Gordon Kromberg: remember that name. Mr. Kromberg is a federal prosecutor who has investigated several radical Muslim groups in Virginia. In 2006, for example, Mr. Kromberg won a conviction against Sami Al-Arian, a Kuwaiti-born Palestinian activist, who pleaded guilty to aiding Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a Damascus-based terrorist group that has been responsible for dozens of bombings and scores of fatalities since the 1990s.

“Well, bully for Gordon Kromberg,” you might be thinking, “at last we can see some good come from the expenditure of the tax-payer’s money. What the world needs is fewer supporters of terrorists groups like Palestinian Islamic Jihad walking the streets.”

Something like that, I confess, flitted through my mind when I first heard about Mr. Kromberg’s activities on behalf of the public weal: “Good job, Gordon!” more or less summed up my attitude. He didn’t make all of the 17 charges against Sami Al-Arian stick, but at least he put him behind bars for a while.

A little background. In 2003, Sami Al-Arian was accused of heading up a domestic cell of an organization that routinely murders people. His lawyers negotiated a deal in which he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge. Judge James S. Moody Jr. sentenced Al-Arian to the maximum allowed under the sentencing guidelines. Responding to the objection that Al-Arian was merely attempting to aid women and children who had suffered in the Middle East, Judge Moody said that “The only connection to widows and orphans is that you create them.”

Fast forward to 2008. Lawyers for Sami Al-Arian are now attempting to turn the tables on Gordon Kromberg, accusing him, as an article in The New York Sun reports, of being “relentless” and “displaying his personal animus” in his pursuit of Islamic radicals.

Let me pause to declare an interest here. When it comes to fighting terrorism, I actually prefer prosecutors who exhibit the terrier instinct: I want them to be relentless, and if “personal animus”–i.e., a settled dislike of people who blow up school buses and otherwise maim and murder innocent people–helps nurture the relentlessness, so much the better.

That, anyway, is my feeling about the matter. But we live in an age in which soft jihad is on the rise–jihad that pursues its aim of establishing Islamic law worldwide not only by plowing jumbo jets into skyscrapers but also by using and abusing the institutions of democratic society in order to undermine those institutions. The legal system, for example, is used not as a tool to maintain the rule of law, but as a sort of sophistical stun-gun to stymie it. Thus we are treated to the spectacle of “human-rights” commissions who employ anti-discrimination legislation to silence journalists who have the temerity to call attention to the actions and goals of radical Muslims. And thus we find lawyers for Sami Al-Arian asking a federal judge to ponder the question of whether “anti-Muslim bias” fuelled the government’s case against him.

Of course, it’s not “anti-Muslim” bias that is at issue. If you want to use the language of bias at all, then what we are talking about is a “bias” against supporting terrorism. But really it’s not a question of “bias”–a word that suggests an irrational or unfounded dislike–but rather an entirely rational and well-founded hatred of evil.

Yes, yes, I know that “hatred” is not an OK, politically correct word today. We even have a whole new category of malefaction called “hate crimes.” What does that tell us?

It used to be that one could distinguish frankly between good and evil, affirming one, hating and rejecting the other. It has been one of the greatest triumphs of soft jihad to blur this distinction. It accomplishes the confusion by encouraging us to substitute the language of “bias talk” for the language of forthright moral discrimination. After a while the main issue–the Israeli school children who had been blown to bits in bus a bombing, for example–recedes to a limbo of endless pettifogging adjudication. Meanwhile, the stupefying mantras of multiculturalism–”diversity,” “bias,” “prejudice,” and the rest–assume center stage and we are lulled into believing, or half-believing, that somehow we are to blame for the depredations that take our very existence as their justification.

Here’s a headline for the ages:

Putting Money Where Mouths Are: Media Donations Favor Dems 100-1

What a surprise!

As William Tate goes on to note in his story in Investor’s Business Daily, the statistics are “overwhelming.” Nevertheless, and “true to form,” the media rankles at the natural conclusion–that there is deep and pervasive left-wing bias in the media. Their response is that “one candidate, Obama, is more newsworthy than the other. In other words, there is no media bias. It is we, the hoi polloi, who reveal our bias by questioning the neutrality of these learned professionals in their ivory-towered newsrooms.”

