Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 12

Who Needs the Marines When You've Got 'Same-Sex Domestic Partners' of Government Employees For Security?

As David says, "words fail" . . . so I'll just pass along the CNSNews report without further commentary about the Obama administration's priorities in assessing security needs in Benghazi, the notorious jihadist hotbed that has long been one of the most dangerous spots on the planet for Americans:

In the months leading up to the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, the U.S. Embassy in Libya was seeking to hire two bodyguards with “limited” English language skills at salaries of about $13,000 per year.

Job descriptions for these openings that the U.S. Embassy in Libya posted online said the State Department would give preference in filling them to qualified U.S. citizens who were family members of U.S. government employees. The job descriptions explicitly stated that this included the “same-sex domestic partners” of U.S. government employees.

In addition to the two bodyguards, the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, Libya was also seeking a security guard, a surveillance detection specialist, a chauffeur for the consulate in Benghazi and a “Senior Guard” for the Local Guard Force working to secure the embassy.

One of the duties of the Local Guard Force that this Senior Guard would join was “providing limited emergency response in the event of a terrorist attack, criminal incident, or major accident.”

All the job descriptions for these positions were posted online by the embassy, and all, except the security guard position, said that applicants needed to be fluent in Arabic. None required full fluency in English. All of them said the State Department would give preference in filling the position to a qualified U.S. citizen who was the “same-sex domestic partner” of a U.S. government employee.

The rest is here.

Obama Unfiltered

Do you think Barack Obama knows who Ernie Banks is? Count me a skeptic. The purported White Sox fanatic couldn’t name a single player for the home team on the South Side, so I doubt he knows Wrigley Field from his beloved “Cominskey Field.” But even if the president was never gripped by the Cub slugger’s infectious calling card -- “Let’s play two today!” -- he has now heard the Mitt Romney version: “It’s fun, isn’t it?”

That’s how the GOP nominee bucked up a befuddled Jim Lehrer during Wednesday night’s ground-shifting debate. It was only 20 minutes in, but the moderator was fretting over the clock while the president fretted over Romney. Already, the challenger had the incumbent reminding 70 million viewers of “Bad Bad Leroy Brown,” the last Chicago legend in his own mind to emerge from a decisive brawl looking like a jigsaw puzzle with a couple of pieces gone.

Whatever you may think of the former Massachusetts governor’s politics, there should never have been any hesitation about Romney the man. This is a bright, self-made man, one whose public and private philanthropy, which puts most of us to shame, should be legendary. It is not. That’s because his good works weren’t done to burnish his political credentials and his decency discourages their exploitation toward that end. You don’t have to agree with Romney on everything to see that he is a mensch. He obviously loves the America that is -- the land of opportunity that has rewarded his work ethic. Like most of us, he wants that America preserved, not “fundamentally transformed.”

#ad#Yet, for months, the Obama campaign has relentlessly portrayed Romney as an inveterate scoundrel: a dissolute shylock -- maybe even a felonious one -- who fleeced mom-and-pop stores, secreted his ill-gotten gains in offshore vaults, and, in his spare time, tortured his own pooch. “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it” -- it’s the Alinskyites following their dog-eared rule book.

The problem for our community organizer–in–chief is the debate setting. With no slavish Obamedia filter between the candidates and the viewers, the Obama campaign’s ludicrous distortion of Romney collided, one on one and for all to see, with the reality of Romney. The challenger’s upbeat energy simultaneously effused respect for the president’s office and sheer joie de vivre at the prospect of laying bare the president’s miserable record -- of forcing Obama’s vision of Euro-America to compete with Romney’s traditionally confident, self-determining America.

Romney pounced from the start: the president’s “trickle-down government”; his “economy tax” that is “crushing” ordinary families, forcing them to make do on $4,300 less income; families that were promised their health-care costs would go down by $2,500 but are finding those costs increased by that amount; a staggering 15 million people added to the food-stamp rolls; millions left unemployed and underemployed; a planned tax hike on small business that will cost another 700,000 jobs; gas prices skyrocketing, along with food prices and electric rates; economic growth slower in each successive Obama year.

