The Cost of Not Being Simon Pure on Leftist Doctorine

James Joyner, earlier today:

Apparently, those of us who thought MoveOn.org has gone too far in suggesting that General Petraeus would “Betray Us” were simply not clued in on how easily the word “betray” is bandied about by the Left.

Matt Stoler has written a vehement post entitled, “Obama Betrays Us, Of Course” that refers to the top challenger for the Democratic nomination as a “sad spectacle of a politician” and “a putz.” His offense? Failing to cancel campaign appearances to vote against a Senate resolution condemning said MoveOn ad.

There it is my friends, in a nutshell.   Anyone not in absolute lockstep with the Looney left, “betrays” them. it’s like I’ve been saying about the left, for a long time, now; for all their complaints about not accepting other people’s views…

AL-QAEDA IN IRAQ LEADER KILLED

Posted: 19 Sep 2007 11:57 AM CDT

AL-QAEDA IN IRAQ LEADER KILLED

I wrote earlier this monring about how there is a split in the Democrat party.  Tell me that this note from Hume doesn’t show us exactly that:

Virginia Democratic Congressman Jim Moran is getting slammed by fellow House Democrats over comments that pro-Israel forces in the U.S., “pushed the Iraq war from the beginning.”

The Politico newspaper reports Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman called Moran’s remarks “deeply offensive.”

A group of 16 Jewish Democrats wrote what is described as a withering letter to Moran, saying in part, “The idea that the war in Iraq began because of the influence of Jewish Americans is factually incorrect and unfortunately fits the anti-Semitic stereotypes some have used historically against Jews.”

But Moran is not backing down. A spokesman conceded that the congressman’s comments may have been “unnecessarily harsh,” but said the criticism was directed at a lobbying organization, not a community of people.

Which ignores, of course, that there was a large body of people paying for that lobbying organization.   People, who in large part, were Moran’s voters. My guess is, they won’t be, anymore.

For years, trial lawyer William Lerach was known as a master of “rush to the courthouse” class-action lawsuits, specializing in billion-dollar securities cases against American companies. But now Mr. Lerach is rushing off in a different direction — to prison — and his downfall has a lesson to offer for trial lawyers everywhere.

In a deal with prosecutors filed this week, Lerach pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge following a federal investigation into allegations that he and his former law firm, Milberg Weiss, covertly (and illegally) funneled at least $11 million in kickbacks to plaintiffs who served as frontmen in dubious shareholder class-action lawsuits.

Lerach’s guilty plea has saved him from the worst, and he’ll serve a prison sentence of just one to two years. But the plea agreement cannot spare class-action litigation in general — and many shareholder lawsuits in particular — from harsh judgment.

The Shakedowns

This one trial lawyer’s fate only confirms what many critics of the trial bar have long suspected: The “shareholder” lawsuits pioneered by Milberg Weiss were phony cases concocted solely to enrich tort lawyers at the expense of innocent companies and their shareholders.

That’s from Investors Business Daily this morning  

(BBCT: Billy) 

There’s more of course, and you should go RTWT.  The whole thing, however would seem to raise a question that nobody dares ask; Since when did we start treating lawyers like they were invariably honest? Certainly, his colleagues still think the guy worthy… As the article indicates…

Worst of all, while Lerach “crossed a line and pushed too far,” as he put in a statement this week, he remains admired and emulated by the trial bar.

Yeah, well… OJ Simpson, pushed too far as well.

Oh… One other comment on this story that caught my eye:

 Asked to comment on Lerach’s undoing, a law professor at Columbia described it to the Washington Post as “the fall of a titan.”

Columbia?  Isn’t that where that thug Ahmadinejad is scheduled to speak? Now we see that the lack of judgment pervades far more than just the president’s office at Colombia.

But what do you really expect from a group of people who place more emphasis on what is legal, and illegal, then they do on what’s right and what’s wrong.

Marc Armbinder notes in The Atlantic, that James Dobson doesn’t much care for Fred Thompson.

‘Isn’t Thompson the candidate who is opposed to a Constitutional amendment to protect marriage, believes there should be 50 different definitions of marriage in the U.S., favors McCain-Feingold, won’t talk at all about what he believes, and can’t speak his way out of a paper bag on the campaign trail?” Dobson wrote.

”He has no passion, no zeal, and no apparent ‘want to.’ And yet he is apparently the Great Hope that burns in the breasts of many conservative Christians? Well, not for me, my brothers. Not for me!”

Well, I guess that’s OK, Jimbo. I can’t recall anyone I’ve really wanted in office you’ve approved of, anyway. What worries this white Christian married male, is why you are under the impression that anyone still worried about anything a drooling megalomaniac like you would have to say, anyway.

Can I make this any clearer for you, or have you got the hint, yet?

I note that Rusty has the story, too. Says he:

I may be wrong, but I doubt Dobson’s attacks are going to have much, if any, negative effect on Fred’s standing among evangelicals.