Right. And if you believe that, . . . But wait, before making me an offer, ponder some more of Tate’s story:

Given the pack mentality among journalists and, just like any pack, the tendency to follow the leader — in this case, Big Media — and since Big Media are centered in some of the bluest of blue parts of the country, it is highly likely that the media elite reflect the same, or an even greater, liberal bias.

A second is to analyze contributions from folks in the same corporate cultures. That analysis provides some surprising results. The contributions of individuals who reported being employed by major media organizations are listed in the nearby table.

The contributions add up to $315,533 to Democrats and $22,656 to Republicans — most of that to Ron Paul, who was supported by many liberals as a stalking horse to John McCain, a la Rush Limbaugh’s Operation Chaos with Hillary and Obama.

What is truly remarkable about the list is that, discounting contributions to Paul and Rudy Giuliani, who was a favorite son for many folks in the media, the totals look like this: $315,533 to Democrats, $3,150 to Republicans (four individuals who donated to McCain).

Let me repeat: $315,533 to Democrats, $3,150 to Republicans — a ratio of 100-to-1. No bias there.

The amazing thing is that anyone not part of the media clique pays any attention whatsoever to the hosannas directed at St. Obama.

Now that I think of it, though, perhaps no one who is not part of that rancid fraternity actually does pay attention to their pious bleatings. “Americans Distrust the Media“: an old story with new traction.

The next time you go to Berlin, why don’t you see if Obamania will work for you. Tell the “tens of thousands of elated Europeans” who have mysteriously shown up to hear you that you are addressing them “not as a candidate for president, but as a citizen, a proud citizen of the United States and a fellow citizen of the world.” Being “elated,” your audience will not pause to point out that no one, not even Barack Obama, is a “citizen of the world,” because a citizen by definition is someone who owes loyalty to and enjoys the protection of a specific state. Nor will the elated Europeans depart from their elation long enough to wonder why they had congregated in their vast multitude to hear someone who’s announced claim on them is only that he is a “proud citizen of the United States.” Generally, of course, the combination of pride and the United States is something that makes Europeans grumpy, not elated.

As it happens, I tend to prefer my Europeans grumpy rather than elated. This is particularly true when the Europeans in question are German. An elated German, especially many elated Germans in one room together, makes me nervous. They hear someone promise, as Obama just promised in his Berlin speech, to “remake the world” and hearken after “our destiny” and their elation becomes a kind of fever. No wonder Obama has called for a “civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as the United States military: following your destiny and remaking the world are projects  likely to require a lot of help.

When I first encountered Obama’s rhetoric, my chief feeling was one of mild nausea. Over time, feelings of alarm have outstripped the nausea: Obama’s clichés, I realized, were not simply, not only, empty platitudes. They were also menacing adumbrations of a megalomaniac narcissist who really did believe he was a man of destiny and wouldn’t have the slightest hesitation about embarking on the effort to “remake the world.”

All that is worrisome enough. Combined with the utter lack of critical perspective—rather, combined with the stunning adulation–accorded to Obama by the so-called mainstream press and you have a recipe for disaster.

Has the mainstream press really been uncritical, indeed adulatory? Here I resort to the “a picture is worth a thousand words” motif, and offer this widely reproduced image of the Man of Destiny surrounded by some of his acolytes–I mean upstanding members of the Fourth Estate:

Obama surrounded by the press

What is multiculturalism? It is the belief that different cultures have different values and that it is “ethnocentric” to judge another culture by one’s own, necessarily limited, cultural values. Here in the West, we may think that people should be free to marry whomever they like. But that is only our Western custom. Elsewhere, people believe that young women can be killed by their fathers or brothers should they display too much independence in the matters of the heart. Elsewhere? Well, multiculturalism is a portable commodity: what had been the custom in Africa or Pakistan can easily be transplanted. The New York Post reports on a successful transplant to the state of Georgia:

On July 6, police say, a Pakistani named Chaudhry Rashid strangled his 25-year-old daughter San-deela Kanwal with a Bungee cord in her bedroom because she wanted to end her arranged marriage. This “honor killing” came not in Pakistan, but in Jonesboro, Ga. - a suburb 16 miles outside Atlanta.

