Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 31

Re: Christie's Judges

Maggie, we've already seen a Governor Christie judicial appointment. Last year, he appointed Sohail Mohammed, a board member of an Islamist organization (the American Muslim Union) who had a history of ripping the Justice Department's successful terrorism prosecutions against operatives of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and who represented an admitted Hamas member, Mohammed Qatanani, when the government tried to deport Qatanani -- who had concealed his Hamas connections in an immigration form Sohail Mohammed's firm helped him prepare. I wrote about it here. 

When citizens of the Garden State had the temerity to protest this awful appointment, the governor, in his usual mild-mannered way, smeared them as "crazies" obsessed over sharia. I doubt he's going to have much more patience for traditional marriage crazies. In any event, it becomes increasingly clear that as a potential presidential candidate, Chris Christie makes a good governor of New Jersey.

The Myth of GOP Stinginess

Mitch McConnell wanted you to know he was livid on Thursday. The Senate was about to Greece the wheels for adding yet another trillion and change to President Obama’s yet-again tapped-out credit card. “More spending, more debt,” brayed the minority leader. “That’s what we’ve gotten from this administration.” Well, no, Senator, that’s what we’ve gotten from you.

Yes, I know, Obama is the one driving us off the cliff. But as McConnell and his fellow Republicans are well aware, he couldn’t have filled his tank without them -- and they are the guys who got us halfway up the summit before handing the president the car keys. No one is falling for this week’s debt-increase “disapproval” charade, the stage for which was set by last summer’s sleight-of-hand, when Republicans agreed to borrow another $2.4 trillion. As if to prove that Obama has not cornered the market on cynicism, the GOP apparently feels the need to insult your intelligence while it helps our latter-day Robin Hood take from the unborn to give to the insatiable.

#ad#For the record, it was Republicans who nearly doubled the national debt during the Bush years -- increasing it by almost $5 trillion dollars. Some context: It had taken the nation over 200 years to accumulate roughly the same amount of debt rung up from 2001 through 2008 -- a time during most of which, besides holding the White House, Republicans held the Senate (with McConnell in the leadership, first as whip and later as leader) and the House (with now-speaker John Boehner in the leadership, first as a committee chairman, then as leader).

Of course, for the Left, enough is never enough. So when Obama took over, he made the GOP look positively stingy -- running up more debt in half the time, with perennial trillion-dollar deficits projected as far as the eye can see. With debt rising about $4 billion per day and each citizen’s share nearing $50,000, frightened voters opted to give Republicans a second chance, electing them in historic numbers in the 2010 midterms. This was not because they suddenly loved Republicans. They didn’t -- and don’t. It was because the GOP was the only available alternative. And it was because leaders such as McConnell and Boehner, affecting a chastened pose, promised that if given the opportunity, they’d slam on the brakes.

Last summer, they had their big chance: Debt hit $14.3 trillion, the statutory ceiling -- “ceiling” being Washingtonese for the point at which the money we’ve borrowed to pay the interest on prior loans for ever-expanding government spending no longer covers the tab because of the added interest on the new loans, necessitating more loans, resulting in more interest, triggering more -- well, you get the idea. Now in control of the House and with near parity in the Senate, Republicans were in a position to stop the madness: to decline to authorize more borrowing and thus force spending cuts.

Instead, they did what they always do: they caved. They shriveled in the heat of Obamedia scaremongering about a purportedly imminent sovereign-debt default that would shred the full faith and credit of the United States. It was bogus. As McConnell and Boehner knew, the debt ceiling was scraped only because the total government spending they annually authorize now outstrips revenues by well over a trillion dollars. There was no credible threat of default because revenues remain vastly higher than what it costs to service the government’s bonds. The real threat -- the threat too terrible to contemplate -- was that our elected representatives might be forced to make hard, accountable decisions about what spending would need to be cut in order to live within their $14.3 trillion limit (i.e., a ceiling about three times as high as what Leviathan cost us in the mid-Nineties, when President Clinton pronounced the era of Big Government over).

#page#So rather than confess that they had no stomach for the fight, McConnell and Boehner settled on two coats of camouflage. The first involved orchestrating the farce we’ve just witnessed: Republicans contrived a Byzantine process that enabled them to raise the debt ceiling but dole the new trillions out in installments. As the installments came due, Republicans would pretend to vote against them#...#and hope you didn’t notice that we were talking about installments only because Congress had already voted in favor of the whole debt enchilada.

