And by a wide margin. I quote in full:
Timing Is Everything
I have no opinion about the merits of this report from the Cato Institute, but the timing isn’t exactly propitious: THE BENEFITS OF PORT LIBERALIZATION: A CASE STUDY FROM INDIA
That’s about as dark as humor gets, but I freely confess to laughing long and hard.
With all the gloominess in the news today, it’s nice to know the guys at The Corner are still doing what they love: lying about things. In a post predicting that Obama will co-opt all of Bush’s terrific policies and rebrand them to rave reviews from the media, VDH says the following:
FISA and wire-intercepts of terrorist communications in the pre-Obama president months were once derided as more of Ashcroft-Bush stomping on the Constitution — except that now ABC News reports that, in fact, US intelligence agencies supplied India with general knowledge of the rough time period, place, and perhaps even method of terrorist attack. Are we to believe that such newfound capability to warn a country 7000 miles away about terrorist infiltration on its borders would be of no utility here at home?
I think in response what we will see is that insidiously, bit by bit, Obama and the Obama-brand press will begin to drop the shrill rhetoric about destroying constitutional liberties, and replace it with the vocabulary of ambiguity (e.g., try “complex,” “no easy answers”, “problematic”, etc.).
This is just flat out dishonest. No one has ever argued that we should just give up on intelligence altogether. Of course, no one has reported that we warned them based on information gained from warantless domestic wiretaps, and no one is going to report that, because it didn’t happen.
As far as I can tell, Hanson isn’t claiming something quite that crazy. Instead, he’s saying that we have this shiny new system for finding stuff out that is doing great work abroad (well, something seems to have gone wrong in this particular case, but still…) and we’d love to use it at home but the whiny Democrats won’t let us. But no part of this is in any way true. There is nothing ‘newfound’ about our capability to warn a country 7,000 miles away about things going on there. That’s called foreign intelligence, and we’ve always done it. Nor is there anything revolutionary about doing the same sort of thing at home. That’s called domestic intelligence, and we’ve always done that too.
What is at issue is something far more specific: warantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens. Some people think it’s a vital source of intel. Other people think it isn’t worth the loss of privacy rights. There is a serious debate to be had there (though the former group of people are on the wrong side of that debate, and anyway it’s illegal). But there is nothing at all serious about pointing to the existence of intelligence gathering as evidence one way or the other. It doesn’t even begin to bear on the question at issue. It is dishonest drivel, and that is the M.O. of the National Review these days.
Mumbai, apparently:
A young rabbi and his wife who moved from Brooklyn to Mumbai to run a Jewish center in India’s commercial capital were among those killed in a series of coordinated terrorist attacks, the Chabad-Lubavitch organization said on Friday.
There are headlines about this all over the place. Perhaps I’m just not patriotic enough, but I’ve never understood why people pay extra attention to Americans killed in disasters abroad. When I already know that at least 151 people have just died, it simply is not news that at least two of them were Americans. I’m not one to go on about the fundamental worth of human life, or all men being created equal, which I find pretty flakey, but when a huge number of innocent people are shot and killed, this is a tradgedy. Who gives a shit where their passports were issued?
