I’d like everybody to pay close attention to this Tweet:

.@mittromney more interested in bogus #Benghazi theory than battling auto bankruptcy. #battleship #p2

— Ed Markey (@MarkeyMemo) October 23, 2012

It’s from back in October of 2012, when – as Legal Insurrection very helpfully notes – Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts (D) (now running against Gabriel Gomez in a special election for MA-SEN) was doing his level best to convince the world that there was absolutely no reason at all to believe that the attack in Benghazi that murdered four Americans (including our Ambassador) was due to a preplanned terrorist attack – and that any suggestion that the White House was covering things up was some sort of bizarre theory promulgated by conservatives. That’s October of 2012.  Now let’s go to May of 2013: (more…)

…you know that they never, ever actually mean it:

Ouch. MT @buzzfeednews: Lindsey Graham already released a statement responding to Obama’s presser. twitter.com/BuzzFeedNews/s…

— Jim Roberts (@nycjim) April 30, 2013

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I can think of at least three arguable, intellectually coherent reasons for being against the death penalty; I do not share that position, but I can do a death penalty opponent the elementary courtesy of treating his or her opinion with respect. So I don’t get upset when somebody says No death penalty, even for scumbags – and means it.

I do get upset when a politician abandons principle for raw political expediency. Like, say, Boston mayor (and Democrat) Tom Menino.

…Mayor Tom Menino, in an uncharacteristic turn, called for the death penalty for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

“I have never supported the death penalty but I will say in this one I might think it’s time this individual serves his time with the death penalty,” Menino said.

Via AoSHQ.  That’s just obscene: if you don’t believe in the death penalty, then don’t believe in the death penalty.  But don’t switch your beliefs just because it’s suddenly politically expedient.  It’s cowardly (in a tough-guy way), hypocritical, cynical, and – depending on how you read Article I, Section 10′s prohibition of ex post facto laws – actually unconstitutional, to boot.

Seriously, why is even this a question?

What’s a good doctor to do when a villain hobbles into the emergency room?

Repeat after me: necromancy doesn’t work.  A living terrorist can talk; a dead one is mute, pretty much by definition.  So you patch the son of a bitch up, get him stable, and then you hand him over to the appropriate authorities for interrogation.  See? Ethical dilemma solved.  I’d ask what they were teaching kids these days, except that the author is almost certainly older than I am (he’s got an unhealthy obsession over Richard Nixon that is kind of diagnostic*)…

Via Hot Air Headlines. (more…)

Please note: “another.”

To the best of my knowledge, accused bombmaker Aaron Greene is not linked in any formal way to last year’s plot by Occupy Wall Street activists to bomb a Columbus, Ohio bridge.  Then again, it’s not entirely clear what Greene was (allegedly) planning to bomb: when the cops arrested him and his bourgeois moll Morgan Gliedman they had just gotten to the stage of putting an actual bomb-making shop together*.  A charming little substance called HMTD was found on-scene**; for those without access to Wikipedia, it’s the triggering explosive of choice for suicide and car bombers worldwide.  And, naturally, Greene and Gliedman are both children of privilege.  One would wonder if Mummy and Daddy hugged them enough… but then, most people who don’t get hugged enough still somehow manage to avoid making bombs in response, so perhaps the answer isn’t really all that interesting after all.

Not much else to note, except for this rather unfortunately surnamed lawyer’s quote from the Huffington Post:

“The whole situation’s sad,” said attorney Lisa Pelosi, who represented Greene. She declined further comment.

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Before we get started:

NO.  DO NOT DO THIS.

OK, wanted to get that out of the way.

[UPDATE: Full background here.]

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Because God forbid that we assume that any of this could be due to a failure of leadership:

Undercover FBI agents arrested an 18-year-old American man who tried to detonate what he believed was a car bomb outside a downtown Chicago bar, federal prosecutors said today. Adel Daoud, a US citizen from the Chicago suburb of Hillside, was arrested last night in an undercover operation in which agents pretending to be extremists provided him with a phony car bomb. But the device was inert and the public was never at risk, officials said.

Or, more accurately, a failure to induce the proper bed-wetting terror that should accompany any thought of setting off an explosive on US soil.  Because if you’re thinking that this sort of story seems to have gotten more and more common since 20[0*]9… well.  Yes, it has.

