Free Republic

Posted 03/26/2007 ET We often disagree with Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, a former prosecutor and now the Democrat who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee. But one thing is for certain: there isn’t a dumb bone in his body. That’s why it’s so infuriating to witness the theater he has allowed (indeed, induced) his committee to become over what is now an MSM-dubbed “scandal” .. forged by the explosive combination of top-tier Justice Department incompetence and shrewd opportunism in the Democrat-controlled Congress .. over the Bush Administration’s firing of eight United States attorneys. On Thursday, following the previous day’s lead...

The Border-Patrol Two Deserve Jail Law enforcement defends its honor, despite the “hero” propaganda By Andrew C. McCarthy “Texans aren’t whiners,” Johnny Sutton told me. Still, forgive him if he sounds a bit frustrated. Sutton is the top federal law-enforcement officer in one of the nation’s most notorious border badlands. Day in and day out, while no one was paying much attention to the dusty Rio Grande towns outside El Paso, he has been the U.S. Border Patrol’s staunchest ally. A solid law-and-order conservative, Sutton’s position, United States Attorney for the Western District of Texas, is a unique perch from...

Neither corner of the ring has distinguished itself. In one, leading Democrats and some Republicans are evidently shocked to learn that many of the nation’s ports are managed by foreigners. Indeed, even as they railed against the prospect of this buy-out by UAE’s Dubai Ports World, Inc., they skipped past the inconvenient fact that the seller, the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, is a British concern. Naturally, they prefer to cast the issue as one of foreign port-terminal management because they lack the gumption to state that the problem is Islamic participation in what is a gaping soft-spot in...

Washington’s scandal du jour involves a wartime surveillance program President Bush directed the National Security Agency to carry out after al-Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001. The idea that there is anything truly scandalous about this program is absurd. But the outcry against it is valuable, highlighting as it does the mistaken assumption that criminal-justice solutions are applicable to national-security challenges. The intelligence community has identified thousands of al-Qaeda operatives and sympathizers throughout the world. After Congress overwhelmingly authorized the use of military force immediately following the 9/11 attacks, the president, as part of the war effort,...

President George W. Bush forcefully explained last night — some of us would say finally forcefully explained last night after too long a lull — why our military operations in Iraq are crucial to success in the war on terror. It was good to hear the commander-in-chief remind people that this is still the war against terror. Specifically, against Islamo-fascists who slaughtered 3000 Americans on September 11, 2001. Who spent the eight years before those atrocities murdering and promising to murder Americans — as their leader put it in 1998, all Americans, including civilians, anywhere in the world where they...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Print Version E.J. Dionne, Matt Lauer, and the rest f the mainstream media vanguard are in high dudgeon. The autopsy report is finally out on Terri Schiavo, and they want to know: Where is the apology? A better question would be: Are they kidding? Let’s review the state of play at the time of Terri’s death, even as these revisionists reshape the history, as victors — no matter how inglorious their victories — surely get to do. There were two questions of critical import: Was Terri Schiavo in a persistent vegetative state...

The Washington Post's Tuesday editorial on, as the editors there call it, "Mr. Ashcroft's Smear," is a transparent effort to help close ranks around beleaguered Commissioner Jamie Gorelick, the former Clinton-administration deputy attorney general whose conflict of interest has riven the 9/11 Commission. For the most part, it adopts wholesale the talking points Gorelick herself ran with in an op-ed that the Post published on Sunday. Though disingenuous, even taken at face value, the editorial actually supports the case for recusal. With knee-jerk predictability, the Post finds that the real culprit in this drama is not Gorelick but rather the...

The grandstanding Richard Clarke having made apologies all the rage, one should expect that President Bush and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice will be getting one in the next day or two. Something like this: Dear Mr. President and Dr. Rice: Very sorry about all that high dudgeon a couple of weeks ago. You remember, when we couldn't pass a microphone, a pencil, or a camera without perorations about the vital need to have the President waive executive privilege and ignore scads of history so Dr. Rice could be permitted to testify under oath and publicly (and improve our Nielson...

The grandstanding Richard Clarke having made apologies all the rage, one should expect that President Bush and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice will be getting one in the next day or two. Something like this: Dear Mr. President and Dr. Rice: Very sorry about all that high dudgeon a couple of weeks ago. You remember, when we couldn't pass a microphone, a pencil, or a camera without perorations about the vital need to have the President waive executive privilege and ignore scads of history so Dr. Rice could be permitted to testify under oath and publicly (and improve our...