By Mr. Curmudgeon

For the party in power, fighting the war on terror has not proved one of their strong suits. Unwilling to adopt a muscular approach in dealing with Islamic crazies determined to kill us, vulnerable Democrats have hit on a novel approach to combat Republican opponents this election season – go back to school. “To combat the problem,” reports POLITICO.com, “House Democrats have asked Third Way, the centrist Democratic think tank, and California Rep. Jane Harman, a leader on intelligence issues in the House, to help lead training session on the issue.” Translation: when you can’t argue the facts, hire advertising hucksters to help spin your way out of trouble.

It will be interesting how Democrats spin granting enemy combatants Constitutional rights and criminal trails. We never did this for Japanese and German prisoners of war. So, what makes Gitmo jihadists so special?

Rep. Gerry Connolly told POLITICO, Democrats have to “avoid the trap of looking soft and weak.” Connolly believes strength in the face of suicidal mass murders is all in the way Democrats construct their sentences, “There are strong adverbs, adjectives and verbs as opposed to weak.” He offers this example: “I’m going to fight for American interests abroad,” and not “I’m going to defend American values.” “Not that one is better than the other, but in language, one is more assertive and one’s stronger. That’s where we need to be. Words matter.”

As voters, we need to ask ourselves this question: what keeps Osama bin Laden up at night? The thought of U.S. Daisy Cutters exploding over his Al Qaeda bat cave or Rep. Connolly’s “strong adverbs, adjectives and verbs?” As Dick Cheney said, “I’m absolutely convinced that the threat we face now, the idea of a terrorist in the middle of one of our cities with a nuclear weapon, is very real and that we have to use extraordinary measures to deal with it.” Democratic demagogy may trip up the occasional tongue-tied Republican, but will do nothing to stop jihadist suicide bombers from unleashing hell on American soil. Sticks and stones and Predator drones may break their bones, but words will never hurt them.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

Health problems may have temporarily sidelined former Vice President Dick Cheney from continuing his attacks on the Obama administration’s trivialization of the war on terror, but Cheney certainly has had a profound effect. According to the New York Daily News, “Feds involved in security preparations for lower Manhattan’s Foley Square courthouse have been quietly ordered to cease all preparations for a 9/11 trial blocks from where the twin towers fell. Senior aids will soon urge President Obama to reverse Attorney General Eric Holder and prosecute the terrorists in a military courtroom.” Granting foreign fighters civilian criminal trials and Constitutional rights was a tough sell for Eric Holder, but when it was discovered that at least nine Justice Department lawyers who helped him devise the aforementioned policy previously represented jihadist detainees in court, that’s when the feathers hit the fan. And the administration’s contrite reversal isn’t sitting well with the lunatic fringe of Obama’s personality cult.

Besides Cheney, another lightning rod for the lunatic left is former U.S. Attorney and National Review contributor Andrew McCarthy. Famous for successfully prosecuting the 1993 bombers of the World Trade Center, McCarthy is relentless in railing against the Justice Department’s decision to treat enemy combatants as common criminals. New York Time reporter Tobin Harshaw wrote, “McCarthy… blamed the ‘al-Qaeda bar’ — the attorneys who secured due process rights for detainees — for Bush-era setbacks… McCarthy wields a great deal of influence in conservative circles on national-security matters. When Attorney General Eric Holder testified in front of the Senate regarding his decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed and the other alleged 9/11 conspirators in civilian courts, Sen. John Kyl read aloud from an op-ed McCarthy had published just the day before, in which McCarthy alleges that ‘leftist lawyers’ actively sought to aid ‘America’s enemies.’”

The outing of Justice Department jihadist sympathizers drove Ken Gude at the Center for American Progress to conclude, “This is exactly what Joe McCarthy did…Not kind of like McCarthyism; this is exactly McCarthyism.” Then Harshaw plays the tired leftist trump card. “Andrew McCarthy’s last name no doubt makes that comparison all too tempting…”

That’s an interesting comparison that Gude and Harshaw insist upon. Sen. Joseph McCarthy was dismissed as a lunatic for insisting Soviet sympathizers had infiltrated the U.S. State Department. When the Soviet KGB files were opened to historians after the collapse of the evil empire, Joe McCarthy and other Cold Warriors were proved right.