On it went, but Romney was not dour and did not rest his case on the Obama torpor. He offered a positive prescription to unshackle the economy: Stop spending money we don’t have, shove the central-planners aside, and put the American people’s unparalleled energy and ingenuity back at the helm. The last part was the best part: a bouncing confidence in what we are, not what we can be engineered into with enough czars and “teachable moments.”

#page#It was a Romney who has appeared in flashes over the years, but then frustratingly veered away. Suddenly, he seemed comfortable and commanding -- like he’d finally arrived at where he wanted to be, like he planned to be staying for a while. When his moment came, the biggest in his political life, the guy who “couldn’t connect” knew he was connecting like there was no tomorrow. And maybe there isn’t. He was the very picture of the happy warrior -- somewhere, at least for this night, Ronald Reagan and Bill Buckley were smiling.

#ad#As Romney cruised along, Lehrer, unable to break the momentum, worried aloud that time was flying by. Romney smiled a winner’s smile: “It’s fun, isn’t it?” Let’s play two today. He pounded on jobs and prosperity and growth for another couple of minutes.

When, at last, his time came to respond, the president slumped. “Jim,” he sighed, “you may want to move on to another topic.” But, Obama being Obama, he then mindlessly rehashed the meme of Romney as George Bush 2.0, making “the same sales pitch that was made in 2001 and 2003, and we ended up with the slowest job growth in 50 years.” Um#...#not exactly: Those bad old days -- even after a shocking terrorist attack ripped the nation’s financial capital -- featured unemployment rates consistently under 6 percent. Actually, the slowest job growth in 50 years is happening now.

Are voters going to buy Obama’s sales pitch? I don’t think so. To the president’s evident chagrin, the 2012 campaign stretch run is not a 2008 rerun. He is actually being vetted this time. Americans are learning that he is not so much prodigy as media creation: the original “birther,” whose memoir turns up more fiction each time it is scrutinized.

Speaking of fiction, an inconvenient videotape resurfaced the day before the debate. It was from 2007 in Virginia: Senator Barack Obama, presidential stars in his eyes, speaking to a largely black audience of religious leaders and inciting racial animus.

To be generous, Obama’s performance is disgusting. Cynically adopting the black dialect of the American South, a dialect utterly alien to him, he demagogues against Washington’s supposedly selective waivers of the Stafford Act -- legislation that requires communities hit by disasters to match 10 percent of federal aid. They waived it for 9/11, he tells the crowd, and they waived it when Hurricane Andrew hit Florida: Those communities were allowed to keep their one dollar for every ten federal dollars. But when he comes to Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the largely African-American population of New Orleans, Obama implies that Congress refused the waiver: “What’s happenin’ down in New O’leans? Where’s yo’ dollar? Where’s yo’ Stafford Act money?#...#Tells me that somehow the people down in New O’leans they don’t care about as much.”

In fact, ten days before Obama gave that speech, Congress had waived the Stafford Act requirement for Katrina. He was well aware of that fact, too. After all, he was one of only 14 senators to vote against the waiver. It was part of a bill to fund the war effort in Iraq. That is, to pander to his Bush-deranged, anti-war base, Obama decided that squeezing New O’leans was a price worth paying. Then, he lied about what happened in order to foment racial resentment -- an atmosphere that he calculated would help his presidential bid.

Just as he’s doing today.

It doesn’t matter to me, though. I was already voting against Obama. Now, though, I’m voting for Romney.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute  and the executive director of the Philadelphia Freedom Center . He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy , which was recently published by Encounter Books.

Obama Weighs Retaliation for Benghazi Attacks

As usual, when you need to know what's going on, Eli Lake is on the case -- details here at the Daily Beast.

Spring Fever Update: Wascally Webels' New Libya Promotes Sharia, As State Department Runs for Cover

From CNSNews.com:

One day after Libya’s top lawmaker appeared to back down – under criticism from fundamentalists – over the need for a secular state, the country’s prime minister-elect on Wednesday submitted a cabinet that does not include a single member of the country’s pro-Western liberal coalition.

