Those of you receiving these
pictures in the U.S.A. please see the last paragraph.
And please forward them to everyone.
These pictures are of Muslims
marching through the STREETS OF LONDON during their recent
‘Religion of Peace Demonstration’.
Whywouldanyone think that we should be at war
with such nice, peaceful
Muslims?! Youneed to forward this one to
everyone! These pictures tell it
all!Muslimshave stated that England
will be the first country they take
over! Theseare pictures not shownon American TV or in American
Newspapers – WHY?!
but were forwarded by a Canadian
friend who thought ALL Americans ought to
know!
Chief
Justice John Roberts has done it again. His twisted reasoning in last
year’s Obamacare ruling wasn’t the only unpleasant surprise he’s sprung
on supporters of the rule of law.
His majority 5-to-4
opinion in California’s Proposition 8 case — throwing the issue back to
California because plaintiffs lacked standing to argue in his court — is
as bizarre as his Obamacare decision. His opinion was joined by an
ideological tossed salad of justices that ranged from Ruth Bader
Ginsburg to Antonin Scalia. But the fact that its list of supporters is
unusual doesn’t mean it won’t present real problems for both liberals
and conservatives when it comes to democratic freedoms. Has the
initiative process in 26 states now been fatally undermined?
Chief
Justice Roberts’s opinion held that supporters of Proposition 8, which
52 percent of California voters used in 2008 to define marriage as
between only a man and a woman, lacked standing to defend the measure in
federal court after state officials refused to defend the law in court.
Supporters could fight for Prop 8 in California courts, the court said,
because California recognized their standing, but they can’t appeal in
federal court because they don’t have standing that meets federal rules.
Since a federal district court had previously ruled Proposition 8
unconstitutional, supporters of gay marriage claim the Supreme Court has
effectively made gay marriage the law in California.
Governor
Jerry Brown is already ordering clerks to issue marriage licenses to
gays in California, a bold step given that it’s unclear the federal
district court had the power to extend gay marriage to anyone other than
the specific people involved in the suit. But that’s for other courts
to sort out in a year or so; for now, Brown is trying to make a show of
force that he hopes courts won’t dare challenge.
In California, the initiative process was started in 1911
specifically to pass laws that the governor, other state officials, and
the legislature didn’t want to pass. As Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is
from California, points out in his dissent to the Roberts opinion: “The
initiative system ‘grew out of dissatisfaction with the then governing
public officials and a widespread belief that the people had lost
control of the political process.’”
Well, that belief will now reassert itself in the wake of Roberts’s opinion.
In
the case of Prop 8, Governor Brown, Democratic attorney general Kamala
Harris, and the Democratic legislature all refused to defend in court
the ban on gay marriage. That’s why the state supreme court unanimously
allowed the proponents of Prop 8 to defend it in court, a decision that
was ratified by the liberal federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals when
the Prop 8 case was heard there on its way to the Supreme Court.
Justice
Kennedy said during oral argument in the Prop 8 case last March that
not granting standing to the proponents of Prop 8 in federal court would
have dangerous implications, what he called “a one-way ratchet.” All
state officials have to do is refuse to defend a law passed by the
people, watch as those seeking to overturn the law go judge-shopping
(Prop 8 opponents found a gay judge in San Francisco who did not
disclose his sexual orientation), and then watch the proponents of the
initiative lose in federal court because they “lack standing” to
represent the law they wrote.
Justice Kennedy, in his dissent
from the majority, warned that “the Court’s decision also has
implications for the 26 other states that have an initiative or popular
referendum system, and which, like California, may choose to have
initiative proponents stand in for the State when public officials
decline to defend an initiative in litigation.” Kevin Drum, a blogger
for the liberal Mother Jones magazine, notes that he is in
favor of gay marriage, but that the Supreme Court’s “gutting” of the
people’s right to defend their own initiatives “has neither the flavor
of justice nor of democratic governance.”
Others are already raising the alarm. Bill Jurkovich, a voter in Citrus Heights, Calif., says:
“Apparently, we the people do not have the right to create a law that
the political elite disagree with. Is it any wonder that people are
becoming radicalized, have lost faith with the political process,
distrust government, and do not vote?” Indeed, the California supreme
court has in the past ruled
that “if the very officials the initiative process seeks to circumvent
are the only parties who can defend an enacted initiative when it is
challenged . . . this de facto veto will erode one of the cornerstones
of the State’s governmental structure.”
