The Thomas Chronicles

I never thought I’d hear a Presidential candidate speak this way. Whereas President Bush sounded like a lawman out in the wild wild West with his “dead or alive” phraseology when addressing terrorists, Mr. Obama sounds like a Chicago mobster when addressing the Republicans.

“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” Obama said at a fundraiser in Philadelphia Friday, according to pool reports.

“We don’t have a choice but to win,” Obama said, joking that he has heard “folks in Philly like a good brawl. I’ve seen Eagles games.”

It makes me wonder who he identifies with: the Untouchable, Elliot Ness, who fought the Chicago mobster, Al Capone? Or Al Capone fighting against the federal government establishment? Perhaps he should finish the quote with, “If they send one of ours to the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue!“

Upping the ante in the lethality of your opponent is, as they say, the Chicago way. If Obama wins the Presidency, I hope would employ such tactics not so much as on his own fellow Americans as on our enemies beyond our borders. Indeed, if “unity” and “change” and “peace” is what he is truly after, he is not doing a very good job in addressing the conservatives, and thus half the country, in this manner.

Maybe in the future we’d hear him tell Tehran, “If you bring a Scud, we’ll bring a nuke.”

Or is such tough thug verbiage only restricted to his domestic opposition? And if so, can this be called bravery?

Well, it had to happen.

The Presidential candidates are split right down partisan lines on the ruling.

Mr. Obama said that the Supreme Court ruling…

“…ensures that we can protect our nation and bring terrorists to justice while also protecting our core values.”

“The Court’s decision is a rejection of the Bush administration’s attempt to create a legal black hole at Guantanamo - yet another failed policy supported by John McCain,” he said. “This is an important step toward re-establishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law and rejecting a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus.”

And Mr. McCain said the Supreme Court ruling on Gitmo is “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”

“We are now going to have the courts flooded with so-called … habeas corpus suits against the government, whether it be about the diet, whether it be about the reading material. And we are going to be bollixed up in a way that is terribly unfortunate because we need to go ahead and adjudicate these cases.”

…

“These are people who are not citizens. They do not and never have been given the rights that citizens in this country have,” he said. “Now, my friends, there are some bad people down there. There are some bad people.”

McCain insisted that though he has fought to make sure that the US military won’t resort to torture, the detainees are still, in fact, “Enemy combatants.”

Needless to say, I agree with McCain. I don’t think foreign terrorists shooting at our troops outside regulated uniforms overseas can be considered U.S. citizens in any way, shape or form, and they certainly should get our civilian legal protections of habeas corpus.

Nationalism and sovereignty mean nothing if our laws became the law of the globe and that everyone therein is made to become little Americans. But, of course, our liberals are very selective about which American laws they want applied to terrorists. Treason and sedition is still on the books, you know.

It is unquestioningly presumptuous and condescending to make our laws applicable to citizens of other countries. This is what the Supreme Court has just done. This is just what Obama just supported.

More reactions:

Neo-neocon

Here’s what Peggy Noonan wrote today in the Wall Street Journal in an Op-ed piece, Brave New World?:

But 2008 will also prove in part to be a decisive political contest between the Old America and the New America. Between the thing we were, and the thing we have been becoming for 40 years or so. (I’m not referring here to age. Some young Americans have Old America heads and souls; some old people are all for the New.)

Mr. McCain is the Old America, of course; Mr. Obama the New.

* * *

Roughly, broadly:

In the Old America, love of country was natural. You breathed it in. You either loved it or knew you should.

In the New America, love of country is a decision. It’s one you make after weighing the pros and cons. What you breathe in is skepticism and a heightened appreciation of the global view.

Old America: Tradition is a guide in human affairs. New America: Tradition is a challenge, a barrier, or a lovely antique.

The Old America had big families. You married and had children. Life happened to you. You didn’t decide, it decided. Now it’s all on you. Old America, when life didn’t work out: “Luck of the draw!” New America when life doesn’t work: “I made bad choices!” Old America: “I had faith, and trust.” New America: “You had limited autonomy!”

