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John Murtagh, a victim of Kathy Boudin’s 1960′s bombing spree, asks if the Marathon bomber will get a teaching job at Columbia.
Somewhere near Boston early Monday morning, he packed a bomb in a bag. It was by all accounts relatively crude — a pressure cooker, explosives, some wires, ball bearings and nails . . . nails which, hours later, doctors would struggle to remove from the flesh of bleeding victims.
His motive is unclear. His intent is not: It was to maximize injury, suffering, pain, trauma and, yes, death.
Perhaps Monday’s bomber will be caught, perhaps not.
Perhaps Monday’s bomber will be offered a teaching job at ColumbiaUniversity.
Forty-three years ago last month, Kathy Boudin, now a professor at Columbia but then a member of the Weather Underground, escaped an explosion at a bomb factory operated in a townhouse in Greenwich Village. The story is familiar to people of a certain age.
Three weeks earlier, Boudin’s Weathermen had firebombed a private home in Upper Manhattan with Molotov cocktails. Their target was my father, a New York state Supreme Court justice. The rest of the family, was presumably, an afterthought. I was 9 at the time, only a year older than the youngest victim in Boston.
One of Boudin’s colleagues, Cathy Wilkerson, related in her memoir that the Weathermen were disappointed with the minimal effects of the bombs at my home. They decided to use dynamite the next time and bought a large quantity along with fuses, metal pipes and, yes, nails. The group designated as its next target a dance at an Officer’s Club at Fort Dix, NJ.
Despite the misgivings of some, it is reported that Kathy Boudin urged the use of “anti-personnel bombs.” In other words, she wanted to kill people not just damage property. Before they could act, her fellows were killed in the townhouse explosion. The townhouse itself collapsed; Boudin fled. …
Peter Wehner provides a petulant president post.
In a Rose Garden statement in the aftermath of his failure to persuade the Senate to move on any of his gun control proposals, the president raged, Lear-like, against his opponents. It was a rather unpleasant mix–one part petulance and two parts anger.
In the course of his outburst, the president said this:
“I’ve heard folks say that having the families of victims lobby for this legislation was somehow misplaced. “A prop,” somebody called them. “Emotional blackmail,” some outlet said. Are they serious? Do we really think that thousands of families whose lives have been shattered by gun violence don’t have a right to weigh in on this issue? Do we think their emotions, their loss is not relevant to this debate? So all in all, this was a pretty shameful day for Washington.”
The unidentified “outlet” who used the phrase “emotional blackmail” was Charles Krauthammer, who on Fox News’s Special Report with Bret Baier said this about the background checks:
“The question is: Would it have had any effect on Newtown? If you’re going to make all of these emotional appeals – you’re saying you’re betraying the families — you’ve got to show how if this had been law it would’ve stopped Newtown. It would not have. It’s irrelevant. I wouldn’t have objected, I might’ve gone the way of McCain or Toomey on this, but it’s a kind of emotional blackmail as a way of saying, “You have to do it for the children.” Not if there’s no logic in this. And that I think is what’s wrong with the demagoguery that we heard out of the president on this issue.”
Krauthammer is once again right and the president is once again wrong. (At some point the president and his White House will discover that it’s not in their interest to get into a debate with Krauthammer. White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer can explain why.)
What Mr. Obama has been attempting to do throughout this gun control debate is to build his case based on a false premise, which is that the laws he’s proposing would have stopped the mass killing in Newtown. The families of the Newtown massacre are being used by the president in an effort to frame the issue this way: If you’re with Obama, you’re on the side of saving innocent children from mass killings–and if you’re against Obama, you have the blood of the children of Newtown on your hands. …
Jennifer Rubin has more.
Had a Republican president lashed out as petulantly as President Obama did yesterday after the defeat of the background check amendment, calling his opponents liars and stooges of special interests (“shameful” is a really harsh thing to say about the red-state Dems who jumped ship), the mainstream press would have been all over him. (Out of control! Lost his cool! Unpresidential!) But, because most of the press also was incensed at the defeat of anti-gun legislation, his performance was barely criticized.
The refusal to take on entitlement reform doesn’t earn Democrats the “coward” label from the press. “Cowardly,” for example might apply when Democratic supporters of Israel believe that Chuck Hagel is anti-Israel but vote for him anyway for fear of offending the White House. Those obvious examples of political timidity don’t earn the media’s ire because that cowardice leads to results they like. Refusing to rebuke one’s own constituents to vote for a feel-good measure for the opposition is many things (“survival instinct,” “politics as usual,” etc.), but it hardly is as despicable as the media chorus would have you believe.
