREEEEENS!

THE sweeping Democratic midterm losses last week raise serious questions for President Obama and a lame-duck Congress. Voters want government brought closer to the vision the framers outlined in the Constitution, and the first test could be the fate of the flawed New Start arms control treaty, which was signed by President Obama and President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia last spring but awaits ratification. The Senate should heed the will of the voters and either reject the treaty or amend it so that it doesn’t weaken our national defense.

The treaty’s supporters are likely to try to rush it through the Senate before Congress adjourns. They worry that since the Republicans have gained six seats, New Start will fail to get the required two-thirds majority when the new Senate convenes in January.

Senators should be in no hurry. The Obama administration’s main strategy in this two-minute drill is likely to emphasize a “resolution of ratification” that the Foreign Relations Committee approved along with the treaty in September. But that resolution, which supposedly addresses concerns about missile defense and modernization of the nuclear arsenal, is a Trojan horse. Any senators who fall for this ploy will not only imperil our safety, they will also undermine the Senate’s formidable powers in the treaty-making process. 

Yeah, the same two guys (and an animate collection of facial hair) that said the plenary power of the Presidency trumped all during a time of war and argued that the President had by definition of the office the power to conduct unrestricted war are now saying that the Senate is the most important government body when it comes to foreign policy.

I'll let that sink in for a minute.  I was unaware that Bolton's mustache could type, let alone ghost write columns either...but there you are.

Senators cannot take these warranties seriously — they are not a part of the text of the treaty itself. As Eugene Rostow, a former under secretary of state, put it, such reservations and understandings have “the same legal effect as a letter from my mother.” They are mere policy statements that attempt to influence future treaty interpretation. They do not have the force of law; they do not bind the president or future Congresses. The Constitution’s supremacy clause makes the treaty’s text the “law of the land.”

Unlike acts of Congress, treaties reorient the balance of power toward the president. His understandings and interpretations of treaties typically have (and should) predominate, as President Ronald Reagan demonstrated in the 1980s debate over the meaning of the antiballistic missile treaty. The president can, after all, completely withdraw from a treaty on his own: President George W. Bush terminated the antiballistic missile treaty in 2002 and President Jimmy Carter ended the Taiwan mutual defense treaty in 1980, both without Senate consent or judicial complaint.

To prevent New Start from gravely impairing America’s nuclear capacity, the Senate must ignore the resolution of ratification and demand changes to the treaty itself. These should include deleting the preamble’s language linking nuclear arsenals to defense systems, and inserting new language distinguishing conventional strike capacities from nuclear launching systems or deleting limits on launchers entirely. Congress should pass a new law financing the testing and development of new warhead designs before approving New Start. 

So yes, to recap Bolton, Bolton's mustache, and John Yoo freely admit that A) the President has all the power when it comes to treaties (and cite examples of such) but B) they think the Senate should ignore that power and do what the three of them want anyway by passing a law that basically scuttles the treaty anyway, so please ignore all that plenary powers of the Office of the President that we pushed with Bush.

For this awesome level of intellectual consistency, Bolton, Bolton's mustache, and John Yoo continue to be treated as Serious Policy Wonks and get columns in the NY Times.

Awesome.