Hewitt Blog

The Monday morning column from Clark Judge:

A Prosecutor’s Take on a Civilian Trial for KSM

By Clark S. Judge, managing director, White House Writers Group, Inc. (www.whwg.com) and chairman, Pacific Research Institute (www.pacificresearch.org)
 
It wasn’t exactly “My Funny Valentine “ that Vice President Joe Biden and former Vice President Dick Cheney sang to each other on the Sunday talk shows.
 
Among many areas of sharp disagreement was the proposed trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) in civilian court.  So we now know what the former and current vice presidents think about this question.  But what do prosecutors themselves actually think?

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Rafiq al-Hiriri, once the prime minister of Lebanon, was assassinated at the direction of Syria five years ago today, an anniversary I was alerted to while finishing Lee Smith's brilliant new book, The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Civilizations.



It has been a long time since I updated what I call "The Necessary Bookshelf," --those books which have, since 9/11, advanced significantly my understanding of the war in which we are engaged. 

The Strong Horse goes on that list as a must-read for those serious about the war, and a thoroughly surprising one, both for its clarity and for its candor.  It will discomfit almost everyone who reads it, and hopefully that will include many in the senior levels of the Obama Administration. 

I hope to broadcast a special show with Smith on Friday, February 26, but don't wait that long to buy and read the book. 

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The New York Times' Dexter Filkins and C.J. Chivers are reporting from the Marines' offensive in Marja, Afganistan.  A second piece by Filkins, from which the title of this post is drawn, is here.  Filkins is an extraordinary journalist, giving our troops and NATO and Afghan forces the coverage they deserve.  Spare some time and prayers for these men as they go into a major battle.

If you haven't read Filkins' memoir of his years in Iraq, The Forever War, you should.



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My friend Rhett Smith is with a group of young missionaries in Haiti and blogging away.

Attention is starting to drift from Haiti, so spend some time with Rhett to keep the suffering there top-of-mind even as the world watches the Games up north.

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Yesterday I interviewed Robert Duvall, who is out touting the Oscar-worthiness of his Crazy Heart co-star Jeff Bridges.  (The transcript of the Duvall conversation is here and the audio is here.)  Bridges plays Bad Blake in the film, a singer who is addicted to drink.  It is a beautiful film of loss and redemption, and Bridges should walk away with the honors, as will the song "Weary Kind" by Ryan Bingham and perhaps even Maggie Gyllenhaal, nominated for best actress in a supporting role.

Thus I was thinking about addicts and their troubles when yesterday's story about a new "jobs bill" hit the news.  Senators Baucus and Grassley had appeared to announce a new era of bipartisanship and an $85 billion dollar spending bill to help create jobs.

The United States doesn't have $85 billion.  It would simply be added to the deficit, the enormous, gigantic and growing deficit.

The "deal" had collapsed by the end of the day as Republicans shuddered and Harry Reid beat a retreat, but the message to the country was clear:  The Congress still doesn't get it.  It is still addicted to spending money it doesn't have in pursuit of a political redemption they cannot earn after TARP and the stimulus that wasn't, after the takeover of GM and the still underway attempt to takeover all of banking and of course the undead Obamacare monster.

Congress is still hitting the bottle, hard.  Even though it is going to kill many of its members politically. Most of the Republicans are in recovery, but as Senator Grassley proved yesterday, each one of them is one shiny press availability away from falling back into the depths of the governing style that proved their undoing in 2006 and 2008.

"What you’ve had in the last year is you’ve had a grass roots anger manifesting itself in the Tea Parties and town halls," Mark Steyn told my audience yesterday. "And, belatedly, the Republican members of the United States Senate sort of caught onto it, caught on to what was happening. But their instincts are still to do what Senator Grassley did, which is to go along with the Democrats. And it makes no sense at all. The Democrats ought to have, this joke of a jobs bill ought to be hung around the necks of the Democrats only, so that every time the jobs bill is mentioned as another Obama laughing stock like the stimulus and all the other stuff, it will be branded Democrat only. I mean, Grassley must understand that. I know he’s been there since Reconstruction, but he must understand that, surely."

Surely?  I don't know.  I thought so.  The MSM braying about the phoney bipartisanship offers from our stunt president has apparently cowed some of the GOP who just a few weeks ago on the morning after the election of Massachusetts had seemed to recognize that the country was clamoring for a fundamental overhaul of D.C.  The country didn't vote for the Obama-Pelosi-Reid huge lurch left.  They are in fact horrified by it.  Like the Gyllenhaal character in the movie, they trusted known addicts and they got the inevitable result. 

What the GOP has to do, every day from now until November, is recommit to doing it differently, to stop the wild spending and the urge to step forward with a government program as a means of garnering favor. It doesn't work and the public grows increasingly impatient for serious people saying serious things about our out-of-control federal government and our bankrupt states.

