Obama Knew Youthful Poverty (?)

Last week our po' boy President let us know how tough life was when he was a child of poverty. Unlike Mitt Romney, he says, "I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth." There wouldn't have been room in there for a silver spoon because he always seems to have his foot in his mouth.

Not only did poor little Barry Soetoro Obama have to settle for a gold spoon, but when they took that away from him, he had to improvise tiny spoons for his college drug use. And it just gets sadder. He remembers that as a child he had to take subways and buses to get to a place where he could buy fresh fruit (Michelle’s big on fixing that modern problem, ya know). I didn’t even know they had subways in Indonesia and Kenya, but I’ll take his word for it. And if he wanted fresh fruit at grandma’s, couldn’t he just walk out into the fields and grab a nice fresh pineapple? I keep waiting for him to steal Oprah Winfrey's story of eating mashed potato sandwiches.

Mitt Romney had the misfortune of being born into a family that did have money, a great deal of it by the time Mitt was a youngster. But papa George taught his son frugality, which grew out of his own experience of hunger and want during FDR’s Great Depression. And contrary to popular belief, Mitt didn’t have the chauffeur pull the Rolls Royce around to the grand portico to pick him up and take him to the fresh fruit stand for guavas and mangoes (or pineapple, for that matter). During Mitt’s younger years they were more likely to hop into the family Nash Rambler (George was moving up in the company at the time).

Said Obama: “In this country prosperity does not trickle down, prosperity grows from the bottom up. That’s why I’m always confused when we keep having the same argument with folks who don’t seem to remember how America was built.” Obviously he got his history from Howard Zinn and his politics from Marx. How does Obama build that bottom-up wealth? Well, not by trickling. He literally pours federal largess on his poor and oppressed acolytes. He’s like a manic Robin Hood. He robs from everybody who works so he can give their money to people who don’t like to work. He’s confused, all right.

Obama’s idea of how to encourage growth from the bottom up is not particularly new. It was invented by the late Lyndon B. Johnson, President and creator of welfare dependency on a massive scale. He called it the Great Society which has evolved into the Bankrupt Society. Nearly a half-century later, and after flooding them with a few trillion no-strings dollars, the poor are poorer than ever. Obama goes Johnson one step better. He redefines the middle class as “rich,” and steals from them. If this bottom-up plan continues much longer, we’ll run out of rich people to pay the bills for the non-working poor.

As somebody recently said, “I don’t know a single poor person who was able to hire other people.” Well, according to Obama, that’s because the poor person has to pay for his two cars, giant screen TV, filet mignon, six illegitimate children and instant slum dwelling before he can hire anybody to help him spend the taxpayers money. The solution is to take even more money from the “rich” and hand it to the poor so the poor can hire others to spend the taxpayers money. It’s hard work getting into your new SUV to go to the grocery store to use your EBT “free food” card to buy those steaks. And it’s also a hard intellectual exercise to get that quart of Johnnie Walker and those Winston 100s classified as food.

At the same time he was making his Ohio silver spoon speech, he also visited several Cleveland suburbs where unemployment has been very high for a long time. He continued his class-warfare tactics throughout the state. Ohio is a battleground state, and Obama is spending a lot of the taxes from the “rich” to convince out-of-work industrial workers that he is looking out for their interests. In other words, he isn’t campaigning on the public dime, he’s “finding solutions.”

This President is the stiffest, most insincere and uptight man in the office since Richard Nixon was photographed walking along the beach at surf’s edge in a suit and tie, but carrying his shoes and socks to exhibit that he had the common touch. I don’t care if a President was born poor or rich. That tells you nothing about the candidate’s actual capacity for understanding, empathizing and finding solutions other than handouts. I’ve known very wealthy people who were poor in their youth and grew up to simply hate poor people. And I’ve known very wealthy people who were very well-off in their youth as well who truly had a sense of the plight of the poor and how (as the United Negro College Fund used to say) the poor need a “hand, not a handout.”

When a business owner has to pay $50,000 a year for a simple clerical employee as salary, benefits and payroll taxes, he always has to be cautious about hiring new personnel. In bad economic times made worse by the government’s hostility toward business, crippling regulations, and love of taxes on the “rich,” that same business owner is simply unlikely to hire anybody new and may have to lay off or terminate valued longtime employees. He can pay more in taxes, or he can hire new employees and retain older ones. But he can’t do both when the future has been rendered dangerously uncertain by leftist social engineering schemes.

