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Republican Rebirth or A Return to Political Cowardice?

Given the thunderous din over the debate concerning President Obama's trillion dollar 'stimulus' legislation it was easy to miss White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's illustrative comment on the matter:  "A crisis is a terrible thing to waste."

That's the predicate to our thinking on this masterfully misguided package.  As Republicans learned after winning control of Congress in 1996, political over-reach is hideous to witness, like a slow-motion auto accident you can't prevent.  As President Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress are now learning, when over-reach is combined with political arrogance, it's patently dangerous. 

Awakening from a six year slumber, Congressional Republicans are discovering the galvanizing potential of being in the minority.  After years of profligate spending, it may not constitute a political act of contrition, but opposing this fiscal feeding frenzy may have benefits with a much longer half-life than momentary political advantage--it may herald the coalescence of the Republican Party around traditional conservative principles.

One of the more instructive editorials on this legislative Leviathan was by Jim Manzi, writing in National Review On-Line.  After he itemizes many of the key spending measures, he persuasively states:

What does this sound like to you?  It sounds to me like a wish list for the left wing of the Democratic Party.

And, of course, it is.  It's the least bipartisan piece of spending legislation produced by either party in at least a decade.  Indeed, the House bill sailed right past the academic arguments of Keyensian versus Friedman approaches to fiscal policy, betraying a smug indifference to any hint of legislative humility or restraint.  It is, in truth, a meaningful move towards a Statist structure of funding for services, in the public and private sectors.  The key difference is that, unlike the Eastern European potentates of four decades ago, who arrogated the power of the people for their personal gain, it's our elected officials who are doing so, for raw political power.

For those Americans whose civic sensibilities still resonate with the seminal aftershocks of our Republic's founding two and a quarter centuries ago, these are not matters to be taken lightly.  Understanding that our Founding Fathers meticulously crafted the delicate symmetry of our tripartite system of government, with a keen and abiding appreciation of the nearly limitless potential for abuse, this legislation confirms that we've advanced from mere abuse of their vision to a wholesale disregard for it.

How Senate Republicans approach this will tell us whether the party's new found footing is the precursor to a political rebirth or merely the fleeting image of courage in a broader context of cowardice. 

Liberalism's Quest For Cures For Self-Wrought Problems

Given the way liberals characterize 'family planning' we would have to conclude it ceases to exist when government withholds funding.  For a glimpse into the comic world of leftist nirvana, we turn to Cristina Page, writing in today's Huffington Post, which features rhetoric rich on irony and short on substance.

A predicate of liberalism is that anyone with the temerity to disagree with its curious symmetry must be ideologically motivated, because, we're told, the left's values are in perfect harmony with the background hum of the universe.  Therefore, when Republicans, led by House Minority Leader John Boehner, argue that spending $200 million for contraceptives is a poor use of tax payer dollars, he's pilloried by Page who reflects the left's smug assumption that the government should pony up so people can have sex without, to quote President Obama, being "punished with a child":

But the ideology-plagued Republicans, and their media enablers, couldn't seem to figure out why unemployed Americans without health insurance would possibly want, or need, to prevent an unwanted pregnancy.

In contrast to Page and her liberal allies, Republicans are aware of several birth control methods on the market and the recommendation they have is for Americans to prioritize their expenses and pay for the option that suits them best.  For reasons best left to mental health professionals, these champions of socialized medicine are convinced that people are innately incapable of planning for a family without tax payer funding.

For them it's all about creating a world unburdened by duty or obligation, where personal responsibility has been written out of the civic script, along with the consequences for imprudent behavior.  It wasn't all that long ago that Americans wouldn't tolerate the prattling of Page and her ilk as they expand and multiply the role of government in our lives, creating entitlements for every bump on the road of life.  But today, we're in a new era, one where 'rights' are omnipresent, from health care to housing, and, yes, to contraceptives.

Curiously, one right seems to be missing, and that's the right to life for the unborn, who liberals wantonly silence before their first breath.  That segues to the so-called Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), that magnificent misnomer which confuses the freedom and choice of the procreator with that of the unborn.  Indeed, whose freedom are we talking about?  And, do liberals believe that the little miracles in the womb would 'choose' to be slaughtered if they had the choice?