The second coat is just as disingenuous as the first. With an assist from compliant conservative pundits -- who somehow always find a way to rationalize runaway Republican spending for a new entitlement here, a financial sector bailout there, and a global sharia-democracy enterprise for good measure -- GOP congressional leaders treated us to the dolorous refrain that they “control one-half of one-third of the government,” so what could you really expect them to do?

#ad#Does that pass your laugh test? Does the Supreme Court’s bloc of reliably progressive jurists ever come to the Left and say, “Gee, we’d love to help you out -- maybe create constitutional rights to abortion, to protect murderers against the death penalty, to invent special rights for homosexuals, to curb free speech in election campaigns, to invite terrorist war prisoners to challenge their detention in civilian courts, all those things on your wish list. But as luck has it, we control only one-half of one-third of the government. It just wouldn’t be right to use our power that way”?

I don’t recall our commentariat’s complaining that President Bush controlled only one-third of the government when he decided -- against deep congressional and public opposition -- to order the surge. I seem to remember the argument being that without the surge, al-Qaeda would achieve a catastrophic triumph in Iraq, and that when the stakes for the nation are that high, elected leaders are obligated to use the power the Constitution gives them to advance the national interest -- even if doing so is unpopular, brings down the wrath of the left-wing press, and risks an electoral rout.

The bunkum about controlling only a minority slice of the government is embarrassing. Divided government is not rule by a majority of government officials. Our Constitution’s separation of powers makes different components of government supreme in different areas. The judiciary gets to resolve legal controversies regardless of what the other two branches think. President Obama is convinced he needn’t even consult Congress, much less get authorization, before starting a war in Libya or sending troops to fight in Uganda. Either party in the Senate can reject a perfectly qualified judicial or cabinet nominee even though it is only one-half of one-third of the government.

The same Constitution that gives the judiciary, the commander-in-chief, and the Senate these powers directs that the House of Representatives -- the body closest and most responsive to the public -- is supreme when it comes to raising revenue. It prescribes, moreover, that money cannot be borrowed on the credit of the United States unless Congress authorizes it. President Obama can demagogue all he likes, but he can’t borrow a dime.

This has nothing to with holding a minority share of the pie; it has to do with holding the share that has primary power over the subject at hand. When it comes to the subjects of borrowing and spending the United States into oblivion, primary power belongs to the Republican-controlled House and to the Senate whose parliamentary procedures ensure that nothing can happen unless 40 Republicans give their assent.

Unbelievably, the United States now has a banana-republic-esque debt-to-GDP ratio of over 100 percent -- we’ve borrowed more money than our gigantic economy produces annually. Obama has led us to the edge of the abyss, but Republicans had the wherewithal to stop him. The public’s desperation to stop him was its sole basis for electing them. Republicans know that, yet they couldn’t bring themselves to do the job -- and they put a lot more energy into making believe than making the fight.

The debt is America’s existential crisis. For a dozen years, Republicans have been more its cause than its solution. In 2010, they were given a new lease on life based on their assurances that they had changed. But nothing has changed. So remind me what we need them for?

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of  The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America .

Congress Had Plenty of Say in Reagan Foreign Policy

I've got no quarrel with Charles Krauthammer's argument that then-backbencher Newt Gingrich is dramatically overstating his role in President Reagan's foreign policy -- just as I think (along with John Hood and Steve Hayward) that Newt detractors are dramatically overstating Gingrich's negative criticisms of Reagan. But it is strange -- particularly in light of Reagan administration history -- to hear Dr. K conclusorily claim that "foreign policy is presidential. The Congress has almost no say. If it has any, it's the Senate. It's not the House."

It is true that the Supreme Court has described presidential power over foreign affairs as "plenary." But that principle has been effaced significantly over time. (I am not saying this is a good thing; it is simply a fact.) A textbook example of that erosion is Iran-Contra, the scandal that plagued the late Reagan years. Its principal cause was the Boland amendment -- named for the member of the House (Massachusetts Democrat Edward Boland) who proposed the legislation that made it illegal to provide U.S. government funds to the Nicaraguan rebels (the Contras) who were trying to overthrow Daniel Ortega's Marxist government.

Charles does correctly say that when the House impacts foreign policy, it is due to the majority party -- the minority in the House has much less power than in the Senate. But he suggests this is an extraordinarily rare occurrence. I would respectfully counter that Congress, including the House, is much more of a player than he allows. How surprised would we be if, 20 or 30 years from now, some presidential candidate is bragging about how -- after being swept into Congress in the 2010 shellacking -- he or she helped stop President Obama from closing Gitmo or forced Obama's hand in getting tough with Iran? And whoever that Congress critter is might actually be right! 

