Bloodthirsty Liberal

Societies collapse, suddenly

Fifteen years ago, I noticed that when things change, they change suddenly. One day there was Hitler and the German population strutting their stuff, but within short order you couldn’t find a Nazi in Germany anywhere. None of them had supported the Nazi party. All those pictures of hundreds of thousands of cheering Germans were but hallucinations.

We saw the same thing happen with the internet bubble – riches to rags in a few months. September 11th took us from a comfortable, silly society in which our biggest problem was summer shark attacks to the society we have today. In short order.

It turns out that this has been studied:

Don’t call me a “declinist.” I really don’t believe the United States—or Western civilization, more generally—is in some kind of gradual, inexorable decline.

But that’s not because I am one of those incorrigible optimists who agree with Winston Churchill that the United States will always do the right thing, albeit when all other possibilities have been exhausted.

In my view, civilizations don’t rise, fall, and then gently decline, as inevitably and predictably as the four seasons or the seven ages of man. History isn’t one smooth, parabolic curve after another. Its shape is more like an exponentially steepening slope that quite suddenly drops off like a cliff.

If you don’t know what I mean, pay a visit to Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas. In 1530 the Incas were the masters of all they surveyed from the heights of the Peruvian Andes. Within less than a decade, foreign invaders with horses, gunpowder, and lethal diseases had smashed their empire to smithereens. Today tourists gawp at the ruins that remain.

The notion that civilizations don’t decline but collapse inspired the anthropologist Jared Diamond’s 2005 book, Collapse. But Diamond focused, fashionably, on man-made environmental disasters as the causes of collapse. As a historian, I take a broader view. My point is that when you look back on the history of past civilizations, a striking feature is the speed with which most of them collapsed, regardless of the cause.

The Roman Empire didn’t decline and fall sedately, as historians used to claim. It collapsed within a few decades in the early fifth century, tipped over the edge of chaos by barbarian invaders and internal divisions. In the space of a generation, the vast imperial metropolis of Rome fell into disrepair, the aqueducts broken, the splendid marketplaces deserted.

The Ming dynasty’s rule in China also fell apart with extraordinary speed in the mid–17th century, succumbing to internal strife and external invasion. Again, the transition from equipoise to anarchy took little more than a decade.

A more recent and familiar example of precipitous decline is, of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union. And, if you still doubt that collapse comes suddenly, just think of how the postcolonial dictatorships of North Africa and the Middle East imploded this year. Twelve months ago, Messrs. Ben Ali, Mubarak, and Gaddafi seemed secure in their gaudy palaces. Here yesterday, gone today.

What all these collapsed powers have in common is that the complex social systems that underpinned them suddenly ceased to function. One minute rulers had legitimacy in the eyes of their people; the next they didn’t.

Think Occupy Movement. Do they consider The Constitution of the United States to be legitimate?

Remember that poster that used to hang in every college dorm, of a runaway steam train that has crashed through the wall of a rail station and hit the street below, nose first? The caption was: “Oh sh*t!” I believe it’s time to ask how close the United States is to the “Oh sh*t!” moment—the moment we suddenly crash downward like that train.

The West first surged ahead of the Rest after about 1500 thanks to a series of institutional innovations that I call the “killer applications”:

1. Competition. …

2. The Scientific Revolution. …

3. The Rule of Law and Representative Government….

4. Modern Medicine. …

5. The Consumer Society. …

6. The Work Ethic. …

For hundreds of years, these killer apps were essentially monopolized by Europeans and their cousins who settled in North America and Australasia. They are the best explanation for what economic historians call “the great divergence”: the astonishing gap that arose between Western standards of living and those in the rest of the world.

In 1500 the average Chinese was richer than the average North American. By the late 1970s the American was more than 20 times richer than the Chinese. Westerners not only grew richer than “Resterners.” They grew taller, healthier, and longer-lived. They also grew more powerful. By the early 20th century, just a dozen Western empires—-including the United States—controlled 58 percent of the world’s land surface and population, and a staggering 74 percent of the global economy.