Silver spoon or not, Obama simply doesn’t understand that poor people almost never create wealth. Poor people who get jobs because wealthier people with money and businesses are anxious to hire them or invest in them then have the opportunity to create wealth themselves. But wealth doesn’t spring up from the bottom by spontaneous generation. Romney does understand that, so if he was actually silver spoon fed, I’ll forgive him.
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Should All Nominees Be Supported?

Should a political party’s nominee always be supported? Generally, the answer is yes. A political party is a collection of people whose views overlap enough to give them a common interest in getting each other elected. To that end, they form a party with the implicit agreement that they will compete with each other to represent the party and then will support the nominee regardless of the outcome of the competition. Thus, the nominee should be supported. But there is an exception.

This exception arises when (1) the nominee’s views are well outside the range of common interests which hold the party together, and (2) there is a legitimate belief that supporting this nominee will harm the long term goals of the party.

On the first point, Reagan famously said that he could support anyone with whom he agreed on 80% of the issues. Reagan was making the point that it is foolish and counterproductive to require 100% agreement with a nominee before you can support them. Indeed, 100% agreement is probably impossible. Hence, this is the reason moderates should support conservatives and conservatives should support moderates and libertarians should support social conservatives and vice versa.

But Reagan’s point also contains the implicit understanding that at some point (possibly below 80% using Reagan’s formula) there is no obligation to support the nominee. Why would this be? For that, we need to look at the question of harm.

Companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year to ensure their products remain consistent. They want to make sure you find the exact same amount in each cereal box, that every batch of Mac and Cheese tastes the same, that every sock has the same number of stitches, and that every Acura uses only Acura parts. Why? Because having a consistent level of quality affects how people perceive their brands. People want to know exactly what they are getting when they make a purchase and branding achieves that -- whereas failing to maintain that consistency damages the brand because people will no longer know what to expect from their purchase.

Whether we like the idea or not, a political party is nothing more than a company, and its product or brand is an ideological range. Choosing a nominee from outside that range blurs the identity of the party and damages its brand.

How? For one thing, this will alienate supporters. Supporters expect nominees to be within the ideological range. When they aren’t, the party has violated the contract under which it claims a right to the individual’s support. It is the equivalent of McDonalds selling you a Big Mac container but including a ham sandwich rather than a burger. This is a violation of trust.

Moreover, this confuses voters. When a person represents a party or ideology, their views become associated with that party or ideology and their successes/failures taint the ideology. In other words, the nominee redefines how the public views conservatism or liberalism, and their meanings change. Hence, conservatism and Republicanism came to be associated with Nixon’s views in 1968, Reagan’s views in 1980, and Bush Jr.’s views in 2000 -- I exclude Bush Sr. because he claimed to be a moderate. Liberalism, by comparison, came to be associated with FDR, LBJ, Carter, and now Obama. Clinton called himself a moderate.

Prior to LBJ, the majority political view of the nation was FDR-liberalism. This could have continued indefinitely, except LBJ disgraced liberalism. His errors in Vietnam and his monstrous Great Society wiped out the Democratic party in the South and set the stage for a conservative resurgence. Jimmy Carter finished liberalism off by proving that Democrats are reckless spenders, incompetent managers of the economy, and militarily inept and cowardly. This set the stage for Reagan.

Reagan’s success revived conservatism while also redefining it back to its roots -- away from the big-government conservatism of the Nixon years. By the time Reagan left office, conservatism had become the natural ideology of the country and 60% of the public believed it.

This could have lasted for generations, except along came George Bush Jr. He wrapped himself in the conservative label and set about running a big government, civil-liberties-crushing, crony-capitalism, foreign-adventuring administration which so thoroughly discredited conservatism that in 2008, the voters were more radically liberal and more willing to accept liberalism than they had been at any time since LBJ. The ONLY THING THAT SAVED CONSERVATISM was the election of Barack Obama. If Obama hadn’t proven to be such a disaster, conservatism would be dead today. But Obama was a disaster and he caused a massive backlash which took the form of the Tea Party.

The lesson here is simple.

