Senator Robert Byrd, defending the minority's right to filibuster on the Senate floor today, wound up his speech by comparing Republican efforts to eliminate the hijacking of the Senate on the Constitutional duty of confirming federal judges to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Not only did Byrd imply that the GOP equates to the worst mass murderers of the 20th century, he's so proud of doing so he's posted the speech to his own website:

Many times in our history we have taken up arms to protect a minority against the tyrannical majority in other lands. We, unlike Nazi Germany or Mussolini’s Italy, have never stopped being a nation of laws, not of men.

But witness how men with motives and a majority can manipulate law to cruel and unjust ends. Historian Alan Bullock writes that Hitler’s dictatorship rested on the constitutional foundation of a single law, the Enabling Law. Hitler needed a two-thirds vote to pass that law, and he cajoled his opposition in the Reichstag to support it. Bullock writes that “Hitler was prepared to promise anything to get his bill through, with the appearances of legality preserved intact.” And he succeeded.

Hitler’s originality lay in his realization that effective revolutions, in modern conditions, are carried out with, and not against, the power of the State: the correct order of events was first to secure access to that power and then begin his revolution. Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality; he recognized the enormous psychological value of having the law on his side. Instead, he turned the law inside out and made illegality legal.

And that is what the nuclear option seeks to do to Rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate.

Let's stop the history lesson here for a moment. By the time the Enabling Law came up for a vote, the SA (Brownshirts) had effectively terrorized the Reichstag into giving Hitler everything he wanted. Hitler did not come to power through purely democratic means, nor did he care all that much about the sheen of legality. His SA by that time numbered into the millions, and they had already blazed a trail of violent chaos, attacking all of their political opponents, assassinating a number of them; that's how the Nazis came to power. So when Byrd speaks about how the Nazis used legal means to secure their dictatorship, rest assured that the Senator takes that completely out of the context in which it occurred.

More important is the disgusting and deranged implication of death camps and genocide towards Byrd's political opponents just because they propose to change the Senate's rules -- not laws, just the internal rules -- to allow for majority rule on one particular task. Perhaps this point eludes someone who spent the Nazi years belonging to a group that paralleled the same racial philosophies of Hitler himself, but Byrd should know better than to demean the millions of victims of the real Nazis by invoking them as an insult to people who simply oppose Byrd politically.

Byrd, with his attempted filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, is the last person who should be standing in the well of the Senate, calling anyone a Nazi. Why the Democrats have defended this doddering old embarassment for decades is beyond any explanation but the most base and cynical: he votes the right way. Republicans shunned Trent Lott for waxing nostalgic for an old Dixiecrat on his birthday. Will the Democrats do the same for the lunatic who has befouled the political environment with this intellectually, morally, and historically bankrupt foolishness?

Don't bet on it. It takes strength of character to hold your allies accountable, and so far, the Democrats haven't shown an ounce of it. Even their own party chair goes around proclaiming his "hate" for Republicans, who comprise at least 35% of all registered American voters. With "leadership" like this, we can expect the Democrats to dissolve into a parody of a political party, tossing around insults instead of ideas and lies instead of truth. (via Hugh Hewitt)

UPDATE: A complete fisking of Byrd's insanity can be found at Radioblogger.  Tuesday, March 1, 2005

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MANUFACTURING DISSENT 

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The Media Research Center has compiled Dan Rather's greatest hits. Some of them had me laughing out loud. All of them had me feeling proud to be associated with the bloggers who took Rather down.

Not having watched Rather for years, I frankly didn't realize that he was this out of control. The partisan rancor that permeates the MRC-selected quotations tells us all we need to know about why Rather violated the standards of journalism in his quest to shoot down President Bush through Memogate. Had the two-member Independent Review Panel that absolved Rather of bias on his say-so examined this record, even it might have inferred the obvious.  Tuesday, March 1, 2005 

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MAKING SADDAM SMILE

The life of an imprisoned ex-dictator is normally devoid of happiness. But a ray of sunshine recently illuminated Saddam Hussein’s jail cell, when he learned that Spain had caved in to terrorism.

Saddam last met his defence counsel in December and conveyed his greetings to all “free people” of the world “and especially to France and Germany,” which were staunch opponents of the war that toppled him, Khassawneh said.

Saddam voiced his joy during the four and a half hour meeting when he was told Spain’s new government had left the US-led military coalition in Iraq.

“He was very happy to know that Spanish forces had left Iraq,” Khassawneh said.