Beginning with Japan, however, one non-Western society after another has worked out that these apps can be downloaded and installed in non-Western operating systems. That explains about half the catching up that we have witnessed in our lifetimes, especially since the onset of economic reforms in China in 1978.

Now, I am not one of those people filled with angst at the thought of a world in which the average American is no longer vastly richer than the average Chinese. Indeed, I welcome the escape of hundreds of millions of Asians from poverty, not to mention the improvements we are seeing in South America and parts of Africa. But there is a second, more insidious cause of the “great reconvergence,” which I do deplore—and that is the tendency of Western societies to delete their own killer apps.

Ask yourself: who’s got the work ethic now? The average South Korean works about 39 percent more hours per week than the average American. The school year in South Korea is 220 days long, compared with 180 days here. And you don’t have to spend too long at any major U.S. university to know which students really drive themselves: the Asians and Asian-Americans.

…

He is going over his points in the current context. I’m skipping most of them, but this is interesting:

The rule of law? For a real eye-opener, take a look at the latest World Economic Forum (WEF) Executive Opinion Survey. On no fewer than 15 of 16 different issues relating to property rights and governance, the United States fares worse than Hong Kong. Indeed, the U.S. makes the global top 20 in only one area: investor protection. On every other count, its reputation is shockingly bad. The U.S. ranks 86th in the world for the costs imposed on business by organized crime, 50th for public trust in the ethics of politicians, 42nd for various forms of bribery, and 40th for standards of auditing and financial reporting.

I mention this because I think we have a problem with corruption in our legal system, and that corruption really threatens the sturdiness of our whole society. If we can’t trust the court system to be above board, we might as well let organized crime run things.

He’s kinda glum:

If what we are risking is not decline but downright collapse, then the time frame may be even tighter than one election cycle.

Ya’ know… people are busy. Voting is an inconvenience and trying to understand these complex issues is just a waste of time. Barry will handle it.

We’ve delegated our future.

- Aggie

This is interesting because earlier today, over coffee with a young friend, I wondered aloud if we weren’t well-and-truly screwed. I had read that Tennessee had arrested some occupiers because they didn’t have permits and were violating certain laws, but that the courts had backed the occupiers. I wondered why the KKK couldn’t take up permanent residence outside of a large black church or urban elementary school and hurl invectives at the worshippers or kids. Why couldn’t the KKK take over a park across the street from a big synagogue and scream death to Jews? Why couldn’t any of these groups use the steps in front of the church, school or synagogue as a latrine? And at what point do the occupiers meet hard resistance? Not in the courts, certainly. So this story about the plan to shut Oakland down tomorrow caught my eye.

Occupy Oakland has scheduled a general strike throughout the California city for Wednesday. What does that mean? “No work. No school. Occupy everywhere,” the group’s website explains. “Shut down the city.”

And: “All banks and corporations should close down for the day or we will march on them.”

“Blockade everything.”

Occupy Oakland activists have not only free speech rights but also the power to stomp on other people’s rights.

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan — a committed left-winger — at first welcomed the protests. But with rats, vigilantism and too much stink, City Hall soured on the ensuing squalor. Too late, Quan discovered that if you give them an inch, they will take Frank Ogawa Plaza. Let them remain downtown and they threaten to trash other parts of the city.

I wonder if the people who have jobs and are paid hourly will resent the lost day’s wages? Will parents be too frightened to drop their kids off at school?

I think we deserve this so I don’t have much compassion, but it sure is a huge honking mess. If you elect a business person to be President, you might get a good business climate; a military leader might help our military, and a community organizer has helped various community groups, like the Occupy Movement, to prosper.

- Aggie

Not that you can tell:

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah said on Sunday women in the conservative Islamic kingdom will have the right to join the advisory Shura Council as full members and participate in future municipal elections, meeting a key goal of liberal activists.

“Because we refuse to marginalize women in society in all roles that comply with sharia, we have decided, after deliberation with our senior ulama (clerics) and others… to involve women in the Shura Council as members, starting from the next term,” he said in a speech delivered to the Shura Council.

“Women will be able to run as candidates in the municipal election and will even have a right to vote,” he added.