The California supreme
court went on to say: “In light of the frequency with which initiatives’
opponents resort to litigation” — over one-third of the initiatives
approved in Arizona, California, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington
between 1900 and 2008 were challenged in court – “the impact of that
veto could be substantial.”
John Eastman, a former dean of Chapman
University’s law school, says he believes people of all political
persuasions should worry about the “huge hole” Justice Roberts has blown
in the initiative process in order to sidestep ruling on the merits of
Proposition 8. “Someday, liberals could win an environmental-protection
measure in a state and see a conservative governor and attorney general
refuse to enforce or defend it,” he told me. “When that time comes, the
proponents may seek their day in federal court and find that there’s
only darkness because they lack any standing to defend their own law.”
The
threat to the initiative process in 26 states is real. Starting with
California, voters should quickly explore ways to craft some mechanism
that will allow proponents to defend initiatives in court if elected
officials refuse to do so. Sounds like a good subject for another
initiative — and if such a measure were to pass, elected officials would
probably be quite leery of trying to block it.
— John Fund is national-affairs columnist for NRO.
Edward Snowden speaks during an interview in Hong Kong. (The Guardian via Getty )
JUNE 25, 2013
BARACK OBAMA'S ENDURING INEPTITUDE
BY WES PRUDEN
Barack Obama’s critics are loud enough and persistent enough, but maybe we’ve been baying at the wrong moon.
It’s not the president’s ideology, his arrogance, his attention-deficit disorder, his endless deference to alien religious faith and his contempt for the faith of those close to home (or even his backswing) that’s what’s wrong with the man in charge of the government. It’s the sheer incompetence of the leader and his gang.
This is the gang that can’t shoot straight, eager to stifle or soften the First, Second, Fourth and Fifth Amendments and ever ready to stumble abroad with timidity in the face of governments that mean us ill. In the circumstances, maybe incompetence is not necessarily a bad thing. They could be doing a lot more harm if they actually knew how to do what they’re trying to do. The Obama legion can’t figure out which is the business end of the gun.
The spectacle of a 29-year-old computer geek armed with a laptop and a credit card racing across the hemispheres, eluding the FBI, the CIA, the TSA, the IRS and the rest of the alphabet soup available to the president, taunting the entire U.S. Government to catch him if it can, has much of the rest of the world applauding, cheering and laughing. This is the entertainment nobody has seen since Bonnie and Clyde redefined the job of bank examiner on the front pages of 80 years ago. This is also something new in our history, the world laughing at the ineptitude of the United States. Only Mr. Obama, who set out years ago to cut America down to a size to suit the third world, can be pleased.
Nobody roots for the fuzz, and a petition to the White House to grant a full pardon to Edward Snowden had collected 111,000 signatures by mid-day Monday, seeking “a full, free, and absolute pardon for any crimes he has committed or may have committed related to blowing the whistle on secret [National Security Administration] surveillance programs,” and calling him “a national hero.”
The petition, to the White House “We, the People” website, has earned an official White House response, even if all the petitioners can expect is the usual argle-bargle, full of mush and slurry, signifying nothing.
These 11 States now have More People on Welfare than they do Employed!
Last
month, the Senate Budget Committee reports that in fiscal year 2012,
between food stamps, housing support, child care, Medicaid and other
benefits, the average U.S. Household below the poverty line received
$168.00 a day in government support. What's the problem with that much
support? Well, the median household income in America is just over
$50,000,which averages out to $137.13 a day. To
put it another way, being on welfare now pays the equivalent of $30.00
an hour for a 40-hour week, while the average job pays $20.00 an hour.
Furthermore:
There are actually two messages here. The first is very
interesting, but the second is absolutely astounding - and explains a lot.
A recent "Investor's Business Daily" article provided very
interesting statistics from a survey by the United Nations International
Health Organization.
Percentage of men and women who survived a cancer five years
after diagnosis:
U.S. 65%
England 46%
Canada 42%
Percentage of patients diagnosed with diabetes who received
treatment within six months:
U.S. 93%
England 15%
Canada 43%
Percentage of seniors needing hip replacement who received it
within six months:
U.S. 90%
England 15%
Canada 43%
Percentage referred to a medical specialist who see one within
one month:
U.S. 77%
England 40%
Canada 43%
Number of MRI scanners (a prime diagnostic tool) per million
people:
U.S. 71
England 14
Canada 18
Percentage of seniors (65+), with low income, who say they are
in "excellent health":
U.S. 12%
England 2%
Canada 6%
And now for the last statistic:
National Health Insurance?