“Honor killing”? Where, pray tell, is the honor? And where, as the Post’s reporter asks, is the outrage?

“It’s such a strange animal: When attacked, it defends itself.”

I first heard this bit of proverbial wisdom at the apartment of Samuel Lipman, the founding publisher of The New Criterion. I don’t remember exactly what the subject of discussion was and I don’t even remember whether it was Sam or one of his guests who uttered the witticism. Witticism? Yes, that’s right: the idea, the shared assumption, back then (we’re talking twenty years ago) was that of course an animal (a community, a society) will defend itself when attacked.

Can we indulge in the same assumption today? I wonder. If the recent activity of the Supreme Court is any indication, the answer might well be: probably not. I am thinking, of course, of the Supreme Court’s latest suicide pact, aka, Boumediene, the June 12 ruling brought to you by the most powerful man in America, Justice Anthony Kennedy, who in his wisdom cast the deciding vote in a 5-4 split that enemy combatants (he had our guests at Guantanamo Bay in mind) deserve the same legal rights and protections that American citizens on US soil enjoy.

In his dissent, Justice Scalia witheringly noted that the decision “will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.” Let’s say Justice Scalia is correct (as I think he is). Would it matter to Justice Kennedy and his high-minded peers who voted with the majority? Or are they subscribers to the Fiat justitia ruat caelum school of jurisprudence–the school that Justice Robert H. Jackson warned against in 1949 when he dryly observed that the Constitution is “not a suicide pact“?

Is Justice Kennedy the sort of animal that, when attacked, defends himself? Maybe not. But does that fact mean he has the prerogative to decree that the American people should join him in his existential helplessness and moral nihilism?

I say No, and I am delighted to note that Andrew McCarthy has intervened with a characteristically brilliant piece over at NRO making the legal argument against Justice Kennedy’s latest effort assert the claims of judicial supremacy and make Americans more vulnerable to their enemies.

McCarthy’s piece is sure to bring howls of anguish from the politically correct partisans who believe in rule by judges. His bold opening gambit is custom made to cause apoplexy: “It’s time,” he writes, “to suspend the writ of habeas corpus.”

“Oh my God, can this right-wing fanatic be serious?” Hold on to your copy of The New York Times, Virginia, and listen to what he says:

I’m not talking about suspending the old writ of habeas corpus, the one that protects all Americans inside the United States.

I’m talking about suspending the new writ invented on June 12, 2008. The faux writ that Justice Anthony Kennedy and his four associates in the Boumediene majority weaved out of whole cloth. The writ that runs only to the protection of America’s foreign enemies in a war Americans overwhelmingly support. The writ that purports to extend the jurisdiction of the courts - which is to say, the rule of judges - anyplace on the planet where the federal government acts and where the American military fights.

I am talking about restoring the separation of powers and the proper, limited role of the United States courts.

Separation of powers, eh? Limited role for the United States courts? What a novel idea, Mr. Madison! Grand proposition, Mr. Hamilton! Why didn’t we think of that?

McCarthy’s entire piece is a must-read document for anyone who cares about 1) the separation of powers 2) American security, 3) the rule of law (as distinct from the rule of lawyers and judges). But let me conclude with these wise reflections on the significance of the Court’s decision in Boumediene and what we can do about it:

Let’s back up for a second. If someone were to posit a general suspension of the writ of habeas corpus enshrined in Article I, Section 9, of the Constitution, that would indeed be a radical proposal. It is not what I am suggesting.