…

Those changes will come after municipal elections this Thursday, for which women have been barred from voting or standing office.

Certain “unalienable rights” are delayable, I guess.

Yesterday, we learned of the greatness of Herbert Hoover. (Shame on you if you haven’t read it.)

Today, Ike:

The Eisenhower administration declared racial discrimination a national security issue, meaning that the Communists around the world were using racial discrimination in the U.S. as a point of propaganda attack.[64] The day after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Brown v. Board of Education in which segregated (“separate but equal”) schools were ruled to be unconstitutional, Eisenhower told District of Columbia officials to make Washington a model for the rest of the country in integrating black and white public school children.[65][66] He proposed to Congress the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 and signed those acts into law. The 1957 Act for the first time established a permanent civil rights office inside the Justice Department. Although both Acts were weaker than subsequent civil rights legislation, they constituted the first significant civil rights acts since the Civil Rights Act of 1875, signed by President Ulysses S. Grant.

The “Little Rock Nine” incident of 1957 involved the refusal by Arkansas to honor a Federal court order to integrate the schools. Under Executive Order 10730, Eisenhower placed the Arkansas National Guard under Federal control and sent Army troops to escort nine black students into Little Rock Central High School, an all-white public school. The integration did not occur without violence. Eisenhower and Arkansas governor Orval Faubus engaged in tense arguments.

Faubus was a Democrat, if you didn’t know, like George Wallace and Robert (Exalted Cyclops) Byrd. And so was Bull Connor.

You’d know this if you read Ann Coulter

The liberal fairy tale that Southern bigots simply switched parties, from Democrat to Republican, is exactly wrong. What happened is: The Democrats switched mobs. Democrats will champion any group of hooligans in order to attain power. As Michael Barone said of the vicious segregationist (and Democrat) George Wallace, he was “a man who really didn’t believe in anything—a political opportunist who used opposition to integration to try and get himself ahead.”

This is why the Democrats are able to transition so seamlessly from defending Bull Connor racists to defending Black Panthers, hippies, yippies, Weathermen, feminists, Bush derangement syndrome liberals, Moveon.org, and every other indignant, angry mob.

Every segregationist who ever served in the Senate was a Democrat and remained a Democrat except one. Even Strom Thurmond—the only one who later became a Republican—remained a Democrat for eighteen years after running for president as a Dixiecrat. There’s a reason they were not called the “Dixiecans.”

A curious sleight of hand is required to hide from the children the fact that all the segregationists in the Senate were Democrats. In history books, such as Robert A. Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, the segregationists are not called “Democrats.” They’re called “Southerners.”

Except it wasn’t just “Southerners” voting against civil rights. Not every senator who opposed black civil rights was a Southerner, but every one was a Democrat. In addition to the Southern Democrats who voted against putting the 1957 civil rights bill on the Senate calendar, for example, there were five Democrats from nowhere near the South: Democratic senator Wayne Morse of Oregon—a favorite target of Senator Joe McCarthy—Democratic senator Warren Magnuson of Washington, Democratic senator James Murray of Montana, Democratic senator Mike Mansfield of Montana, and Democratic senator Joseph O’Mahoney of Wyoming.

According to Caro, the Western Democrats traded their votes on civil rights for a dam authorization on the Idaho-Oregon border. That’s how dear black civil rights were to liberals—they traded them away for a dam.

I didn’t know that. But I knew—and have repeatedly reported—the facts and figures of the Civil Rights Act (1964) votes:

The original House version:

Democratic Party: 152-96 (61%-39%)
Republican Party: 138-34 (80%-20%)

Cloture in the Senate:

Democratic Party: 44-23 (66%–34%)
Republican Party: 27-6 (82%–18%)

The Senate version:

Democratic Party: 46-21 (69%–31%)
Republican Party: 27-6 (82%–18%)

The Senate version, voted on by the House:

Democratic Party: 153-91 (63%–37%)
Republican Party: 136-35 (80%–20%)

I can’t find similar breakdowns of the votes on the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and ’60, but there are some telling hints.

1957:

The bill that became the 1957 act was introduced in Congress during the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Attorney General Herbert Brownell played a large role in shaping the bill. It was very similar to a 1956 bill which was not enacted because of the resistance of Southern senators.