Also on Wednesday, Libya’s central bank governor confirmed plans to push for a shari’a-compliant banking system. Reuters quoted Saddek Elkaber as saying on the sidelines of a banking meeting in Kuwait that demand for the changes was so high he hoped the new rules would be in place by the end of this year.

Together, the developments add new concerns to those voiced over the months since the overthrow of the Gadaffi dictatorship about the future direction the North African country may take – concerns dramatically underscored by the deadly September 11 assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi....

The report goes on to explain that the speaker of the General National Congress had to apologize after declaring -- in what we'll call "State Department logic" -- that the new Libyan constitution should be "secular" but should not "clash with Islam." The "secular" part caused the "largely secular" Muslim Brotherhood members to walk out of parliament. Can't have that.

Our Libyan adventure is looking better every day, isn't it?

Meanwhile, Jake Tapper of ABC News reports on new evidence that the Obama State Department declined to provide diplomatic personnel with security adequate to meet the perilous conditions of Libya -- the country which, by percentage of population, led the world in sending jihadists to fight Americans in Iraq. Foggy Bottom denied its Libyan embassy's request to keep a DC-3 airplane, which embassy personnel had been using in order to get around the country more securely. The embassy said they still needed it; Washington decided they didn't. If the president's name were Bush, and Madame Secretary's were Rice, this would be a story that never left the front page. But they are Obama and Clinton . . . so it's not even a story. It's the Benghazi stonewall, and the media want you to know they'll get right on it the second after they've dragged their guy across the finish line.

Then it's on to the next cycle: HILLARY 2016: IT'S SPRINGTIME IN AMERICA!

Jack Welch on That 'Good' Jobs Report

To add into the hopper with Kevin's sharp analysis, Jack Welch has tweeted: "Unbelievable jobs numbers . . . these Chicago guys will do anything . . . can't debate so change the numbers." (Hat tip Zero Hedge.)

Buying Thomson Is about Closing Gitmo, No Matter What They Say

"If you like your health-care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan, period." "The allegation . . . that ATF 'sanctioned' or otherwise knowingly allowed the sale of assault weapons to a straw purchaser who then transported them into Mexico -- is false." The Benghazi terrorist attack, in which jihadists killed four Americans, was a spontaneous "response to a video that is offensive." 

I could go on, but you get the point. This administration lies whenever lying is expedient in a scheme it is trying to accomplish or an accusation it is trying to dodge. Its current suspect claims, rationalizing its just-announced purchase of Thomson state prison in Illinois -- namely, that it understands and respects the will of Congress that enemy-combatant detainees at Gitmo not be brought into the United States; that it has no present intention to transfer those detainees into the U.S.; that its sneaky, unprecedented method of buying Thomson has nothing to do with its previously floated proposal to house the Gitmo detainees there; and that it is just trying to deal with a purported crisis in federal prison overcrowding (which crisis apparently could not be dealt with while the body expected to pay for new prisons, Congress, was in session) -- are incredible. This president's record, moreover, does not warrant our giving him the benefit of the doubt.

As the 9/11 Families point out, the Justice Department's court filing on the purchase of the state prison took pains to keep open its option to transfer Gitmo prisoners there. DOJ declares that the purpose of the acquisition includes "provid[ing] humane and secure confinement of individuals held under authority of any Act of Congress, and such other persons as in the opinion of the Attorney General of the United States are proper subjects for confinement in such institutions.” The Gitmo detainees are being held under the authority of acts of Congress -- in particular, the 2001 authorization for the use of military force. And Attorney General Holder has been insistent that, in his opinion, civilian federal prisons are fitting holding facilities for enemy-combatant terrorists captured in wartime. 