What is radical, though, is Boumediene. Prior to June 12, 2008, when the ruling was announced, there was no writ of habeas corpus outside sovereign American territory. But five voracious justices now say not only that there is a global writ - i.e., that the legitimacy of government action always and everywhere depends on its capacity to win judicial approval. The justices further audaciously declare that this new global writ vests judges with the power to probe and reverse combatant determinations no matter how fastidiously any system defers to our enemies’ “rights” - and regardless of whether that system has been designed by the military or even Congress.

That is not democracy. It is judicial oligarchy - and nothing in our Constitution requires that we stand for it.

What I am thus proposing is that Congress simply return us to the law of the United States as it existed, soundly and through innumerable crises, for 219 years preceding June 12. Make clear that we are not suspending the traditional writ: we must not disturb the core function our courts perform in ensuring our domestic rule of law. But suspend the writ outside the United States (where it never ran in the first place) as to all non-Americans (who were never entitled to its protection in the first place). We must reject the perilous new world of enemy habeas and extra-territorial judicial fiat that has been in place not for 219 years but for one month.

Remember this: Boumediene “is not democracy. It is judicial oligarchy - and nothing in our Constitution requires that we stand for it.” Write your Congressman. Get your friends to write their Congressmen. Let’s show them that, notwithstanding the preening tergiversations of Justice Kennedy, we are still animals that, when attacked, have the will to defend ourselves.

Journalists love giving advice to political candidates. You know the drill: “The Five Things McCain Should Do To Boost The Economy, Bring Peace and Tranquility to the Middle East, and Prevent Balding,” “The Three Things Obama Should Do To Lower Gas Prices, Make Friends With Iran, and Cure Cancer”–that sort of thing. Fortunately, candidates seem blissfully unaware of all of this earnest advice. They follow their consciences–or maybe it’s only the results of the latest focus-group poll as filtered through the intelligence of their strategists. In any event, the shrift candidates bestow upon the punditocracy is characteristically (and, let’s face it, appropriately) short.

This fact is one reason I generally try to refrain from dispensing advice to candidates. But the recent dust-up–first reported, I believe, by the Drudge Report–over The New York Times’s refusal to print an op-ed by John McCain responding to an op-ed they published the week before by Barack Obama prompts me to depart, at least partially, from this tradition.

I say “at least partially” because my advice is negative: I do not have a 5-point program for ending taxes, avoiding death, or obtaining waterfront property in Maine free of charge. But I hate to see wasted energy just as much as Al Gore says he hates it, and I have a simple one-stop program for saving the McCain campaign–and the campaigns of other Republican candidates–quite a lot of energy. (By the way, you can read the McCain op-ed in The New York Post here.)

It’s as simple as it is efficient: Ignore The New York Times. More and more of your constituents are doing so, why shouldn’t you? Join the many happy folks who have Kicked the Times: Don’t read it, don’t refer to it, don’t regard it as an authority on anything. You’ll feel cleaner and your blood pressure will thank you. Above all, do not write, and do not allow your staff to write, op-eds for the Times. On the off chance that the paper actually publishes your piece, you will only help to bolster its sense of smug self-righteousness and perpetuate the illusion that the paper treats the candidates, or the issues, even-handedly. They don’t, and you shouldn’t collude in fostering the destructive myth that they do.

Here’s a headline from Fox news about Obama’s upcoming trip to Europe:

Obama Trip Could Push Rock-Star Persona to New Heights

The story explains:

“What you’re about to see is enormous publicity,” Democratic strategist Susan Estrich said. “He’s got three anchors coming with him. He’s got the glitterati of the press corps.”

With his visit, the presumptive Democratic nominee is recreating the kind of public whirlwind that he enjoyed at the height of the Democratic primary — only on a global scale.

Yesterday, reflecting on Obama’s call for “civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as the United States military, I quoted Hannah Arendt’s observation that “a mixture of gullibility and cynicism” as a reliable feature of totalitarian movements, with the quota of cynicism increasing as one ascended from the ran and file to the leadership of the movement.