…

After debate, the bill passed the House of Representatives on June 18, 1957, by a vote of 286 to 126.

The biggest obstacle to civil rights legislation in 1957 was the bloc of Southern Democrats led by Senator Richard Russell of Georgia. Southern senators had blocked every piece of civil rights legislation proposed since 1875. The most vocal supporters of the bill in the Senate were Republican leader William Knowland of California and liberal Democrat Paul Douglas of Illinois. Although neither senator was a particularly strong leader, it appeared that they had public opinion and Senate votes on their side. Whereas the coalition in support of the bill was not a closely unified group, the Southern senators in opposition were. Many believed the bill would die in the Senate, despite its support, because Southern senators would filibuster, if necessary, to defeat the bill.

Credit goes to Lyndon Johnson for steering the bill through the Senate. But many complained that the bill had been weakened to near nothingness in the process.

So, on to 1960

The Civil Rights Act of 1960 was a United States federal law that established federal inspection of local voter registration polls and introduced penalties for anyone who obstructed someone’s attempt to register to vote or actually vote.

The Senate’s debate over the passage of this bill actually started on February 29, 1960. However, a group of 18 Southern Democrats divided into three teams of six in order to be able to create a continuous filibuster wherein each member would only have to speak for four hours every three days. This system resulted in the longest filibuster in history, lasting over 43 hours from February 29 to March 2. On the morning of March 2, only a fifteen-minute break was allowed before the Senate sat for another 82 hours. By the time the 24-hour sessions were called off by majority leader Lyndon Johnson, the Senate had sat for 125 hours and 31 minutes minus a fifteen-minute break.

The act was signed into law by President Dwight Eisenhower on May 6, 1960.

Republicans didn’t give African Americans their “unalienable rights”: such rights were endowed by their Creator, not a political party. But Republicans passed bills, over Democrat opposition, to see that those rights were respected in law.

And yes, this will be on the test.

Worker at Jackson’s Civil Rights Organization claims Jackson harassed and humiliated him.

I wonder if Jesse Jackson will be the keynote speaker at the Democrat convention again? Will gay progressives mind this, or will they shrug it off?

A spokesman for the Rev. Jesse Jackson Thursday denied a claim from a man who says he was fired from the Civil Rights leader’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition because he is gay.

Tommy Bennett filed a complaint with the city of Chicago’s Commission on Human Relations last year, alleging Jackson fired him unjustly and that the civil rights leader forced him to perform “uncomfortable” tasks, including cleaning up hotel rooms after Jackson had been there with various women.

“The Rainbow PUSH Coalition and Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., unequivocally deny Tommy Bennett’s false claims of harassment, retaliation and discrimination,” PUSH spokeswoman Lauren Love said in a written statement. “We are fully cooperating with the Chicago Commission on Human Relations and expect to be fully exonerated.”

The statement goes on to say that Bennett’s “inflammatory allegations are an attempt to malign Rev. Jackson and the organization, and are hurtful and harmful to the progressive community.”

The Windy City Times story claims Bennett, in his complaint with the city, said he was forced to escort women for Jackson into hotel rooms — and later clean up the rooms.

There are other reports that suggest that Jackson requested… the kind of non-sex that Bill Clinton had from Monica Lewinsky.

- Aggie

How dumb is this policy? So dumb that they have decided we will be safer if they do not allow the CIA to interview terror suspects.

We kill them instead. And if we can’t kill them, we ignore them. Feel safer? Feel more moral?

He’s considered one of world’s most dangerous terrorism suspects, and the U.S. offered a $1-million reward for his capture in 2005. Intelligence experts say he’s a master bomb maker and extremist leader who possesses a wealth of information about Al Qaeda-linked groups in Southeast Asia.

Yet the U.S. has made no move to interrogate or seek custody of Indonesian militant Umar Patek since he was apprehended this year by officials in Pakistan with the help of a CIA tip, U.S. and Pakistani officials say.