It does not matter what Obama officials say they "understand" about Congress's will or about what the president's current "intentions" are. The president is laying the groundwork to close Gitmo -- something he has long promised to do, that he believes should be done, that he argues he has the power to do regardless of Congress's wishes, and that he has signaled he would do once he gets the upcoming election behind him.#more#

This summer when the Left, having been stalled on Thomson in 2009, started to agitate over it again, I wrote a column about it:

Once again, the administration and congressional Democrats, particularly Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, are stepping up pressure to have the federal government buy Thomson. They claim that this is no longer about moving the terrorists -- no one, they assure us, is trying to do that anymore. Now, we’re to believe this is just another Keynesian stimulus -- as if, after hundreds of billions of failed stimulus, that somehow makes it all okay. Thomson is being hyped as a way to “create jobs” in Illinois. Proponents also contend that a federal purchase will address what is suddenly framed as a “crisis” in federal-prison overcrowding. Funny -- the reason Thomson was built in the first place is that these same Illinois pols claimed there was a crisis in state-prison overcrowding. Yet, Thomson lies empty.

Durbin and other Democrats are squeezing Frank Wolf of Virginia, the Republican who chairs the powerful House Appropriations Committee. Representative Wolf has also always been strong when it comes to American security against the terrorist threat. He is blocking the federal purchase of Thomson. It makes no economic sense for Illinois’s fiscal recklessness to be socialized onto the rest of the country, particularly when we’ve already paid for Gitmo and when Leviathan is even more of a fiscal basketcase than the Land of Lincoln. Moreover, it makes no national-security sense to give Obama a golden invitation to close Gitmo and transfer terrorists into the country once the election is over.

On that latter point, it is contended that the administration understands that Congress opposes the transfer of trained-terrorist enemy combatants into the country, and that the Justice Department has thus abandoned this plan. Don’t believe it.

The Obama administration is not pushing this hugely unpopular initiative now -- for the same reason that it arranged for many of its other agenda items, including the phase-in of Obamacare and the phase-out of the Bush tax cuts, to be postponed until after the election. If Obama had to run on the things he wants to do, he could not win. Shrewdly, he has tried to take them off the table, figuring that Republicans are too inept and timid to make them into campaign issues.

But remember this: When Obama signed the legislation banning him from transferring the detainees into the country, he did so under protest. As a senator and as a presidential candidate, he objected strenuously to President Bush’s use of “signing statements.” These were proclamations, made when Bush signed laws, that certain aspects of the legislation were deemed by the executive branch to be unconstitutional and unenforceable. As president, Obama has not only muted his criticism of signing statements, he has resorted to them. In that vein, he and his Justice Department have argued that congressional attempts to prohibit him from transferring alien enemy combatants into our country are invalid.

Yes, Obama is claiming, in order to kill Gitmo as a campaign issue, that he has no present intention of transferring the prisoners into the United States. But make no mistake that his formal position is that he has the power to do it and that he thinks it should be done.

Congressional Republicans ought to be rallying around Wolf. And the Romney campaign should not be letting Obama lie low in the tall grass on this one. The public strongly supports keeping Gitmo open and keeping terrorists out of the country. The issue presents Romney with an opportunity both to show how extreme Obama is and to remind Americans of all the time bombs that could go off after November 6, once Obama no longer has to worry about being punished at the ballot box for acting on his worst instincts.

Which gets us back to lawlessness. Even if Obama does not have the lawful authority to transfer the prisoners into our country, he certainly has the sheer power to do it -- just as he had the sheer power to initiate a war in Libya without congressional authorization, the sheer power to announce recess appointments even though there was no recess, the sheer power not to enforce the immigration laws, and the sheer power to make up his own welfare standards regardless of what congressional statutes say.

This is a renegade presidency. If Obama decides that he is going to put these terrorists on a plane and fly them into the United States, what is going to stop him? A law? Are you kidding? There is only one thing that might stop him: Congress’s refusal to purchase Thomson or some similar space that would give him a place to stash them.

There is nothing new under the sun. 

It Is Not an 'Interdependent World'

In his U.N. speech, President Obama declared:

The attacks of the last two weeks are not simply an assault on America. They are also an assault on the very ideals upon which the United Nations was founded -- the notion that people can resolve their differences peacefully; that diplomacy can take the place of war; that in an interdependent world, all of us have a stake in working towards greater opportunity and security for our citizens.