In prior anniversaries of the barbaric Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade, we've titled our posts concerning the left's assault on the innocent unborn "The Tyranny of the Living," because of the cynically self-referential way in which they dehumanize those they brazenly deem "unwanted."  Once that stigma achieves cultural acceptance, the ultrasound imagery of a new life in the womb that a young couple celebrates as a gift from God is savagely transformed into an expendable mass of cells.

Once the left successfully redefined sexuality as a recreational activity rather than an act reserved to a man and a woman blessed by holy matrimony, teen pregnancy rates skyrocketed, single parenthood became the norm in our inner-cities, and, for many, abortion became a common, if heinous form of birth control.

For Page, government is the best proxy for the family, which she and her leftist brethren have severely damaged in the course of a single generation.  The cultural anarchy they've unleashed on society, is thoroughly convinced that the only acceptable absolute is relativism.  Their charges of ideologically motivated politics aside, the irony is that it's their own ideologically saturated values that have vilified our traditions and raised amorality to a kind of perverse virtue.

The lessons of 2000 years of civilization provide irrefutable evidence of the family structures and civic mores most likely to lead to stable societies.  Were liberals to follow those quaint recommendations they wouldn't find themselves in the awkward position of arguing for legislation to correct the ills created by their renegade values. 

But, of course, they know better.

The Gitmo Conundrum

In a moment of high political theater yesterday, President Obama signed an Executive Order requiring that the Guantanamo Bay prison be closed within one year.  While it's important for any new administration to draw a bright line between its policies and those of its predecessor's, substantively, this action does nothing to resolve the legal conundrum underlying this matter. 

One day a team of political anthropologists may be able to penetrate the opaque ignorance that informs the argument that enemy combatants captured on foreign soil deserve access to the American system of jurisprudence, however, in the meantime, President Obama must face the same intractable reality as President Bush, which is how to deal with the 245 prisoners, many of whom pose an imminent threat to U.S. national security. 

Integral to this problem is the media's studied distortion of the treatment the Gitmo prisoners receive.  Several dozen members of Congress have toured the facility, and although hard left senators such as Edward Kennedy have made grandstanding assertions that it's a lightning rod for anti-Americanism, other than the three prisoners who have undergone severe interrogations, allegations of systemic torture are nonexistent.  Indeed, they're treated humanely, and afforded unprecedented cultural and religious amenities.

Although the legal framework that provided relatively swift justice for those tried at Nuremberg could be adopted for those at Gitmo, we should remember that those trials began in 1945, after the cessation of hostilities.  Moreover, the team of allies ultimately responsible for determining the rules and legal framework for the trials began its work well before the end of the war, and the International Military Tribunal that oversaw them was unanimous in its understanding and agreement that the suspects were, in fact, Nazis who worked directly for Hitler or one of the infamous branches of his military.

Moreover, the legal justification for the court's jurisdiction at Nuremberg was derived from the Instrument of Surrender, which provided sovereign power over Germany, and which allowed it to punish violations of international law and the laws of war.  Needless to say, there is no equivalent mechanism in the current legal or military circumstances to provide such leverage.

Complicating matters, today, we're faced with a stateless, non-uniformed enemy, and our challenge is compounded by the fact that many in our midst ignorantly conflate terrorists with freedom fighters.  The moral equivalence argument, advanced by many of our academic elites and at least tangentially abetted by a blinkered media, is but one of many political instruments used to distort the truths concerning these prisoners and their so-called rights.

It's also vital to recall that the purpose of Gitmo wasn't to conduct trials but rather to extract vital intelligence information.  Moving from that paradigm to gathering evidence for trial after all these years is impractical and quixotic.  Indeed, were President Obama to establish a regimen whereby the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was remanded to a federal court none of the evidence obtained during interrogations would be admissible.  There are 14 others the government has deemed just as lethal as Mohammed and the same legal conundrums arise with their prosecution as well.