Ideologies get defined by their leaders and they get punished for the sins of their leaders. If a nominee calls himself conservative but acts like a liberal, the public doesn’t blame liberalism for his crimes and failures, it blames conservatism even if that person never once acted like a true conservative. Thus, Bush and Nixon, neither of whom could be called conservatives, discredited conservatism. LBJ/Carter/Obama, each of who were progressives and not liberals, discredited liberalism. And in each case, the only thing to save conservatism/liberalism was pure luck that someone worse came along to discredit the other side. If Moderate Joe Democrat had come along after George Bush Jr., we could well be looking at an America that views liberalism as the natural order of things and sees conservatism as meaning reckless spending, bad economic management, and cronyism.

Moreover, the nominee need not even be as disastrous as a Bush/Obama to harm the ideology. The goal of politics is to effect long term change in the country. That is simply not possible when the person representing your ideology holds views that are inconsistent with the ideology. This muddies the ideological waters and confuses the differences between the parties. In other words, when the Republicans and the Democrats both push the same solutions to the same issues, voters will come to believe there is no difference, and they will either stop voting or they will pick the party that promises them the most loot -- advantage Democrats.

This is what happens when you pick someone who is far outside the acceptable ideological range for the party or who happens to be insane. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if Newt or Santorum or Romney or Paul are so far outside the bounds that you should not support them, but ask yourself: “how bad would it be for the party, for my beliefs, and for the country if conservatism came to be defined in the way ____ sees it?”

Winning elections is important, but you don’t want to sacrifice the future to win a single election.


By the way, there's an interesting poll out which shows that 33% of Republicans want a new candidate to jump into the race. This is down from 68% only two months ago. I think the field is set.

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More Proof That Liberals Are Insane

Liberalism truly is a mental condition. Time and again, liberal policies lead to disaster and yet liberals absolutely refuse to see that. If at first you don’t succeed, just keep doing the same thing over and over until you get a different result. . . and don’t you dare try to fix any problems that may arise. Consider these examples.

1. Food Stamps For Rich College Kids Liberals believe in food stamps as a way to help poor people who “don’t earn enough to survive.” So you would assume liberals would want to stop rich and middle class moochers from exploiting the food stamp program? Apparently not.

Unlike other states, Michigan allows college kids to get food stamps. Federal law forbids this, but Michigan liberals got around that by classifying college as an “employment training program.” They also check eligibility for food stamps on the basis of income only without regard to assets. Hence, someone with a ton of money but no actual income can qualify for food stamps. . . someone like Leroy Fick, who won the state lottery but remained on food stamps.

Michigan is now changing its rules. College kids can now only get food stamps if they are single mothers or if they work more than 20 hours per week and still fall within income restrictions (assets will be considered as well). This change will kick 30,000 college kids off the program and save the state $75 million per year in food stamps.

Liberals should be thrilled. These middle class to rich moochers living comfortably on parental support and federal student loans, most of whom have better job prospects upon graduation than 90% of taxpayers, were robbing taxpayers (including “the working poor”) and draining the system, which prevented the money from reaching people who really needed it. But liberals aren’t outraged at the moochers, they’re outraged at the conservative governor who has made the change. Their reasoning? A change in the law to prevent the rich from taking money meant for the poor “will be unfair to the poor.”

Stupidity or insanity?

2. Stimulus Failure (redux): The evidence is indisputable that government spending to boost an economy in the short term is a disaster. I do believe careful spending in certain types of infrastructure can lead to long term growth. For example, the creation of a highway or getting electricity to people can create a wealth of opportunities as consumers and businesses make use of those services to reach each other. But you can’t boost an economy just by hiring people to build something.

History has shown this over and over. In fact, the biggest ignored lesson of the Great Depression came from FDR’s own Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, who wrote this in his diary about their efforts to stem the recession:

“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. . . [A]fter eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. . . and an enormous debt to boot!”

Sound familiar? Now the Democrats want to go for another stimulus bill. . . a fifth under Obama. The others all failed, yet they think this one will work. That’s Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity: repeating the same action over and over, but expecting a different result. Hence, liberals are insane.

3. CAFE Standards Obama just introduced new fuel efficiency standards (CAFE) for trucks. Raising CAFE standards makes cars more expensive, driving down demand and keeping poor people in older, less-safe vehicles longer. What’s more, the one type of vehicle in which American car companies still dominate is the truck. This will hurt Detroit. I guess Obama’s slogan for 2012 will be, “The GM bailout was so successful, I want to repeat it in 2014!”