By declaring Dick Cheney, Andrew McCarthy and others McCarthyites for warning the country of pro jihadists elements within the Justice Department, Gude pays them the highest of compliments. In his famous Wheeling, West Virginia, speech of 1950, Joseph McCarthy condemned “those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer . . . the finest homes, the finest college education and the finest jobs in government we can give.” Ouch! No wonder Gude sees shades of McCarthy in the former vice president and Andrew McCarthy – They’re hitting a little too close to the mark.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

Days after a Justice Department report exonerated Bush-era lawyers for giving the previous administration a legal thumbs-up on the issue of waterboarding, Attorney General Eric Holder – after much stonewalling – admitted to hiring at least nine lawyers who previously represented Islamic terrorists. At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, last November, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) asked Holder, “I want to know more about who is advising the Attorney General. I understand that there are attorneys at the Justice Department working on this issues [trying terrorists in U.S. criminal courts] who either represented Guantanamo detainees or worked for groups who advocated for them…My request is about establishing transparency and holding the administration to its word to make the Government’s business public.” In response, Holder said, “I will consider that request.” He went on to defend all Obama’s appointees as “patriots” with “national security uppermost in their minds.”

One Justice lawyer with a soft spot in his heart for terror detainees is “patriot” Neal Katyal. Katyal “…is now Principal Deputy Solicitor General…formerly a law professor at Georgetown University, who worked on legal challenges to the Military Commission Act – he represented Osama bin Laden’s driver – and is reportedly still working on detainee questions at the Justice Department,” reports the Washington Examiner.

The Examiner’s Byron York reported that, attorney Jennifer Daskal, “previously advocated for detainees while at Human Rights Watch.” She currently holds a position at the Justice Department’s National Security Division. No wonder Holder was reluctant to tell Sen. Grassley how many ACLU types were advising Justice on detainee issues.

It’s becoming clear what Eric Holder means when he calls Obama’s lawyers patriots. Holder’s men and women are so on fire with patriotic zeal they want to bequeath the blessings of our Constitution on foreign enemies captured in battle. In granting Gitmo detainees civilian criminal trials here at home, Holders Heroes believe they’re adding to the great melting pot of America — it’s part of Obama’s twisted transformative vision for America.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

The extraordinary times in the early days of America’s war of terror called for extraordinary measures, which included building holding cells for enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and waterboarding Al Qaeda terrorists for intelligence to help disrupt plots following 9/11 that may have inflicted further harm on the people of the United States. Today, in the age of Obama, extraordinary measures protect unworkable and dangerous political correctness. President Obama’s Justice Department released a report detailing efforts to charge Bush administration lawyers for advising the president on the legality of using intensified interrogation methods (some say torture) on captured jihadist detainees. The executive branch sought legal advice, as CIA lawyer John Rizzo said, to seek “maximum legal protection for its officers.” Though the report absolves Bush lawyers Jay Bybee and John Yoo of criminal wrongdoing, it labels their legal opinion as “professional misconduct.”

The Office of Professional Conduct, which issued the report, criticized councilor Yoo for veering away from political correctness in a time of war, declaring “situations of great stress, danger and fear do not relieve department attorneys of their duty to provide thorough, objective, and candid legal advice, even if that advice is not what the clients want to hear.” Translation: “You acted in good faith. You did nothing illegal. But your views differ from ours and the ACLU.”

One government official with the correct ACLU worldview is John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism chief. He is so infected by political correctness, he even refuses to call Islamic killers jihadists. “They are not jihadists, for jihad is a holy struggle, an effort to purify for a legitimate purpose, and there is nothing – absolutely nothing – holy or pure or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women and children,” Brennan said. Al Qaeda, Hamas, Islamic jihad, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Al-Aqsa Brigade, Hezbollah, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and many, many others must not have gotten Brennan’s memo.

Of the 9/11 hijackers, Osama bin Laden said:

“These young men refused to stay behind and engage in unimportant things. They set out on jihad and hastened to uphold the cause of God and the call of monotheism: ‘There is no god except God and Muhammad is the Messenger of God,” They engaged in jihad against the infidels…

“Each and every matter has its own reality. The reality of this hero, Saeed al-Ghamidi and his brothers is that they showed the truthfulness of their faith by offering themselves and their souls for the sake of God. Thus, they gained a status that greatly angered the infidels, and will continue to anger them for a long time, God willing.”