There's a growing number of legal academics, among them Harvard's Jack Goldsmith, the Brookings Institution's Ben Wittes, and Georgetown's Neal Katyal, who have advanced the idea of a national security court, to supervise detentions and administer trials.  However, former President Bush's military commissions, which currently oversee these processes are substantively similar to what these scholars are contemplating.  Furthermore, Professor Katyal, who successfully challenged the legality of Mr. Bush's use of military tribunals, provided the following illuminating comment in a Time article concerning the legal complexities of closing the prison:  "This is a huge and difficult problem.  I don't actually see obvious answers."

Once the political drama of Obama's Executive Order has subsided, he'll be left with precisely the same challenge Bush faced:  How to credibly bring these enemy combatants to justice in a way that satisfies U.S. legal precepts and political expectations, as well as scrutiny by the international community, which, ironically, will likely be led by the exemplar of amorality, the United Nations.

President Obama may have innovative ideas concerning this vexing matter, but threading this needle will be just one of his many daunting challenges.  Finally, that Mr. Bush's counter-terrorisism efforts have played a key role in keeping us safe for the past seven years affords Obama the luxury of even discussing the closure of Guantanamo Bay prison--yet another truth our biased media will avoid.

President Obama: Governing Versus Campaigning

For many Republicans, the weeks leading up to today's inauguration of President Obama reflected the residual bitterness of loss as the nation began adjusting to a new party in power.  Many on the right, at the national and local level, seemed to harbor a sense of mild scorn that Mr. Obama was about to be sworn in as president. 

For reasons as complex as they are immaterial to the immediate future, many saw this man as a political neophyte with a thin resume, whose prescient political instincts made him untouchable.  However, close observers also noticed the post-election foreshadowings of moderation.  That, in itself, is not atypical, but for Obama it revealed not merely a predisposition towards centrism, but a sense of shared vision for our Republic that may surprise even conservatives. 

We're confident that we'll have meaningful disagreements with the Obama Administration, but, as John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, minority leaders for the House and Senate, respectively, recently observed, the hard-edged liberal who ran a campaign well left of center has begun moderating his thinking.  Moreover, the man many accused of being intellectually callow and naive, appears to be subscribing to mainstream thinking concerning the most viable remedies for our economic ills.

Predictably, his inaugural address was effervescent with hope and sounded themes that recalled speeches by many of his predecessors.  But it's a sign that the conservative base retains an unflattering measure of  disdain that the political aftershocks from the likes of Rush Limbaugh this morning were so ungenerous in spirit.  There will be innumerable opportunities to contrast--or excoriate--President Obama's policies, but we betray the less laudable angels of our natures if we fail to provide the respect that the office of president--and the new incumbent--deserves.

In truth, conservatives should be encouraged by the fact that the left guard of the Democratic Part, from Speaker Pelosi to Majority Leader Reid, are already showing signs of agitation in response to the growing evidence that President Obama is going to govern quite differently than he campaigned.  There are grave matters facing our nation, as profound as any president has faced.  Now that he's been fully briefed on those challenges, from the economy to the threat of radical Islam, and now that it's his administration at the helm, it's our sense that we'll see a measured, restrained approach.

For example, Mr. Obama has said it may take his entire first term to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, which might have happened sooner had Senator McCain been elected.  He's floated the idea of dedicating fully 45 percent of new spending to tax relief, not just for the vaunted middle-class, but also for businesses in the form of a reduction in the corporate income tax rate.  Remember candidate Obama's pledge to eliminate the much maligned Bush tax cuts?  Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff, said no date has been set, and that everything's up for discussion.

We could run down the line of issues from health care reform to re-regulating our financial markets, as well as the president's plan for dealing with Iran and withdrawing from Iraq, but the theme of caution and thoughtful restraint have clearly overtaken that of the 'radical departure' he ran on.  Perhaps liberals and conservatives hoped and feared he would run as the arch liberal he was in the Illinois Senate, but his relative inexperience has been dramatically overshadowed by political instincts redolent of Ronald Reagan.

At one point in his inaugural speech, President Obama defended American values and warned our real or would-be foes that America's spirit would prevail:

We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.