Old America: “We’ve been here three generations.” New America: “You’re still here?”

Old America: We have to have a government, but that doesn’t mean I have to love it. New America: We have to have a government and I am desperate to love it. Old America: Politics is a duty. New America: Politics is life.

The Old America: Religion is good. The New America: Religion is problematic. The Old: Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. The New: I’ll sue.

While I think her description is accurate to some degree of the Old and the New America, I think she’s presented an inaccurate dichotomy. Indeed, we are looking down at a fork in the road, but it is not simply a matter of change in modalities.

You don’t simply change from the Old America to the New America. You have to actively reject the Old America, send it crashing down for the New America to exist. Perhaps “crashing down” is too dramatic a phrase. Gradual legislation and young indoctrination is more accurate. And it’s been a progressive slide for more than 40 years.

I am an immigrant to America, and I most definitely fall on the side of the “Old America”.

“Old America.”

The term suggests that the ideals that created and molded America are somehow antiquated in a modern technological environment. These ideals, however, DO NOT CHANGE in the so-called “New America” she present here. The “New America” exists, such as it were, only as an anti-”Old America”. That is, the “New America’s” beliefs and values are adversarial to the values of the “Old America”.

Should they succeed in toppling the America that created all the wealth and freedom and prosperity of this entire country, the “New America” will not be America at all; certainly not the one I fell in love with. Instead, it will be a sub-sovereign entity, answerable to the world at large, perhaps the U.N. or Europe, and not to its own people.

She wrote that the “New America” prizes “sacrifice”? What she described is not sacrifice; it is cold, calculated ambition and greed, for you can’t manipulate events for your own personal gain and aspiration and call it “sacrifice”. I think it is an accurate description of the “New America” values, and it’s even accurate that they would even call naked greed personal sacrifice.

Such is the effrontery of this brave new world that they would call grasping after power noble.

I haven’t read the decision yet, but SCOTUS Blog wrote the following:

In a stunning blow to the Bush Administration in its war-on-terrorism policies, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that foreign nationals held at Guantanamo Bay have a right to pursue habeas challenges to their detention. The Court, dividing 5-4, ruled that Congress had not validly taken away habeas rights. If Congress wishes to suspend habeas, it must do so only as the Constitution allows — when the country faces rebellion or invasion.

The Court stressed that it was not ruling that the detainees are entitled to be released — that is, entitled to have writs issued to end their confinement. That issue, it said, is left to the District Court judges who will be hearing the challenges. The Court also said that “we do not address whether the President has authority to detain” individuals during the war on terrorism, and hold them at the U.S. Naval base in Cuba; that, too, it said, is to be considered first by the District judges.

The Court also declared that detainees do not have to go through the special civilian court review process that Congress created in 2005, since that is not an adequate substitute for habeas rights. The Court refused to interpret the Detainee Treatment Act — as the Bush Administration had suggested — to include enough legal protection to make it an adequate replacement for habeas. Congress, it concluded, unconstitutionally suspended the writ in enacting that Act.

If accurate, this is unprecedented.

We have just given the rights of US citizens to non-US citizens, and even more outrageous, we’ve given habeas corpus to enemy combatants captured in the field.

From this, two things might happen: a) We, as a sovereign nation, cannot enter into a war without a logistical fishtail of lawyers in train; and b) our troops would be less and less willing to capture prisoners, i.e. expect the kill rate of our enemies to dramatically rise. Those are the two possibilities I see just over our immediate horizon from this decision. Who knows the ripple effect it will have in the years to come.

God help us. It seems our own Supreme Court has, for all intents and purposes, actively curtailed the war-making ability of the United States.

This is not just a blow to the Bush Administration; this is a blow against the United States. If the rights of US citizens are to be granted foreign enemies, won’t the reverse be true? How long will it be when the U.N. Courts have jurisdiction over US citizens?