4. Obama Strong Warlord The last Democrat with any sense of how to win a war was Harry Truman, and he seemed to lose that by the time Korea came along. Since that time, the Democrats have become a party of pacifists, cowards and military incompetents. Obama looks to continue this ignoble tradition by tucking his tail in Afghanistan and Libya. But the Democrats want to portray him as a big tough killer. What to do? What to do?

Oh, I know. Let’s have Hollywood make a movie about Obama’s dithering over the killing of Osama bin Laden to prove his resolve of steal (hmm, is that spelled right?).

Here’s the catch. When Obama was thumping his chest after the military killed bin Laden, he got all of a three point bounce, which vanished again before the first shark took a bite out of bin Laden’s body. Obama got no bounce form running away in Iraq or cowering before Iran or Honduras. He got no bounce from the surge in Afghanistan. He got a negative bounce from bombing Libya. And Americans have stayed away in droves from every war film Hollywood has produced about the war on terror. Hmmm. So what makes liberals think this will help the man of steal? Insanity.

5. London Violence London police killed some gangbanger. According to liberals, it is outrageous that anyone should ever be killed and violence is unacceptable. So what do liberals do to protest? They start rioting in London, burning buses with people in them, beating people with baseball bats, etc. In other words, they have turned to massive, random violence to protest a single instance of probably justified violence. Nice.

As an "interesting" aside -- at least it will be interesting for most liberals (possibly even mind-boggling) -- the rioting stopped in London once the police threatened to use rubber bullets. The rioters moved on to other cities at that point. As a further aside, they don't riot in my neighborhood because we don't waste our time with rubber bullets.

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It Ain't Easy Being A Demagogue

I’m consistently amazed at how well scholar Victor Davis Hanson can make ancient Greek history come alive and bring it forward to today’s parallels. Recently, he did a take on demagogues going back to the fourth-century original, Cleon. He then brought it forward to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in America. The original Greek word literally means “leader of the people.”

But the great Greek comedy writers quickly turned it into its modern meaning as a person who uses jealousy of the wealthy and successful, along with appeals to the masses, to advance his personal agenda.

Domestically, the word has most frequently been used to describe figures such as William Jennings Bryan, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and Sen. Huey “Kingfish” Long. Our demagogues were pikers compared to the experts such as Adolf Hitler and Mao Tse-Tung. A certain amount of charisma is required for a successful demagogue. Hanson points out that Jimmy Carter was more than a failure as a President. He was also a failure as a demagogue. He was boring, whiny and his speechifying skills were nonexistent. It wasn’t for want of trying, however, since Carter tried to attack three-martini lunches and luxurious private yachts, but he couldn’t get people to like him enough to hate the alleged “bad guys.”

Demagogues are good at pretending to be at one with the masses, even though they are far from it. FDR constantly chastised the rich, though he was not exactly the genuine American poverty-to-prominence story that his Vice President Harry Truman was. Barack Obama is not super-rich by any means, but he certainly isn’t a poor kid who made good as he would like people to believe he is. He has carried the “log cabin myth” far beyond its former boundaries. FDR and Obama both used the rule of stirring up popular anger against “the establishment.” Both were and are members of that very establishment. Both had the ability to wield immense power, including the redistribution of wealth.

As champions of the people, demagogues who are good at it use catch-phrases and exaggerations such as using alligators and moats to keep the huddled masses out of America. They have to paint pictures of starving poor children (ignoring the obesity crisis that they address entirely separately), and evoke plutocrats flying around in private jets. The demagogue must “share our pain” produced by the evil oil companies by making sure his tires are properly inflated, his car in good tune, and getting rid of those gas-guzzling old cars in exchange for a green vehicle.

The good demagogue must prove his mettle by rejecting demagoguery—except for his own, of course. Obama damns the habits of fat-cat corporate big-wigs and bankers, while spending more time on the golf course than all our former presidents combined. He says we must all tighten our belts while taking vacations that the rest of us can only dream of. He decries the use of private corporate jets while using Air Force One as if it were his own personal taxicab (a Prius, naturally). You must remember that the demagogue is always “the other guy.”

He says things like “we must bring a gun to a knife fight,” then condemns uncivil usage among Republicans when they describe an up-in-the-air electoral locus as “a target district.” He poses as the first “post-racial” President, but uses metaphors that picture his opponents as “making the down-and-out sit in the back of the bus.” He claims to be racially-neutral because he is of mixed ancestry, yet has his hand-picked attorney general call Americans cowards on race while describing his own grandmother as “a typical white person.”