Putting America's national security interests ahead of party will be one of the first tests of this presidency, but if he passes that test, it will be sure evidence that Mr. Obama has taken to heart President Kennedy's sentiment, expressed in his own inaugural address:

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

Godspeed, Mr. President.  You'll be in our prayers.

Arianna Huffington & the Liberals' Assault on the Bush Presidency

One of the few truisms about political leaders generally and American presidents specifically, is that, not unlike saints, it's many years before perspective and context meld to make an informed judgment concerning their lives on earth.  Those with lengthy memories, as well as students of history, know that President Truman left office as a political outcast, spurned and excoriated as an abject failure.  Today, his courage and political prescience is admired, as he not only saved thousands of American lives by bombing Japan, he laid the framework that led to an American victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

Although many commentators and analysts have filed briefs in support of President Bush's tenure, given the disdain that's been abetted and nurtured by our liberal media, the entertainment world, and a culture with an inbred ignorance of history, their voices have been overwhelmed by those who condemn him.  For a prototypical example, we turn to our reliable liberal, Arianna Huffington, writing in the eponymous journal, who walks us through Mr. Bush's recent valedictory remarks, highlighting his alleged delusions and sins.

The broadest, most kind comment we can muster is that her analysis is stained with a systemic flaw, we'll call it the 'forest and trees' effect.  However, in this case, it's not merely her proximity to her subject, but her perfervid loathing of him, that has so obviously compromised her judgment.  You could turn the task of analyzing his speech over to a high school debate team and it would easily produce more substantive observations, insights, and conclusions.

We'll let you wend your way through her contorted thinking, and reserve our comments to three of her more remarkable assertions.  First, Huffington states that "He was wrong about Iraq and Saddam and WMD," which, in our jaundiced court of public opinion, is all that's needed to brings smirks to the legions of liberals who thrive on this political palaver. 

However, Page 84 of the July 7, 2004 report by the Senate’s Select Committeeon Intelligence, titled “Report of the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Pre-War Intelligence Assessments on Iraq,” references a June 1999 report, which concluded:  “All of the assessments in these [Intelligence] Community papers on Iraq’s nuclear program were consistent in assessing that:  Iraq continued low-level clandestine theoretical research and training of personnel, and was attempting to procure dual-use technologies and materials that could be used to reconstitute its nuclear program…if Iraq acquired fissile material it could have a crude nuclear weapon within a year.”

Having used chemical weapons on his own people, and given his wholesale lack of compliance with the U.N. Resolutions, literally every intelligence agency in the world, believed that Hussein constituted a credible threat to his neighbors and the civilized world.

 

Second, she makes the reflexive judgment that "He was wrong about warrantless wiretaps...".  For a cogent acquittal of the president's program, see our January 7th post, "A Defense of the NSA's Warrantless Wiretap Program." 

 

Finally, Huffington makes the risible assertion that Mr. Bush "was wrong about Wall Street being able to regulate itself."  We can go all the way back to President Carter's Community Investment Act, later 'strengthened' by President Clinton, which mandated the recalibration of debt-worthiness to include those with ostensibly risky credit, but there were two driving forces in this meltdown; the first is the quasi-governmental entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  Begun by President Roosevelt, these lending giants were massaged by Democratic presidents and Congressional leaders to become clearinghouses for loans that no commercial lender would touch.  At their height they carried leverage ratios of 60 to 1.  It was liberal Democrats who created this mess, and now they want to pump another $1 trillion into the system?

 

The second component of this disaster, which you'll never see analyzed in the mainstream media, is Senate Bill 190, the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, which would have mandated unprecedented levels of regulatory oversight for Mae and Mac.  In a party-line vote, Democrats handily defeated it; ironically, Senator McCain was one of its three co-sponsors.  The fact that President-elect Obama and Sens. Clinton and Dodd have received tens of thousands from Mae and Mac is another one of those secrets the editors of the New York Times would rather keep to themselves.