Mrs. Malkin reviews conservative reactions to this ruling here.

*** UPDATE 6/12/08 ***

Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia, said the words that will be sure to reverberate across the length of the country, “The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done today. I dissent.”

Supreme Court, Chief Justice, John Roberts remarked of today’s ruling that we “lose a bit more control over the conduct of this Nation’s foreign policy to unelected, politically unaccountable judges.”

Will our court system become the American Brussels, where unelected, politically unaccountable lawyerly bureaucrats dictate policy to Americans in like manner to how Brussels dictate policy to Europe? Is this how the beast enters our door?

“He stole the election!”

Probably one of the most vehement accusations against the Bush Presidency these past seven years is that the wasn’t a legitimate President. In the 200 election, they accused President Bush of stealing the election with legal chicanery. They said, and still say, that he “won” or “stole” the election with judicial decision and not by the popular will of the people, which made him a sham of a president. As evidence to this, they point out that Al Gore received more of the popular vote than President Bush (a point that was untrue then as it is untrue now, but that’s beside the point).

The Left was disgruntled and antagonistic, but they left well enough alone at least temporarily, not in thought and word but in deed because President Bush seemed such a dunce, a lightweight, a kicker cowboy well out of his depths. In the aftermath of 9/11, however, they were proven very wrong.

It was around this point, the point at which the Left discovered that President Bush wasn’t a bumbling nincompoop that they actively attempted to castrate and discredit his administration by unendless accusations and perpetual negative campaigning (compliments of George Soros and the Leftists.).

So, as to this Democratic Primary, where are the outcries of injustice? Where are all the denouncements of foul play, chicanery and lies, lies, lies?

What I am referring to, you might ask?

It is simply this. Hillary Clinton received more votes than Obama. She has won more states than Obama. The states that Obama won were oftentimes caucus states that lock out the general public voting. So, when all’s said and done, it’s Hillary that has more claim to the Democratic nomination than Obama.

But Hillary Clinton will concede the election this week because she doesn’t have the delegates, superdelegates and the love of the Leftists— and she certainly doesn’t have the support of Soros who’s ditched her for Obama. Anyone ever wonder where Obama’s endless millions comes from?

Well, someone should be posing the question, and I hope it’s just not me.

You know, watching the Democratic Primary was like watching two football teams duking it out up and down the field. Two yards here, five there. A yellow flag penalty here, a touchdown there. Now that it’s effectively over (I’m still hoping that Hillary would take the fight to the convention… ), I should feel somewhat cathartic, that I should be somehow relieved that the Democrat’s year-and-a-half long hissy-fit against each other has ended.

But I don’t feel cathartic. I feel worried. Anxious of what will happen next.

I watched the post-game highlights last night with snippets of Hillary’s sort-of-but-not-quite victory speech and Obama’s now familiar political rock concert and I’d to make an observation.

Like all rock concerts, there is a segment of people who attend rock concerts who don’t really go to see the band at all. They come to fantasize that it’s them on the stage playing music to the throng of thousands. These groupies would close their eyes and sing along with some internal fantasies playing inside their heads. Then they would open their eyes and see the enormous big screen tv projecting over the crowd, and they imagine they are seeing themselves up there being slobbered on my the masses.

Last night as I watched Obama worked the crowd in his speech, I noticed that none of the people standing behind him at the podium looked at him. The all inclined their heads upward to the undoubtedly massive tv screen somewhere up above. They were seeing images of themselves standing behind the great Barack Obama and they looked very enamored with what they saw. The people standing behind Obama kind of looked like the people closing their eyes at rock concerts pretending that they’re the band rather than part of the crowd.

Does this sum up Obama’s constituents or is this indicative in any way?

With Hillary Clinton and McCain, however, there is a difference in the crowd. They actually look at their candidate and try hard to listen to what they have to say.

I watched McCain’s speech before the results of the primaries came in. There too is another difference between Obama’s and McCain’s crowd. In McCain’s crowd, there weren’t many of the ready cheerleaders hustling the hoorays and the gimmick chants like in Obama’s mass rallies. Those there tried to really listen to what he had to say because what he had say required thought.

