R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.

WASHINGTON -- Whatever happened to the mainstream media's high regard for "anger" in politics? From roughly the midterm elections of 2006 through the presidential election of 2008, the "Angry Left" seemed to grow in stature with the media. Liberal pundits spoke of it with a hush of awe. By the election of the Prophet Obama, the Angry Left had acquired a hallowed public status similar to that of the "muckraker" or the "consumerist," though no consumerist whom I have ever known has been agreeable company. Would you want to sit down to tea with, say, Ralph Nader? Certainly Ralph has never been known for his hearty laugh or elegant manners.

Yes I said "tea." The word has become something of a red flag among the bien pensants. Tea brings to mind Tea Parties, which for the bien pensants means angry political activists, not angry political activists of the noble variety but angry political activists of the alarming variety. That is to say, activists variously inveighed against as members of the "extreme right," the "far right," the Reagan Administration. The Tea Partiers are supposedly crazed and provincial, or as a recent chronicler of the Tea Party Movement (TPM), John Avlon, puts it, "wingnuts."

Well, gratefully we are now getting some solid information about the Tea Partiers; and, though they are angry, they are apparently not homicidal, as one member of the Angry Left proved to be recently. I am thinking of Professor Amy Bishop who blew her top at a faculty meeting at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and, it is alleged, shot six of her colleagues, killing three. Years earlier she shot her brother to death in an outburst that she survived free of criminal charges, possibly because of her family's political influence in her Braintree, Massachusetts hometown.

Between that shooting and her recent run-in with the law at Huntsville, Professor Bishop came under suspicion of mailing a pipe bomb to a Harvard University medical doctor and was convicted of assaulting a woman in an International House of Pancakes in Peabody, Massachusetts. Reports the Boston Herald,"a family source" described Professor Bishop as "a far-left political extremist who was 'obsessed' with President Obama to the point of being off-putting." For obvious reasons the identity of this "family source" has not be revealed. The source could be accused of having Tea Party sympathies.

The information we now are getting on the Tea Partiers is reassuring, at least to me. It comes from Eric O'Keefe, the head of a Chicago-based organization devoted to free markets and limited government, the Sam Adams Alliance. O'Keefe has surveyed 49 Tea Party leaders in 38 states and found that what anger these Tea Partiers harbor is mostly benign. "They want to make a difference," as good-government types are wont to say. Seventy percent told O'Keefe they hope to "have a positive impact on the country." According to O'Keefe, they are neither "political junkies nor crusty right-wing extremists." Nearly half have never been involved in politics before. What angers them is the reckless federal spending of the Democrats in 2009.

It is this combination of anger and concern over profligate federal spending that seems to have the media's bien pensants cooling their ardor for anger in politics. They contemplate the Tea Party protests, and their minds fill with visions of homicidal maniacs protesting the IRS and flying private planes into government buildings. In fact, when Andrew Joseph Stack III, a homicidal maniac angered by the IRS, flew his plane into the IRS offices in Austin, Texas on February 18, New York Times columnist Frank Rich could not get the Tea Partiers off his mind. He said it would be "glib and inaccurate" to link the murderer to the Tea Party Movement. Yet that is precisely what Rich did in his February 28 column, despite having read Stack's Website manifesto, which expresses sentiments nothing like the mild sentiments discovered by O'Keefe.

In his manifesto Stack howls against "the vulgar, corrupt Catholic church," "the monsters of organized religion," "presidential puppet GW Bush and his cronies," the "rich" and the "wealthy." Actually, when I read these sentiments I thought of Gore Vidal and was reassured knowing that Gore is, for a certitude, too old to qualify for a pilot's license. How Rich could read these sentiments and think of the Tea Partiers is difficult to fathom, though I am not very well versed in the workings of a deranged mind and Rich has been mildly deranged for years.