John Brennan is one of many infidels in the Obama administration incapable of righteous anger for jihadists – political correctness prevents them from believing they even exist. And you can’t waterboard what you don’t see. That presents them with a problem. What do you do with the bearded Koran-readers cooling their heels at Gitmo? Easy, redefine them as American criminals and try them in our courts…problem solved.

If Obama can’t criminalize opposition to his twisted worldview, he will use the Justice Department’s investigative powers to harass you into submission. There is no god except political correctness, and Obama is its messenger.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

Back in 2007, during the bad old days of the Bush administration, many around the world – including the left here at home – worried after reading press reports that warned of an impending Bush attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. “Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups,” wrote Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker magazine. “The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.”

As if by magic, members of America’s crack intelligence community leaked portions of a National Intelligence Estimate, parts of which were later declassified. “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program,” said the report. Democrats in Congress used the report to rein in any attempt by Bush to needlessly confront Iran on its nonexistent nuclear program. ABC News described the NIE report as creating an “embarrassing situation for the United States as it pushes for a third United Nations resolution against Iran for its nuclear activities.”

The insightful neocon Norman Podhoretz made an interesting point during the controversy regarding the CIA leak. “…I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again. This time the purpose is to head off the possibility that the President may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installations.”

Today, the New York Times reports, “The United Nation’s nuclear inspectors declared for the first time on Thursday that extensive information they have collected raised concerns about ‘past or current undisclosed activities’ by Iran’s military to develop a nuclear weapon. The unusually strongly worded conclusion seems certain to accelerate Iran’s confrontation with much of the rest of the world.” However, the Times offered a glimmer of hope to Obama’s supporters on the radical fringe, assuring them that “several of President Obama’s top national security advisers have questioned it.”

The Times continued, “Perhaps the most startling revelation in the report is that for the first time Iran told inspectors it was preparing to make its uranium into a metallic form — a step that can be explained by some civilian applications, but is widely viewed as necessary for making the core of an atom bomb.”

If our CIA wasn’t so secretive (that is, when it isn’t leaking misinformation to the New York Times) it would offer a one-word statement in response to the U.N. report, “Oops.”

Back in the 1980s, President Reagan was roundly criticized for running a secret intelligence network from the White House basement. The effort, you may recall, was to overthrow the socialist Sandinista dictatorship in Nicaragua. Reagan understood what Republican administrations that followed him never figured out: that the CIA is a worthless intelligence gathering body with a leftist and subversive contingent working to undermine American efforts against dangerous external enemies.

Nearly a decade has passed since 9/11, and the paper-shuffling hacks at the CIA still can’t get it right. That intelligence failure cost 3,000 Americans their lives. Will it take the destruction of an entire U.S. city before we wake up to the dangerous inadequacies of the CIA?

We can only hope that when President Obama leaves office in 2012, the Palin administration will do away with the CIA and the Tea Party Congress will charter a new intelligence agency – with Dick Cheney as its director. Hey, if Massachusetts can elect a Republican to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, anything is possible.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

President Obama is worried about Iran. Not its development of nuclear weapons, but that the Islamic republic’s Revolutionary Guard may overthrow the mullahocracy. In a bizarre take on reality, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in remarks before students in Qatar, “We see that the government of Iran – the Supreme Leader, the president, the parliament – is being supplanted and that Iran is moving toward a military dictatorship.” This must be startling news to Iran’s dictator mullahs. After all, the Ayatollah Khomeini established the Revolutionary Guard in 1979, which answers directly to Iran’s top mullahs. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad rose to the presidency from relative obscurity due to electoral fraud perpetrated by the Revolutionary Guard – on orders from Iran’s clerics. And Ahmadinejad was once a member of the guard.

Iran once seized our embassy and held our diplomats hostage; it trains and supplies terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah; it smuggles missiles and small arms into the Palestinian Authority to wage a genocidal war against Israel and has actively participated these past eight years in killing Americans fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Shortly after taking office, Obama released a video address directed at Iran’s ruling mullahs, “My Administration is now committed to diplomacy,” the president pleaded. “This process will not be advanced by threats. We seek, instead, engagement that is honest and grounded in mutual respect.”