U.S. NO
England YES
Canada YES
Check this last set of statistics!!
The percentage of each past president's cabinet who had worked in the private business sector prior to their appointment to the cabinet.
You know what the private business sector is; a real-life business, not a government job. Here are the percentages.
T. Roosevelt.................... 38%
Taft................................ 40%
Wilson ........................... 52%
Harding........................... 49%
Coolidge......................... 48%
Hoover ............................ 42%
F. Roosevelt..................... 50%
Truman........................... 50%
Eisenhower................ .... 57%
Kennedy......................... 30%
Johnson.......................... 47%
Nixon.............................. 53%
Ford................................ 42%
Carter............................. 32%
Reagan............................ 56%
GH Bush.......................... 51%
Clinton .......................... 39%
GW Bush........................ 55%
Obama............................. 8%
This helps to explain the incompetence of this administration:
only 8% of them have ever worked in private business!
That's right! Only eight percent---the least, by far, of the
last 19 presidents! And these people are trying to tell our big
corporations how to run their business?
How can the president of a major nation and society, the one
with the most successful economic system in world history, stand and talk
about business when he's never worked for one? Or about jobs when he has
never really had one? And when it's the same for 92% of his senior staff
and closest advisers? They've spent most of their time in academia,
government and/or non-profit jobs or as "community organizers."
John Kass has covered a variety of topics since arriving at the Chicago Tribune in 1983.
The son of a Greek immigrant grocer,
Kass
was born June 23, 1956, on Chicago's South Side and grew up there and
in Oak Lawn. He held a number of jobs—merchant marine sailor, ditch
digger, waiter—before becoming a film student at Columbia College in
Chicago. There, he worked at the student newspaper and caught the
attention of Daryle Feldmeir, chairman of the journalism department and
former editor of the Chicago Daily News.
Feldmeir and journalism
professor Les Brownlee helped him obtain an internship at the Daily
Calumet in 1980, where Kass worked as a reporter until he left for the
Tribune.
In 2004, Kass was awarded the Society of Professional
Journalists' Sigma Delta Chi national award for general column writing,
the Scripps Howard Foundation's National Journalism Award for
commentary, the Press Club of Atlantic City's National Headliner Award
for local interest column writing on a variety of subjects, and the
Chicago Headline Club's Lisagor Award for best daily newspaper
columnist.
In 1992, Kass won the Chicago Tribune's Beck Award for writing.Kass lives in the western suburbs with his wife and twin sons. His column appears on Page A2 of the Chicago Tribune every Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Sunday.
The Chicago Tribune
John Kass
IRS scandal a reminder of how I learned about
'The Chicago Way'
John Kass
May 19, 2013
As the IRS scandal attests, President Barack Obama brought
The Chicago Way to Washington.
(Andrew Harrer, Bloomberg / May 19, 2013)
The
Internal Revenue Service scandal now devouring the Obama administration
— the outrageous use of the federal taxing authority to target Tea
Party and other conservatives — certainly makes for meaty partisan
politics.
But this scandal is about more than partisanship. It's bigger than whether the Republicans win or the Democrats lose.
It's even bigger than President Barack Obama. Yes, bigger than Obama.
It
is opening American eyes to the fundamental relationship between free
people and those who govern them. This one is about the Republic and
whether we can keep it.
And it started me thinking of years ago, of my father and my uncle in Chicago and how government muscle really works.
Because
if you want to understand The Chicago Way of things in Washington these
days, with the guys from Chicago in charge of the White House and the
federal leviathan, there's one place you start:
You start in Chicago. My
father and uncle ran a small business, a supermarket on the South
Side.. Uncle George worked in the front, my father in the butcher shop
in the back. My uncle had been a teacher. My father had plowed his
fields with a mule.
They were immigrants who came here from
Greece with nothing in their pockets but a determination to work, and
the belief that here, in America, no other power could roll in with
tanks and put their boots on the necks of their children.
My
father and uncle, like the rest of the family, valued education and
books and free political debate. And so at large extended family
Sundays, we'd all sit around the dinner table, many uncles and aunts and
cousins, young and old.
There were conservatives and socialists,
Roosevelt Democrats and Reagan Republicans and a few bewildered,
equivocal moderates in between, everyone squabbling, laughing, telling
stories.
No matter whose house we were visiting, the TV was never
turned on after dinner. Instead, we'd have coffee and fruit and dessert
and argument. We had different views, we loved each other, and even
strangers who showed up were expected to join in, to debate education,
the presidency, social issues, the war, drugs, blue jeans, long hair,
baseball, everything.