The little-known case highlights a sharp difference between President Obama’s counter-terrorism policy and that of his predecessor, George W. Bush. Under Obama, the CIA has killed more people than it has captured, mainly through drone missile strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas. At the same time, it has stopped trying to detain or interrogate suspects caught abroad, except those captured in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The CIA is out of the detention and interrogation business,” said a U.S. official who is familiar with intelligence operations but was not authorized to speak publicly.

To review: This administration uses more drone attacks that any other nation, including this one during the Bush years, combined. Drones have a high civilian kill rate, meaning that Obama has far more innocent blood on his hands than Bush… but, hey, he’s much cuter!

On top of that, we are apparently doing less to stop terror attacks before they happen. Why in the world wouldn’t we interview high level terrorists captured by friendly governments?

Several factors are behind the change.

Widespread criticism of Bush administration interrogation and detention policies as brutal and degrading led Obama to stop sending suspected terrorists to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Public exposure also forced the CIA to close a network of secret prisons. That left U.S. officials with no obvious place to hold new captives.

In January 2009, Obama ordered the CIA to abide by the interrogation rules of the U.S. Army Field Manual, which guides military interrogators and includes prohibitions on the use of physical force against detainees. Critics warn that Al Qaeda operatives could study the manual, which is available on the Internet, to learn how to resist its techniques, although no evidence has emerged suggesting that has happened.

In addition, some CIA officers are spooked by a long-running criminal investigation by a Washington special prosecutor into whether CIA officers broke the law by conducting brutal interrogations of suspected terrorists during the Bush administration.

“Given the enormous headaches involved … it’s not surprising there are fewer people coming into our hands,” said Paul Pillar, a former senior CIA official.

If we have another major terror attack, and it turns out that we didn’t even bother to gather information, not that we misread the information or didn’t take it seriously, but simply didn’t bother to ask questions, the Left will own it. They may try to claim the moral high ground, but it probably won’t work if thousands of Americans are slaughtered and one of the planners is smirking in a prison in Indonesia or elsewhere.

Patek, described by intelligence officials and analysts as a central figure among Islamic extremists in Southeast Asia, could reveal links between Al Qaeda sympathizers across the region. He is a prime suspect in the 2002 nightclub bombings that killed 202 people on the Indonesian island of Bali.

Oh, well. Elections have consequences.

- Aggie

BTL posted the email which was received by several Republican state senators below, and a reader asked who sent the email. The answer is that the State Justice Department is investigating.

The State Department of Justice confirms that it is investigating several death threats against a number of lawmakers in response to the legislature’s move to strip employees of many collective bargaining rights.

Among the threats the Justice Department is investigationg is one that was emailed to Republican Senators Wednesday night. Newsradio 620 WTMJ has obtained that email.

The following is the unedited email:

Please put your things in order because you will be killed and your familes
will also be killed due to your actions in the last 8 weeks.

Etc. BTL posted the text below. Civility is sprouting along with the crocuses in liberal Wisconsin. Good to know.

- Aggie

He’s writing about The Clash of Civilizations

Samuel Huntington was one of America’s greatest political scientists. In 1993, he published a sensational essay in Foreign Affairs called “The Clash of Civilizations?” The essay, which became a book, argued that the post-cold war would be marked by civilizational conflict.

Human beings, Huntington wrote, are divided along cultural lines — Western, Islamic, Hindu and so on. There is no universal civilization. Instead, there are these cultural blocks, each within its own distinct set of values.

The Islamic civilization, he wrote, is the most troublesome. People in the Arab world do not share the general suppositions of the Western world. Their primary attachment is to their religion, not to their nation-state. Their culture is inhospitable to certain liberal ideals, like pluralism, individualism and democracy.

Huntington correctly foresaw that the Arab strongman regimes were fragile and were threatened by the masses of unemployed young men. He thought these regimes could fall, but he did not believe that the nations would modernize in a Western direction. Amid the tumult of regime change, the rebels would selectively borrow tools from the West, but their borrowing would be refracted through their own beliefs. They would follow their own trajectory and not become more Western.

So, do we believe this or don’t we? David Brooks does not believe it.

In retrospect, I’d say that Huntington committed the Fundamental Attribution Error. That is, he ascribed to traits qualities that are actually determined by context.