Hanson also points out a facet of the demagogic personality that I hadn’t given much thought to. He says: “The demagogue, in messianic fashion, sees himself as a lone crusader taking on special interests, again, always on ‘behalf of the people.’ Almost everything is personalized in these cosmic struggles.” Which distinguishes him from FDR, and Reagan, for that matter. FDR and Reagan both used the pronoun “I” only when it involved an act specifically charged to the presidential power itself. Obama narcissistically uses “I,” “my,” “mine” as if he were the lone occupant of the executive branch. Most recently, he tried to steal the thunder of the SEAL team that captured and killed Osama bin Laden by constantly referring to what “I” did to effect the capture.

The good demagogue must also set himself up as the only reasonable person in town. That requires setting up straw men both to the left and right of himself so that he can take the “reasoned, middle position.” Likewise, he must denigrate anyone who disagrees with him as a lesser person than he himself is. Thus, Obama recently declared himself the only adult in a roomful of children. Then he told us all to “eat our peas.”

Hanson closes his treatise with words I wish I had thought of: “What impresses about Barack Obama is his ability to take an ancient art, refine it with an Ivy League veneer, and become a new, cool version of the old Cleon.”

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It's Just History Repeating. . .

History loves irony, and right now the Democrats are giving it off in spades. They are repeating obvious mistakes that millions of others before them have made. Yet, like so many Wiley E. Coyotes, they’re shocked that things aren’t turning out the way they expected. In fact, they spent the weekend whining about the unfairness of it all.

Consider the following four issues: the stimulus, the TARP, Obama’s dictator-appeasement plan, and Obama’s mortgage rescue plan. Each is blowing up in their faces like an ACME explosive.


• DeStimulus: The Democrats spent the weekend freaking out both on and off the record that despite all the money they poured into the stimulus, unemployment remains higher than it was before the stimulus began. What’s worse, they think they are now being unfairly blamed by ungrateful taxpayers for running the deficit/debt to dangerously high levels.

But of course, they aren’t the first to do this. Indeed, consider the case of FDR’s Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau. Here is what Morgenthau wrote in his diary about their efforts to combat the Bush. . . er, Hoover Recession:

“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. . . [A]fter eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. . . and an enormous debt to boot!”

Sound familiar? Despite FDR’s mega-stimulus, unemployment fluctuated between 14% and 20% during his first eight years, with the 20% coming later, not earlier. You would think somebody (**cough cough** Obama **cough cough**) might have considered this before they acted, but maybe that’s too much to ask.

Interestingly, FDR raised the top income tax rate so he could keep spending, causing unemployment to spike. The top rate went from 24% under Hoover to 63% to 79% to 90%. In 1941, FDR even proposed raising it to 99.5% on all income above $100,000 -- probably would have worked better if he’d said $250,000. All this did was bring unemployment to an all time high and stretch out the Great Depression an extra 15 years. FYI, Obama wants to raise the top income tax rate so that he can keep spending. Obama’s rates are not as bad, he’s aiming for something in the 50% rate, but the effect will be the same. Geithner’s diaries should make for fun reading someday.


• TARP Monster: Do you remember how the TARP was supposed to save the banking system from the folly of the banks who were too big to fail? Well, it turns out the TARP put the banking system at the mercy of those very banks. Indeed, a recent report from the government’s own TARP watchdog reports that the TARP has hurt smaller banks, who are having trouble repaying the money, and they are now vulnerable to being taken over by the very same too-big-to-fail banks that caused the crisis. Soon, those too-big-to-fail banks will be too-bigger-to-fail.

By the way, the historical parallels to this are legion. For example, every time socialism has been put in place to help the common man or a dying industry, it ended up making living conditions worse, and it ended up wiping out small firms in favor of the large firms that caused the competitiveness problem in the first place. Similarly, for you history buffs, the US government’s attempts to fix (read: “bailout”) abusive and negligent railroads which were putting the whole economy at risk resulted in those same railroads consuming vast numbers of other industries who found themselves at the railroads’ mercy.


• Appeasement: You would think by now that people would understand that you can’t negotiate with dictators from a position of weakness. But the cornerstone of Obama’s foreign policy has been appeasement. He begged forgiveness of Muslims and got only contempt. He surrendered our friends in Eastern Europe to the Russians to get help with Iran. . . the same Russians who will start fueling Iranian reactors this week. And he begged the Chinese to go along with the harshiest, most-non-cuddly sanctions yet on Iran, only to have them flip him the bird and announce last week that they would start buying Iranian oil. His bended-knee effort to get the Iranians to behave appears to have made war inevitable. His kowtowing to North Korea has brought us closer to war with them than we’ve been at any point since the 1950s. And don’t get me started on Cuba, Venezuela, Brazil, Sudan, etc. The fact that begging for respect has never worked, never once crossed Team Obama’s minds.