Uncle Alex was the uncle who told us young
people how best to make our points. He ran a snack shop in the
Bridgeport neighborhood — the legendary home of Chicago mayors and
Democratic machine bosses.
"Don't wait for a ticket," he'd say,
and puff on his cigar, always in a white shirt and tie, on those family
Sundays. So we'd just jump in when we could, like the rest.
One Sunday, I must have been 12 or 13, I decided to ask what I thought was an intelligent question that was something like this:
We talk politics every Sunday, we fight about this and that, so why aren't you politically active outside?
Why don't you get involved in politics?
There
was an immediate silence. The older cousins looked away. The aunts and
uncles stared at me in horror, as if I'd just announced I was selling
heroin after school.
You could hear them breathing. No one spoke. I could feel myself blushing.
Someone
quickly changed the subject to some safe old story. It could have been
the one about how our grandfather named the family mule — a white,
big-headed animal — after President Truman. My sin seemed forgotten.
But
I couldn't forget it. I couldn't understand how we could argue about
politics over baklava and watermelon and coffee, but not put it into
practice.
We could support a political candidacy, we could donate or work for one or another politician that we agreed with.
This is America, I said.
"Are
you in your good senses?" said my father. "We have lives here. We have
businesses. If we get involved in politics, they will ruin us."
And
no one, not the Roosevelt Democrats or the Reagan Republicans,
disagreed. The socialists, the communists, the royalists, everyone
nodded their heads.
This was Chicago. And for a business
owner to get involved meant one thing: It would cost you money and
somebody from government could destroy you.
The health
inspectors would come, and the revenue department, the building
inspectors, the fire inspectors, on and on. The city code books aren't
thick because politicians like to write new laws and regulations. The
codes are thick because when government swings them at a citizen, they
hurt.
And who swings the codes and regulations at those who'd
open their mouths? A government worker. That government worker owes his
or her job to the political boss. And that boss has a boss.
The
worker doesn't have to be told. The worker wants a promotion. If an
irritant rises, it is erased. The hack gets a promotion. This is
government.
So everybody kept their mouths shut, and Chicago was hailed by national political reporters as the city that works.
I
didn't understand it all back then, but I understand it now. Once there
were old bosses. Now there are new bosses. And shopkeepers still keep
their mouths shut. Tavern owners still keep their mouths shut.
Even billionaires keep their mouths shut.
One
hard-working billionaire whose children own the Chicago Cubs dared to
open his mouth. Joe Ricketts considered funding a political group
critical of Obama before last year's campaign. Mayor Rahm Emanuel,
Obama's former chief of staff, made it clear that if the Cubs wanted
City Hall's approval to refurbish decrepit Wrigley Field, Ricketts
better back off.
It happened. He backed off. It was sickening. But it was and is Chicago.
And
now — with the IRS used as political muscle and the Obama
administration keeping that secret until after the president was elected
— America understands it too.
The
decision of Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old contractor who exposed
details of top-secret U.S. spy programs, to hole up in Hong Kong is one
of more bizarre aspects to this story. He told the South China Morning
Post this week that he chose Hong Kong to better broadcast his
revelations, not to flee U.S. justice. But Mr. Snowden seems determined
to use that stage to inflict maximum damage on the U.S. government and
its reputation abroad.
In
the same interview with the Post, Mr. Snowden accused the National
Security Agency of spying on the Internet backbone in Hong Kong since
2009 as well as hundreds of targets in China, and provided documents to
back up his claims. He may have inflicted serious damage to the U.S.
national interest by exposing a successful espionage operation. It's
hard to see how this squares with his insistence that he is a
"whistle-blower" motivated by patriotism.
Mr.
Snowden has also damaged the cause of civil liberties he claims to
defend. Beijing has long tried to deflect Western criticisms of its
human rights record by criticizing shortcomings in the U.S. and Europe.
This attempt at moral equivalence has always fallen flat. Reporters
Without Borders calls China "the world's biggest prison for journalists,
bloggers and cyber-dissidents." But now the Communist Party has a new
advocate who some in the U.S. are hailing as a hero.
Even
in Hong Kong, Mr. Snowden fails to understand where the battle lines
are drawn. He is correct that the territory has a tradition of
protecting free speech with the rule of law. But the real threat to its
freedoms comes from self-censorship because local tycoons have business
interests on the mainland. It's notable that he gave his interview to
the South China Morning Post, which has softened its China coverage in
recent years.