Heh. No kidding?

Glenn Reynolds makes an interesting point about the lack of attention being paid to the back and forth over the Jena 6.

Perhaps they just don’t wanna be caught in a fight between Jesse Jackson and his kid, huh?

Jesse Jackson is fond of the term “defining moment.”   In politics, a defining moment is when a politician accidently speaks  thbe truth.  Glenn Thrush, Newsday, reports:

WASHINGTON – The Rev. Jesse Jackson has accused Barack Obama of “acting like he’s white,” claiming the candidate hasn’t spoken out on behalf of six Jena, La., students charged in a 2006 racially charged brawl, according to South Carolina’s The State newspaper

Tom Maguire, Just One Minute, has the backstory:

So let’s go to a real newspaper – the Chicago Tribune had good coverage on May 20 2007, and the WaPo had a detailed piece on August.

CNN interviewed Jackson about the incident.   When directly asked if he said Barack Obana was acting “too white”,  Jacks0on hemmed and hawed but did not deny the charge. video.  

Two obsrevations from the video.   One, Jackson does not deny accusing Obama of acting “too white”, and two, Jackson continues to support Obama for president.

Therefore is it fair to conclude that Jackson thinks acting white is positive attribute in a presidential canidate?  If acting white is good, why not endorse a white?  Might I suggest Fred Thompson.   Why not the real thing?

What HE said:

Why do radical imams seek to convert young Canadian, British and even American men and women in their late teens and twenties? Because they understand that when you raise a generation in the great wobbling blancmange of Deval Patrick-style cultural relativism – nothing is any better or any worse than anything else; if people are “mean and nasty” to us, it’s only because we didn’t sing enough Barney the Dinosaur songs at them – in such a world a certain percentage of its youth will have a great gaping hole where their sense of identity should be. And into that hole you can pour something fierce and primal and implacable.

Flat out wonderful. It’s our BitsBlog Snark of the Day .

While I have the editor open, I may as well pass along tday’s runner up in the Snark contest… It goes to Brenden Loy, who says:

In other news from the world of academia, it seems that while Larry Summers isn’t welcome to be a dinner speaker at the University of California, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is an honored guest at Columbia.

Which in my opinion, reveals all we need to know about the state of academia today.

After watching the back and forth over Andrew Meyer getting tasered on YouTube, I can only say that this is a prime example of what a lack of common sense and an overwhelming desire for attention will do for you.

There’s been an awful lot said about blaming the cops in that particular situation , but I think it ought to be pointed out that it was the organizers of the event… ostensibly a Democrat supporter,  that turned off his microphone.  It was the organizers of the event that asked the police to be there in the first place.

Keep in mind; the tape of the event was on Meyers personal machine.  He had handed to another individual and the crowd asking him to record what happened.   The result is what everyone saw.

Mind you, I hold no truck with John Kerry. I think John Kerry to be among the most contemptible people on the planet.   But Andrew Meyer, was way out of line.  What the police did was not the wrong thing to do.  They followed procedure.  They did their job. To blame the police for something Meyer set up is more contemptable than John Kerry, even, and that’s saying something.

And, Andrew Meyer knew police procedure.  If you watch the tape closely enough, you’ll notice that Meyers actions  specifically calculated to elicit a specific response from the police.  If you look on the man’s web site, his face book profile describes him as a “born heckler”.  I keep hearing rumors also, that the man was drunk at the time of the confrontation.  Have you noticed, that the mainstream media can’t be bothered to investigate any of this?  Yet they will continue to run the footage that he’s so gladly provided them…
In short, he’s lucky they only tasered him. They should have put his glutius maximus up around his shoulder blades.

I see Mary Mapes posted a note for Dan Rather, over at HuffPo last night. And of course, it’s all OUR fault…

Here we go again.

It has been three years since we aired our much-maligned story on President Bush’s National Guard service and reaped a whirlwind of right-wing outrage and talk radio retaliation. That part of the assault on our story was not unexpected. In September 2004, anyone who had the audacity to even ask impertinent questions about the president was certain to be figuratively kicked in the head by the usual suspects.

What was different in our case was the brand new and bruising power of the conservative blogosphere, particularly the extremists among them. They formed a tightly knit community of keyboard assault artists who saw themselves as avenging angels of the right, determined to root out and decimate anything they believed to be disruptive to their worldview.

To them, the fact that the president wimped out on his National Guard duty during the Vietnam War — and then covered it up — was no big deal.

(Sigh) That you’re still trying to pass off this obvious lie as truth, and blaming everyone who found holes in the story… most of them large enough you could drive a TV remote truck through them, suggests you will never learn.
Mary, face it, woman, you lied.

You used the obviously falsified documents in an attempt to steal the election for the Democrats. And you got caught. End of story.

