Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 34

Obama Recruits Qaradawi

The surrender is complete now. The Hindu reports that the Obama administration has turned to Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s leading jurist, to mediate secret negotiations between the United States and the Taliban.

I wrote about Qaradawi at length in The Grand Jihad and, here at NRO, have regularly catalogued his activities (see, e.g., here, here, here, here, and here; see also Andrew Bostom’s “Qaradawi’s Odious Vision”). For those who may be unfamiliar with him, he is the most influential Sunni Islamist in the world, thanks to such ventures as his al-Jazeera TV program (Sharia and Life) and website (IslamOnline.net). In 2003, he issued a fatwa calling for the killing of American troops in Iraq. As he put it, 

Those killed fighting the American forces are martyrs given their good intentions since they consider these invading troops an enemy within their territories but without their will. . . . Although they are seen by some as being wrong, those defending against attempts to control Islamic countries have the intention of jihad and bear a spirit of the defense of their homeland.

#ad#Qaradawi urges that Islam must dominate the world, under a global caliphate governed by sharia. He maintains that Islam “will conquer Europe [and] will conquer America.” He sometimes qualifies that the conquering will be done “not through the sword but through da’wa,” but the qualification is a feint.

Da’wa sounds harmless -- it refers to missionary work to spread Islam. Islam, however, is not like other religions. The idea is not to spread a set of spiritual principles but incrementally to impose a full-scale social system with its own authoritarian legal code, covering all aspects of life and instituting a caste system in which women and non-Muslims are subjugated. Nor is da’wa like other missionary work; it is the use of all available means of pressure -- political campaigns, lawfare, infiltration of the media, control of the education system, etc. -- to advance (a) the acceptance of Islamic principles and (b) the evisceration of principles (e.g., free speech, economic liberty) that undergird competitors, in particular, Western civilization. Moreover, the claim that da’wa is non-violent is frivolous. Much of the mission of da’wa is to rationalize terrorism as divinely mandated self-defense.

Thus does Sheikh Qaradawi champion Hamas, mass-murder attacks, and suicide bombings. “They are not suicide operations,” he brays. “These are heroic martyrdom operations.” Indeed, he elaborates, “The martyr operations is [sic] the greatest of all sorts of jihad in the cause of Allah.”

Thus does Qaradawi urge the destruction of Israel, rebuking clerics who dare counsel against killing civilians. “I am astonished,” he inveighs, “that some sheikhs deliver fatwas that betray the mujahideen, instead of supporting them and urging them to sacrifice and martyrdom.” As the Investigative Project on Terrorism recounts, when the imam of Mecca’s Grand Mosque issued guidance against the killing of civilians, Qaradawi upbraided him: “It is unfortunate to hear that the grand imam has said it was not permissible to kill civilians in any country or state, even in Israel.”

Not surprisingly, then, the sheikh is also wont to invoke what the West refuses to acknowledge: the Jew-hatred that is endemic in Islam because it is rooted in scripture -- not in modern grievances that could be satisfied if only the West changed its policies and Israel had the good grace to disappear. As Qaradawi puts it, echoing the charter of Hamas (the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch):

This is what is told in the Hadith of Ibn-Omar and the Hadith of Abu-Hurairah: “You shall continue to fight the Jews and they will fight you, until the Muslims will kill them. And the Jew will hide behind the stone and the tree, and the stone and the tree will say: ‘Oh servant of Allah, Oh Muslim, this is a Jew behind me. Come and kill him!’ The resurrection will not come before this happens.” This is a text from the good omens in which we believe. 

Qaradawi uses his al-Jazeera platform to preach this message to the Muslim masses. As the Middle East Media Research Institute and Robert Spencer document, in one memorable Friday “sermon” broadcast in 2009, he prayed that Allah would kill all Jews: “Oh Allah, take this oppressive, Jewish, Zionist band of people. Oh Allah, do not spare a single one of them. Oh Allah, count their numbers and kill them, down to the very last one.” He added that throughout history, Allah had imposed upon Jews “people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Adolph Hitler.”

After thousands of young Americans have laid down their lives to protect the United States from jihadist terror, President Obama apparently seeks to end the war by asking Qaradawi, a jihad-stoking enemy of the United States, to help him strike a deal that will install our Taliban enemies as part of the sharia state we have been building in Afghanistan. If the Hindu report is accurate, the price tag will include the release of Taliban prisoners from Gitmo -- an element of the deal Reuters has also reported. The administration will also agree to the lifting of U.N. sanctions against the Taliban, and recognition of the Taliban as a legitimate political party (yes, just like the Muslim Brotherhood!). In return, the Taliban will pretend to forswear violence, to sever ties with al-Qaeda, and to cooperate with the rival Karzai regime.

It would mark one of the most shameful chapters in American history.

— 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 .

The Year the Wheels Fell Off

Even if my buddy Jed Babbin hadn't been nice enough to give me not one but two plugs, I'd still urge you to read his sadly hilarious reflection on 2011 A.D. For those who love New York Post headlines, it's a double scream.

I didn't mean "subordinate" as in "second-class citizen"

I winced when I reread a passage in my column this morning. The column revisits Newt Gingrich's proposal to rein in the federal judiciary, and the specific bone of contention (between me and Stephen Fitschen of the National Legal Foundation) is the former Speaker's idea of having Congress subpoena federal judges to have them come explain their wayward rulings. Contrary to Mr. Fitschen's insistence, Newt did not offer this suggestion as a component of impeachment hearings. Instead, he anticipates "judicial accountability hearings" -- the usual congressional flaying for the TV cameras. The offending passage in my column is this one:

While business executives (other than union bosses) may have to put up with this sort of theater, judges and presidents do not. The Constitution makes them the peers of Congress. Not being subordinate, they are not subject to congressional commands that they show up for such dog-and-pony shows.