• Mortgage Failure Program: Finally, do you remember Obama’s mortgage rescue plan, which was supposed to help homeowners by stopping the flood of foreclosures and thereby stabilizing the housing market? It’s not working. According to a special inspector general for the bailout programs, the mortgage plan has not “put an appreciable dent in foreclosure filings” and foreclosures have hit an all time high. In other words, it turns out that giving second chances to irresponsible people does not suddenly make them responsible. And this is forcing down home prices, further hurting the housing industry, and delaying the resolution of millions of inevitable foreclosures, all of which puts more homeowners at risk.


One definition of insanity involves trying the same things over and over but expecting different results. Interestingly, if you add in a little self-pity to that definition, then it seems you’ve defined the Democratic Party.


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Knock, Knock. Who's There? Yoo. Yoo Hoo?

At least for now, warrantless wiretapping and interception of electronic transmissions originating in or near Al Qaeda terrorist camps are in limbo. President Obama and his Attorney General are occasionally at odds, then in agreement, then at odds again with Congress over the issue. There is also on-again, off-again talk of investigation and trials for those involved in the program. If the investigations and trials go forward, the subject of this article will probably find himself in the dock as a defendant. He is U C Berkeley Boalt Hall Law Professor John Yoo.

If you've heard the professor's name at all, it's probably in relation to a much more exciting and overplayed topic--his opinions on enhanced interrogation techniques. But except for the possibility of show trials, that issue has pretty much been put to bed. The administration will determine the policy, and that will be it. With or without enhanced interrogation techniques, the war against terrorists goes on, and our ability to prevent attacks is being crippled by political nonsense and legal gibberish revolving around interception of foreign electronic communications.

In the wake of September 11, 2001 the nation realized that our ability to know what we need to know overseas was a mess. Our investigative agencies were forbidden to share information, lest that mystical line between CIA extraterritorially and FBI domestically be crossed. Mainland authorities knew very little about Al Qaeda, and its possible entry onto American soil was knowledge forbidden to be passed on by the CIA to the FBI and other local authorities. Yet knowledge of communication between terrorists in the Middle-East and here was critical. That was tragically demonstrated by the World Trade Center attacks.

FISA (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978) was a tool of the Cold War. We had clearly-defined enemies, and huge counterintelligence agencies with a nearly one-for-one personnel ratio. For nearly every spy, we had a spy spying on him. The internet scarcely existed, so most communications were by telephone, mail or diplomatic courier. Phone wiretaps were relatively easy to obtain, because the warrant would allege "Boris Badinoff, known KGB agent, is receiving calls from his bosses in Moscow" and a judge would routinely sign the warrant.

Al Qaeda saw the weaknesses in the act, as well as the potential of cell phone and internet communications. They exploited those weaknesses. The enemy was largely unknown, and its operatives nearly impossible to locate or identify.

Immediately after 9/11 the President and his advisors recognized the weaknesses as well. Immediate information was needed about any further pending terrorist attacks, and FISA rules severely limited that ability. What was needed most was the ability to monitor communications from overseas terrorist strongholds to their operatives in the U.S. The requirement of probable cause and identity of the person(s) to be tapped (the domestic FISA standard) rendered the operation nearly impossible. Likewise, building evidence to prove past crimes as the purpose of domestic criminal wiretapping rules is completely irrelevant to monitoring the activities of unknown terrorists receiving instructions from their master overseas.

As a high-ranking member of George Bush's national security advisory group, John Yoo advised that if the agencies were scrupulously cautious about monitoring only those communications coming from the terrorist camps, and specifically Afghanistan and border regions of Pakistan, then they could proceed without violating the FISA rules or the Constitution. They were faced with looking to lengthy and often contradictory FISA rules which did not address the subject directly, since the act had long since become obsolete in terms of the new technology threats facing America after the Cold War. And they were faced with an all-new kind of threat, immediately after a horrible attack on American soil that very few saw coming.