Anytime he takes up the matter of politics in his column Rich becomes unhinged, usually drawing precisely the opposite conclusion from the evidence available. Certainly that is what Rich has done from Stack's manifesto. With its thunderclaps against organized religion, the Catholic Church, our 43rd president, and the rich, Stack's manifesto is hardly the work of a Tea Partier. It is the work of an indignado of the Angry Left. I can understand Rich's embarrassment, if embarrassment it be. 

WASHINGTON -- I am beginning to think of President Hamid Karzai as Hamid Karzai (D-Afghanistan). The way he inveighs against troops who are fighting to secure his government in that inhospitable realm sounds very much like Senator Richard Durbin (D-Illinois) inveighing against our troops during the Bush administration. Not only that, but now Mr. Karzai has arrogated for himself a formerly independent Afghan commission whose duty it was to monitor elections for fraud and other irregularities. Last week he signed a decree that will henceforth allow him rather than the United Nations to appoint officials to the Electoral Complaints Commission, which the United Nations had set up in the aftermath of Karzai's rigged reelection. So maybe it would be more appropriate for me to think of him as Hamid Karzai (D-Chicago).

We now have underway in Afghanistan the most massive military operation since autumn 2001, when our forces sent the Taliban fleeing to their caves and mountain refuges. Thousands of American, British, and Afghan troops have overrun the former Taliban stronghold of Marjah. There they are trying to establish a proper civilian government while capturing or killing a sufficient number of Taliban to persuade the rest to lay down their arms. Yet on at least two occasions civilians have been killed. This was not because our troops were reckless or insensitive to the plight of civilians. A major goal of our forces is to minimize civilian casualties so as to win, as they say, the hearts and minds of the Afghans. So strict are the rules of engagement that they have increased the risk of injuries and fatalities to our forces.

Yet still civilians have been wounded and killed -- not exactly by accident. A little-remarked fact of war against Islamic fundamentalists is that they use civilians (Muslims!) as shields. They even use holy places such as mosques as shields for stationing their troops and storing their weapons. This use of civilians as shields takes place in the Palestinian territories, where the death of civilians is used as propaganda against the Israel Defense Forces, and of course in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the death of innocents is seen as a propaganda triumph against us.

Islamic fundamentalists not only use civilians as shields, they target them with roadside bombs and -- even grislier -- with suicide bombers attacking bazaars and cafes. The strategic purpose is to create dissension and demoralization among the citizenry. People familiar with warfare against Islamic fundamentalists know this. Surely Mr. Karzai (D-Chicago) knows this. He also knows that our air strikes are nixed if our monitors perceive civilians in a targeted area. Likewise our soldiers hold their fire, when the enemy is using civilians -- often women and children -- as shields while they travel through the country, planting bombs and planning ambushes. Nonetheless he assists them in spreading the propaganda that we are responsible for civilian deaths.

Over the weekend he opened the Afghan parliament with a diatribe. It was not against the Taliban who are in insurrection against his government but against our troops who are training his army, pursuing the Taliban, and trying to hand over a secure Afghanistan to him. He brought along a picture of a young Afghan girl who lost her family during a mid-February strike by our forces against suspected Taliban. Now that is a bit of public relations wizardry, but it is at the expense of his protectors and on behalf of his enemies. His protectors led by General Stanley McChrystal have apologized for their involvement in civilian deaths. His enemies who have put the civilians in harm's way apologize for nothing.

Reviewing his presidency, its corruption, ineptitude, and arrant stupidity, I am convinced of the aptness of thinking of President Hamid Karzai as Hamid Karzai (D-Chicago.) Perhaps this year the Democrats will ask him to speak at one of their Jackson Day Dinners.

WASHINGTON -- This week the Drudge Report gave emphasis to its lead headline that a CNN poll found 52% of its respondents opposed to the reelection of President Obama with the boldfaced screamer: "Shock." Who is shocked? The American people are a sensible lot. Frankly I am not shocked.

