[The Anti-Defamation League’s Abe] Foxman soon ran through a series of grievances with Obama’s policy, including his “outreach to the Muslim world…at Israel’s expense.” Shockingly, he then veered into his biggest complaint — that the Obama administration might actually achieve peace:
Still, I continue to sense that the administration is putting too much weight on solving the conflict. We all want to see progress and I have no problem with the administration view that the US must be much more engaged to achieve progress. But I am concerned when expectations rise dramatically, as when the president says that he expects the problem to be resolved in two years.
Foxman has previously criticized Obama’s Middle East envoy George Mitchell for being too “meticulously even-handed” and “fair” in his approach to the conflict.
I guess if you’re in no hurry to end the conflict, then fairness and even-handedness would not exactly be characteristics you’d prize in a peace envoy…
Bork, who was nominated by Ronald Reagan, also lashed out at the way Democrats conduct confirmation hearings.
“It’s quite true that the Democrats are willing to engage in furious attacks, often without any basis in fact, and Republicans are not,” he said.
“I don’t know if that’s a Republican virtue or Republican timidity. But I think the Republicans are either going to have to persuade the Democrats to quit that approach to confirmations, or take up the same kind of tactics themselves, which would be too bad.”
Those poor, innocent Republicans, once again victims of their own compulsion to play nice with those vicious cutthroat Democrats. Makes me weep, it does.
Almost four years ago, I observed that “Bush’s claim that he had to take extraordinary measures to fight terror is at odds with his resolute unwillingness to take ordinary measures against terror.” Apparently the intel inspectors general agree with me:
We’ve known for years that the Bush administration ignored and broke the law repeatedly in the name of national security. It is now clear that many of those programs could have been conducted just as easily within the law — perhaps more effectively and certainly with far less damage to the justice system and to Americans’ faith in their government.
That is the inescapable conclusion from a devastating report by the inspectors general of the intelligence and law-enforcement community on President George W. Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program. The report shows that the longstanding requirement that the government obtain a warrant was not hindering efforts to gather intelligence on terrorists after the 9/11 attacks. In fact, the argument that the law was an impediment was concocted by White House and Justice Department lawyers after Mr. Bush authorized spying on Americans’ international communications.
(…)
So why break the law, again and again? Two things seem disturbingly clear. First, President Bush and his top aides panicked after the Sept. 11 attacks. And second, Mr. Cheney and his ideologues, who had long chafed at any legal constraints on executive power, preyed on that panic to advance their agenda.
It is absolutely criminal that these people are not being treated as criminals.
Okay, I am admittedly not a law-talking expert, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work this way…
Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, asked if she would recuse herself from future gun control cases because she ruled in the past that the right to bear arms under the Second Amendment does not apply to state gun control laws.
Can anyone see where justices recusing themselves from cases involving issues where they had previously ruled might potentially cause some problems?