Alexander Hamilton recognized "new dangers" early in the history of the Republic. He argued in the Federalist Papers that the power to protect the nation ought to exist without limitation because "it is impossible to foresee or define the extent and variety of national exigencies." He further argued that "decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch will generally characterize the proceedings of one man (the executive), in a much more eminent way than the proceedings of any greater number (the Congress and the courts)." This is an early statement of the "unitary executive" concept as it relates to the power of the President to conduct war.

Although cooler heads prevailed in the long run, the power of the President to conduct foreign affairs, particularly war, has remained with the President for overseas action ever since. Domestically, law and the Constitution prohibited the President from exercising this power (particularly the Fourth Amendment), and the power overseas was allowed as a prerogative of conducting a traditional war. September 11 changed all that. Even FISA, designed originally to speed up the process of obtaining warrants in light of speedier communications and capability of a foreign power to strike quickly, did not address the world of instant global communications from sworn enemies of the United States who had no public faces or traditional home countries.

After a honeymoon period of say, two or three days, the mainstream press and the liberal hounds started their march to the tune of "why do they hate us?" and the rhythms of "what did we do to bring this on?" followed by the mantra of "why are people in the government looking at our private communications and listening in on our private telephone calls?" The simple answer is--they're not, unless you're staying in touch with your terrorist friends in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and then only if the communication originated there. Otherwise, your communications are protected by FISA, even though it has had to be much-revised since September 11, 2001.

Once the blood was in the water, the liberal sharks (and some conservative fuddy-duddies) started the "nothing like this has ever been allowed in American history before" litany. Well, in response to a Supreme Court decision forbidding warrantless domestic wiretapping, liberal icon Franklin Roosevelt authorized the FBI before Pearl Harbor to intercept "any communications, domestic or international of persons suspected of subversive activities, including suspected spies." Bush, upon careful advice from Yoo, never went that far.

Based on law, constitutional precedent, and the opinions of every appellate court which addressed the issue, including the FISA appellate court, and in tandem with the provisions of the Patriot Act in 2002, Yoo advised the President that he was free to intercept and investigate any communications from terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan which were addressed to persons physically present in the United States. The 2002 FISA court decision included the following clear words: "The President did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information. FISA cannot encroach on the President's constitutional power."

Five Inspectors General, ignoring everything cited above, have advised President Obama and Attorney General Holder that Professor Yoo was entirely wrong in the advice he gave President Bush, and have stated that they believe the overseas interceptions were both unlawful and unconstitutional. They relied on the rules which have been applied to Presidential power in peacetime, while ignoring the exigent circumstances, and the clear inability of Congress to declare war on a faceless enemy that was nevertheless conducting a war against America. Had Congress been able to declare war, then everything the left is throwing at Professor Yoo and his boss would be completely moot. In fact, it is clear that Yoo erred on the side of caution by advising Bush not to follow FDR's example.

But a political show trial is a political show trial, so facts mean next-to-nothing. In the early going, the pro-investigation, pro-trial forces on the left have singled out Professor Yoo as a particularly juicy target because of the wiretap advice as well as some things he has subsequently suggested about enhanced interrogation (but did not advise Bush on directly).

Even if it never happens, what makes this situation unique is the nature of what might be charged against Yoo. For the first time in modern American history, the President, Congressmen, Senators, and the Attorney General have been seriously considering the investigation and prosecution of a legal advisor to the President for offering legal advice. Even if some court, somewhere, sometime, should decide that Yoo was wrong in his opinion, that has never been grounds for prosecuting the advisor. Think of it this way: If Woo had advised President Bush that overseas wiretaps were illegal and unconstitutional, but that the President should go ahead and do so anyway out of emergency necessity, there might be a case. But exactly the opposite is true, and even the leftists out for Woo's scalp have never claimed otherwise.

Yoo is important only because he is a rather unknown figure outside legal and political circles, and as important as his advice was, it's not clear that he was personally important enough to the fortunes of political types on the right to warrant circling the wagons. They are wrong. In the event that such a thing should happen, the importance of the matter is that the Obama administration will have established the idea that is is perfectly acceptable to put a man on trial solely because he is on the wrong side of the political fence from a triumphalist political party-in-power. That slippery slope could easily lead to the end of two-party government in the United States.

Minor disclaimer: Although Professor Yoo teaches constitutional law at my alma mater, he arrived after I left, I have never met the man, and I have no ties to Boalt Hall other than my Alumni Club membership.
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