This administration is as inept as you would expect an administration to be when presided over by the most inexperienced and most far-left president in modern American history. Mr. Obama is out of his depth. Moreover, he and his aides are oblivious to political realities.

A perfect example of this is their deployment this week of Vice President Joe Biden to refute former Vice President Richard Cheney's criticism of the Obama administration's approach to the war on terror. Pithily put, Cheney accuses the administration of treating the war on terror as a legal matter rather than a war. He is worried about our national security and quite properly he fears more attacks within the United States unless we are on the offensive.

So whom does the White House send out against this formidable foreign policy advocate? The administration sends the gaffable Joe Biden, the most gaffe-prone figure in public life. If you are like me, you tune him in simply for a hearty laugh. Moreover, the White House puts Biden in an absurd position. He is scheduled for two Sunday morning refutations of Cheney's Sunday morning appearance on ABC's "This Week," one on CBS's "Face the Nation," the other on NBC's "Meet the Press." But his NBC refutation was taped Saturday night from the winter Olympics before Biden had anything to refute. It would be perhaps 12 hours before Biden even heard Cheney's criticism. Amusingly, "a senior White House official" told the Washington Post that the administration had chosen Biden for his ability to "hold the former vice president accountable to the facts in real time." Yes this fantasist said the "facts."

Biden's unhappy experiences with the facts are legendary. I cherish his early autumn string of blunders committed during the 2008 campaign. Do you recall? During an interview with CBS's Katie Couric, Biden claimed that Franklin Roosevelt was president during the 1929 crash of the stock market and that Roosevelt immediately "got on television" to reassure the American people. Incidentally, when Biden uttered this preposterosity Couric's face betrayed no hint she recognized that Herbert Hoover was president in 1929 and that there was no national television audience in existence -- journalistic mediocrity meets political mediocrity.

Biden's gaffes continued. Despite having been ignominiously forced from the 1988 Democratic presidential primaries for plagiarizing British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock's recollections of life in Welsh coal mines, Biden B.S.-ed to an audience of Virginia coal miners that when he was young he had been "a hard coal miner" -- which was revealed to be a total fabrication. It was at about this time that Biden was caught lying (repeatedly!) that along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border his helicopter had recently been forced down by enemy fire. Ultimately, the press reported that inclement weather was the cause.

More seriously, during a debate with Governor Sarah Palin Biden erroneously claimed that the United States "drove Hezbollah out of Lebanon." Alas, nothing of the kind had happened. More amusingly, he declared, "The number one job facing the middle class, and it happens to be as Barack says, a three-letter word, jobs, j-o-b-s, jobs." The gaffable candidate made all these misstatements within a four-week period in early autumn, beginning with some memorable advice to a journalist covering him. Tapping the reporter on the chest (presumably a male reporter), Biden advised, "You need to work on your pecs."

White House officials have been telling reporters that they relish the run-ins with Cheney because he is, to quote the Washington Post, "one of the least popular political figures in America." That would put him in the category of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Harry Reid. Yet other historic figures have borne Cheney's message of national peril and endured public scorn, for instance, Winston Churchill. When Churchill was summoning his countrymen to vigilance he was so alone that historians have called the period his "Wilderness Years." It was a tough time, and Churchill did not even have the delightful Vice President Biden to pin the donkey's tail on. 

War Is Hell -- Not Litigation

WASHINGTON -- The editor of the venerable conservative weekly Human Events is causing an admirable ruckus. Jed Babbin, once deputy undersecretary of defense in the administration of George H.W. Bush and now the editor of the oldest conservative periodical in the land, is petitioning Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to dismiss charges against three SEALs for allegedly causing discomfort to one of the most-wanted terrorists in Iraq during his capture last September. Babbin now has over 90,000 petitioners. Count me in.