Mr.
Snowden tags U.S. "hypocrisy" for targeting China's civilian
infrastructure while condemning Beijing for doing the same thing. The
state-run media on the mainland has been quick to trumpet this
accusation as well as exaggerated characterizations of NSA domestic
snooping. However, he offers no evidence that the NSA steals commercial
secrets the way China does.
Perhaps
Mr. Snowden believes that he can make himself useful enough to Beijing
that it will block his extradition from Hong Kong to the U.S. That would
give him more of the notoriety he seems to crave. But it would also
debunk the notion he is a crusader for freedom.
Renegade NSA techie Edward Snowden apparently
seems to be extending his campaign to do as much damage as possible to
America’s national security. It’s not bad enough that he blew two highly
classified programs designed, with considerable safeguards to protect
civil liberties, to monitor telephone calls and Internet traffic. Now in
an interview with the South China Morning Post, a newspaper in
Chinese-controlled Hong Kong which is owned by the pro-Beijing
billionaire Robert Kuok, he has disclosed what he describes as U.S.
government efforts to penetrate computer networks in China and Hong
Kong.
After an extensive interview with him, the Postreported:
Snowden said that according to
unverified documents seen by the Post, the NSA had been hacking
computers in Hong Kong and on the mainland since 2009.
One of the targets in the SAR, according to Snowden, was Chinese
University and public officials, businesses and students in the city.
The documents also point to hacking activity by the NSA against mainland
targets.
Snowden believed there had been more than 61,000 NSA hacking
operations globally, with hundreds of targets in Hong Kong and on the
mainland.
“We hack network backbones – like huge internet routers, basically –
that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of
computers without having to hack every single one,” he said.
This is very useful information–for Chinese authorities. What wider
purpose it could possibly serve in Snowden’s self-styled war for
American liberties is hard to say. None of this hacking was directed
against American citizens, after all; it was directed, assuming his
account is accurate, against a rival state that itself engages in
extensive hacking of American computer networks. Constitutional
protections certainly don’t apply to citizens of foreign states.
One
wonders what further information is contained in the “unverified
documents” he handed to the Post; whatever it is, it’s a safe bet
that it is harmful to America’s security and that it is now in the
hands of Chinese intelligence.
Whatever other information Snowden possesses (and he claims to have
taken many more Top Secret documents with him than have so far been
published) will undoubtedly wind up in Chinese hands too. That’s
inevitable given that Snowden has chosen to hide out on Chinese
territory; Hong Kong’s supposedly separate political system, which is in
fact increasingly compromised by Beijing’s heavy-handed
authoritarianism, will not for a minute stop Chinese intelligence agents
from seeking to learn what he knows. His computer and cell phone
undoubtedly have been downloaded by Chinese authorities already, with or
without his permission. It would not be surprising if intelligence
operatives seek to interrogate him as well–and if he refuses to talk he
could face the threat of extradition and the likelihood of a long prison
term in the United States.
Snowden looks less and less like an overzealous civil libertarian and
more and more like someone driven by the same kind of anti-American
animus which inspires Julian Assange, the accused rapist and WikiLeaks
founder. Snowden is now objectively serving the interests of the
People’s Republic of China–not the people of the United States.
That didn’t take long. The official who leaked
top-secret information about the National Security Agency’s surveillance
programs to fight terrorism has now come forward in the pages of the Guardian to revel in his role “as one of America’s most consequential whistleblowers, alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning.”
Edward Snowden is described as a 29-year-old high school dropout who
worked (ironically) on computer security for the CIA before becoming a
highly paid contractor at Booz Allen, making a reported $200,000 a year
working for the National Security Agency in Hawaii. The Guardian
story presents him as a martyr for some kind of libertarian world view:
“In a note accompanying the first set of documents he provided, he
wrote: ‘I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions’ but
‘I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and
irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are
revealed even for an instant.’ ”
He claims he is willing to sacrifice a comfortable lifestyle in
Hawaii “because I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to
destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around
the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly
building.” In reality, of course, the United States is the greatest
champion of liberty the world has ever seen–this is, after all, the
nation that defeated Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and has
championed democracy from Libya to the Philippines, freeing untold
millions from oppression.
But that’s not the only delusional aspect of Snowden’s
justifications. It turns out he is not so willing to accept the
consequences of his actions. On May 20, having downloaded all the Top
Secret documents he intended to leak, he took a flight to Hong Kong,
where he has been ensconced in a hotel room ever since. Why Hong Kong?