 

It will take time, perhaps decades, but his obvious political shortcomings notwithstanding, one day the Bush presidency will receive fair treatment from historians.  They will correctly appraise the foresightfulness of his decision to seed a rudimentary form of democracy in the Middle East as the best guarantor to migrate those nations towards Western forms of government.  They'll also clarify that the actions of liberals such as Huffington were far more deleterious to the national security of the United States than those of Mr. Bush, which have kept us safe at home since 9/11.

 

But that judgment will not only take time, it will require an intellectual maturity--and humility--conspicuous by its absence in the modern liberal.

Have We 'Evolved' Beyond our Founding Fathers?

It's rare that a commentator provides the quintessential blueprint for a counter-argument, which is why we simply can't let Joe Conason's piece in The New York Observer pass without a rebuttal.  His theme is that Republican congressional leaders and conservative think tanks and commentators are stonewalling the constructive efforts by Democrats to advance President-elect Obama's so-called stimulus package, and that they have no substantive plans to address the

...problems of rising unemployment, falling demand, shrinking production and disappearing credit. There is no fresh policy platform and no honest effort to confront the costs of deregulation and disinvestment.

It's axiomatic that even in the most ideal times, conservatism generally, and fiscal conservatism specifically suffers a conspicuous disadvantage with liberalism, because whereas the latter promises to provide substantive rewards for phantom efforts, the former only provides a nominally level playing field and then checks the finish line to rank the contenders.

That clearly takes the smug and fleeting sense of accomplishment out of the spectator sport of redistributing other people's money--which is the one inviolable founding principle of modern liberalism-- but it establishes in its stead the rule predicated on the quaint notion that people bring a disparate amount of talent to the work-a-day table, as well as work ethics that span the entire gamut, from the clock watcher to the overachiever.

The reason Conason and his ilk decry the Heritage Foundation's call to make the Bush tax cuts permanent and to lower corporate and capital gains taxes is that it reaffirms the truth, which they fervently deny (a la Don Quixote), that capital in the hands of the productive is the best guarantor of economic success across the board.  Underlying their denial is their politically motivated belief that those in the lower income quintiles can't advance without government larges.  Yet, a November 2007 study by the Treasury Department, which analyzed income over nine years, unequivocally concluded that low-income earners advanced through the quintiles rather efficiently over time.

Next Conason defends the left's favorite stimulus argument, which is that an infusion of federal capital can increase employment, and chastises "right-wing commentary" for its counterargument which "revolves around silly claims that federal spending cannot increase employment and demand...".  As we've observed in other posts, the history of federally funded jobs is checkered at best because it's an inconstant fiscal stream.  Indeed, its the libidinal equivalent of tantalizing one with erotic overtures and then summarily removing the so-called "stimulus."  Moreover, the employers that are targeted are often the result of political favoritism.

Glimpsing all of this through the rarefied prism of liberalism, Conason argues that the message of conservatism amounts to nothing "except to maintain or worsen the inequities of our tax system."  Yes, that's a quote.  It may surprise, but the top 5 percent of income earners pay 55 percent of federal taxes and the top 1 percent pay 35 percent.  Just as revealing, the bottom 50 percent pay 4.4 percent, and fully 39 percent pay no federal income tax at all.  However, facts have rarely penetrated liberalism's hermetic world, because they would render their claims laughable were they not so patently self-serving. 

In our culture, which has made a virtue of externalizing the source of our problems and has rendered personal responsibility and accountable obsolete, it's a daunting task to make the case for conservatism.  Yet for those with more than a passing understanding of the kind of government contemplated by our Founding Fathers this is not something to be taken lightly. 

Moreover, simply because those principles happen to be out of fashion today--in large measure because they only appear in public school curricula as objects of derision--is no justification to concede, as the left obviously has, that they're no longer applicable, or in their tiresome parlance, that we've "evolved" beyond them.

Will Obama Learn From Economic History?

The early days of every administration are times for expansive ideas, and Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package, which will easily crest $1 trillion, fits that historical model perfectly.  But, is a reliance on sheer magnitude wise, economically or culturally?  We link to a piece in today’s LA Times which quotes from Obama’s interview yesterday on ABC’s This Week where he begins acting like a president, which is to say, sending blunt warnings to Congress that it must pass his Leviathan spending package.