The president and his Secretary of State fret over an imaginary coup d’état aimed at Iran’s Supreme Leader and his front man Ahmadinejad – the very characters commanding the 125,000-man terrorist army that will soon possess nuclear weapons. A morally, intellectually and financially bankrupt world’s last hope won’t be Obama or Hillary — but tiny Israel.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

President Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, is proving his job title to be an oxymoron. Speaking before the Islamic Center at New York University, Brennan told the gathering of Muslim law students it’s no big deal that 20 percent of terrorist detainees continue their murdering ways once released upon the world, “People sometimes use that figure, 20 percent, say ‘Oh my goodness, one out of five detainees returned to some type of extremist activity.’ You know, the American penal system, the recidivism rate is up to something about 50 percent or so, as far as return to crime. Twenty percent isn’t that bad.” As the 9/11 hijackers and the Christmas Day underpants bomber illustrate, a hand-full of jihadists can ruin your whole day.

And speaking of the underpants bomber, he was recruited by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The leadership of that little Al Qaeda splinter group is made almost exclusively of recidivists from Saudi Arabia’s jihadist rehabilitation program.

Of the hurtles the administration continues to encounter in its attempt to find some small corner of American willing to house Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for trial, Brennan complained, “We are trying to push this forward as best we can, but we also need nonobstruction from certain forces in our government. … There are stiff winds delaying us from bringing this man to justice.” The obstructionists Brennan denounces are Congressional representatives who are, well, representing. It’s the people of the United States that are the administration’s staunchest obstructionists.

No matter. Once Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder move Gitmo detainees to Illinois for trial as common criminals, the courts will see to it that the recidivist rate among jihadists climbs, as Brennan observed, from 20 to 50 percent. That’s enough to make Osama bin Laden say, “You know, 50 percent isn’t that bad.”

By Mr. Curmudgeon

The New York Times unwittingly scored points for Republicans on the terror issue in a recent editorial. “An election is coming,” the Times warned voters, “so Republicans are trying to scare Americans by making it appear as if Democrats don’t care about catching or punishing terrorists.” The dunder-heads at the Times made the point many Republicans have been hammering home since the underpants bomber was Mirandized and allowed to lawyer-up last Christmas Day. “Catching and punishing” enemy combatants is not a serious way to fight a war. Killing, interning and interrogating terrorists, or holding them for the duration of the conflict (even if it lasts one thousand years), is how serious leaders deal with enemies at war with the United States.

President Obama’s discredited Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, John Brennan, believes the objections to Obama’s coddling and trying of terrorists plays into Al Qaeda’s hands. “Politically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering only serve the goals of al-Qaeda. Terrorists are not 100-feet tall,” Brennan wrote in USATODAY. They may be small in stature, but that didn’t stop them from toppling New York’s 110-story Twin Towers. His charge raised the hackles of Republicans, some of whom demanded the president fire him.

Last August, in a speech delivered before the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Brennan outlined the president’s strategy for dealing with Al Qaeda:

“Describing our efforts as a global war only plays into the warped narrative Al Qaeda propagates. It plays into the dangerous and misleading notion that the U.S. is somehow in conflict with the rest of the world. It risks setting our nation apart from the world rather than emphasizing the interests we share. And, perhaps most dangerously, portraying this as a global war reinforces the very image Al Qaeda wishes to project for itself: that it is a highly organized global entity capable of replacing sovereign nations with a global caliphate. And nothing could be further from the truth.”

It seems to be the perception of the president and his terror chief that antagonizing Al Qaeda antagonizes the world. To some extent, this may be true. But this is more an indictment of a twisted and evil world than it is of America. Brennan then suggests that Al Qaeda’s absurd goal to establish a global caliphate somehow minimizes the seriousness of its threat. Hitler’s aggression in Europe and the murder of six million Jews was predicated on the Nazi belief that Germans should rule the world by virtue their racial superiority. And that this superiority stemmed from an ancient bloodline stretching back to the mythical island of Atlantis. Vladimir Lenin believed Russia’s blood-soaked dictatorship of the proletariat would eventually morph into a utopian paradise. Will a nuclear weapon possessed by Iran be less threatening because President Ahmadinejad’s prays for a global apocalypse to hasten the arrival of Islam’s messianic 12th Imam? If anything, history shows that the crazier the ideology animating America’s aggressive enemies, the greater the danger they pose.