According to the Guardian, “he chose the city because ‘they have a
spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent,’
and because he believed that it was one of the few places in the world
that both could and would resist the dictates of the US government.”
In point of fact the latter justification is considerably more
compelling than the former. One wonders if even someone as ignorant and
delusional as Snowden could possibly imagine that Hong Kong–ruled by a
Communist dictatorship in Beijing–is more of a haven of “free speech and
political” dissent than is the United States, which happens to be one
of the freest countries in the world. Freedom House rates Hong Kong as
only “partly free,” and getting less so all the time, as Beijing
consolidates its control over what was once a genuinely free British
colony.
It is a cardinal irony that Snowden, a self-styled martyr to Internet
freedom, has taken refuge in a country (China) that does more to
restrict the Internet than any other major country and has far more
intrusive electronic surveillance than anything the NSA could possibly
dream up. If he thinks he can elude Chinese intelligence by typing in
passwords with a bag over his head, he is deeply ignorant of how
sophisticated the Chinese government is in tapping into cell phones and
computers. They don’t even need physical access to download everything
he has in his hard drive.
That the Guardian is glorifying this misguided and malevolent
individual does him no favors: He needs to see a psychiatrist or a
minister rather than to be granted access to the front pages of the
world to blow some of the U.S. government’s most important
intelligence-gathering activities.
The fact that the CIA and NSA employed him for years—and then allowed
him to leave the country with Top Secret documents–suggests that major
modifications are needed in their security procedures. The intelligence
community has been mostly focused on checking out employees with
overseas family or friends on the assumption that they are most likely
to be compromised by foreign intelligence services. But Snowden, like
Bradley Manning (and, for that matter, like Robert Hannsen, Aldrich
Ames, the Walker family and other high-level spies), is a homegrown
traitor who managed to escape the tightest security. It is time to
readjust the assumptions on which U.S. counter-intelligence operates–and
time, too, to make the most strenuous efforts to move Snowden out of
China and bring him to justice for the serious crimes he has committed.
Far from striking a blow for political liberty and freedom of
expression, he is unwittingly helping the most illiberal individuals in
the world–jihadist terrorists–to more effectively attack us.
A deep bow to our “friends” in the Middle East no
longer satisfies Barack Obama’s White House. His new ambassador-to-be to
the United Nations has a better idea. Samantha Power thinks the
president should take a deferential knee. (It worked for Al Jolson,
paying tribute to Mammy.)
Mzz Power is nothing if not flexible, and admires
“flexibility” in presidents paying court to the nation’s adversaries and
enemies. This president just hasn’t bowed deeply enough to suit her.
A decade ago, when Mzz Power was a learned perfessor at Harvard, she
set out a few guidelines for how an American president could earn the
respect of the squalid and the corrupt, envious as they are of American
pelf and power.
She held up the example of German Chancellor Willy Brandt, who in
1970, eager to expiate the sins of the Nazis, went to one knee on a
street in the old Warsaw ghetto, scene of one of the great atrocities of
World War II, to apologize for the unspeakable and the unforgivable.
“A country has to look back before it can move forward,” she wrote of
the gesture in New Republic magazine. “Instituting a doctrine of the
mea culpa would enhance our credibility by showing that American
decision-makers do not endorse the sins of their predecessors. When
[Willy] Brandt went down on one knee in the Warsaw ghetto his gesture
was gratifying to World War II survivors, but it was also ennobling and
cathartic for Germany. Would such an approach be futile for the United
States?”
Al Jolson
“Futile” is not the word for such a gesture. “Sick” is the word.
Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S Truman, who led the coalition of the
civilized in World War II, were neither Nazis nor evil-doers, nor were
the 291,000 Americans who shed their blood to liberate Europe and the
Pacific from the embrace of Nazis and their journeymen in evil.
Mzz Power’s infamous essay – for which she has apologized, though for
getting caught at saying it, not for thinking it – was titled, “Why do
they hate us?” In it, she concedes that George W. Bush was right about
“some” America-bashers when he rightly and accurately said “they hate
our freedoms – our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our
freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” But Mzz
Power thinks her adopted land deserves the abuse of the bashers and
malicious malcontents. “U.S. foreign policy has to be rethought,” she
wrote. “It needs not tweaking but overhauling. We need: a historical
reckoning with crimes committed, sponsored or permitted by the United
States.”
Wes Pruden is the Editor Emeritus of The Washington Post