Before Mark Steyn goes all Mark Steyn on me, let me confess error. Though I try hard to avoid the trap of speaking too much like a lawyer when writing for an audience of (mostly) non-lawyers, I occasionally fall down on the job when technical legal issues like the parameters of separation-of-powers are being argued. I do not mean to imply that ordinary citizens are "subordinate" to citizen legislators in a way that officials from other branches of government are not -- that is, I do not mean to say that the Constitution sets up a caste system in which government officials are superior to the rest of us.

What I mean is that the people vest Congress with certain powers, including the power to compel testimony, that can be exercised against all Americans -- but that are subject to limitations (i.e., privileges to refuse to testify) that have also been crafted by the people. Included in those limitations are privileges based in the concept of divided government. Separation of powers is at the heart of liberty because if the branches were not equal, the greater could devour the lesser and become a ruler instead of the people's adjutant. In that sense, the president and the courts are not subordinate to Congress -- they must accede to Congress's authority in certain matters (e.g., spending) where the Constitution makes Congress superior, but they need not yield to Congress's power to compel testimony. I was talking about "subordinate" versus "superior" in terms of the dynamics of power between the branches. Similar dynamics are at work between Congress and the people, too. If a person, for example, has a reasonable fear that testimony would tend to incriminate him, he, too, may refuse to testify -- Congress's desire for information is "subordinate" to his liberty interest, protected by the Fifth Amendment.

"Subordinate" was an unfortunate choice of words, and I wish I had thought of a better way to say what I was trying to say. 

Newt and the Courts . . . Again

Newt Gingrich issued a bold proposal on reining in the federal judiciary that is about 90 percent terrific and 10 percent#...#not so much. In the latter category is the idea of having Congress issue subpoenas to federal judges who hand down constitutionally invalid rulings. The former Speaker and his supporters undermine the tremendous good the overall plan could do by continuing to harp on the wayward notion of coercing judicial testimony.

Typical is the National Legal Foundation’s Stephen W. Fitschen, who has taken to the pages of the Washington Times to defend the subpoena proposal -- specifically chastising former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and me for our naysaying. It is hard to tell whether Mr. Fitschen’s basic problem is that he does not know the difference between a fact and an opinion, or that he has not read Newt’s proposal. After noting Judge Mukasey’s reported assertion that Congress may only subpoena judges “to consider legislation,” and my contention that congressional subpoenas to judges would violate “separation-of-powers principles,” Fitschen writes:

Let me try to take this out of the realm of opinion into the realm of fact. First, the only fair reading of Mr. Gingrich’s comments is that he advocates subpoenaing judges as part of an impeachment investigation. If so, this surely can be done.

#ad#Mr. Fitschen, when you claim that “the only fair reading” of something is your interpretation of it, that is an opinion -- it does not take us “into the realm of fact.” More saliently, your opinion is emphatically wrong -- and that is not just my opinion.

I respectfully suggest that you have a look at the Gingrich proposal. In it (at page 21), the former Speaker offers a series of practical steps, which include “Impeachment Power” and “Congress Can Create Statutory Guidelines for the Impeachment of Federal Judges.” In neither of these does Gingrich discuss the possibility of summoning judges to testify before Congress. That proposal, instead, is in a separate category having nothing to do with impeachment:

Judicial Accountability Hearings  Congress can establish procedures for the relevant Congressional committees to express their displeasure with certain judicial decisions by holding hearing [sic] and requiring federal judges come [sic] to explain their constitutional reasoning in certain decision [sic] and to hear a proper Congressional Constitutional interpretation.

Patently, Newt’s concept is not impeachment-hearing subpoenas. Rather, he would have judges coerced to attend finger-wagging circuses -- akin to when lawmakers, “to express their displeasure,” haul tobacco- or oil-company executives into their woodshed for a televised scourging. It is a brush-back pitch, not impeachment or serious legislating. The idea is to create an in terrorem effect that will discourage judges from overstepping their bounds while showing the folks back home that their congress-critter is righteously indignant over judicial imperiousness (though not necessarily indignant enough to do anything about it).

While business executives (other than union bosses) may have to put up with this sort of theater, judges and presidents do not. The Constitution makes them the peers of Congress. Not being subordinate, they are not subject to congressional commands that they show up for such dog-and-pony shows.

#page#Four other points warrant making. First, when you read Newt’s actual proposal on subpoenas, its pointlessness screams out. While Mr. Fitschen focuses on my separation-of-powers objection, my principal objectionhas been that coercing judicial testimony would be utterly unnecessary even if it were constitutionally kosher. The Speaker would have subpoenaed judges “explain their constitutional reasoning” in problematic rulings and then sit and be harangued with “a proper Congressional Constitutional interpretation.” Judges, however, already explain their constitutional reasoning in written opinions; and if Congress believes the court’s decision is incorrect, it can attempt to reverse the ruling by enacting a statute that explains Congress’s competing constitutional interpretation. This would open its own can of worms: As I discussed in the cited column, nothing in the Constitution makes the judiciary the final word on the Constitution’s meaning, but acceptance of the courts’ claim to this power has become ingrained over the last half-century. In any event, there would be no need to hold a hearing in order to divine judicial reasoning and lay out what Newt posits as the contrary point of view of 535 lawmakers -- and I don’t know if the Speaker has been at a House or Senate Judiciary Committee hearing lately, but let’s just say Jeff Sessions and Louie Gohmert are not exactly on the same page as Pat Leahy and Maxine Waters when it comes to interpreting the Constitution. 