Senator Grassley's huge mistake yesterday was a reminder to the GOP that it cannot have just one drink.  It has to stand where it stood throughout 2009 --on principled opposition to the Obama agenda, no matter how many times a CNN correspondent insinuates that Republicans are somehow stopping the government from solving pressing problems.  The country knows, as Ronald Reagan once famously said, that government is the problem right now, and must be pushed back and carved down, immediately.

This is no place for the weary kind of Congressman.  The members of the GOP who do not have the stomach to trust their voters who have told them again and again what they want done but who instead want to gain the praise of the Sunday show hosts had just better retire. 

It is possible to change the Congress, and the voters are going to do that in November.  The GOP's job between now and then is to ready themselves to actually do the work of reducing the size and cost of the government, and to fight every day against Obamacare, against the takeover of the banks, and against every ridiculous line of spending in this ridiculous budget. 

Can they stay sobered up for nine months?  Can they persuade the public that they will stay that way in 2011 and 2012? 

Take a congressman or a staffer to see Crazy Heart.  Tell them that is how they are viewed.  Everybody knows they are out of control and looking more and more foolish by the moment.  Spread the word.

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I will talk with Robert Duvall on today's program --about Crazy Heart and Jeff Bridges, his most physically demanding role, the most beautiful place he has worked, Presidents Bush and Obama and many other topics.

The transcript will be posted here later.

And here is the audio.

02-11hhs-duvall.mp3
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Senators Baucus and Grassley have released their "jobs" bill, and I hope bipartisan opposition to it forms immediately.

Because it is utterly foolish.

Here's the short summary from the New York Times:

Senators Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and chairman of the Finance Committee, and Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the panel’s senior Republican, released a draft $85 billion plan that would give employers a payroll tax exemption for hiring those who have been unemployed for at least 60 days. The bill would also provide a $1,000 income tax credit for new workers retained for 52 weeks. (A draft of the bill is available here.)

This is risible, and demonstrates an almost total disconnect with the mood in the country which wants the incompetent federal government to stop doing anything and get out of the way of the free market and the private sector instead of nudging here and pulling there using money it doesn't have to create jobs we will never see.

I employ people to assist in my media business.  Along with my law partners, we employ associates and support staff at my law firm.  I have been in the business of hiring people for more than 20 years. Unlike the senators, I know  at least a little about when and why new workers are hired in the private sector, and it isn't in response to $1000 tax credits.

There is no way these "incentives" will create many real jobs, though they will lower the cost of workers who would be hired anyway by expanding businesses. 

If the Congress would simply order water deliveries in California's Central Valley or rewrite the absurd Consumer Protection Safety Improvement Act of 2008 or any of a dozen other common sense measures to increase economic activity, the jobs outlook would be much better off than with this election year posturing.

I hope Republicans have the courage to quickly call this an absurd bit of political theater, just as the health care summit is, and rely upon the common sense of the American voter to see through the rhetoric of "obstructionism" and MSM Obama-swooning over the word "bipartisan." 

We don't have $95 billion to waste on the re-election program of incumbents. 

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I didn't hear the interview, but if Right Wing News has reportedly it correctly, Debra Medina's campaign for governor in Texas is over.

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Ahmadinejad announces that Iran is a nuclear state, and demonstrators begin to take to the streets.  Use #iran on the search.twitter.com feed to follow events.  The president's outreach to the mullahs hasn't turned out very well.



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Yesterday I devoted most of the program to the issues raised by the launch of iBizReporting .com.  That site is discussed in this post, and the audio of the show is posted there as well as it provoked so much response. 

As part of that discussion I invited James Rainey of the Los Angeles Times on to the program as Rainey had written a column critical of iBizReporting.com.  I had prepared a list of questions for Rainey --who did you vote for, do you own a gun, are you pro-life etc-- to center him in the audience's mind.  The list could have taken about a two minutes to complete, except Rainey simply refused for the most part to answer, substituting instead filibuster after filibuster, a practice that continued as we got deeper into the conversation.

The transcript of the conversation is here.

This conversation is another exhibit in the museum of dead or dying newspapers.  Offered a chance to connect with an audience that almost certainly doesn't read his paper much --not even in the Los Angeles market-- Rainey instead telegraphs contempt for the program's listeners while refusing to display any of the sort of transparency and objectivity that might have listeners seek him out via the web.  Mark Steyn, who will lead off today's show, has often remarked that American newspapers are horribly dull, and this sort of refusal to engage in a conversation about bias with anything approaching candor or transparency is just another example of the disease killing off newspapers --the deadly combination of insufferable arrogance and impenetrable dullness, wrapped up in lengthy, impossible-to-follow answers which are themselves long sidesteps of simple questions. 

Or this could just be the spread of Obama disorder: the inability to answer any question in under five minutes and the accompanying delusion that people are interested in the specifics of the evasion.

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