He argued that people in Arab lands are intrinsically not nationalistic. He argued that they do not hunger for pluralism and democracy in the way these things are understood in the West. But it now appears as though they were simply living in circumstances that did not allow that patriotism or those spiritual hungers to come to the surface.

Then why does he bring this up? What is the point? Is it because he needs to come up with columns on a weekly basis?

It now appears that people in these nations, like people in all nations, have multiple authentic selves. In some circumstances, one set of identities manifests itself, but when those circumstances change, other equally authentic identities and desires get activated.

Oh, that’s it. Multiple authentic selves. I love the concept. It reminds me so much of the 70′s and 80′s, when we were all much younger. Reading it makes me feel I could get out there and run a marathon.

This is stirring memories of President George W. Bush:

Culture is important, but underneath cultural differences there are these universal aspirations for dignity, for political systems that listen to, respond to and respect the will of the people.

As usual, Brooks hedges his bet:

I write all this not to denigrate the great Huntington. He may still be proved right. The Arab world may modernize on its own separate path. But his mistakes illuminate useful truths: that all people share certain aspirations and that history is wide open. The tumult of events can transform the traits and qualities that seemed, even to great experts, etched in stone.

I hope that the optimists, starting with George W. Bush are correct. I want them to be correct. But the image of journalist Lara Logan surrounded by roughly 200 Egyptian men screaming Jew! Jew! as they beat and molested her for twenty to thirty minutes is stuck in my mind, you know? Yes, history marches forward. But it has a way of repeating the same dreary truths. Was the brutal assault on Logan an anomaly or was it business as usual?

- Aggie

So much for compromise

Developers of a Muslim community center near the site of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks in New York Wednesday declined an offer by Gov. David Paterson to relocate the project.

Paterson had suggested Tuesday that state-owned property could provide an alternative building site for the controversial project.

“If the sponsors were looking for property anywhere at a distance that would be such that it would accommodate a better feeling among the people who are frustrated, I would look into trying to provide them with the state property they would need,” Paterson told reporters.

Developers say the current location for the project – two blocks from ground zero – was selected intentionally to serve the Lower Manhattan community.

“We have a tremendous amount of respect for our governor, and we are always interested in hearing what our leaders have to say, and what their ideas and proposals are. But this has always been about serving Lower Manhattan,” said developer Sharif El-Gamal of Soho Properties.

The proposed $100 million, 13-story facility, which is being built by the Cordoba Initiative, will include a mosque, performing arts center, gym, swimming pool and other public spaces. The Cordoba Initiative describes itself as a Muslim outreach group.

I guess I don’t have much to say about this. The different perspectives are obvious. I agree with Pope John Paul II, who told a group of Carmelite nuns that they couldn’t build a facility next to Auschwitz. In no way is Ground Zero comparable to Auschwitz (nothing is), but the insensitivity to the feelings of the victims is comparable. The nuns meant well, and I will give the Muslims the benefit of the doubt, but the lack of compassion for the feelings of others speaks the loudest here. The great theologian, Martin Buber, said something about the importance of specific places, or the lack thereof.

HERE WHERE ONE STANDS

Rabbi Bunam used to tell young men who came to him for the first time the story of Rabbi Eizik, son of Rabbi Yekel of Cracow. After many years of great poverty which had never shaken his faith in God, he dreamed someone bade him look for a treasure in Prague, under the bridge which leads to the king?s palace. When the dream recurred a third time, Rabbi Eizik prepared for the journey and set out for Prague. But the bridge was guarded day and night and he did not dare to start digging. Nevertheless he went to the bridge every morning and kept walking around it until evening. Finally the captain of the guards, who had been watching him, asked in a kindly way whether he was looking for something or waiting for somebody. Rabbi Eizik told him of the dream which had brought him here from a faraway country. The captain laughed: “And so to please the dream, you poor fellow wore out your shoes to come here! As for having faith in dreams, if I had had it, I should have had to get going when a dream once told me to go to Cracow and dig for treasure under the stove in the room of a Jew — Eizik, son of Yekel, that was the name! Eizik, son of Yekel! I can just imagine what it would be like, how I should have to try every house over there, where one half of the Jews are named Eizik and the other Yekel!” And he laughed again. Rabbi Eizik bowed, traveled home, dug up the treasure from under the stove, and built the House of Prayer which is called “Reb Eizik Reb Yekel?s Shul.”

