The Washington Times

The White House shakeup story last week generated an astounding amount of dubious political analysis. In fact, since so much of the misunderstanding seems to center on the role of Karl Rove going forward, with most of the commentary bent on painting the move as a demotion for him, I am tempted to think that the whole thing was an especially wily Rove plot.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Washington Times

What did Hitler sound like to those hearing him speak in the 1930s? Did he sound any less menacing than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran?

Read the rest of this entry »

The Washington Times

What did Hitler sound like to those hearing him speak in the 1930s? Did he sound any less menacing than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran?

Read the rest of this entry »

Moussaoui and his victims

View this article at The Weekly Standard

THE LEGAL CASE OF ZACARIAS MOUSSAOUI, the so-called “twentieth hijacker” and the only person hauled into U.S. criminal court for playing a direct role in the September 11 attacks, has been a morass from the beginning. Prosecutors have struggled to shove the square peg of international terrorism into the round hole of the criminal justice system. With an erratic defendant throwing away due legal protections and at times insisting on acting as his own counsel, extensive wrangling over the use of classified evidence and access to testimony from other al Qaeda detainees, scores of court filings, rulings, and appeals, and finally a judge’s finding of egregious government misconduct during the trial, one must ask: Is this the best we can do?

Moussaoui’s complicity in the 9/11 conspiracy is not in doubt. Whether you think he deserves the death penalty for his involvement probably comes down to the question of whether you favor the death penalty under any circumstances. Indeed, public opinion in the case of Moussaoui may well repeat the pattern that showed up in the case of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh: In surveys, more people supported his execution in particular than supported the death penalty in general. You might call that evidence of people’s inconsistency on the subject–or you might call it a judgment that some crimes, such as McVeigh’s and Moussaoui’s, are especially heinous.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Washington Times

It was surprising that Tom DeLay got to write his own narrative for his exit from Congress. One might have expected a greater degree of media and partisan skepticism directed at his self-portrait of his exit as a man seizing a political opportunity to extract maximum benefit for his party. At least, if my former deputy chief of staff had copped a plea to corruption charges the very same week, with more to come, I would expect skepticism.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Washington Times

You are perhaps wondering what it is like to be in Paris at the time of a nationwide strike, in which demonstrators gather in an attempt to be deemed expressing the “general will” in opposition to their government’s betrayal of the principles of “liberty, equality, fraternity”? For there I found myself a week ago today, when – but let’s let Reuters catch us up, with reference to the repeat performance scheduled for today: “Tuesday’s demonstrations and strikes will be keenly watched for signs that two months of sometimes violent protests peaked last week with the three million demonstrators that unions say joined a nationwide day of action on March 28.” Where to begin? Maybe with the 3 million figure. That’s the figure the unions are giving, and it bears about as much relation to the actual size of the demonstrations as one might expect from those who have every incentive to vastly overstate their influence.

Read the rest of this entry »