Put aside the first two fallacies -- people cannot always resolve their differences peacefully; when war is necessary, because what it is fought over is worse, diplomacy is not an effective and just substitute. Where all this goes off the rails is in the notion that we live in an "interdependent world." We don't. Americans live in a world where there is interaction of our own choosing. We are not dependent -- we remain independent. We engage the world as a volitional act, and we should do it in pursuit of our interests. But our liberties and our capacity to chart our own destiny, to be different, to be free, and to lead are not dependent on the indulgence of other nations.

Much political bloviating is so leaden and mind-numbing, we stop thinking critically about it. It starts to sink in and distort our perception of reality. Obama hardly has the market cornered in this regard. It was equally delusional and counterproductive for President Bush to claim, in the second inaugural, that "the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." That's absurd. We have a way of looking at the reality and of understanding ourselves that is different from, say, Soviet totalitarians and Islamic supremacists. We can be free and can flourish even if people were and are enslaved in those very different cultures. We can be a beacon for them, but our liberty does not depend on their changing their ways.

Dependency is a two-way street. If you conclude that your liberty depends on theirs, you invite the attrition of your liberty to accommodate their demands. You are saying maybe we do not really need free speech anymore -- after all, we're dependent on your repressive sharia blasphemy standards, we need to compromise for the good of our interdependency.

Among the many awful aspects of the Obama presidency is the obsession to make the United States just another cog in the wheel, to bring us into line with a purportedly "interdependent" global order wherever our culture and traditions tell us we've got a better way. "Dependency at Home and Dependency Abroad" is not something Americans ought to aspire to. 

A Duplicitous Administration

If they lie, you can’t trust them. That’s a fairly straightforward rule. It is certainly the one that trial lawyers bank on.

It is not a hard and fast rule. A person may shade the truth for various reasons: vanity, personal allegiances, financial incentives, etc. Usually, once you figure out the relevant motivation, you can sort out on what matters he is probably credible and what he is prone to lie about. Sometimes, though, the story is so unbelievable, so insulting to the intelligence, that a rational juror knows it is best to discount all of the testimony -- or, worse, to conclude that the truth is likely the opposite of the witness’s desperate version.

Of course, all the world’s a stage, not a courtroom. I am reminded of this when, as now, I happen to have a book out (Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy) that speaks to events currently roiling the world. I am reminded, that is, that I am no longer a trial lawyer making arguments to a jury. Now I am a writer who makes his arguments to the public and, at book-publication times like these, through the prism of the mainstream media. So it was that, in a few interviews this week, I have been asked about two currently raging symptoms of “Spring Fever,” the Libya attacks and the Blind Sheikh.

#ad#Today’s journalists do not resemble jurors. The interviews proceed in a now-familiar pattern. We go through the events of last week’s atrocity in Libya, where U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were murdered in Benghazi. Again and again, Obama-administration officials insisted that the killings were the result of spontaneous rioting over an obscure movie casting Islam’s prophet in an unflattering light -- a movie from months ago, a movie virtually no one knew about, much less saw, a production so cockamamie that calling it a “movie” fails the straight-face test.

As the administration well knew, this was a coordinated jihadist attack led by al-Qaeda-affiliated forces, clearly well-trained and equipped with sophisticated weapons. One of the participants was a former Gitmo prisoner, detained there for years because it was patent that, given the chance, he’d go back to the jihad. There appears to have been forewarning about likely trouble on the 9/11 anniversary.

Did anyone really need in-depth intelligence to recognize these dangers? Part of the reason the United States struck up an alliance with Qaddafi’s despicable regime was his intelligence cooperation: Per capita, Libya sent more jihadists to Iraq to fight against American troops than any other country. The only difference between then and now is that, with Obama having toppled Qaddafi in a war the U.S. launched without provocation and on the side of al-Qaeda, the rabidly anti-American Islamists of Benghazi now have access to high-powered weaponry previously unavailable to them. A movie? Before the president ever got to his unseemly Vegas fundraiser, with the nation still mourning its dead, it was pluperfectly obvious that we’d been subjected to a terrorist strike that had nothing to do with a moronic movie.