The swooning intoxication of the press as it contemplates the spectacle of Obama in Europe–its anticipation of a Beatlemania-sort of populist publicity blitz–reminds me of something else Arendt discusses in The Origins of Totalitarianism, namely “the temporary alliance between the mob and the elite.” Arendt has many pertinent things to say about the effects of this alliance, and perhaps I will come back to her analysis in a later post. For now, let me simply quote what she has to say about the reason for the superiority of totalitarian propaganda:

The fundamental reason for the superiority of totalitarian propaganda of the propaganda of other parties and movements is that its content, for the members of the movement at any rate, is no longer an objective issue about which people may have opinions, but has become as real and untouchable an element in their lives as the rules of arithmetic.

That is, the propaganda, the image, the ideology, is beyond criticism because it is accepted not as a description of a political platform but a charismatic performance whose goal is not expression of limited policies but a sort of magical unity. In such cases, hesitation is evidence of faithlessness while criticism assumes the lineaments of heresy.

The question remains, however, whether most Americans wish to see their political institutions transformed into props for such pre-critical, mystical posturing.

Noting that “There’s nothing new about narcissism in politics,” Charles Krauthammer has a few questions about Barack Obama:

Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted “present” nearly 130 times. As president of the Harvard Law Review, as law professor and as legislator, has he ever produced a single notable piece of scholarship? Written a single memorable article? His most memorable work is a biography of his favorite subject: himself.

It is a subject upon which he can dilate effortlessly. In his victory speech upon winning the nomination, Obama declared it a great turning point in history — “generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment” — when, among other wonders, “the rise of the oceans began to slow.” As economist Irwin Stelzer noted in his London Daily Telegraph column, “Moses made the waters recede, but he had help.” Obama apparently works alone.

Here’s what the presumptive Democratic candidate for President said on July 2, 2008:

“We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.”

Got that? As reported by WorldNetDaily, this little bijoux was sandwiched into a speech Obama gave earlier this month in Colorado Springs. But don’t look for it in the published transcripts of the speech. It’s not there. But it is in the speech itself, which you can watch on YouTube here (the passage in question comes about mid-way through minute 16).

A “civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as the United States military.

What would that mean? It is, surely, a remarkable statement. Why was it not reported by the Dry Creek (formerly the Mainstream) media?

Reflecting on Obama’s comment and the absolute lack of notice it received in organs like The New York Times, Hugh Hewitt observes that “Obama represents the most inexperienced, risky major party nominee in American political history, and he is demonstrating that with at best inscrutable off-the-cuff rhetoric on a daily basis, but the MSM bigs are covering for him. Astonishing.”

It is indeed astonishing. Being a generous-spirited chap, Hugh Hewitt allows that Obama’s inscrutabilities (not to mention his inconsistencies, contradictions, and simple gaffes) are at least to some extent the product of “inexperience.” I wonder about that. I suspect Obama knows exactly what he means when he suggests that “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times . . . and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK.”I think he understands what he means when he suggests implementing a government administered program requiring high school and college students to participate in “national service” programs. I think he understands what he means when he proposes, for example, to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire, to eliminate the cap on social security taxes, and to increase taxes on dividends and capital gains. I also think he understands what he means he inserts a line about creating a “civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as the United States military–a project, by the way, he would undertake while significantly disarming the United States military. Today, Powerline recaps some of Obama’s proposals on that score:

I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems…

…I will not weaponize space…

…I will slow development of future combat systems…

…and I will institute a “Defense Priorities Board” to ensure the quadrennial defense review is not used to justify unnecessary spending…

…I will set a goal of a world without nuclear weapons…

…and to seek that goal, I will not develop nuclear weapons…

…I will seek a global ban on the development of fissile material…

…and I will negotiate with Russia to take our ICBMs off hair-trigger alert…

…and to achieve deep cuts in our nuclear arsenals…

But even as Obama is racing to diminsih the capabilities of the United States military–the institution that protects us from foreign aggressors–he seeks to establish A “civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as the United States military.

Whom or what would such a security force police? Whom would they protect? Whom would they intimidate?

I think Obama knows exactly what he is doing. As Paul Mirengoff at Powerline notes, “Liberals aren’t less militaristic than the rest of us. They just differ as to who it is that needs to be confronted by our forces.”