The SEALs, Julio Huertas, Jonathan Keefe, and Matthew McCabe, are members of SEAL Team Ten. Their platoon captured one Ahmed Hashim Abed during a nocturnal raid on or about September 1 in Iraq. Abed is suspected of being the mastermind of the March 2004 ambush in Fallujah of four Blackwater security guards, which by hindsight was not such a good idea on Abed's part. In a wild firefight his brutes killed the Blackwater contractors, all retired commandos, when they drove into an ambush. Then they desecrated the bodies, dragging them through the streets and hanging two from a bridge for the world to see. That ostentatious display of barbarism caught the attention of the U.S. military, making it, of a sudden, aware that Iraq was becoming dangerously unstable, with violence potentially spiraling out of control. The atrocity was, as the military commentator Rowan Scarborough has observed, a wakeup call that did not turn out well for the brutes.

Precisely what happened to Abed that September night is unclear. But he claims one of the SEALs, McCabe, punched him in the stomach causing him to bleed from the lip -- odd symptoms, no? Presumably we shall get all the details during the SEALs' court-martial trials that are scheduled to begin next month. Yet are these trials really necessary? The other two SEALs are charged with participating in a cover-up. I think it is by now pretty well established that terrorists do not always tell the truth, and they can be unruly when fallen upon in the dark of night in what they had thitherto considered secure hiding places.

Moreover, al Qaeda provides them with a training manual. According to Chapter 18 of a manual released by the Justice Department, al Qaeda's finest are encouraged to complain of torture and lesser acts of mistreatment at the hands of their captors. Possibly they even hire publicists. Thus we have come to the point where members of one of our most elite special ops forces are going to be court-martialed for causing Abed a bloody lip during his capture.

The travesty could have been averted had the SEALs settled for a lesser charge. That seems to be what the commanding general in charge, Major General Charles T. Cleveland, expected after conferring with Army lawyers. Yes, Army lawyers are almost as influential in the execution of this war on terror as our finest special ops forces. Yet these SEALs entered military service with the highest ambitions. They want, according to Babbin, to become members of the SEALs' most elite team. If they settled for the "non-judicial punishment" under Article 15 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice that was dangled before them, their chances of serving our country at a higher level of combat would be ended.

So now these warriors, who regularly faced a barbaric foe to defend our country, will face courts-martial and possible ruin. General Cleveland had it in his power to tell lower-level commanders simply to lecture these soldiers on avoiding bloody lips in the future, but he set a process in motion that is destructive to these men and to the morale of our finest fighters in the war on terror. Secretary Gates can end this abuse of power by simply doing what Cleveland failed to do. Send these men back to their officers for a chewing out.

I hope Gates will follow this course. He is an honorable and intelligent man. I have known him since his boss at CIA, then-CIA Director Bill Casey, introduce him to me over two decades ago and told me that with Gates' talent and good sense he was destined to do great good for our country. These SEALs have done great good too. Let us get them back to work and get these courts-martial canceled. The guy that should be appearing in the dock is Ahmed Hashim Abed, whose lip has doubtless healed.

The Politically Correct and Altercationists Anonymous

WASHINGTON -- I am rather sorry that Myles Brand has passed on to his reward. Brand is the fellow who as president of Indiana University gained enormous respect among Liberals for ruining the basketball program of that basketball-loving university in that basketball-loving state. He fired basketball coach Bob Knight, one of the sport's greatest coaches, for a minor altercation that was an obvious setup. Knight had donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the institution and overseen an athletic program that insisted on academic seriousness from its players as well as competitiveness. Under Knight IU won three National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championships and 11 conference championships. The basketball program has yet to recover, and I very much doubt that its players match the academic records of Knight's teams.

Admittedly the hot-tempered Knight was controversial. He got into rows with coaches, journalists, players, referees, spectators -- actually anyone who was available. Yet, by the time Brand fired him, Knight had taken heed of those who admonished him to manage his temper better and was a much more irenic citizen. Call him a recovering altercationist. Perhaps Knight had enrolled in Altercationists Anonymous (AA). His forced departure ignited angry stu....
Publ.Date: Sat, 13 Feb 2010 17:32:00 -0500