Yet our U.N. ambassador, Susan Rice, repeated the farcical Obama-admnistration line with a straight face. It was insulting, and even reporters for whom Obama can do no wrong could not take it seriously. In some of my interviews there has been nervous laughter -- not over the situation, which is so deadly serious, but over the administration’s line, which has been ludicrous.

But then we get to the Blind Sheikh. I prosecuted Omar Abdel Rahman back in my former trial-lawyer life. He is less than 20 years into his life sentence for terrorism convictions. During his time in prison, he nevertheless managed to issue the fatwa Osama bin Laden credited as the required sharia green-light for the 9/11 attacks. So I have been asked often this week about reports that he may be transferred to his native Egypt. There, as Spring Fever demonstrates, the populace is overwhelmingly adherent to the supremacist Islam that dominates the Middle East. There, his war against America makes him a hero, and he would be welcomed, triumphantly, as such.

Could that possibly happen? “You bet it could,” I’ve told my interlocutors, “it could and it will.” Watch for the frightening weeks between Election Day and Inauguration Day, when, no matter who wins the election, Barack Obama will retain all the awesome power of the presidency without any of the accountability of an impending election.

“But wait,” I’m admonished. “They’ve denied it. The Justice Department has denied it. So has the State Department, and at least one member of the National Security Council. How much clearer can they be?”

I don’t know. How much clearer could they have been about Libya?

The Obama administration is the witness whose testimony a jury would discount out of hand. We trust jurors to decide important questions because they bring to the task the common sense of the community. After Libya, the sensible person says, “Never again.” The sensible person does not even see the point of asking Obama officials for information.

#page#Not the media, though. Whether it is Libya, the “practically complete fence” along the Mexican border, the Obamacare tax that is not a tax, the indignant denial of gun-running, cutting the deficit in half by the end of the first term, the composite girlfriend, the “most transparent administration in history,” and so on -- the media compartmentalizes from lie to lie, assessing the next as if the last had never happened.

Does the president rate the benefit of the doubt at this point? Seriously?

No way this administration would spring a notorious terrorist? Are you kidding?

#ad#The president has already released the terrorists responsible for murdering our five soldiers in Karbala. In his last go-round at Justice, Eric Holder orchestrated pardons for convicted FALN terrorists -- pardons signed off on by President Clinton, who went on to release two convicted Weather Underground terrorists on his way out the Oval Office door.

There is nothing new here. Reports that the State Department was discussing a transfer of the Blind Sheikh back to Egypt surfaced months ago, in the context of a potential swap for democracy activists the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces was then detaining. The administration then issued a visa to Hani Nour Eldin, a member of the Islamic Group -- the Blind Sheikh’s terrorist organization, to which it is a felony to provide material assistance. The purpose was to invite Eldin to, yes, the White House, for consultations with top American national-security officials on prospective relations between the United States and the new, Islamist Egypt. As the administration had to know he would do, he pressed his top agenda item: The United States must return the Blind Sheikh as a “gift to the revolution.”

Eldin obviously felt very comfortable making the demand. We do not know exactly what he was told or what message he took back to Egypt. We do know that shortly afterward, as soon as the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi was announced as winner of the July presidential election, Morsi publicly vowed to pressure the United States to transfer the Blind Sheikh back home.

Did the Obama administration express outrage? Did the president tell Morsi, “Not in a million years”? No, he dispatched Secretary of State Clinton to Cairo for a friendly face-to-face meeting with Morsi -- right after she paid a visit to the ruling generals, squeezing them to surrender power to the popularly elected Brotherhood regime. Then the Obama administration got about the business of planning both more billions in aid for Egypt and a red-carpet welcome for Morsi at the White House -- the kind of meeting our actual ally, Israel, asked for but can’t seem to get as our busy commander-in-chief bounces from David Letterman to Jay-Z.