The potential for more job loss, which is Obama’s most potent stage prop, will certainly resonate with most Americans, but we must begin by asking how infusing the economy with one-time ‘investments’ will provide the kind of transformational, long-term results he desires.  Despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary, as well as the fact that Obama has appointed centrists to his economic team, the theme of massive Keynesian spending has dominated his agenda. 

However, flooding the system with borrowed dollars has never produced a sound economy, because it’s money directed by bureaucrats not entrepreneurs, and it’s almost always structured to maximize political, rather than economic efficacy.  Indeed, Mississippi governor Haley Barbour was recently quoted as saying he’d rather not receive any federal money if it’s time-limited and targeted to fund jobs because he would be obliged to raise taxes once the funding stream dried up.  If Obama is smart he’ll focus on two simple economic truisms:  A strong dollar and low taxes, which have always led to economic vitality.

To illustrate the point, let’s compare two opposing views, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.  The former appointed Michael Blumenthal as his Treasury Secretary, who immediately telegraphed his desire for a weak dollar.  Demonstrating that ignorance is a guarantor of failure, the price of gold shot up 270 percent and inflation rose to 14 percent.  Federal spending increased significantly and the misery index wreaked fiscal pain, from the individual taxpayer to businesses, large and small.

In contrast, Reagan cut taxes deeply and directed Paul Volker his Fed chairman to tighten the money supply to begin strangling inflation.  The result was that inflation dropped from 14 percent to below 4 in less than two years.  The tale of two Bushes highlights how getting only half the equation correct is equally ill-advised:  H.W. championed a strong dollar but raised taxes, stifling credit and creating a recession as the U.S. became an exporter of capital.  W cut taxes, which increased federal receipts, and, although he talked about a strong dollar, he did nothing to make it happen.  Of course, his desperate attempt to emulate liberal spending only exacerbated matters, including tarnishing the Republican brand.

The other index to watch is the percent of GDP consumed by government spending.  History demonstrates that the economy soars when it’s below 18 percent and begins choking when it hits 20 percent.  Unfortunately, Obama follows the Bush act which saw it increase significantly, and although he’s talking about targeted tax cuts, political realities will inhibit the kind of boldness necessary to reduce government’s fiscal footprint.

History demonstrates that the urge for robust action in dire circumstances is hard-wired in politicians.  However, getting the balance correct and handicapping one’s ideology by adducing the lessons of the past, is a challenge few have surmounted because the ego’s inner voice consistently tunes out anything that diminishes the notion that we alone have the perfect political pitch to succeed where others have failed.

A Defense of the NSA's Warrantless Wiretap Program

The incoming Obama Administration will face a myriad challenges, but one of the most controversial is National Security Administration's warrantless wiretap program, which is integrally related to the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the Patriot Act, and the Protect America Act of 2007, an amendment to FISA.  Recall that candidate Obama began his campaign with strong denunciations of the Bush Administration's interpretation of the FISA law as well as the implementation of the Patriot Act.  The early indications are that a President Obama might have revised his thinking.

Since so much of the heated controversy over this matter is embedded in emotion rather than fact, it's important to provide some historical context.  About a week after the 9/11 attacks,  Congress passed  a resolution titled Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF), which authorized the president to "use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determined planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks...in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States...".  It passed the Senate 98-0, and the House vote was 420-1.

The Bush Administration has argued that its use of warrantless wiretaps was sanctioned by AUMF.  However, once the New York Times disclosed the program in 2005, the administration moved to pass the Protect America Act of 2007, which, the president said, would restore FISA's "original focus" vis a vis privacy concerns, "so we don't have to obtain court orders to effectively collect foreign intelligence about foreign targets in foreign locations."  The bill passed the Senate 60-28, and the House vote was 227-183.