The Muslim-American Muddle

That's the topic of an AEI panel I'll be participating in this afternoon, built around a very interesting essay by Boston College's Peter Skerry in National Affairs. 

Details here.

Romney Taking the Wrong Lesson from South Carolina

Mitt is attacking Newt for allegedly lobbying on behalf of Freddie Mac and President Bush's prescription drug benefit. Newt maintains that he never "lobbied." So we now have a two-ships-passing-in-the-night fiasco reminiscent of the "torture" debate.

The popular understanding of lobbying is importantly different from the narrower concept of legally actionable lobbying. Both sides throw the term around without explaining the distinction -- Mitt darkly suggests that Newt has not only associated himself with one of the immensely unpopular mortgage giants but done something unethical -- or perhaps even illegal -- in the process; Newt responds that there is nothing to see here because he consulted lawyers in order to stay on the legal side of the barrier -- as if any sort of facilitation or promotional work in support of wayward private/public enterprises, which disastrously intrude government into the private sector, is fine as long as it steered carefully clear of indictable conduct.

Romney needs to understand that he did not get walloped in South Carolina because he failed to tar Gingrich enough. Newt's failings are already notorious. Mitt's problem is that he is failing to make the case for himself as a reliable conservative, which is causing conservatives to look elsewhere. As I've indicated before, I don't think it is impossible for Romney, even at this late stage, to address -- or at least mitigate -- this problem. But he is not going to rally the enthusiasm he needs to win by dirtying up the competition. He needs to convince us that he's the most conservative candidate who can be elected -- if he continues to neglect the "most conservative" part, he can forget about the "can get elected" part.

And for what it's worth, I suspect he is leading with his chin on Freddie and prescription drugs. The Democrats are already out with a story about how, while Mitt has been publicly pummeling the mortgage giants, he has been privately investing in them, at a handsome profit, through a mutual fund. I heard Newt mention this story in an interview this morning, and I imagine that will be a regular topic for the next couple of days. I doubt it's anything most of us would much care about ... except that Mitt has chosen to make Newt's Freddie connection a big deal.

As far as Bush's Medicare Part D plan is concerned, conservatives are going to be a lot less concerned about whether Newt lobbied for it than about how the various candidates stand on it as a matter of policy. Many of us believe that, notwithstanding some positive elements (which James Capretta describes here), it was wildly irresponsible to add a new entitlement program -- one the comptroller general called "probably the most fiscally irresponsible piece of legislation since the 1960s" -- to the Medicare entitlement program whose costs were already out of the stratosphere.

When Newt gave a full-throated defense of the prescription drug entitlement last night, it left a big fat opening for someone to make the limited government case against entitlement expansion. But, alas, no one stepped up to the plate. You can see why. Mitt has spoken favorably of the prescription drug plan (see, e.g., here and here). Like Rick Santorum, who voted for Part D, Romney says he wishes the legislation creating the new entitlement had been more fiscally responsible and had dealt with Medicare's ruinous cost projections. But that was not going to happen -- the choice at the time was to be for it or against it. You're left saying to yourself, "No way the architect of Romneycare would have been against it." He's not giving you any reason to think otherwise. And if you're convinced he'd have been for it, who cares about his complaints regarding Gingrich's efforts to get it passed? 

Newt's negatives are well known, and they are being very effectively highlighted by conservative journalists, Romney surrogates, and members of Congress who served while Gingrich was Speaker (including Ron Paul last night). Romney makes himself seem small by focusing on them. He also looks very uncomfortable doing it -- it's not him. Mitt needs to focus on improving the conservative case for Mitt. 

Report: Former Obama Campaign Staffer Arrested for Identity Theft in Alleged Scam to Frame Iowa's Republican Secretary Of State

From the Iowa Republican:

Barack Obama’s 2008 Iowa New Media Director was arrested Friday for attempting to use the identities of Secretary of State Matt Schultz [a Republican], and/or his brother Thomas, with the intent to falsely implicate the Secretary Schultz in illegal or unethical behavior. Zach Edwards, 29, of Des Moines, currently works for Link Strategies, a Democrat-affiliated organization with ties to Iowa Senator Tom Harkin. Edwards is the Director of New Media for Link Strategies.

The Secretary of State’s office discovered the alleged crime and reported it to authorities. Edwards turned himself in to the Iowa DCI agents Friday afternoon. He was charged with identity theft, a misdemeanor, and booked into the Polk County jail. Edwards posted $2,000 bail and was released later on Friday. He faces up to two years in prison.

