The Enlightened Despot

Lisa Schiffren has the scoop:

If Mark Krikorian and the new conventional wisdom are right, and nominating one “Nuyorican” woman (who, as Jonah noted earlier, is not even properly the child of immigrants, as Puerto Ricans are citizens) is all it takes to allow the White House to delay indefinitely the messy, no-win issue of amnesty for 10 million illegal aliens, mostly of Hispanic origin, few of Princeton/Yale education — that is a strategy that should not be subjected to too much conservative scrutiny. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, as the saying goes. The less talented you think Sonia Sotomayor is, the easier a trade this should be.

If it works, the White House should consider other applications. Everyone suspects that President Obama has been fibbing about his sympathies in the gay-marriage debate (he supported it before he opposed it) because he understands the potential political fallout (not least among black voters) from advocating, or helping to advance, same-sex marriage. Gay activists are coming to suspect that they’ve been played, yet again, by a Democratic administration which they believed to be sympathetic. Can they be bought off with a SCOTUS appointment? Would the nominee have to be out? Perhaps a genuinely brilliant, prominent lesbian constitutional law scholar would be a reasonable sop. There is one on the short lists. For conservatives, of course, that is a dicier deal than the Sotomayor tradeoff — since a genuinely brilliant constitutional scholar might advance the left-wing agenda a little too effectively.

Did I say, “if it works”? We know this strategy works — at least with the rank and file. Case in point: President Obama regularly makes plain his disdain for Israel’s democratically elected leaders; his almost visceral desire to force Israel to bend to his vision of an accommodation with the Palestinians; and his clear indifference to Israel’s existential security from threats of nuclear annihilation. Yet large numbers of liberal American Jews, who in many respects are quite intelligent, continue to point to Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod — two high-level political advisor/enforcers lacking in tenure or the ability to make law or interpret the constitution (not yet a redundant statement) — and smile about how much they love the president and believe that he loves them back.

My kingdom for a horse? My huge, game-changing cultural issue for a seat on the court? The Obama version of “triangulation”? Whatever.

That’s how you crazy!

• How about that? An enthusiastic reception and the most flattering picture I’ve seen of her from the New York Post. Hometown love trumps ideology. Incidentally, you can count on seeing a headline reading ‘SOTOMAJORITY’ the first time she writes an important majority opinion. It’s not quite as obvious in advance as the ‘Exit Sandman‘ headline we’ll see in 2010, but it’s close.
• The controversy over Sotomayor’s ‘wise Latina’ comments doesn’t, I think, have legs. It really is superficially offensive, pace the counter-outrage on the left, and I’m still not wild about it in context. At the very least, she could have been more careful with her words. But it’s pretty clear that she was referring to judgement on issues concerning women and minorities. She didn’t mean that a wise Latina will just be a better judge than a white man in general, though that is what she said. She will no doubt get grilled about this, but it won’t change the fact that she is a shoo-in.
• All the griping about identity politics and affirmative action is ugly. It’s all well and good to argue against preferential treatment and lowered standards on the basis of race as a general practice, but if you really think Sotomayor is a mediocre talent who got the nod because she is hispanic, then clearly the part to focus on is that she is a mediocre talent. Your empirical evidence for this fact is what lead you to conclude that racial preferences are afoot, right? The theory about Obama’s motivations is really just a side show, not particularly germane to the discussion. Of course, it’s a lot easier to demonstrate that someone is a Latina than that she is incompetent. But laziness is no defense for racism.
• You will hear a lot about how Sotomayor’s decisions are overturned at a high rate. Nate Silver points out that this is based on a very small sample, and that the sample actually shows the opposite. So you can put that in the straightforward lie file. The Volokh Conspiracy tries to plug Sotomayor into the results of a more rigorous statistical study, which shows her to be more or less in the middle of the pack. The methodology is murky at best, though. I doubt that there is any statistical shortcut here - if you want to figure out how smart and capable a judge is, you just have to read some of her opinions. Alternatively, you could acknowledge that she will be confirmed, for good or ill, and change the channel.

The most recent wave of piracy is a lot of things to a lot of people, but first and foremost it’s a great opportunity to remind people that you really hate Muslims:

The early republic’s experience of piracy shows how long it can take to stamp it out. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams dealt with the Barbary pirates — essentially a north African Muslim protection racket — when they were diplomats in the 1780s. The problem continued through the first four presidential administrations, until after the War of 1812.

George Washington negotiated, and John Adams signed, a treaty with the bashaw of Tripoli in which we agreed to pay protection money to spare our ships from attack and asserted that America “was not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” Latter-day secularists often cite the Tripoli treaty, without seeming to realize that it was an attempt to blackmail thugs.

It’s not entirely clear to me what impact religion had on the conduct of Barbary piracy, but I don’t have time to stop and think about it because there’s just so much more:

I try to take away the larger lesson here, which is about the so-called “rule of law.”  “So-called,” I say, because transnational progressives, who are instinctively converting the Somali piracy into — as Secretary Clinton put it yesterday — mere “criminal activity,” are perverting what the “rule of law” means. It’s the same thing they’ve done with the challenge of radical Islam in general, the Muslim pirates being no different from other Muslim unlawful combatants who flout the laws and customs of civilized warfare.