#ad#Second, Mr. Fitschen’s “only fair reading” of the Gingrich proposal actually raises new constitutional problems. Impeachment is a political remedy, but it is quasi-criminal in nature, to be invoked only in cases of high crimes and misdemeanors (although, to be sure, the term misdemeanor has a broader meaning in impeachment parlance than in the criminal law). While impeachment proceedings do not trigger Fifth Amendment double-jeopardy protections (i.e., an impeached official can still be tried for the underlying offenses after removal from office), Fifth Amendment self-incrimination protections may very well apply -- and would unquestionably apply if the grounds for impeachment were in any way connected to a potential criminal-law violation. Consequently, if Mr. Fitschen’s depiction of the Gingrich proposal were correct -- and, as I’ve shown, it’s not -- there would be an additional constitutional problem with it beyond separation-of-powers: Congress may not force a government official to testify against himself.

Third, Mr. Fitschen makes much of the fact that Congress has enacted a statute that ostensibly requires the appearance before Congress of “every person” who has “been summoned as a witness” by either house. But there are several such provisions in the law, such as the rules for compelling witnesses to appear at trials or before grand juries. Regardless of what these statutes say, they are subject to the Constitution and other provisions of law. Perhaps Mr. Fitschen has heard the expression, “I take the Fifth.” If a subpoenaed person has a privilege to refuse compliance with a subpoena (e.g., self-incrimination, marital, priest/penitent, doctor/patient, or separation-of-powers -- including executive privilege), he need not testify -- not at a trial, not before the grand jury, and not before Congress. Like the courts, Congress legislates a lot of things that are constitutionally dubious, and when they crash into the Constitution, they have to yield.    

Finally, Mr. Fitschen’s column is largely built on a straw man. He claims I am arguing that impeachment itself is a separation-of-powers problem. I have said no such thing. To the contrary, in the column to which he refers, I noted that Newt -- apart from the ill-conceived subpoena idea -- had cited impeachment as a way of combating judicial usurpations; I argued that impeachment was an appropriate alternative, less drastic than his more controversial notion of making entire courts (e.g., the Ninth Circuit) disappear; and I lauded what I took to be Gingrich’s suggestion that Congress “could revisit the dubious tradition that judges can be impeached only for personal corruption, and not for persistently, egregiously overstepping their authority.”

#page#My objection is not to impeachment where the grounds for it exist. I oppose issuing congressional subpoenas to federal judges, a terrible idea, and one that undermines the good in the Gingrich proposal (of which, as Judge Mukasey and I have both opined, there is plenty). That point is completely separate from impeachment. Contrary to Mr. Fitschen’s “only fair reading” of Gingrich’s position, Newt did not tie the subpoena suggestion to the impeachment suggestion at all. Even if he had, moreover, it would not be necessary to subpoena a government official before impeaching and removing him -- any more than it would be necessary to subpoena a criminal suspect before indicting and convicting him.

#ad#Like the subpoena gambit itself, Mr. Fitschen’s op-ed is as confused as it is counterproductive.

— 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 .

Gingrich and the Courts

In 2005, Congress barred our terrorist enemies from appealing their wartime detention to the civilian courts. The Detainee Treatment Act (DTA) was an eminently reasonable statute. The handling of captives in wartime had always been exclusively an executive-branch prerogative -- war being a political and military exercise, not a litigation. The framers committed all aspects of warfare to the political branches, accountable to the people whose lives are at stake, not to the politically insulated judiciary.

Congress acted comfortably within its powers: The Constitution makes it master of the federal courts’ jurisdiction. Indeed, other than the Supreme Court, all federal courts are creatures of statute -- the Constitution does not require their existence. Yet, in a nod to the ambiguities of terrorist warfare, in which jihadists do not operate openly as honorable soldiers, the DTA even provided a narrow avenue of judicial review. That made our enemies the first anti-American belligerents in history to be given systematic access to American people’s courts in wartime -- something the World War II–era Congress would not have tolerated, and that the Supreme Court of that time actually warned against.

#ad#Not good enough, pronounced the Supreme Court’s transnational-progressive majority. The justices ignored Congress and licensed the lower courts to entertain the enemy’s cases anyway. Soon after, they invalidated the military-commission war-crimes trials the commander-in-chief had ordered -- even though commissions had been an executive prerogative since the Revolutionary War, and even though Congress, in the DTA, had implicitly endorsed them.

The Court also implored Congress to do more -- to intervene and explicitly resolve the question of how detainees should be handled. “Turns out they were just kidding,” as Justice Scalia would later acidly say of the leftist justices behind this string of detainee rulings. After Congress did exactly as the justices had asked, the Court again thumbed its nose, ignoring the legislature’s unambiguous directive that the lower courts lacked jurisdiction to entertain the detainees’ appeals. In a ruling that defied both logic and centuries of Anglo-American jurisprudence, the Court held that aliens captured outside the United States -- aliens whose only connection to our body politic was to wage a terrorist war against us -- were somehow vested with a constitutional right of access to our courts to challenge their detention.

These rulings are not simply legal outrages. They deny the sovereign power of the American people to enforce their natural right of self-defense -- all for the benefit of foreign jihadists who target civilians for mass murder. Nor are they singular excesses. In the last three-quarters of a century, there has been an explosion of juristocracy, of politically unaccountable judges’ nullifying the American people’s democratically enacted choices. The courts have not merely been an advocate for our wartime enemies but a partisan in the culture wars -- inventing abortion rights; eroding the bedrock principle of equal protection before the law; cossetting heinous criminals; banning public expressions of religious reverence; protecting the publication of child pornography while curbing political speech; cherry-picking international law as needed to reverse popular self-determination; and so on.