Moe Lane

[*Nag, nag, nag.]

Mind you, you wouldn’t know that from the Washington Post’s article on the arrest of John Kiriakou.  While the Washington Post – from appearances, somewhat reluctantly – reported that Kiriakou (a former CIA officer and Senate Foreign Affairs staffer) had been arrested for revealing names, operations and investigations to the media back in 2008-2009, the paper completely neglected to mention who Kiriakou ended up working for – which is to say, Senator John Kerry (D, MA).  Oddly enough, the Washington Post managed to simultaneous note that “[t]he committee had not been aware of the criminal probe of Kiriakou, according to a former U.S. official familiar with the matter” in its article, while unaccountably mentioning that Kiriakou has been leaking classified information publicly for years – including to the, well, Washington Post.  One can only guess why a premiere Left-Establishment paper would be so eager to whitewash the record when it comes to protecting prominent Left-Establishment politicians… like, say, John Kerry, who is the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee (at least until next January)… (more…)

…(no relation) on the vicious attempts by Democrats to smear Tea Partiers as ‘terrorists.’ Note that Charles Lane does not actually agree with the Tea Party, but manages to tell the difference between them and, say, people who try to murder civilians with nail bombs and rat poison; something that the Left seems to be having (deliberate) trouble with these days.  However, there’s this howler:

…[liberals] are surely correct to condemn such ugly rhetorical excesses as the Obama-is-Hitler placards that flowered across the land in the summer of 2009.

Indeed.  LaRouche Democrats were unwelcome interlopers in the Tea Party movement… (more…)

…for that matter, so am I.

‘These people’ being the media, and their contemptible willingness to accept a double standard when it comes to violent rhetoric.  After screaming for so long about every possible hint of a suggestion of a possibility of violent speech from the Right, it’s amazing what will be forgiven when it comes from the Left:

Tom Friedman — who knows a bit about Hezbollah — calls the tea partiers the “Hezbollah faction” of the GOP bent on taking the country on a “suicide mission.” All over the place, conservative Republicans are “hostage takers” and “terrorists,” “terrorists” and “traitors.” They want to “end life as we know it on this planet,” says Nancy Pelosi. They are betraying the founders, too. Chris Matthews all but signs up for the “Make an Ass of Yourself” contest at the State Fair.  Joe Nocera writes today that “the Tea Party Republicans can put aside their suicide vests.” Lord knows what Krugman and Olbermann have said.

Then last night. on the very day Gabby Giffords heroically returns to cast her first vote since that tragic attack six months ago, the Vice President of the United States calls the Republican Party a bunch of terrorists.

Regardless, No one cares.

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Via Hot Air:

Hell, switch ‘em out with half the punditocracy in this country and we’d come out ahead.  I mean, you expect some of this stuff from an eight year old; it’s only when it comes out of the mouth of a thirty-something Ivy League journo-drone that you start wincing.

Pajamas Media took a survey of various European media sources and their evolving reaction to the Osama bin Laden excision.  It will not surprise anyone in the slightest to hear that the level of disapproval has been increasing all week, with many an envious sneer along the way.  The German response is particularly telling  (they’re usually a leading indicator of Left-wing antiwar thinking*): even the center-right (hah!) magazines want international tribunals and investigations and whatnot.  So we should probably see the first calls for that over here in about… a week or so.  Probably followed with the leaking of the SEAL team’s names by some fellow-traveler in the Executive Branch with a grudge against the military and an iPad, so I hope that the SEALs are taking my advice and getting a lawyer now.

I’m also going to give some free advice to the White House: and I actually hope that they’ll take it, because this is an American issue, not a Right/Left, Republican/Democrat, or Competent/Incompetent one.  Let’s just say that I don’t really care what’s on the tapes that we’re suddenly now saying that we don’t actually have.  This is because I’m reasonably sure that there’s nothing drastically awful on them, given that they weren’t suppressed from the get-go: so there’s nothing like an actual noncombatant being molested or shot out of hand or anything like that.  If there is something like that on them then I would have to wonder why the administration didn’t react with horror at the time, but never mind that right now: the point is, I expect that the video record doesn’t show an actual atrocity. (more…)