The report goes on to explain that the Democratic party in Iowa has targeted Secretary Schultz since his election in November, attempting to portray him as unethical. The Iowa Department of Public Safety press release (with a link to the criminal complaint against the defendant Zach Edwards) is here.

Newt, Make Up Your Mind about the Media

When I was a young prosecutor, I tried a drug dealer who sold crack to two undercover cops. No prints, video, or confession -- my entire case was just the two cops' testimony to ID the dealer and the crack. So the defense lawyer decided to spin the case as a frame-up: the two cops and I were making up the whole thing. Not that we'd made an honest mistake but that we were corrupt. When he opened to the jury, he kept pointing at me and ranting, "Something's rotten over here, something stinks over here . . ."  

Fine . . . except that as soon as his rant to the jury was done, he began oozing respect and gratitude as I helped him get his exhibits straight and bantered with him as lawyers unavoidably do during a trial -- "Oh, thank you, Mr. McCarthy," "I appreciate that, Mr. McCarthy," "your Honor, Mr. McCarthy has just been good enough to inform me that . . ." My body language told the jury: "See, he wasn't serious about all that nasty stuff he said -- it was just defense lawyer schtick." And when I put the two cops on the stand, the lawyer was unfailingly respectful and affable during cross-examination -- like he was eating out of their hands. (It helped that the two detectives were gorgeous, charming young women. My adversary was smitten, which is the only sensible thing I remember about him.) 

Yet, when we soon moved to closing arguments, there he was again, raving about me and the two undercover cuties, and what a cabal of conniving, low-life charlatans we were. By now, the jurors weren't shocked at such allegations -- some of them were quietly chuckling. It was a good lesson for me, one having nothing to do with the law and everything to do with common sense: Your manner has to be consistent with your story. If you want people to believe a bunch of scoundrels has fabricated a perjured case to persecute your client, you can't treat the scoundrels like they're really nice folks whom you'd be delighted to have a beer with after court. Indignation is not an approach that works part-time -- not if it's authentic. And if it's not authentic, then normal people are wont to think it's a performance, which is apt to put them off.

That's what I didn't get about Newt last night. Sure, his righteous rage at the start of the debate struck a chord with me like it did with many viewers: The country is sinking into an abyss of debt, we have crushing unemployment, the economy's a train-wreck, Europe is exploding, the Muslim Brotherhood is sweeping the Middle East, and yet CNN decides to begin the night by asking about Newt's jilted ex-wife? The same CNN that continues to ignore Obama's background and radical ties? It's infuriating, and I took satisfaction in watching someone as articulate and cutting as Newt turn the tables on them. 

But Newt's indignation quickly disappeared. Some of that is to be expected -- it is not normal or helpful for anyone, much less a politician running for president, to exude anger for two hours. I get that. But Newt's anger seemed to shut off instantly, not linger and gradually fade like most people's. Then, in starting his closing remarks, Newt made a point of thanking John King and CNN for what he portrayed as their steering of a terrific debate. Then, minutes later, there was Newt again -- not only content to sit for an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper but going out of his way to say that "John" had done a "great job." 

The dissonance made me wince. To be sure, most people don't watch the debates. When they see the news, they are only going to see Newt's righteous rage at CNN, not his cozy embrace of CNN as the night wore on. But I think you've gotta make up your mind: Your story is either that King embodies the lapdog Obamedia out to destroy Republicans while protecting the president, or that King is a superb journalist who did a great job handling a very significant event.  It can't be both.

Newt Was Right

Newt Gingrich’s ardent admiration for Franklin Delano Roosevelt owes more to the latter’s unflinching wartime leadership than his welfare-state policy prescriptions. This week, though, the former Speaker is also undoubtedly in accord with FDR’s aphorism, “I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.” To his great credit, Newt has made an enemy of CAIR.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, that is. The nation’s best known cheerleader for radical Islam -- or, as Fox News compliantly puts it, “the largest Muslim civil liberties group in the United States” -- has issued a blistering press release that labels Gingrich “one of the nation’s worst promoters of anti-Muslim bigotry.” The occasion for this outburst is the imminent Republican primary in South Carolina.

#ad#Asked at a campaign appearance whether he’d ever consider endorsing a Muslim for president, Gingrich sensibly answered that he would not rule it out -- “it would depend on whether [the hypothetical Muslim candidate] would commit in public to give up sharia.” Naturally, the usual suspects are in full fury, with CAIR the loudest among them. They’ve trotted out the rote response, dutifully echoed by Fox, that sharia, Islam’s legal code, is simply a set of spiritual guidelines -- one that, in CAIR’s portrayal, “teaches marital fidelity, generous charity, and a thirst for knowledge.”