#page#For daring to pronounce this state of affairs a subversion of our constitutional order, and for proposing to rein in the imperial judiciary, Newt Gingrich has been derided as “outrageous” -- that’s actually one of the tamer descriptions.

One could argue that the former Speaker and current GOP presidential hopeful has himself to blame for that. “Outrageous” is one of the critiques applied to aspects of Gingrich’s proposal to rein in the judiciary by Michael Mukasey, who served as President Bush’s last attorney general. A widely respected former federal judge and conservative thinker, Judge Mukasey actually approves Gingrich’s overarching aim. “There’s a lot in there that’s good,” he said of the Gingrich plan in a Fox News interview. “Take a red pen to the parts that are bad, stick with the parts that are good, and run on it.”

#ad#In a sadly predictable drama, the media and former Speaker are playing to their worst tendencies: The media is hyping the bits that are red-pen-worthy, and Gingrich is vigorously defending what is not only indefensible but pointless.

Consuming all the oxygen, and thus distorting the proposal, is the sideshow prospect of hauling federal judges before Congress to compel them to explain particularly atrocious rulings. That this would violate separation of powers is obvious. The worst aspect of this tempest, though, is its pointlessness. Judges always explain their rulings in written opinions. The problem is that the explanations depart grossly from the original understanding of the Constitution and the modest role of judges in a free society -- not that we don’t know what the explanations are and can’t grasp them absent some theater of the absurd.

More dismaying is the caricature of a serious idea: repealing some federal courts. This has been reported, with no small contribution from campaign bombast, as the notion that, because the Ninth Circuit federal appeals court (taking the most notorious example) issues a disproportionate number of what Mitt Romney might call “zany” rulings, we should just get rid of the Ninth Circuit -- Congress created it, so Congress can eliminate it. You get the sense that Gingrich would have us proceed forthwith from bad ruling to pow! no more court.

That is not a realistic rendering of what is at issue. It is as unserious as would be the suggestion that anyone thinks we should move from disagreement with a bad presidential decision to impeachment, the drastic remedy invoked exactly twice in 225 years of constitutional governance. In the real world, there are many steps between the extreme we have now -- sheep-like acquiescence to a continuing usurpation of power -- and the extreme of making the offending judges disappear.

For example, the political branches may enact laws that deny the courts jurisdiction to hear certain kinds of cases. If the courts ignore these bars (as they did in the detainee cases), the political branches may enact laws reversing those decisions. If the courts persist in their obstinacy, theorizing that they are vested with the final power to divine the Constitution’s meaning (a power found nowhere in the Constitution), the political branches could enact a law, or propose a constitutional amendment, that explicitly empowers them to overturn decisions of the Supreme Court. Or they could simply refuse to enforce court rulings -- the courts’ impotence in unilaterally imposing their judgments having been the principal reason Hamilton presumed the judiciary to be “the least dangerous” branch. Congress, moreover, could revisit the dubious tradition that judges can be impeached only for personal corruption, and not for persistently, egregiously overstepping their authority.

#page#This kind of change would also require the political branches to look in the mirror. There could be no judicial usurpation absent cravenness on the part of elected officials. Presidents and lawmakers routinely punt the hard calls to politically insulated judges: enacting vague, elastic laws, relying on the courts to do the tough legislating -- and then complaining about the way they do it. If we really want judges to limit themselves to applying law, rather than making it, we need to demand that the real lawmaking be done by the political actors we hired for the job.

If all else failed, could we eliminate defiantly willful courts? Of course we could. We are, in the end, a political society, and repeal, like impeachment, is a political remedy available in dire circumstances. But you don’t go from zero to DEFCON 1 over a bad ruling or two.

#ad#If the public were sufficiently provoked by judicial imperialism to pressure elected officials into using the less draconian tools available, behavior would change, and we’d have no cause to discuss eliminating courts as a punitive measure. Then we could explore an equally pertinent question arising from statist, rather than judicial, excess: Should we eliminate some federal courts to improve our republic? That is, do we have too many federal courts because we have too many federal laws -- because Leviathan does too many things that should either be done by the states or not be done at all?

Gingrich deserves credit for forcing the vital issue beneath all of this, an issue that every GOP candidate ought to address. The Supreme Court has long purported to be the final authority on what the law is. It was one thing to take that position when the judges had a modest understanding of their role: namely, to resolve cases between litigants, without the grandiosity that would impose those rulings on every American. As Gingrich points out, however, for the last half-century, the Court has regarded itself as a permanent constitutional convention. This is the absurdity: The Constitution says it cannot be amended absent an elaborate process involving supermajorities of Congress and the states -- but the courts have somehow convinced us that a 5–4 shakeout from nine unelected lawyers can do the trick.

So the question for the candidates is, who is the sovereign? Who gets the final word on what the law is? Hint: The first three words of the Constitution are not, “We the Judges#...#”

— 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 .

There Is No Power and No Reason to Subpoena Federal Judges

I was surprised that the usually excellent Megyn Kelly's debate question to Newt Gingrich about his proposal for reining in the judiciary intimated that former Bush administration attorneys general Michael Mukasey and Alberto Gonzales had panned the proposal as "dangerous, ridiculous, totally irresponseible, outrageous," etc. To be sure, that's what they said about some aspects of Gingrich's proposal; but not the overall plan. In fact, as Megyn's report states, Judge Mukasey said of Gingrich's plan, "There's a lot in there that's good. Take a red pen to the parts that are bad, stick with the parts that are good, and run on it."