The anti-terror strategy of this administration, then, is to move away from an aggressive war footing in favor of a change in America’s perceptions. Al Qaeda is no longer the spear point of totalitarian Islam. They are mere criminals to stand in judgment before the bar. And while we’re at it, let’s perceive they are Americans entitled to the protections of our Constitution. The attacks on 9/11 that killed 3,000 Americans are no longer acts of war. They’re “man caused disasters.” When an Al Qaeda terrorist breezes past airport security and boards an aircraft, which nearly results in the death of 300 passengers, the correct perception should be that “the system worked.” When some Republicans complain that perception is not reality, it’s just “unfounded fear-mongering” that “serve the goals of al-Qaeda.”

No wonder the New York Times fears voters might perceive “Democrats don’t care about catching or punishing terrorists.” That can only happen if voter perception is based on what they see around them and not perceptions spawned by deluded and crazy ideology. If fearful voters send Mr. Obama packing in 2012, he should not perceive it as a rejection by the American people; they just voted him former president for life. It is, after all, just a matter of perception.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

Built in 1824, Blair House – across the street from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue – has served as the president’s guesthouse for visiting foreign dignitaries since 1942. Recently, President Obama announced his intention to use the venue for a bipartisan summit on ObamaCare. The unanimous (at least for now) Republican opposition to the president’s take-over of the nation’s health care system has obviously perplexed the administration to the point that they view the Party of Lincoln as sufficiently foreign – if not outright extraterrestrial – as to accord them a half-day stay at Blair House. Unlike past health care negotiations, these proceedings will be televised.

In a CBS Super Bowl pre-game interview with Katie Couric, Obama said, “If we can go, step by step, through a series of these [ObamaCare] issues and arrive at some agreements, then, procedurally, there’s no reason why we can’t do it a lot faster than the process took last year.” The president, no longer able to count on frightened Democrats to pass his totalitarian monstrosity, is hoping to sweat squishy Republicans – under the glare of television lights – to cave, providing the president the fig leaf of bipartisan support. If Republicans were smart (and that’s a big if), they would use the half-day summit, in the words of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, to provide the nation with a “teachable moment.”

This will require bringing in Tea Party consultants. Principle-free Republicans are a little rusty – if not completely oblivious - to making cogent Constitutional arguments against an overreaching government. It would be nice to see Obama’s minions put on the spot, requiring Pelosi Democrats to provide a Constitutional defense of the indefensible. They can’t, of course, but their dismissal of Constitutional restraints on government power would provide a very powerful and very public moment for Americans already suspicious of the totalitarian motives of Obama’s personality cult.

It might help generate a discussion; not between politicians – Republican and Democrat – arguing the fine points of totalitarian minutia, but between today’s Americans and those who founded the nation. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution provide windows into the hearts and minds of our predecessors. Today’s Republican Party may not hold to the conservative principles of Ronald Reagan or the Tea Party, but they ought to be concerned with conserving the Constitutional arrangement between the people and its government - a contract Obama’s dangerous initiatives threaten to erase.

“Do not separate text from historical background,” James Madison said of our founding document. “If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government.” Republicans, are you listening?

By Mr. Curmudgeon

President Obama, like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, can’t seem to make up his mind. As public confidence in the president’s terror fighting capabilities continues to slide, and his administration grapples with a face-saving venue change for the criminal trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Washington Post reports a prickly inconsistency between what the president says and what he does. His ACLU buddies will not be pleased. The Director of National Intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, testified before Congress that the administration is specifically targeting American citizens for death – the president being a one-man death panel.

Blaire said the criteria for terminating – with extreme prejudice – Americans fighting for Islamic terror organizations overseas is “whether that American is involved in a group that is trying to attack us, whether that American is a threat to other Americans.” And there is only one way that could happen, ladies and gentlemen – CIA hit teams must first receive a signed presidential finding.

Similar to, but far more bloody than Obama’s executive order granting mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie unlimited funds, presidential findings are classified executive orders granting presidential authority to kill. Under the Intelligence Authorization Act of 1991, intelligence committees of Congress must be made aware “before the initiation of a covert action authorized by the finding.” In other words, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are also in on it. That then begs the question: if Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is worthy of a trial with all the privileges and immunities granted by our Constitution, why not bonafied Americans fighting for the religion of peace? Obama may have a blind spot when it comes to seeing Al Qaeda foreign fighters as enemy combatants but he has no such qualms when it comes to Americans.