What annoys you so much, is it was largely bloggers who caught you in the lie. I’m suddenly reminded of the Scooby Doo adventures, where the criminal always says “If it hadn’t been for you meddling kids, I’d have gotten away with it, too. ”

Don’t tell me about how “good people ” lost their jobs. “Good People” claiming to be NEWS people don’t pass off lies in an attempt to throw an election, as you and Rather and some other folks at CBS did. CBS as a company should have been folded over this. The lot of you should have ended up in the slam, for your crimes, yourself included. Rigging elections is a crime, after all. Or so we were led to think when you were wasting all that spittle in Florida trying to convince us the Republicans had stolen the election.

Again, you LIED, in your attempt to STEAL THE ELECTION FOR THE DEMOCRATS.

You should be in jail for your crime, not writing “If I Did It” columns for the HuffPo.

And as for your future, dear lady, everyone has to have a purpose in life, and yours apparently is to be a bad example for J school. These days, when the press lies like that, they tend to get caught, after all… and I cannot imagine those fresh young leftists entering J school not being given a stern warning about such things because of your getting caught. Not because it was wrong to lie, mind you, but because you got caught at it.

Some things, you see, never change.

Am I the only one embarrassed by the dingbat brouhaha over Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s attempt to visit Ground Zero to lay a wreath?

No, Josh Marshall, the sad part is, I expect you’re not.

So what’s the problem exactly? Presumably we can be frank enough to acknowledge that the real issue here is that while Ahmadinejad is not Arab to most of us he looks pretty Arab.

Oh, of course… you don’t know the answer to the question, and so the answer must be that all us crackers are just racist, right? How alarmingly typical.

OK, I’ll break down and give you the story, just this once. (Aren’t I a nice guy?)

There is a link between this creature, and the 1979 Iranian uprising, that you may want to look into. In short, he created that situation. Perhaps it’s the connection to, and your wishing to cover for, the failed Carter administration that blinds you to that particular section of history? In any event you show your lack of understanding of recent history, and thereby your lack of understanding for the whole Islamo-facist situation, here.

Oh, and need I say, he’s a state sponsor of the weaponry and actions that are killing our people in Iraq today, in the name of the very same cause for which the WTC was attacked. I’ll bet you can’t understand why that might annoy Americans. Clearly, it doesn’t annoy YOU.

Not a shock to most of us, Josh, that you can’t put this together for yourself… or won’t try. But, just so you know, you’ve shown yourself as uniquely unqualified to speak on this subject.

Shut up.

Bruce over at Q&O reminds us:

 Bob Owens at Confederate Yankee reminds us that today is the two month anniversary of Franklin Foer’s promise that TNR would get to the bottom of the Scott Thomas Beauchamp thing.

*crickets*

Yeah, well he’s been out helping OJ find the real killer, after all.

Here we go again, with more indication of a serious split in the Democratic party.

This time, TPM’s Election Central is reporting:

The GOP-introduced resolution condemning MoveOn just passed by a huge margin, 72-25. Roughly half the Democrats in the Senate supported it.

Captain Ed has a slightly different angle, from a glass-half-empty/glass-half-full scenario:

25 Senate Democrats Support “Betray Us”, Including Hillary

But, look; First, the Senate SHOULD have condemned the ad. It was a despicable act.  But looking forward, this situation is over even greater import because of how this is going to affect the election in 08… Either way you look at this, there’s about a 50/50 split among Democrats, for which this move-on “Betray us” thing has become emblematic.  This is getting deeper by the day, folks, and harder to hide.  And from my point of view, it couldn’t happen at a better time.

Michelle has a list of those Democrats who voted against the resolution.

Action Alert – Please Read and Re-Post

Prompted by the following action alert from GDG contributor Kenneth Timmerman, I discovered that Iranian president Ahmadinejad still plans to visit ‘ground zero’, despite the NYPD’s refusal to allow it for “security reasons”.

In response to this outrage, many have begun organizing to repel or protest this incursion into one of America’s most hallowed memorials. Please read the following action alert, and participate if you are able:

Dear Friends of Freedom,

The Foundation for Democracy in Iran, in coordination with Citizens United and other groups, is calling on all Americans, regardless of their origin or political beliefs, to come to New York on Monday to defend Ground Zero from desecration by the terrorist president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

We will be chartering buses from the Washington, DC area. Please watch our website, www.iran.org, for more details and for rendezvous points.

Stay tuned!

Best regards,

Kenneth R. Timmerman
President and CEO
Foundation for Democracy in Iran
www.iran.org

For more information about this, please visit Michelle Malkin’s blog.

“Hillary Clinton had a choice. She could stand with our troop commander in Iraq, or she could stand with the libelous left wing of her party. She chose the latter. The idea that she would be a credible commander-in-chief of our armed forces requires the willing suspension of disbelief.”

Hat tip and more:  Ed Morrissey, Captain’s Quarters.