By Andrew P. Napolitano
The president's men trash the Constitution to pursue antagonists
A magician typically succeeds when the attention of the audience is diverted from his main activity onto some distraction. President Obama has raised this sort of deflection into a political art form.
Suddenly, congressional leaders of both parties are demanding investigations into serial disclosures of national security secrets on President Obama's watch. The truth of the matter is that we already know what we need to about those leaks.
T here's a debate just behind the Republican search for a winning candidate, just at the edges of President Obama's campaign for re-election, about whether America is finished. These debaters put it in the form of a polite academic question: Is America in decline?
If you're a political junkie, you've got to love a presidential candidate who lights the fire Newt Gingrich has lit. Or at least you have to love the fire. Impeach judges? Subpoena them? Arrest them?
As the nation mourns the loss in combat of 30 of its military heroes - including 22 members of the Navy's elite SEAL Team 6 - in Afghanistan over the weekend, the question inevitably occurs: What are we fighting for that justifies this latest among so much sacrifice in that distant, backward and inhospitable land?
It is not exactly news that the Obama presidency is determined to go to unprecedented lengths to mollify, appease and otherwise pander to what it calls the "Muslim world." But the question has begun to occur: At what point do these efforts cross the line from a misbegotten policy to one that is downright anti-American - hostile to our values, incompatible with our vital interests and at odds with our Constitution?
Actor and former teen king Andrew McCarthy would rather talk about settling down.
The Muslim Brotherhood's mask is slipping in Egypt. Small "d" democrats there and elsewhere are alarmed by top Brotherhood officials who now aver openly what has been utterly predictable: Once in power, they will impose Shariah - the totalitarian, supremacist politico-military-legal program practiced in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Somalia, Sudan and, increasingly, elsewhere.
Christine O'Donnell's "I'm not a witch" quote from an Oct. 4 political ad was one of the "top-10 quotes of the year," according to Fred Shapiro, associate librarian at Yale Law School.
"If we were in that objective frame of mind, we would easily see that a freedom culture requires separation of the spiritual from the secular."
For anyone who has grown complacent about the danger of terrorism, the incidents in London and Glasgow were supposed to provide a jolt of reality. As former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy put it, "these foiled attacks are best understood as new rounds in a long, global war, provoked by the challenge of radical Islam." Here was proof the jihadists are still out there, ready to strike at the moment of their choosing.
Andrew McCarthy, who was the federal prosecutor who secured Rahman's conviction of conspiring to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993, warns that despite the administration's serial and artfully worded denials, Mr. Obama is likely to release the sheikh after the November election.
Mr. McCarthy added pointedly: "It is not a question of your patriotism or your trustworthiness. It is about whether you would be burdened by such obvious conflicts of interest that you would be tempted to act on those interests, rather than in the best interests of the United States."