For now, though, I just want to address a bad part that is getting most of the attention -- as Kate's post from yesterday indicates. That's the business about issuing congressional subpoenas to federal judges to coerce them into explaining themselves before lawmakers. As many commentators have suggested, this proposal would violate separation-of-powers principles. The judiciary is a peer of the political branches. It would be no more appropriate for Congress to subpoena a federal judge (or that judge's clerks) about the reasoning of one of the judge's rulings than it would be for Congress to subpoena the president (or his top advisors) about a controversial decision that was within the president's constitutional authority, or for a judge or the Justice Department to issue a subpoena to a member of Congress (or the lawmaker's staff) to question that member about the deliberations over some legislative act that arguably went beyond Congress's enumerated powers.

Put aside the constitutional problem, though. What I find most difficult to understand is the pointlessness -- of both the proposal that judges be forced to explain themselves and the offense taken at the proposal.

In cases involving important questions of constitutional law, judges always explain their reasoning. Take Chief Judge Fred Biery's infamous ruling that barred school prayer at a graduation ceremony -- which Newt frequently cites. There is a great deal to be said about this ruling, but one thing that ought not be said is that the judge failed to explain his reasoning. He cited recent Supreme Court precedents, a number of circuit court rulings, and some district court cases applying these precedents. You can disagree with Biery's reasoning, or you can conclude that the hash the Supreme Court has made of this area of First Amendment jurisprudence gives activist judges a wide berth to discriminate against religious expression in the public square. But you can't say he didn't tell you what he was thinking. He said his ruling was a logical application of higher court guidance which lower court judges like himself were bound to follow.

Why are we fighting about whether judges can be forced to explain themselves when judges always explain themselves? By all means, it's worth arguing about why we don't like the explanation, don't believe it is called for by the Constitution, and don't think judges should be legislating their preferences. It's also vital to consider what can and should be done in response to judicial excesses -- and Gingrich is doing a great service in provoking that discussion. But there's no cause to champion a constitutionally dubious measure on the theory that, if Congress doesn't subpoena the judges, we'll be clueless about the rationales for these imperious rulings. The rationales are right there in black and white -- just read the opinions.

Gingrich's Virtues

I respectfully dissent from National Review’s Wednesday-evening editorial, which derided Newt Gingrich as not merely flawed but unfit for consideration as the GOP presidential nominee. The Editors further gave the back of the hand to the bids of two other prominent conservatives, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann -- a judgment that is simply inexplicable in light of the frivolousness of its reasoning and of the Editors’ embrace of Jon Huntsman, a moderate former Obama-administration official, as a serious contender.

The editorial surprised me, as it did many readers. I am now advised that the timing was driven by the editorial’s inclusion in the last edition of the magazine to be published this year, which went to press on Wednesday. The Editors believe, unwisely in my view, that before the first caucuses and primaries begin in early January, it is important to make known their insights -- not merely views about the relative merits of the candidates but conclusions that some candidates are no longer worthy of having their merits considered. Like many other voters, I haven’t settled on a candidate. What I want at this very early stage is information about the candidates so I can consider them, not a presumptuous and premature pronouncement that good conservatives do not even rate consideration.

#ad#Regarding former Speaker Gingrich, I have no objection to the cataloguing of any candidate’s failings, and Newt has certainly made his share of mistakes. But there ought to be balance -- balance between a candidate’s failings and his strengths, balance between the treatment of that candidate and of his rivals. The editorial fails on both scores.

Gingrich’s virtues are shortchanged -- his great accomplishment in balancing the federal budget is not even mentioned, an odd omission in an election that is primarily about astronomical spending. His downsides are exaggerated in two unbecoming ways.

Let me preface the first by conceding that I am as concerned as anyone by the former Speaker’s walks on the wild side -- though I think they are outweighed by his unique gifts. Like other conservatives, I was disappointed this week by his dig at Governor Romney’s success at Bain Capital -- we can’t both fight to restore economic liberty and talk like Occupy Wall Street agitators when someone practices it. I accept Gingrich’s explanation that the remarks were a bad attempt at cutting humor -- in reaction to withering taunts from the Romney campaign -- and are not a reflection of his views. But he has to know that such outbursts exemplify his famed impulsiveness, giving his detractors a chance to say, “I told you so.”

Nevertheless, if the Editors were enterprising enough, they could just as easily write a similar editorial, with the same tone of alarm, about, say, Governor Romney or Governor Huntsman. Their heresies, too, are notorious -- and their explanations no more satisfying. I am not suggesting that such editorials be written -- particularly with respect to Romney who, like Gingrich, would make a superb president. I am just saying that it could be done. For the Editors to single out Gingrich for this kind of raking -- particularly when his accomplishments in government dwarf anything his rivals have managed to achieve -- fails the test of judgment conservatives expect from National Review. The transcendent mission of our founder calls for explicating principled conservative arguments about the great issues of the day, not “winnowing” intra-GOP primaries. I appreciate, as Jonah Goldberg recounts, that the magazine has made endorsements in some prominent contests throughout its history. In this instance, however, we are talking about clearing a seven-person field -- eliminating strong conservatives, preserving spots for two moderates (and one solid conservative who is a very long long-shot) -- before a single vote has been cast.

