Faith-based
Nominee
With
the nomination yesterday of Harriet Miers to the
Supreme Court, President Bush has fulfilled his
promise to appoint Justices in the mold of Antonin
Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Or has he? The only
person who can say for sure seems to be the President
himself, who has known Ms. Miers for 20 years as
his personal attorney and White House adviser.
For
the rest of us, the nominee is mostly a Texas mystery. The 60-year-old has had a worthy career —
any woman of that era who rose to lead a Dallas
law firm, was elected to head the Texas Bar Association
and became White House Counsel is no legal slouch.
But when it comes to the judicial philosophy that
she would bring to the Supreme Court, she is a blank
public slate. Mr. Bush is asking the Senate, his
supporters especially, to trust him on this one.
If
his track record on judges is a guide, Mr. Bush
deserves some deference. His appellate nominees
have been uniformly solid, and often distinguished.
One of those nominees was John Roberts, who at 50
years old is now the Chief Justice. For five years
Ms. Miers has been part of the President's judicial-selection
committee that promoted those nominees, and for
the last year was its chairman.
The
fact that Mr. Bush has known Ms. Miers so well and
for so long also makes it unlikely that she is another
David Souter, who was sold to George H.W. Bush as
a "conservative" by Warren Rudman but
morphed into a liberal on the bench. Assorted Texans
who have more political credibility than Mr. Rudman
— such as state Supreme Court Judge Nathan Hecht
— also speak highly of Ms. Miers as a legal mind
and assert confidently that she is a conservative
constitutionalist.
Editorial
Opinion Journal
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007357
--
A
New Era
John
Roberts Takes His Seat
As
John Roberts honors tradition, his recent nomination
process was replete with newly established precedents
and deflected partisan tactics. It is now established
that Senate hearings and a vote should be held in
a timely manner, that not all privileged Justice
Department documents are open to inspection by voracious
opponents, and, most important, that a nominee should
not answer every question asked by a senator. The
next nominee's hearing will, hopefully, be free
of boorish debate among senators as to what brilliant
questions they can properly ask a nominee. The Roberts
precedent is now well established: The nominee determines
for himself what is appropriate to answer. Putting
aside the debate over questions may give us a deeper
exchange on substantive issues than we saw in the
Roberts hearings.
The
Roberts hearings also saw liberals in retreat from
litmus tests. No one dared to ask Mr. Roberts the
simple question "Are you pro-life?," even
while almost every senator was concerned with the
issue of Roe v. Wade by any other name. And
with two exceptions, Mr. Roberts was not put to
a religious test.
Outside
the Senate, partisans and activists lost ground.
They have cried wolf too often now, in voices too
shrill to be credible much longer, if at all. Americans,
and the media that shape their opinion, are now
also better informed. We know, for example, if we
paid attention, that what liberals mean by "judicial
activist" is a judge who determines that Congress
overstepped its constitutional authority and strikes
down a law that liberals like, while conservatives
mean a judge who rewrites the law (or the Constitution)
as he wants it to be.
Manuel
Miranda
Opinion Journal
http://www.opinionjournal.com/nextjustice/?id=110007350
--
The
Bennett Libel Divides the Decent Left from the Indecent
Left
It
is time now for people with integrity on the Left
— and liberal opinion pages — to show their integrity
and defend Bill Bennett against the libel of being
a racist who advocated the abortion of all black
babies.
For
make no mistake: This is as pure a character issue
as one can imagine. Bill Bennett is not a racist
and said nothing that even remotely came close to
advocating the abortion of all black babies. This
is the dividing line between the decent and the
indecent on the Left. The indecent make these charges;
the decent will defend him against them. It's as
simple as that.
What
happened is easy to summarize. In response to a
caller who said that America "lost revenue from the people who have been aborted
in the last 30 years," Bennett made the point
that one cannot argue against abortion by pointing
out anything theoretically positive that could come
from either allowing or outlawing abortion. For
example, he went on to say, "You could abort
every black baby in this country, and your crime
rate would go down." And he immediately added,
for the sake of those who might distort his meaning,
that aborting all black babies would be "impossible,
ridiculous, and morally reprehensible."
But
talk show host Ed Schultz, whose syndicated radio
show is aired on liberal Air America, heard these remarks. He alerted fellow leftist David
Brock, who then put the transcript of the Bennett
dialogue on his website.
The
Left and the world's news media picked up the dialogue
and then announced that Bill Bennett had advocated
the abortion of all black babies.
This
lie is as intentional as it is complete. Sometimes
lies contain a kernel of truth; this one has none.
In fact, the irony is that if Bennett's social policies
were followed, no black babies would ever have been
aborted; they are aborted in great numbers thanks
to left-wing social policies.
Dennis
Prager
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/
opinion/columns/dennisprager/2005/10/04/159247.html
--
Don’t
Be Manipulated by the Master Marketers
We’re
bamboozled daily on a wide variety of subjects,
from abortion on demand for any reason to same-sex
“marriage.” As David [Kupelian] notes in his new
book, The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists
and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised
as Freedom: “The plain truth is, within the space
of our lifetimes, much of what Americans once almost
universally abhorred has been packaged, perfumed,
gift-wrapped and sold to us as though it had great
value. By skillfully playing on our deeply felt
national values of fairness, generosity and tolerance,
these marketers have persuaded us to embrace as
enlightened and noble that which all previous generations
since America’s founding regarded as grossly self-destructive
— in a word, evil.”
What
makes David’s book so useful is the fact that he
steps back and allows the other side to explain
their game plan, their efforts to change the way
you and I think. Take homosexual activists. It looked
as if the AIDS crisis of the 1980s would set their
cause back, but the activists weren’t about to let
that happen.
Some
175 of them met at a conference in February 1988
and hammered out a master PR plan. Two Harvard-educated
researchers, Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, laid
it out in book titled After the Ball: How America
Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the
’90s, noting that they would counter negative publicity
with “a program of unabashed propaganda, firmly
grounded in long-established principles of psychology
and advertising.”
That
meant relying on established advertising techniques
such as “desensitization” (inundating the public
with positive, gay-related advertising) and “jamming”
(in which the topic of homosexuality is deliberately
talked about until it becomes tiresome to normal
people). As marketing expert Paul Rondeau of Regent
University explained, “If you can get [straights]
to think [homosexuality] is just another thing --
meriting no more than a shrug of the shoulders --
then your battle for legal and social rights is
virtually won.”
Rebecca
Hagelin
http://www.townhall.com/
opinion/columns/rebeccahagelin/2005/10/04/159258.html