Actually, it teaches polygamy, the underwriting of jihadist violence through ostensible charity, and the Islamization of knowledge. Don’t take my word for it. I refer you instead to a CAIR favorite, the International Institute of Islamic Thought.

CAIR and IIIT are both Muslim Brotherhood affiliates long active in our country. Founded in the early Eighties, IIIT is a Virginia-based think tank dedicated to what it calls the “Islamization of knowledge,” which is a “euphemism,” as the Hudson Institute’s Zeyno Baran puts it, “for the rewriting of history to support Islamist narratives” -- such as the claim that Spain is actually the rightful property of Muslims, to be renamed “al-Andalus,” as it was known under jihadist conquest. CAIR, strategically based in Washington, was shrewdly designed to be an Islamist public-relations arm -- the Brotherhood realizing that the American media and government were suckers for agitators who style themselves as “civil rights” advocates. This was back in the mid-Nineties, when new criminal laws against supporting terrorists complicated the Brotherhood’s overt championing of Hamas.

Both CAIR and IIIT were identified as Brotherhood satellites in the internal Brotherhood memoranda that proved critical in the Justice Department’s successful Holy Land Foundation prosecution -- a case involving millions of dollars funneled to Hamas, and a case in which CAIR was cited as an unindicted co-conspirator.

CAIR and the IIIT are so inter-bred that CAIR’s advisory board has included Sayyid Syeed, a founder of, and director of “academic outreach” for, IIIT -- in addition to being a founder of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA, another unindicted coconspirator in the HLF case) and a former president of the Muslim Students Association (MSA), the first building block of the Brotherhood’s American infrastructure. And late last year, just weeks before blasting Gingrich, CAIR presented a lifetime achievement award to Iqbal Unus, a top IIIT official, who was also a prime mover in the development of MSA and ISNA.

CAIR’s reverence for the IIIT is relevant because the Islamization think-tank is prominent among the endorsers of Reliance of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law. In fact, IIIT’s endorsement report is included in Reliance, vouching that this English translation of Umdat al-Salik -- an authoritative compendium of sharia composed by a renowned 14th-century Islamic jurist -- is accurate, faithful to Muslim doctrine, and highly successful in “its aim to imbue the consciousness of the non-Arabic-speaking Muslim with a sound understanding of Sacred Law.” Thus, IIIT opined, “there is no doubt that this translation is a valuable and important work, whether as a textbook for teaching Islamic jurisprudence to English speakers, or as a legal reference for use by scholars, educated laymen, and students in this [English] language.”

#page#I have previously summarized sections of this IIIT-certified manual. The law it promulgates is not merely a set of religious principles for spiritual guidance but a full-scale, authoritarian governmental system, regulating every aspect of political, social, and economic life. For example, Reliance denies freedom of conscience, explaining that apostasy from Islam is a death-penalty offense. It further elaborates, with supporting citations from scripture, that a Muslim apostatizes not only by clearly renouncing Islam but by doing so implicitly -- such as by deviating from the “consensus of Muslims,” or making statements that could be taken as insolence toward Allah or the prophet Mohammed.

Reliance further approves a legal caste system in which the rights and privileges of Muslims and men are superior to those of non-Muslims and women. For example, it approves polygamy: Muslim men may marry up to four women, though Muslim women are limited to marrying one man, who must be a Muslim -- the system being designed to produce Muslim children. Under the manual’s legal regime, the testimony and inheritance rights of women are worth half that of a man; women are directed to be obedient to their husbands (they may otherwise be beaten) and must have permission from their husbands before leaving the marital home.

#ad#The manual penalizes extramarital fornication by stoning or scourging. It matter-of-factly assigns other cruel corporal punishments for various offenses (e.g., amputation of a thief’s hand). The death penalty is directed for homosexuals, as well as for those who spy against Muslims, and for those who make interest-bearing loans.

This sharia system leads to an epidemic of unreported rape, because rape allegations must be verified by four male witnesses -- otherwise the intercourse is considered extramarital fornication (turning the victim into a capital criminal). There can, moreover, be no marital rape in sharia because a wife is obliged to submit on demand. There is a reason why sexual assault is the unmentioned scandal of an increasingly Islamic Europe.