#page#Second is the personal stuff. As the Editors point out, Newt has been a major figure in our politics for a very long time. We all know the marital history, and we all know it is relevant. There is, however, no need to dwell on it beyond saying it is obviously an issue voters must weigh -- though hardly the top of the list. Yet the Editors make it the top of the list. It is Count One of their indictment, and they make sure to spell out that we’re talking not only about divorces but also about multiple marriages to “mistresses.” Later, just in case we’ve been too dense to get the Newt-is-a-betrayal-waiting-to-happen point, the Editors conclude by admonishing Republicans “to reject a hasty marriage to Gingrich, which would risk dissolving in acrimony” -- the lasting impression they decided was worth emblazoning in big bold letters at the top of the homepage all day long. This has all the subtlety of Obama’s class-warfare tropes. I’m not contending that there’s no there there, but c’mon. I don’t want to cringe reading an editorial written by friends of mine any more than I want to wince hearing Newt talk about Bain Capital.

#ad#And as for Gingrich’s Republican “colleagues,” whom the Editors applaud for ejecting him from the speakership, no one can deny that they had their reasons. But is there not another side of that story worth telling? In the seven years they controlled Congress after Gingrich left, didn’t these esteemed colleagues have something of a “weakness for half-baked (and not especially conservative) ideas”? Under a Republican president, they added over $3 trillion to the federal deficit, shunned conservative policy in favor of Beltway influence-peddling, and so damaged the GOP brand that we ended up, first, with an electoral rout that lost the majority Gingrich had worked years to forge, and then, with Obama. How much should I really care that Newt’s fabulous colleagues think his reemergence would be a disaster for Republicans? Lest these characters forget, it is the Tea Party and President Obama’s radicalism that have put them back in the saddle -- 2010 was not a merit promotion; they were the only alternative in town.

The 2012 election will be about a government careering toward financial ruin, and Gingrich is the candidate who can say he actually wrestled the federal budget into balance -- by comparison, Gov. Jon Huntsman, who the Editors say rates “serious consideration,” blew out Utah’s budget, raising government spending by a whopping 33 percent. In an election about the imperative to repeal Obamacare, Gingrich is the candidate who helped defeat Hillarycare -- by comparison, Governor Romney ushered in a health-care system that became a model for Obamacare (and he stubbornly continues to insist that it was a great achievement -- the main reason he can’t crack the 25 percent ceiling in most polls). In an election that is about grappling with budget-busting entitlements, Gingrich is the candidate who reformed welfare -- which, the Editors acknowledge, is “the most successful social policy of recent decades.”

Is Newt guilty of so many missteps that the tremendous good he has done is outweighed? I don’t think so, but that is what the primary process is about. Although I think NR should stay out of the endorsement/disqualification business at this early stage of the GOP race, I would not complain if my colleagues were simply assessing both sides of the ledger and deciding that other candidates are preferable to Gingrich. But to conclude that he is unfit, as the Editors do, is not only wrong; it is a gross exaggeration. NR absolutely should give conservatives the information they deserve -- good and bad -- to make an intelligent choice. Moreover, while I don’t subscribe to this view, it is certainly defensible to argue that beating Obama is so vital that nominating a surer winner trumps nominating a potentially better president. But to declare, as the Editors do, that Gingrich should be “exclude[d] from consideration” is an unfair evaluation of his candidacy; more significantly, it is a disservice to conservatives and other Republicans, who are more than capable of assessing his worthiness vel non.

#page#In an even worse excess, the Editors shift from skewering Speaker Gingrich to a peremptory dismissal of two other admirable conservatives, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann. Perry has been a tremendously successful governor of Texas -- a state that has experienced job growth while the national economy, under Obama, languishes in a near depression (or is it a “jobless recovery”?). Like Governor Perry, Representative Bachmann of Minnesota is a champion of limited government in the framework of the original Constitution. She has fought President Obama tooth and nail on Obamacare, the national debt, and other crucial issues -- often holding to the fire the feet of a spaghetti-spined Republican establishment.

#ad#Playing to the cheap seats, the Editors mock Perry’s deficiencies as a debater -- he needs “to spend much of his time untying his own tongue.” Do we really need to turn National Review into American Idol -- and over trivia that pales beside Perry’s impressive executive record? Bachmann is a superb expositor of conservative principles, but the Editors are in a huff over her occasional resort to hyperbole -- most infamously, overstating the dangers of Gardasil in an otherwise devastatingly competent critique of Perry’s vaccination mandate. Such rhetorical gaffes seem pretty tame in a field of candidates whose flaws run substantive and deep. And were she to win the nomination, President Obama wouldn’t be able to exploit this vulnerability -- even if he had the expert advice of Jon Corzine and of all the “corpse”-men in the 57 states, armed to the teeth with every breathalyzer the English embassy could find.

The Editors also want to drum Ron Paul out of the field. I think this is unwise, too, but not worth dwelling on. Paul has zero chance of being nominated, and the Editors give good reasons for discrediting his candidacy -- although I think they’d have done well to clarify that when they refer to “the movement he leads,” they are not talking about the Tea Party (as opposed to an extremist anti-government fringe that likes to represent itself as the Tea Party). I’ll stick with Perry and Bachmann. The Editors’ position on this pair of good conservatives is astonishing when one compares it to their claim that Governor Huntsman “deserve[s] serious consideration.”

Here is the totality of their argument: “Governor Huntsman has a solid record, notwithstanding his sometimes glib foreign-policy pronouncements; his main weakness is his apparent inability, so far, to forge a connection with conservative voters outside Utah.”