…

“Civilized” is a much-misunderstood word, thanks to the “rule of law” crowd that is making our planet an increasingly dangerous place. Civilization is not an evolution of mankind but the imposition of human good on human evil. It is not a historical inevitability. It is a battle that has to be fought every day, because evil doesn’t recede willingly before the wheels of progress.

There is nothing less civilized than rewarding evil and thus guaranteeing more of it. High-minded as it is commonly made to sound, it is not civilized to appease evil, to treat it with “dignity and respect,” to rationalize its root causes, to equivocate about whether evil really is evil, and, when all else fails, to ignore it — to purge the very mention of its name — in the vain hope that it will just go away. Evil doesn’t do nuance. It finds you, it tests you, and you either fight it or you’re part of the problem.

The men who founded our country and crafted our Constitution understood this. They understood that the “rule of law” was not a faux-civilized counterweight to the exhibition of might. Might, instead, is the firm underpinning of law and of our civilization. The Constitution explicitly recognized that the United States would have enemies; it provided Congress with the power to raise military forces that would fight them; it made the chief executive the commander-in-chief, concentrating in the presidency all the power the nation could muster to preserve itself by repelling evil. It did not regard evil as having a point of view, much less a right to counsel.

Christian pirates, we hardly knew ye. That’s a lot of crazy to digest, but when you’re done, consider this bit of satire from the Exurban League:

Obviously, this incident has raised many concerns among Americans. There have been calls for justice and even violence against the misguided perpetrators. But such an emotional reaction has led to the disparagement of entire groups with which we are unfamiliar. We have seen this throughout history.

For too long, America has been too dismissive of the proud culture and invaluable contributions of the Pirate Community. Whether it is their pioneering work with prosthetics, husbandry of tropical birds or fanciful fashion sense, America owes a deep debt to Pirates.

The past eight years have shown a failure to appreciate the historic role of these noble seafarers. Instead of celebrating their entreprenuerial spirit and seeking to partner with them to meet common challenges, there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.

Some of us wonder if our current Overseas Contingency Operation would even be needed had the last administration not been so quick to label Pirates as “thieves,” “terrorists” and worse. Such swashbucklaphobia can lead to tragic results, as we have seen this week.

Emphasizing the achievments of good pirates is absurd, because all pirates are engaged in evil. This is a terrific send-up of the rhetoric on Islamic terrorism that emphasizes the achievments of good Muslims, because all Muslims- Wait, never mind.

Here’s what crazy right-wingers, crazy left-wingers, and Sarah Palin have to say today:

From the right, Brookhiser wins the very competitive contest for the most deranged reaction to a picture of Obama bowing to the king of Saudi Arabia:

I wish he had been raised Muslim. Then it would be habit, not baseness.

Meanwhile, Ed Whelan reacts to the Iowa Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage:

The lawless judicial attack on traditional marriage and on representative government continues.

On the left, Bill Keller has an interesting take on how people view the decline of his publication, the New York Times:

Saving the New York Times now ranks with saving Darfur as a high-minded cause.

Finally, Sarah Palin responds to the suggestion that Senator Begich should resign and make way for a special election, as it is unclear that he would have been elected if voters had known Ted Stevens’s seven felony convictions would be overturned due to prosecutorial misconduct:

I absolutely agree.

Back in early December, I wrote about an emerging strategy from GOP party-line hacks: portraying certain Obama policies as functionally identical to some of the Bush policies he criticized on the campaign. I imagined that, while sticking to the standard this-is-terror-loving-socialism fare on most issues, they would trot this Bush v2.0 routine out whenever he was doing something particularly popular, successful, or irritating to the hard-left, who would be a great source of rhetorical ammunition. It did not occur to me, however, that they could ever use both of these strategies at the same time. How naive. Here’s Victor Davis Hanson, summing up the early days of the Obama administration:

If one were to have gone into deep sleep in late October during the Dark Ages, and woken up in late January in the AB (after Bush) era of Hope and Change and an end to all evil, would the world seem different? No, it looks pretty much the same. Same old Predator strikes on terrorists in Pakistan [wait, the strikes Obama promised before Bush ever ordered any? Sorry, keep going]. Same old DC and NY grandees caught fudging on taxes and giving complex explanations of hiring less than legal nannies and maids, same old Guantanamo open with the same old pledges to, “Close it now! Or at least soon!”

Yep, the more things change, and all that. This should be wonderful news for Bush fans. Sure, you have to hate Obama for being such a dishonest hypocrite, but you also have to be pretty thrilled that W’s agenda is still on track, right? Er…:

(more…)

Solis is now addressing the nation in Spanish. Which Mark will snark first, Steyn or Krikorian? I’m going to guess the latter, but I’m on the edge of my seat.

Without speculating on the truth of the claims involved, I’d like to point out that this is pretty high on the list of headlines you never want to see written about you:

George Tenet, Drunk in Bandar’s Pool, Screaming about Jews

Uncool.