Among other key revisions to FISA, PAA substituted the requirement of a warrant with a system of extensive National Security Agency (NSA) controls.  However, the PAA required the NSA to inform the FISA Court of any warrantless surveillance within 72 hours.  More specifically, the bill allowed monitoring of all electronic communications within the United States without a court's order or oversight, so long as it is not targeted at one particular person "reasonably believed to be" inside the U.S.  It also clarified that monitoring communications between suspected terrorists and Americans was authorized only if intelligence officials had reason to believe it may provide evidence relevant to terrorist activities.

The legal controversy surrounding the NSA warrantless surveillance program involves two major categories, statutory interpretation and Constitutional law.  The former is the process of interpreting and applying legislation to the relevant facts in a given case; the latter is the body of law that governs the interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.  It includes the interface of federal and state laws and governance, the rights of individuals, and a variety of other issues.

At the core of the controversy is the application and interpretation of Title 18 U.S.C. (United States Code) 2511(2)(f), which states, in part, "the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 shall be the exclusive means by which electronic surveillance, as defined in Title 50 U.S.C. 1801(f)...and the intercept of domestic [communications] may be conducted."  It's a little known irony that both proponents and opponents of the NSA program agree that it functions outside the procedural framework as defined by FISA.

Due to its transparently political motivations, the mainstream media studiously avoids examination of this kind of background analysis because a candid analysis would effectively undermine their cynical argument that the Bush Administration has circumvented the Constitution and abrogated our civil liberties.  One of the commonly held myths is that the legal standards concerning intelligence gathering are inadequate and susceptible to widespread abuse.  Since a search of the New York Times archives won't be of any help, we've linked to a report titled Legal Standards for the Intelligence Community in Conducting Electronic Surveillance, which was mandated under Intelligence Authorization act of 2000. 

Let's take a brief retrospective tour of this matter, all the way back to May of 1979, which is when President Carter issued Executive Order 12139, which permitted intelligence gathering without a warrant, provided it complied with Title 50 United States Code 1802(a).  That document requires the president, through the Attorney General, to certify that the focus target is a foreign entity, and that the so-called "minimization procedures" (which limit the exposure of innocents during the process) are adhered to.

Moreover, pursuant to Title 50 Section 1805 (which is referenced in 1802), an application to the appropriate judge must be made within 72 hours of the proposed surveillance, unless an "emergency situation" exists, which allows the surveillance provided a retroactive application is filed within 72 hours.  Given the burdensome nature of this process, as well as the media's cynical characterization of the administration's behavior in this matter, it may surprise readers to learn that the court approved dozens of these requests throughout the time that charges of warrentless surveillance occurred.  Indeed, the court approved 1,244 surveillance requests in 2004 and 2,072 in 2005, and each year that number increases.

Although it's unknown whether or how many warrantless wiretaps occurred, reviewing the seminal cases in the matter, in particular ACLU vs. NSA, the courts typically find the plaintiffs do not have standing because there's no evidence that the alleged spying occurred. 

The legal defense of President Bush's authority to conduct warrantless electronic surveillance was ably made by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, in a January 2006 report.  Although it was debated among legal scholars, it didn't penetrate the mainstream media's hermitic world, and so most Americans' understanding of the legal issues is based almost exclusively on network television news, which has a notorious liberal bias.

Although President Bush made numerous speeches concerning the threat of radical Islam after 9/11, there's no question that he could have been more forceful early on in his acquittal of his decision to authorize warrantless wiretaps.  Despite those political missteps, if the American people were aware of the safeguards and oversight measures mandated in the NSA program, and in light of the manifest threat of another lethal attack on our soil, the vast majority would approve the president's decision. 

Moreover, despite its political grandstanding, Congress has consistently voted to support the program, and there is no evidence that any U.S. citizen's rights have been compromised.  Most critically, there have been no subsequent attacks on American soil since 9/11, and although skeptics may argue the NSA's program did not measurably contribute to that success, their anecdotal testimony is clearly tainted.

There's no question that the civic health of our Republic demands a that we abide by our Constitution, but it's also the case the Framers provided broad discretionary powers to the Executive, most cogently argued in the Federalist Papers, in particular, number 70.  That every president has employed those powers and, at times, tested their limits, is unambiguous, as is the fact that, in certain instances, they been imperfectly applied. 