Seriously? When you ask conservatives and Republicans what they think of Governor Huntsman’s bid, you don’t get a bunch of psycho-babble about “inability to forge a connection.” You get, “Why would Republicans nominate a guy Obama picked for an important role in his administration?” Huntsman was the president’s ambassador to China -- a fact the Editors, remarkably, omit. So, when it comes to Bachmann, the Editors think “anti-vaccine rumors” are a disqualifier; on Huntsman, however, somehow the little matter of his service in the Obama administration doesn’t even rate a mention. To be clear, I am not suggesting that there is anything dishonorable about Huntsman’s service. But we’re not talking about whether he should be ostracized; we’re talking about whether he is a viable candidate in a race Republicans must frame as a referendum on the Obama administration. How bad can the administration be if we’re going to recruit our nominee from it?

#page#And Huntsman's “solid record”? Maybe he has one if we’re gauging him by Republican-establishment standards. After all, as Utah’s governor, Huntsman was a spendaholic and global-warming alarmist who was lax on illegal immigration and favored a government mandate that citizens purchase health insurance. Does it get any more mainstream GOP than that? In 2009, Huntsman opined that the problem with Obama’s failed Keynesian stimulus was that it wasn’t big enough -- it should have been $1 trillion (gee, I wonder why President Obama figured he’d be a good fit). On foreign policy -- a topic on which even the Editors chide Huntsman despite their amazingly generous grading curve -- he appears to be a transnational progressive of the Council on Foreign Relations bent who never met a treaty he didn’t like. Much can be said about all of that, but it is not exactly a “solid record” by conservative standards as National Review used to apply them.

#ad#This is not to say Governor Huntsman would not be a dramatic improvement over President Obama. As the Club for Growth notes, his irresponsible profligacy on the spending side was mitigated by sensible tax policies. He is clearly a very bright, articulate fellow -- and he was overwhelmingly reelected governor of a very conservative state. But how could the beacon of the conservative movement find that he merits serious consideration but Gingrich, Perry, and Bachmann do not? That is absurd.

They all merit serious consideration: those four, as well as Governor Romney, with his significant up- and downsides, and Rick Santorum -- who, along with Romney and Huntsman, is judged fit by the Editors to enter the trio to which they would whittle us down. When reliable conservatism and valuable experience are combined, Senator Santorum is as solid as any in the bunch. But given the Editors’ professed belief that the likelihood of beating Obama is such a crucial consideration, how odd that they single out “lack of executive experience” as his downside. Manifestly, Santorum’s credibility barrier is the electoral drubbing he suffered as an incumbent senator. He surely has a case that he can surmount this hurdle: Pennsylvania is a blue state, 2006 was a very bad year for Republicans, many great leaders have lost elections, and the passing years have proved him prescient on the cultural and foreign-policy issues that matter. But while Santorum could still catch a wave, as several of the other candidates have, it is the one-sided loss of his seat, not want of executive experience, that has dogged him.

The endorsement business and its flipside, the disqualification business, are bad ideas for this illustrious institution. That is a point I tried to make before the 2010 midterm elections. There is no avoiding the fact that we live in a practical, tactical world. Personality has its place and electability matters. But National Review has endured as a beacon of our movement for over a half-century because the power of conservative ideas can trump personality and dramatically alter voters’ notions about who is electable. If we lose that conviction -- if we convince ourselves that conservative candidates, effectively arguing conservative ideas, cannot persuade a center-right country to reject the most radical Leftist ever to occupy the Oval Office -- we are nowhere.

— 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 .

The Obama Defense Department: Willful Blindness HQ

If you want to know why Maj. Nidal Hassan was able to carry out a jihadist attack at Fort Bragg Hood [ACM: senior moment -- my apologies] one of the most fortified targets imaginable; if you want to understand why, despite months of neon signs that he was a jihadist, Hassan was able to murder 13 United States soldiers and support personnel (i.e., about double the number killed in the 1993 terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center); then look no further than this video clip.

It features testimony at a House hearing on threats to our military by Paul Stockton, President Obama's Assistant Defense Secretary for Homeland Defense & America's Security Affairs. He is unable to bring himself to utter the word "Islamist," much less admit what ought to be the undeniable fact that Muslim terrorists are motivated by Islamist ideology.

It reflects the Obama philosophy that we cannot even hint that an interpretation of Islam -- drawn literally from Islamic scriptures -- is the force motivating our enemies. Even though this is unquestionably true, to say so, to acknowledge it in any way, would mean, according to administration thinking, that we are at war with Islam itself -- with all 1.4 billion Muslims, including the hundreds of millions who do not subscribe to this interpretation. Unwilling to entertain the possibility that the enemy has a coherent, knowable doctrine -- which is a powerful catalyst precisely because it draws credibly (not inarguably but credibly) on scripture -- we have forfeited the natural right to defend ourselves and the troops who make it possible for us to live freely. 

This is criminal recklessness. It is idiocy beyond description, so I should just stop trying to describe it. Watch it in all its jaw-dropping ignominy. Three and a half minutes -- although it will take you longer than that because you'll need to watch it a few times in order to come to grips with the fact that it's not a parody but the real thinking of top officials in the Defense Department and throughout the administration.

UPDATE: I am doing something wrong in trying to embed the video. Until someone who actually knows what he's doing arrives, click here. 

Iran and Venzuela Plot In Mexico to Conduct Cyberattacks Against U.S. Nuclear Plants -- Report

As President Obama wrings his hands over Iran's seizure of our CIA drone, attack on the "English" embassy, and imminent acquisition of nuclear weapons, the Iranians are evidently plotting with the friends they've long cultivated in Latin America to wage cyber warfare against the United States. From Shaun Waterman of the Washington Times:

U.S. officials are investigating reports that Iranian and Venezuelan diplomats in Mexico were involved in planned cyberattacks against U.S. targets, including nuclear power plants.