McCain didn’t offer quick crowd pleasers, eloquent platitudes. He asked his audience to ponder and turn over his ideas and see if those ideas were true and if they matched their own.

And between the two, there lies the difference.

Part 1 of 2

There was a memorable scene in Dead Poet’s Society when Robin William’s character asked his impressionable young students to walk around an open cobblestone courtyard in whatever manner suited them. After one or two brief roundabouts, he exclaimed, “There it is!” Naturally, without thinking, a group of his students started walking together, and then almost immediately thereafter, they began taking steps in unison. Arms, legs and feet swung and thudded against the cobblestones in lock step.

What was Robin William’s character, Mr. Keating, point in this quirky exercise? Conformity. It’s an old, well-trodden topic, but it’s one not many people are talking about lately.

What sparked this topic was a conversation I had the other day. In that conversation, a friend of mine said that the reason for all the tantrums at and around us since the dawn of the millennium is for the simple reason that we don’t conform. We don’t fit into pre-defined categories and modes of behavior and beliefs that are acceptable to the “collective”.

In my social and work environment, there is a certain amount of pressure to move along with the flow. Go along to get along, as the saying goes. One can be different as long as that difference is only topical, only surface deep. You can be “different” with the application or insertion of adventurous piercings, tattoos and have metal stainless-steel spikes coming out of your earlobes. But believe the wrong thing, state the obvious, or refuse to engage in the belittling slam dance that passes for conversation nowadays and you can find yourself in a puddle of kim-chi.

If modern social interaction were as simple as identifying concrete “do’s” and “don’ts” in any given setting, much like what was once known as social etiquette, it would be a rather simple matter of memorizing these lists of rules and adjust yourself accordingly. Then contemporary social interplay would be cake, right?

… ah, no. Not cake. Unfortunately, it ain’t even frosting.

The dynamic of many groups– social, business or otherwise– is that it is a free-floating consensus. Not quite like a beehive mentality, but darn close. It’s kind of like having a schizophrenic parent with an imperial ego asking you to push peas around the living room with the tip of your nose. Not satisfied with that approach, the schizoid parent then asks you to push walnuts, and then maybe apricots, and then– wait a minute, why push things at all? Pulling a tether with the apricot attached at one end and you on the other and with a piece of thread between your clenched teeth is much more appealing… Anyway, you get the idea.

In all these machinations, the wit and wisdom of the group must never be questioned. Unfortunately for me and others of my ilk, I like to go left when others want to go right. Part of it, I suppose, is me being a contrarian (i.e. doing it out of sheer bloodymindedness), but the larger part of it, I think (and I hope), is that I couldn’t conform even if I wanted to. And when I was younger, boy howdy, did I want to. A natural born orange in a basket full of apples, you might say, is not very pleasant at times.

When people see that I, and others like myself, don’t conform and have no intention of conforming to the beliefs of the group, there are tantrums. I’ve had it happen on the whole Global Warming shtick. I’ve had it happen on my position favoring gay marriage and gay rights. These tantrums take on many forms, but one of the more frequent reactions I receive is where they would accuse me of being a) arrogant and unwilling to listen b) uncompassionate and c) plain stupid. All this tend to be delivered in acerbic sarcasm and mockery.

I am, of course, not suggesting that people huff and puff whenever they interact with me all the time. I’m simply illustrating a pattern of behavior toward those who do not conform to the shifting beliefs of the collective group. One can be a “Winner” one minute, and a “Loser” in the next. In favor one day, out of favor the next, and there is no seeming rhyme or reason for it. The group just somehow decides it will forevermore have tea rather than coffee in the morning, and all the lemmings run out to have an English Breakfast tea with a dash of honey.

For those still having coffee, well, they just can’t quite keep up, can they? Didn’t you know that today Oceania is the enemy?

Read further in Part II