According to a new Gallup poll, more than one in four Americans would use nuclear weapons against “terrorist facilities” if needed: One in Four Americans Would Use Nukes Against Terrorists, Gallup Finds. (Hat tip: Sarah D.)

NEW YORK More than one in four Americans would go so far as to utilize nuclear bombs if need be in the fight against terrorism, according to a national survey reported today by The Gallup Organization.

Gallup asked Americans whether they would be willing or not willing “to have the U.S. government do each of the following” and then listed an array of options.

For example, “assassinate known terrorists” drew the support of 65% of all adults. “Torture known terrorists if they know details about future terrorist attacks in the U.S.” won the backing of 39%.

Finally, the option of using “nuclear weapons to attack terrorist facilities” drew the support of 27% of adults, with 72% opposing, which would shatter the taboo on using these weapons militarily since the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Experts agree that the power of today’s weapons, their range of damage and the peril of drifting radioactive fallout far exceeds the bombs used against Japan. That support has declined 7% since 2001, however.

Are you listening, Tehran?

ARAB BANK TOLD TO STOP WIRE TRANSFERS

Another blow to the terrorist financing network, according to US regulators: Officials tell Arab Bank to stop wire transfers.

Arab Bank’s New York branch office was implicated Friday by U.S. regulators in a money-laundering investigation into “suspicious” transfers of substantial sums of money by the Middle Eastern bank involving “high risk” customers.

The Treasury’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency ordered Arab Bank, which is based in Jordan, to immediately halt wire transfers from its Madison Avenue office, preserve its records, including documents related to its Grand Cayman Island branch, and to begin an “orderly winding down” of all bank operations in this country.  Tuesday, March 1, 2005

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CLOSING THE CIRCLE ABROAD, CONNECTING THE DOTS AT HOME

A long summary of yesterday's Lebanon news from the Muslim-American Society, including this quote from Bashar Assad:

"Washington has imposed sanctions on us and isolated us in the past, but each time the circle hasn't closed around us," Assad told La Repubblica .

"If, however, you ask me if I'm expecting an armed attack, well I've seen it coming since the end of the war in Iraq."

Asked if an attack was imminent, Assad said: "I don't think so, for now it's just skirmishing. True, the White House language, if looked at in detail, leads one to expect a campaign similar to the one that led up to attack on Iraq ."

Updates here:

CaptainsQuarters
Instapundit
AcrossTheBay
PubliusPundit
SyriaComment

The domestic reaction to the Lebanon story is beginning to take shape.

Ed Kilgore, guest blogging at TalkingPointsMemo, signals the left's spin on the democracy movement in the Middle East  --it has nothing to do with Bush!:

"[I]t literally never crossed my mind that Bush's fans would credit him with for this positive event, as though his pro-democracy speeches exercise some sort of rhetorical enchantment.

This is the kind of thinking, of course, that has convinced God knows how many people that Ronald Reagan personally won the Cold War. It's the old post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) logical fallacy. This is a president and an administration that chronically refuse to accept responsibility for the bad things that have happened on their watch--even things like the insurgency in Iraq that are directly attributable to its policies. Barring any specific evidence (provided, say, by Lebanese pro-democracy leaders) that Bush had anything in particular to do with Syria's setbacks in Lebanon, I see no particular reason to high-five him for being in office when they happened.

Let us congratulate the Lebanese, not those in Washington who would take credit for their accomplishments."

By citing to Reagan, Kilgore demonstrates that he wouldn't accept even "specific evidence (provided, say, by Lebanese pro-democracy leaders) that Bush had anything in particular to do with Syria's setbacks in Lebanon,"  because he won't accept specific evidence from Eastern European leaders that Reagan had anything to do with the fall of the Soviet Union. Here's Lech Walesa on Reagan:

"When talking about Ronald Reagan, I have to be personal. We in Poland took him so personally. Why? Because we owe him our liberty. This can't be said often enough by people who lived under oppression for half a century, until communism fell in 1989."

As with the Poles, so with the Lebanese --they are putting their lives on the line to face down their oppressors. But American policy stands with them and encourages them, and pressures the dictators not to strike back, and threatens the tyrants if they do.  The refusal to recognize that American policy does indeed have consequences is yet another exhibit in the huge array of arguments as to why Democrats cannot be trusted to run the nation's foreign policy  ---they don't think it matters.  Kilgore's dissuasiveness of presidential rhetoric --"as though his pro-democracy speeches exercise some sort of rhetorical enchantment"-- isn't just a misguided slam at W, it is an admission of awesome ignorance of the power of the American president to shape a world through words, a failure of imagination and an admission of an inexperience with foreign affairs that makes you question his commentary on literally everything. It is tantamount to saying "How many divisions does the Pope have?"