Remember this: A “civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as the United States military. And remember what Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, said about that curious “mixture of gullibility and cynicism” that is “prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements, and the higher the rank the more the cynicism weighs down the gullibility.” In The Road to Serfdom , Friedrich Hayek chose a wise but also widely neglected observation by David Hume for one of his epigraphs: “It is seldom,” Hume wrote in 1742, “that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.” Worth bearing in mind, is it not?

Is it “closing times in the gardens of the West,” as Cyril Connolly predicated the middle of the last century? Are we witnessing Der Untergang des Abdenlandes, as Oswald Spengler said even earlier in that most unhappy and bloody of centuries? More to the point, is America, which just yesterday was proclaimed (or berated as) “the world’s only super power,” on the wane? Are we on our way to geopolitical irrelevance? Are observers like Fareed Zakaria right when they say that “Just as the rest of the world is opening up, America is closing down”?

Many pundits, from Patrick Buchanan on the right side of wrong, to innumerable writers for organs like The New York Times, on the left side of wrong, seem to think so. Without minimizing the problems that America faces, I suspect that what we have here is a case of wishful thinking, colored variously by self-hatred and (what is not quite the same thing) oceanic, socialist-inspired utopian longings. In short, I believe that what Mark Twain observed of his own demise–the reports of which, he said, had been greatly exaggerated–can also be said of the gloomy prognostications of American eclipse.

How refreshing, then, to find Robert J. Lieber’s bracing essay “Falling Upwards: Declinism, The Box Set,” in the current issue of World Affairs. Lieber does not underestimate the challenges–economic, social, political–that America faces. But he puts them into perspective, which means he looks at America’s place in the world without the anti-American assumptions that seem to inspire most of the opinion-emitting elite these days. “On the economic front,” Lieber observes, “without minimizing the impact of today’s challenges, they will likely prove less daunting than those that plagued the U.S. in the 1970s and early 1980s.”

The overall size and dynamism of the economy remains unmatched, and America continues to lead the rest of the world in measures of competitiveness, technology, and innovation. Here, higher education and science count as an enormous asset. America’s major research universities lead the world in stature and rankings, occupying seventeen of the top twenty slots. Broad demographic trends also favor the United States, whereas countries typically mentioned as peer competitors sag under the weight of aging populations. This is not only true for Russia, Europe, and Japan, but also for China, whose long-standing one-child policy has had an anticipated effect.

What about America’s military might?

In the realm of “hard power,” while the army and Marines have been stretched by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the fact is that no other country possesses anything like the capacity of the United States to project power around the globe. American military technology and sheer might remain unmatched—no other country can compete in the arenas of land, sea, or air warfare. China claims that it spends $45 billion annually on defense, but the truth comes closer to three times that figure. Still, America’s $625 billion defense budget dwarfs even that. The latter amounts to just 4.2 percent of GDP. This contrasts with 6.6 percent at the height of the Reagan buildup and double-digit percentages during the early and middle years of the Cold War.

Moreover, Lieber observes, if American pundits, the wives of some Presidential candidates, and French foreign ministers drool over the prospect of American hardship and decline, most of the rest of the world looks to us not only for leadership but also political, moral, economic, and military succor. “Other countries,” Lieber notes,

understand the unique nature of American power—if not wholly selfless, not entirely selfish, either—and its role in underpinning global stability and maintaining a decent world order. This helps to explain why Europe, India, Japan and much of East Asia, and important countries of the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America have no use for schemes to balance against the United States. Most would rather do business with America or be shielded by it.

Lieber’s whole essay is worth reading. I was particularly pleased by its conclusion:

Over the years, America’s staying power has been regularly and chronically underestimated—by condescending French and British statesmen in the nineteenth century, by German, Japanese, and Soviet militarists in the twentieth, and by homegrown prophets of doom today. The critiques come and go. The object of their contempt never does.

Hat tip to Arts & Letters Daily for putting me on to this refreshing essay.