Reliance venerates jihad, which it defines as “to war against non-Muslims.” Muslims, moreover, are obliged to strive to establish an Islamic government, ruled by a caliph, who must be Muslim and male. If an Islamic state is established, non-Muslims are permitted to live in it only if they accept the state’s authority, pay a poll tax, and comply with various degrading conditions of dhimmitude that are designed to remind them of their inferior status.

Newt Gingrich is not pulling this stuff out of the sky any more than I am. It is all there in black and white, courtesy of CAIR’s Islamist allies. Of course, there are Muslims who do not want to live in a sharia state, Muslims who desire a civil society on which private spiritual beliefs are not imposed. That is exactly why Newt, in answering the question about presidential qualifications, took pains to qualify that “a truly modern person who happened to worship Allah” would pose no problem. But that is not the type of Muslim that CAIR and other Brotherhood satellites are grooming. They advocate sharia, which is why Gingrich makes sharia, not the fact that someone happens to be a Muslim, his line in the sand.

Fox is owned by News Corp, whose second-largest shareholder is the Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal, whose fabulous wealth spearheads the aggressive campaign to put a happy face on sharia while promoting it in the media and the academy -- just as Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna instructed in his elaborate plan for Islamizing societies. It is no surprise, then, to find Fox’s report on Gingrich parroting CAIR’s stock rebuttal that sharia is no threat to America because it mandates that “Muslims respect the law of the land in which they live.” This, by the way, is the same thing the Blind Shiekh and other terrorist defendants claimed when I prosecuted them in the first World Trade Center case; they argued to the jury that they couldn’t possibly be involved in a jihadist war against the United States because when a Muslim lives in a non-Muslim country, sharia dictates that he honor that country’s legal code.

#page#It is laughable. Even if you believe that Islamists respect our laws, those laws allow for their own repeal and modification. Hence, they comfortably accommodate a campaign of sharia incrementalism -- if we allow it to happen. There is nothing illegal about it, but a quick glance at Europe will tell you that its success would gradually and dramatically alter the character of the West. And CAIR’s unmitigated gall in smearing Gingrich as a segregationist is astounding. These are the guys whose ideal society segregates everyone along lines of creed and sex. Their strategy in the West is voluntary apartheid: Muslims counseled to retreat into their own enclaves, the better to argue that they must be permitted to govern themselves under their own parallel sharia system -- giving sharia the toehold of legitimacy from which it can spread. Read Reliance and ask yourself who the segregationists are.

#ad#The sharia of the IIIT and their chums at CAIR is patently antithetical to the individual liberties, equality of opportunity, and separation of powers that undergird our constitutional system, which any president must swear to preserve, protect, and defend. It is, of course, permissible in our free society to believe that our system should be overthrown in favor of a sharia system -- just as it is permissible to believe the moon is made of blue cheese. But the rest of us are not required to admire an Islamist’s beliefs just because there is no crime in his holding them, or just because they derive from a belief system he labels “religion.” And given that one cannot rationally believe both a proposition and its opposite, Newt is exactly right to argue that a presidential candidate could not be faithful simultaneously to the Constitution and to the classical sharia preached by the Brotherhood.

CAIR despises Gingrich because he is not seized by factophobia. That’s the Western epidemic whose seemingly untreatable pathogen is the dread accusation of “Islamophobia,” leveled by smartly groomed Islamists in their neatly pressed suits who so exude moderation -- at least until you ask them about Israel -- that you could never imagine them swatting a fly, much less chopping off a hand. Nearly two decades of boot-licking by a bipartisan parade of American politicians and administrations have conditioned these CAIR “civil rights” activists to expect -- to demand -- that no one will question them, not about sharia tenets, not about their organization’s sordid history.

When someone dares to depart from the script, that someone must be vilified without remission. Otherwise, the fortress of cards comes tumbling down. But imagine an American media that actually did its homework and asked CAIR about what’s in Reliance of the Traveller, rather than mindlessly repeating the Brotherhood’s lavishly financed talking points.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of  The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America .

Looks like Perry is out

See here. Erick Erickson has been urging this course for a couple of days -- i.e., get out before the debate and endorse someone (he suggests Newt) who can stop Romney. We'll see how it plays out.

Oops -- Did we mention that he's a registered sex offender?

Michelle Malkin presents the "editor's note of the day", added to a Boston Globe story of star-crossed Occupy Wall Street lovers:

Editor’s note: This story about relationships that began during Occupy Boston featured a man, Robert Stitham, who is a registered sex offender, according to state records. Had his status been discovered during reporting, the story would not have been published.