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WSJ Editors on the move by some, including Obama, to give the protection of our courts to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who planned 9/11.
On Monday, some six years after 9/11, military prosecutors filed charges against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al Qaeda’s foreign-operations chief, along with five of his conspirators. They will stand before a military tribunal, and if convicted they could face execution. And as if to prove that the U.S. has lost its seriousness and every sense of proportion, now we are told not that KSM is a killer, but a victim.
The victim, supposedly, of President Bush. Opponents of military commissions (including Barack Obama) want KSM & Co. turned over to the regular civilian courts, or at least to military courts-martial; anything else is said to abridge American freedoms. This attitude is either disingenuous or naïve, or both, because it is tenable only by discounting the nature of the attacks and the enemies who carried them out.
KSM himself has made plain the extent and ambition of his world war. “I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z,” he admitted during a hearing in March last year. He planned the 1993 World Trade Center attack, the 2002 bombings of the Bali nightclubs and the Kenya hotel, among 31 actual attacks. KSM was an architect of the Bojinka plot in 1995; by his own confession he drew up plans for strikes in South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Panama, Israel, Brussels and London, plus a “new wave” of post-9/11 attacks on L.A., Seattle, Chicago and New York. …
Mark Steyn comments on the Dem race.
These days, Obama worshippers file two kinds of columns. The first school is well-represented by Ezra Klein, the elderly bobby-soxer of The American Prospect:
“Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair.”
Er, OK, if you say so. …
… Poor mean, vengeful Hillary, heading for a one-way ticket on the Oblivion Express, has a point. Barack Obama is an elevator Muzak dinner-theater reduction of all the glibbest hand-me-down myths in liberal iconography – which is probably why he’s a shoo-in. The problems facing America – unsustainable entitlements, broken borders, nuclearizing enemies – require tough solutions, not gaseous Sesame Street platitudes. But, unlike the whose-turn-is-it? GOP, Mrs. Clinton’s crowd generally picks the new kid on the block: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama. I wonder if Hillary Rodham, Goldwater Girl of 1964, ever wishes she’d stuck with her original party.
London Times’ Gerard Baker shows how hubris worked havoc for Hillary and Barack.
… The truth is that until now she has run a campaign that will become a model of how not to win elections.
It began a year ago with the insistence on her invincibility, as though she did not need to earn the nomination but was owed it by a grateful party.
It continued with her emphasis on her experience and familiarity with the ways of Washington in a year in which it was clear to all that voters wanted change.
Then when she ran into trouble after the first few contests, she made the catastrophic mistake of letting her husband run riot for a few crucial days and remind voters of all that they feared about a Clinton restoration.
Her one remaining asset after all this is that her core voters are still the Democratic party’s base: working-class types struggling to make ends meet in a weakening economy.
But even they may be starting to waver in the direction of Mr Obama’s inspiring rhetoric. She has two weeks to persuade them that she has a real plan to help them.
Peggy Noonan has advice for Clinton. We hope it is ignored.
… Her whole life right now is a reverse Sally Field. She’s looking out at an audience of colleagues and saying, “You don’t like me, you really don’t like me!”
Although of course she’s not saying it. Her response to what from the outside looks like catastrophe? A glassy-eyed insistence that all is well. “I’m tested, I’m ready, let’s make it happen!” she yelled into a mic on a stage in Texas on the night of her latest defeat. This is meant to look like confidence. Whether or not you wish her well probably determines whether you see it as game face, stubbornness or evidence of mild derangement.
In Virginia last Sunday, two days before the Little Tuesday voting, she suggested her problem is that she’s not a big phony. “People say to me all the time, ‘You’re so specific. . . . Why don’t you just come and, you know, really just give us one of those great rhetorical flourishes and then, you know, get everybody all whooped up.’ “
When she said it, I thought it might be a sign that Mrs. Clinton was beginning to accept the idea that she might lose. …
The Captain analyzes a Michelle Obama speech.
… It’s hard to know where to start in with this speech. First, what evidence does Mrs. Obama have that the largest part of credit card debt goes to health care? Second, if she has seen the standard of living get progressively worse during her lifetime, she needs new glasses. The living standard of even those classified as poor now have per-person expenditures of the American middle-class of the early 1970s, according to the Census Bureau. Eighty percent of the poor live in air-conditioned housing, 43% of them own their own homes, and the average poor American has as much living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, and Athens. Only 3% don’t own a color TV.
But it’s the notion that only Barack Obama can save our souls that is the most offensive part of the speech, by far. Government doesn’t exist to save souls; it exists to ensure domestic tranquility and provide for the common defense. …
Jim Taranto’s take on superdelegates is interesting.
… Politico reports that some Democrats are complaining the superdelegates aren’t diverse enough:
According to a Politico analysis, close to half of the 700-plus Democratic superdelegates who could end up determining the party nominee are white men.
One Obama superdelegate, a House member, had sharp criticism for the superdelegate racial and gender makeup, a reaction that reflects the sensitivities surrounding the issue.
“It’s still the old guard, the white men. They always want to control the outcome,” the superdelegate said. “But this time, they won’t be able to do it.” . . .
David Warren on globalony.
… the global warming hysteria is one area of public policy entirely in the hands of experts. Only fully-qualified eco-scientists, and then, only those in the employ of the United Nations and the various national environmental bureaucracies, are consulted on the issue. (“The science is settled.”) These are the sages of today, and fools of tomorrow.
There is a vast and growing literature of extremely well-qualified skeptics, who doubt the very premise behind the international hysteria — that fluctuations in human-caused CO2 emissions have anything much to do with either global or regional temperature trends. Most have noticed that the trends coincide much better with solar cycles, beyond human control. But, by definition, these skeptics are not in the pay of the environmental bureaucracies, or at least, do not remain in their pay for long. …
So, what’s it like to live in South Africa? American.com looks at power shortages there.
… The power crisis is not only a source of national embarrassment—Eskom says it won’t be able to guarantee full service until 2012—it exposes some of South Africa’s serious public policy problems. There has been little effort by the African National Congress (ANC), the governing party, or by Eskom to hold anyone accountable for the electricity shortage and its colossal costs. The fact that the ANC holds more than 70 percent of the seats in parliament means that it can disrespect the institution with impunity and advance its own agenda without regard for the smaller parties. It also maintains a tight grip on the state-owned media, which has been spinning the energy crisis and deflecting blame from the government.
In all likelihood, it was the ANC’s obsession with changing the racial makeup of companies, both state-owned and private, that led to the current problems. In practice, this meant firing white workers and hiring black ones. Transforming Eskom so that it better reflects the country’s demography is one thing, but doing so in a way that alienates the current employees and robs the organization of years of expertise was shortsighted. As we now see, it has been enormously costly to all South Africans, regardless of their skin color.
President Thabo Mbeki’s government is constantly accused by the hard-left trade unions and the South African Communist Party of being too pro-market and economically liberal. If only these charges were true. …