However, no president prior to Mr. Bush has had to deal with a stateless, omnipresent, asymmetrical foe such as al-Qaeda, whose stated goal is the destruction of the United States.  In light of that, President Bush's program can be justified as a reasonable response to unprecedented circumstances that have the potential to gravely injure our nation. 

If President-elect Obama can build upon the improvements made in the Protect America Act of 2007, so much the better, but, his historical criticism of the program notwithstanding, most observers believe he'll continue the NSA's program with modest modifications.

The Fruits of Post-Modernism

As we begin the new year, it's useful to take a reading of our cultural temperature because one of the more profound causes of our myriad modern ills is the insidious influence of culture.  How our shared values inform our understanding of ourselves as citizens of America or any other nation, and as members of a community, effectively defines how we address the challenges we must confront.

Two of the many virtues that became a casualties of our post-modern sensibility are self-reliance and individual accountability.  Sometime during the past fifty years, the cultural habit of looking inward for solutions, as well as understanding our complicity (albeit at times unwitting), in our missteps, became supplanted by a sense of universal collectivism.  The result, which can be seen in every aspect of our civic lives, is that every problem, from the most inconsequential to the most daunting, is now seen as the rightful purview of government to solve.  Similarly, when things go awry, as they inevitably do, we reflexively cast a wide net for the culprits, overlooking the many ways in which we ourselves were to blame.

The dovetailed nature of culture is insidious, because unless it is informed by principles and absolutes it invariably assumes a downward trajectory which is conducive to cultural anarchy.  Humans yearn for structure and stability, adults no less than children, and when relativism becomes ubiquitous, as it surely has today, solutions to quandaries, from economic to moral, are instinctively chosen based on a consensus, one driven by the vagaries of fashion.

It's that oblique and latent argument for tradition that modern liberalism has jettisoned, motivated as they are by their abiding--read blinkered--disdain for their current definition of things parochial.  However, those who posture a civic tolerance are just as ideologically rigid in their summary dismissal of traditional values as the conservatives they so loathe.  However, in contrast to their newly minted values, the efficacy of the dogma that underwrites those values has been demonstrated in the crucible of over two thousand years of history.

To make the point more precisely, the new modernism, colloquially referred to as secular humanism, posits a wide array of iconoclastic values, most of which are predicated on the paradoxical notion that freedom from responsibility is synonymous with happiness.  Examples include premarital sex, which the left naively believed was an innocent indulgence, a kind of proving ground for the young.  Rather, it provided a noxious justification for the 'natural' inclination of men towards promiscuity, sharp increases in out-of-wedlock births, poverty, drug abuse, and domestic violence, all of which were passed to subsequent generations.

In economics, capitalism has been successfully stigmatized, because in the view of liberals, any system that fails to produce immediate success across the demographic spectrum is deemed a wholesale failure.  Indeed, the old saw about our tendency to court reprisals of history's failed policies and programs is again being proven by a Congress and president whose cynical lack of confidence in markets lead them to justify federal spending at an unprecedented level.

We could lace into these arguments the left's astonishingly ignorant belief that the availability of guns causes increases in crime, this despite peer-reviewed research that demonstrates that the thirty-eight states that have passed concealed-carry laws saw an average 8 percent reduction in violent crime within one year.  We could, as well, make the case for virtually eliminating our dependence upon foreign energy sources by the aggressive pursuit of the oil and gas reserves easily within our grasp.

The list is nearly limitless, but because a culture of stupidity has become a proxy for wisdom, the common sense that safeguarded our Republic for two-plus centuries is in danger of becoming extinct.  It doesn't bode well for the upcoming year, one in which challenges at home and threats abroad demand a deft thoughtfulness and keen understanding of human motivation and events.  The inbred disincentive to apply proven solutions to these problems, to assume that by sheer dint of charisma we can transform evil into goodness spend our way out of a recession, and regulate self-interested behavior (licit and illicit), will likely protract and exacerbate the problems.

These are the fruits of post-modernism and they're hostile to the common good.