If you don't understand the power of the presidency, then you and your candidates ought not to be trusted with it, for it will end up a replay of the Carter experiment with presidential "small ball," where resignation to events is the dominant theme, and America's enemies to set the tempo and most of the rules.

Democrats have spent more than 15 years trying to deny Reagan his role in bringing down the Soviets. I suppose they will be trying to minimize Bush's role in introducing democracy to the Arab world for an even longer period of time.  Both efforts ask the public to set aside the facts they have witnessed and watch the Michael Moore movie over here, with post viewing commentary provided by Howard Dean. It didn't work with Reagan and it won't work with Bush.

Here's an idea for Democrats: Reclaim the tradition of FDR/Truman/JFK that has in recent years been carried forward by Reagan/Bush.

Of course that would mean unloading the excitable Dean, the dyspeptic Teddy and the very, very dense Senator Boxer, plus MoveOn, Soros, Biden, Kerry etc.

One person might go for a Sister Souljah moment knock-down of the new isolationism within the Democratic Party, and that would be Hillary.  But she'd need a very long speech, and there'd be some ugliness afterwards.  Plus she'd have to actually slam her husband and his team for the North Korean debacle.  But it is what the Dems need, and soon, before Dean et. al., takes them off stage left for a very long time indeed.  Tuesday, March 1, 2005

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DOMINO EFFECT REDUX

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THE THEATER WIDENS

Austin Bay links to Mark Steyn and Christopher Hitchens' view of events sweeping across the Middle East: Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt and possibly Syria. It is a reminder of why Iraq was commanded through CENTCOM. During the days when the overt action was centered on Iraq, it was easy to forget that it was one battlefield within a theater. Now the theater itself has come to the fore and the atmosphere is one of 'breakout and pursuit'.

The breakout creates a new set of opportunities and problems. These can be described as 'emergent phenomenon',  -- the result of interactions between individual elements within the Middle East and Southwest Asian theater that are now bouncing off each other. Worse -- or more exciting -- is that these recent developments now have linkages into Europe and Russia. France and the EU, for example, are getting engaged in Lebanon while going in the other direction, Russia has declared interest in supplying technology to Iran. Just as it was important to recall that Iraq was part of the Middle East theater, the Middle East itself is part of action spanning the globe. In retrospect, events as disparate as the dismantling of of the Libyan nuclear program and the exposure of the AQ Khan atomic weapons mart played their part in leading up to current developments. As historical drama the GWOT's scope is staggering and may prove to be bigger in certain respects than that old yardstick, the Second World War.

 'Militant' groups have often attempted to stabilize the front whenever events threatened to take a direction which they could not control. This usually took the form of a spoiling terrorist attack to re-mire things in blood, chaos and hatred as often happened during negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. It would not be surprising if the terror masters fell back on this old repertoire by staging attacks directed not only at Middle Eastern targets but at the United States to throw back the threatening psychological wave. The problem is that there is no longer any widespread confidence, even in the places like Lebanon, that terror tactics will prevail. To that extent even the most heinous attacks, like the carbomb which recently killed more than 100 in Iraq, have lost their bite. Psychologically speaking, the greatest contribution of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns is that they have shattered terrorism's myth of invincibility. The terrorists embarked on a maximum effort to dislodge the US from Iraq, employing every weapon of violence, political maneuver and propaganda they could muster and came up much the worse for wear. This lesson has not been lost to public perception and has emboldened dissidents all across the region.

The real challenge will be to find ways to respond to the campaign of spoiling terror which may be forthcoming. Unlike Iraq, where US forces can respond directly to challenge, the problem will be the ability of the US to affect events over the wider region in clandestine or indirect ways. Tempo is America's friend, but the enemy is even now looking for a place to stem the rot.  Wednesday, March 2, 2005

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THE GRAY LADY WAKES UP

Sometimes it takes behemoth a long time to awaken, but when it does, if we're all lucky, it will stay awake. This morning the New York Times editorial virtually endorses George W. Bush's pro-active democracy policy.