It’s rich, really, that the fellow who rammed through Obamacare in the face of public opposition with a load of malarkey (Keep your insurance. Won’t add a dime to the deficit. No taxes on the middle class.) would lash out in this fashion.
For this outburst, Obama was surrounded by the Newtown parents, which was telling. He put his muscle behind background checks, which even anti-gun crusader Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) admits had nothing to do with Newtown. (To those lefties who retort “So what?” the response is, “Then stop hiding behind the Newtown parents.”) …
IBD Editors think congress reflected the people’s will in the gun control debate.
… Turns out that our republic is working the way it’s supposed to. A Gallup poll asking what’s the most important problem facing the country shows why what the president is trying to do is indeed a “heavy lift” — only 4% in both April and March cited “guns/gun control,” down from 6% in February.
The “economy in general” at 24%, “unemployment/jobs” at 18%, “dissatisfaction with government” at 16% and “federal budget deficit/federal debt” at 11% all dwarfed concerns about guns. And the problems of “health care,” three years after ObamaCare was passed, and “ethical/moral/family decline” are both more worrisome to the public than gun control. …
Toby Harnden writes on the president in thrall to the CIA killing machine.
ONE balmy evening, Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, was relaxing with his family on his father-in-law’s rooftop in the village of Zanghara, south Waziristan.
Two miles above, a Predator drone trained an infrared camera on him as he lay on his back and was joined by his wife and uncle. The images were so clear that it could be seen that the ailing Mehsud was receiving an intravenous drip.
Moments later two Hellfire missiles were launched from the Predator. Once the dust had cleared, all that was left of Mehsud was a bloody torso. Eleven others, including his wife and mother-in-law, had also died.
Mehsud’s death, in August 2009, caused barely a ripple in Washington, but it was extraordinary because he was an enemy of Pakistan, not America.
CIA lawyers had struggled to get approval to kill him but, under pressure from Pakistan, had made the case that he could be added to the “kill list” because the Pakistani Taliban sheltered al-Qaeda operatives. In the US capital some described the strike as a “goodwill kill”.
The incident is recounted in a new book, The Way of the Knife, by Mark Mazzetti. It details how the CIA has got back into the killing business over the past dozen years and how President Barack Obama fell under the spell of the spy agency.
The man who ran as a liberal, anti-war candidate has brushed away concerns about the attacks. During one meeting he responded to a request for an expansion of America’s drone fleet by saying: “The CIA gets what the CIA wants!” …
Amity Shlaes warns about the “tax grope.”
First comes Tax Day, then comes the Tax Grope.
That is the attitude of Americans toward tax authorities. Citizens have resigned themselves to the new rates, official and public, that will apply this year to long-agreed-upon definitions of taxable income. Traditional income is fair game.
The taxpayer is alert, though, to something else: future arbitrary impingement by a tax authority in an unexpected way. Sometimes the intrusion comes from an expected party, more uncomfortable and irritating than fatal. But sometimes, the intrusion shocks either by its scale or because it comes as a total surprise.
The grope image goes back to the revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine, who wrote of “the Greedy Hand of government.” Back in the 1960s the business writer John Brooks sketched out the grope concept further, writing of the intruding taxing authority approaching as an unwanted suitor, with a “ghastly expression of benignity.”
The most obvious recent grope has been overseas: the garnishment of bank accounts in Cyprus. The depositors simply didn’t expect to pay for the euro’s failings from this part of their fiscal selves. Another Cyprus-related tax grab is a levy just proposed by the German government’s senior economics advisers on those who own valuable houses in countries that ask for bailouts. When, say, an Englishman bought his villa in Portugal, he probably expected to pay taxes on the vacation home, but not this extra surcharge.
Budget Portents
Portents of possible impingements on Americans are evident, too, in President Barack Obama’s budget.
Steve Hayward asks how many ways CA can be stupid.
Beating up on California these days is easier than snatching lunch money from the pocket protector of a skinny near-sighted kid. But why should Victor Davis Hanson have all the fun? And besides, now that I’m back in my home state after a decade away, the decay is palpable, like roads suffering from obvious “deferred maintenance” to unfinished housing tracts, etc. So what are the main problems facing California right now?
If you’re the ex-Governator, it’s—wait for it now—climate change! Ah-nold calls it California’s “silent disaster,” and it is nice of him to help us distinguish it from the very noisy and visible disaster that was his governorship. Can’t he just stick with making saggy superhero movies? (I mean, have you seen those surreptitious National Enquirer photos of what he looks like these days with his shirt off? He needs more chest prosthetics these days than Riccardo Montalban in The Wrath of Khan.) …