Allegations about the cyberplot were aired last week in a documentary on the Spanish-language TV network Univision, which included secretly recorded footage of Iranian and Venezuelan diplomats being briefed on the planned attacks and promising to pass information to their governments.

A former computer instructor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico told Univision that he was recruited by a professor there in 2006 to organize a group of student hackers to carry out cyberattacks against the United States, initially at the behest of the Cuban Embassy.

In an undercover sting, instructor Juan Carlos Munoz Ledo and several selected students infiltrated the hackers and secretly videotaped the Iranian and Venezuelan diplomats.

Reports about Iran’s involvement in the suspected plot come amid the Islamic republic’s refusal to return a sophisticated, unmanned U.S. spy plane that crashed inside its borders this month. Iranian officials have laid claim to the drone, vowing to research it for its technology.

Calling the reports “disturbing,” State Department spokesman William Ostick said federal authorities are examining the cyberplot allegations but added that U.S. officials “don’t have any information at this point to corroborate them.” 

Sen. Robert Menendez, New Jersey Democrat and chairman of theSenate Foreign Relations subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, called for hearings in the new year about Iranian activities in Latin America. Some House lawmakers called for the expulsion of a Venezuelan diplomat in the U.S. who is implicated in the suspected plot.

There is more, here.

John Kerry reporting for duty ... to the Muslim Brotherhood

Senator John Kerry (D., Mass.) is in Egypt, meeting with leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood -- the Islamist organization whose goals are to destroy Israel, "conquer Europe" and "conquer America" (to quote its most influential jurist, Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi).

The Brotherhood, which operates throughout the world, seeks the imposition by governments of strict sharia law (as outlined in Reliance of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law) and, eventually, a global caliphate. Naturally, the Obama administration describes it as a "largely secular" and moderate organization -- and William Taylor, President Obama's hand-picked "special coordinator for transitions in the Middle East," announced last month that the administration would be quite "satisfied" with a Brotherhood victory in the Egyptian elections.

As the Investigative Project on Terrorism reports, Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee and key Obama administration congressional ally, "welcomed the results of Egypt's first democratic elections," in which "voters gave the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) nearly 40% of seats, and more than 24% went to the ultra-conservative Salafi coalition led by al-Nour Party." [ACM: by ultraconservative, IPT means al-Nour is somewhat more impatient than the Brotherhood for the imposition of supremacist Islam; as I've explained on other occasions, the Muslim Brotherhood is Salafist in its ideology.] 

In addition to praising the Brotherhood's election as a model of transparency and integrity, Sen. Kerry also called for an infusion of cash from the International Monetary Fund to undergird Egypt's new Islamist government.

The United States, though over $15 trillion in debt, is the leading contributor-nation to the IMF, providing close to a fifth of its funding. That is about three times as much as second-place Japan, more than four times as much as China, more than six times as much as the leading Islamist country (Saudi Arabia), and more than the combined contributions of the three top European donors -- Germany, Britain and France. (See Wikipedia Table, here.)  Consequently, a cash infusion by the IMF to the Brotherhood-led Egyptian government would be a redistribution of wealth from American taxpayers to Islamists whose goal is to conquer American taxpayers -- assuming, of course, there is any money left in the IMF after the Obama administration gets done using it as the device through which tapped out American taxpayers bail out, at least temporarily, Europe's collapsing experiment in trans-continental socialism.

Ironically, Kerry's overtures and pledge of support to the Brotherhood come only a few days after a federal appeals court upheld the convictions of five top Brotherhood operatives in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation (HLF) trial, the Justice Department's most significant terrorism support conspiracy prosecution in recent years. As the proof overwhelming demonstrated, the Brotherhood, through its American affiliates, channeled millions of dollars to Hamas to support terror operations against Israel. Hamas is the Brotherhood's Palestinian branch, and underwriting its campaign to destroy Israel has long been a top priority for the Brotherhood's satellite organizations in the West -- many of which were designated "unindicted coconspirators" by the Justice Department in the HLF case, and shown by the evidence to have abetted the Hamas-support scheme.

Almost two years ago, I wrote a book about the history of the Muslim Brotherhood, including: its game-plan for overcoming opposition in the Middle East and the West; its support for a post-sovereign order in which national interests are subordinated to the interests of the global Muslim community; its implacable hostility to America's liberty culture; and its collusion with Leftist American politicians who, for different reasons, also support a post-sovereign order in which American national interests and American individual liberty give way to the priorities of the international Left. The book is called The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America -- [shameless plug: the book, a bestseller, has just been released in paperback with a new preface that charts the game-plan's ongoing progress].

I took the title taken from an internal Brotherhood memorandum in which senior organization leaders describe their work in America as a "grand jihad" aimed at "eliminating and destroying" the West "from within" by "sabotage." In carrying out this work, the Brotherhood banks on the support of influential Leftist politicians in the United States and Europe.

The book has been dismissed by Islamic democracy-project enthusiasts. In fact, as late as a couple of days ago, it was panned as a "shallow idea" by former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson -- who also rebuked GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich for purportedly allowing himself to be influenced by it. I'll have more to say in due course about Mr. Gerson, a transnational progressive gussied up as a "compassionate conservative," whose concept of a good idea is the promotion of popular elections that are guaranteed to empower America-hating Islamists and expel American allies -- while imperiling religious minorities and demoralizing both secular democrats and authentic Muslim moderates.

I'll stick with the shallow idea, thank you. You can keep ignoring the game-plan, of course, but I think the Brotherhood would tell you it is right on schedule.