Still, this has so far been a year of heartening surprises - each one remarkable in itself, and taken together truly astonishing. The Bush administration is entitled to claim a healthy share of the credit for many of these advances. It boldly proclaimed the cause of Middle East democracy at a time when few in the West thought it had any realistic chance. And for all the negative consequences that flowed from the American invasion of Iraq, there could have been no democratic elections there this January if Saddam Hussein had still been in power. Washington's challenge now lies in finding ways to nurture and encourage these still fragile trends without smothering them in a triumphalist embrace.

Well, sure. But I think now Bush, whose triumphalism was never that great in the first place, has learned to be more subtle in that regard. Is this the beginning of a new trend for the Times? Who knows? Soon they may be sounding like Michael Ledeen.

BTW, this editorial in the Times could signal a sea change in the MSM, at least for a while. Look for it.  Tuesday, March 1, 2005

www.rogerlsimon.com

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We're in a period right now where I can't wait to check the news every day. Events, especially in the Middle East, are moving in what would have been considered an impossibly hopeful direction just a few months ago. The Bush administration believed that if the door to democracy and reform were opened in Iraq, much of the Arab world might follow. This was always a big gamble--one that we supported in part because, as we've often said, no one has proposed a competing plan to deal, long-term, with the problem of Islamic terrorism.

Right now, President Bush's gamble is looking very good indeed. Something like 50 million people have been liberated in Afghanistan and Iraq. Positive developments are occurring before our eyes in Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. It's way too soon to proclaim the administration's strategy a success; indeed, we may not be sure in our lifetimes whether the strategy that underlay the Iraq war was a sound one. But right now, it sure is fun to read the headlines.

Of course, not everyone agrees. MSNBC's Question of the Day is: "Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria: Is the Bush Doctrine working?" Currently, 35% say "yes," while 65% say "no." These folks seem to have a high standard for what constitutes "working," which I suspect tells us more about MSNBC's readership than about the geopolitical merits of the administration's strategy.

...wasn't that Turkey? Not anymore. A German group funded a study which appeared in Die Welt and was reported on in today's Telegraph. The results aren't pretty:

The country whose post-war recovery was hailed as an economic miracle is no longer basking in prosperity but increasingly languishing in poverty, especially when compared with rival nations....The turnaround is likely to prove a huge blow to a nation which prided itself on its high standards of living and looked down on the rest of Europe as workshy, inefficient and technologically backward.

By 2011, per capita income in Germany will have been overtaken by Spain, until recently one of the poorest in the European Union. Most startling is the finding that Germany has fallen way behind Britain in economic performance and individual purchasing power.

This graphic tells the story of Germany's decline:

Germany is plagued by the same problems that have bedeviled Western Europe since World War II: the welfare state combined with an archaic union system:

Experts from the New Social Market Economy Initiative recommend that the German government follow Britain's example and concentrate on tackling problems in the highly-regulated labour market in order to pull Germany out of its malaise.

"The recipes are out there," said Tasso Enzweiler, of the New Social Market Initiative. "To follow them we just need the British will, which is sadly lacking in Germany."

The symptoms of decline are everwhere to seen and the impact on the country's morale has been dire. Its once generous welfare state now looks completely unaffordable and Germany is now suffering a brain drain of scientists.

A people with a reputation as the hardest-working in Europe have come to hate work and unemployment has reached a higher level than at any other time since the Second World War.

I'd guess that most blog readers are too young to remember the days when virtually all Democrats berated the U.S. for not being more like Germany and Japan, which were held up as exemplars of "modern," liberal economies. Liberals muttered darkly about the grim futures faced by Ronald Reagan's America and Margaret Thatcher's Great Britain.

One nice thing about politics, I guess, is that there are so many "do overs." You can be wrong time after time and still make a nice living, courtesy of the Sulzbergers, or whoever. But still: at some point, don't people start to notice?  Tuesday, March 1, 2005 

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A KNIFE AND A COPY OF THE QURAN

A few days ago I noticed that the usual photographs of Palestinian street celebrations didn’t appear after Friday’s mass murder in Tel Aviv.

Islamic Jihad held their party Monday in Hebron.

A masked supporter of the Islamic Jihad movement, which claimed responsibility for last Friday’s suicide bomb attack that killed five Israelis in Tel Aviv, holds a knife and a copy of the Quran, Islam’s holy book, during a demonstration in the university of the West Bank town of Hebron Monday Feb. 28, 2005. The rally was the first major expression of support for Friday’s bombing. (AP Photo/Nasser Shiyoukhi)

Members of Islamic Jihad militant group attend a rally in the West Bank city of Hebron, February 28, 2005. REUTERS/Nayef Hashlamoun

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