But don’t worry: Obama would never send the Blind Sheikh back to Egypt after the election, when the wrath of voters is no longer a concern for him. After all, administration officials have sworn otherwise, and we know we can take that to the bank, right?

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and executive director of the Philadelphia Freedom Center. His latest book is Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy , recently published by Encounter books.

Obamedia, Holder Style

Look, we have a Justice Department in which the attorney general himself -- not some middle-management minion but the top federal law enforcement official in the country -- attaches himself at the hip to the country's most notorious race-demagogue, as Eric Holder did with Al Sharpton in agitating for a race-driven, rather than evidence-driven, state murder prosecution of George Zimmerman. Worse, if worse there can be, it is a Justice Department that has adopted a willfully anti-constitutional, racially discriminatory standard for civil rights enforcement. It is a Justice Department that designs harebrained firearms investigation schemes that inevitably get people killed -- including law enforcement officers -- and then lawlessly stonewalls congressional efforts to investigate. It is a Justice Department that has pervasively politicized not only enforcement protocols but hiring practices. With this kind of record (and I've only scratched the surface), is anyone really surprised that DOJ has pressed the lefty goon squad Media Matters into service as an adjunct of its press operation?

As one of the targets of Eric's lapdogs, I suppose I should be honored. But in the greater scheme of things Obama, what would be shocking is if this kind of Romper Room stuff weren't going on. If Peter Orszag has to run his columns by Valerie Jarrett, and the campaign press thinks its time is best spent coordinating attacks on Romney while Obama's four-year policy of empowering Islamists has our people getting murdered and the Middle East exploding, why wouldn't DOJ retain George Soros to run its own little Pravda.

There are two things worth remembering about this. First, Senate Republicans have no excuses: This is not a surprise, Holder already had a deplorable record when he was nominated, they knew exactly what they were getting and they joined in an overwhelming vote to confirm him anyway. Second, while law-enforcement itself should never be politicized, they manner in which law-enforcement duties are performed is a profound political issue, as to which elections are the time for accountability.

What Obama and Holder have done with the Justice Department is mind-blowing, but the press is in the tank for its administration partners. DOJ will never be relevant unless the Romney campaign makes it relevant. I don't know if 47 percent of the country is with Obama, but I do know that 100 percent of the Obama Justice Department needs to be shown the door.

The 'Social Compact'?

As Mike correctly notes, there's plenty to say about David Brooks's faulty logic. I'll stick to one aspect of it. Progressives like Brooks see government as if it were not merely a sentient being but one to whom we could transfer our personal responsibilities -- as if there were virtue in spending other people's money and directing other people's effort. Most conservatives see government as a ministerial device needed to perform a few functions that a free society must see to in order to maintain the order and security necessary for society to flourish. I have never thought "government has a responsibility to help those who can't help themselves"; I have thought that I have a responsibility to help those who can't help themselves.

That said, let's concede for argument's sake the dubious propositions that (a) the society has a collective responsibility to help those who can't help themselves, (b) this responsibility can only be satisfied by government, and (c) the government in question should be the central government in Washington with one-size-fits-all prescriptions for 310 million people stretching across several time zones and varying social conditions. Brooks's claim is that 62 percent of Republicans in 1987 and 40 percent of contemporary Republicans accepted these premises with respect to those who can't help themselves. Romney was not talking about those who can't help themselves. He was talking about 47 percent of the country who are on various forms of government assistance. The vast majority of those people can help themselves. They would also get better help, if they really wanted it, from sources other than government if inefficient, unsustainable federal programs were slashed.

I do not believe there is a social compact of the kind Brooks describes. I think, insofar as the federal government is concerned, the social compact is the Constitution, and, properly understood, it does not provide for a centrally planned entitlement state -- such matters are left to the people themselves and state and local governments closest to them. But even if I am wrong about that, Brooks's column shows that it is he, not Romney, who has hopelessly distorted the concept of helping those who can't help themselves.