“Take this story to heart,” Rabbi Bunam used to add, “and make what it says your own: There is something you cannot find anywhere in the world, not even at the zaddik?s, and there is, nevertheless, a place where you can find it.”

This, too, is a very old story, known from several popular literatures, but thoroughly reshaped by Hasidism. It has not merely — in a superficial sense — been transplanted into the Jewish sphere, it has been recast by the Hasidic melody in which it has been told; but even this is not decisive: the decisive change is that it has become, so to speak, transparent, and that a Hasidic truth is shining through its words. It has not had a “moral” appended to it, but the sage who retold it had at last discovered its true meaning and made it apparent.

There is something that can only be found in one place. It is a great treasure, which may be called the fulfillment of existence. The place where this treasure can be found is the place on which one stands.

I realize that most of our readers are less interested in Buber than I am. But he has a lot to teach the world. It isn’t necessary to built the mosque at Ground Zero, but we also don’t have to flip out over it.

- Aggie

The nightmare of the Obama Justice Department

During the Bush years, we heard about the loss of our liberties daily. I never could figure out what the Left was talking about, and, true to form, they have been largely silent now that we have the Messiah in office. Yet most of the Bush era policies that were the source of the worry have been either retained or strengthened.

But Obama does seem to be hellbent on destroying our system of voting.

J. Christian Adams,, a former career Justice Department lawyer who resigned recently to protest political interference in cases he worked on, made some news yesterday in testimony before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

As expected, he claimed that Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli, an Obama appointee, overruled a unanimous recommendation by six career Justice attorneys for continued prosecution of members of the New Black Panther Party on charges of voter intimidation in an incident I detailed here yesterday. But Mr. Adams leveled an even more explosive charge beyond the Panther case. He testified that last year Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes made a jaw-dropping announcement to attorneys in Justice’s Voting Rights section. She said she would not support any enforcement of a key section of the federal “Motor Voter” law — Section 8, which requires states to periodically purge their voter rolls of dead people, felons, illegal voters and those who have moved out of state.

According to Mr. Adams, Justice lawyers were told by Ms. Fernandes: “We’re not interested in those kind of cases. What do they have to do with helping increase minority access and turnout? We want to increase access to the ballot, not limit it.”

If true, Ms. Fernandes was endorsing a policy of ignoring federal law and encouraging potential voter fraud. Ms. Fernandes was unavailable for comment yesterday, but the Justice Department has issued a statement accusing Mr. Adams of “distorting facts” in general and having a political agenda.

But there is some evidence backing up Mr. Adams. Last year, Justice abandoned a case it had pursued for three years against Missouri for failing to clean up its rolls. When filed in 2005, one-third of Missouri counties had more registered voters than voting-age residents. What’s more, Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan, a Democrat who this year is her party’s candidate for a vacant U.S. Senate seat, contended that her office had no obligation to ensure individual counties were complying with the federal law mandating a cleanup of their voter rolls.

The case made slow but steady progress through the courts for more than three years, amid little or no evidence of progress in cleaning up Missouri’s voter rolls. Despite this, Obama Justice saw fit to dismiss the case in March 2009. Curiously, only a month earlier, Ms. Carnahan had announced her Senate candidacy. Missouri has a long and documented history of voter fraud in Democratic-leaning cities such as St. Louis and Kansas City. Ms. Carnahan may now stand to benefit from voter fraud facilitated by the improperly kept voter rolls that she herself allowed to continue.

Mr. Adams’ allegations would seem to call for the senior management of Justice to be compelled to testify under oath to U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. But Justice is making none of its officials available and is refusing to enforce subpoenas issued by the commission. The more this story develops, the more it appears Justice is engaged in a massive coverup of its politicization of voting rights cases.

Isn’t that creepy?

- Aggie