Patterico's Pontifications

9/20/2005

Bird Flu

Filed under: Current Events — Patterico @ 10:50 pm



Bird flu sounds really bad.

Lucky for Us We Already Won the War on Terror . . . Now Onto the War on Porn!

Filed under: Morons — Patterico @ 9:32 pm



Ace explains better than anyone else could why providing federal agents to fight porn is not a terribly high priority. What with the terrorism, and the thing.

This is rumored to be a bid to make Alberto Gonzales acceptable to conservatives. To which Ace responds:

Let’s see– wobbly on Affirmative Action, immigration, abortion, etc.

But hey– he’s vowed, Elliot Ness-style, to be the man to get Max Hardcore!

Here’s when you can be on the Supreme Court, Alberto:

The first Monday of October in the year Two Thousand and Never.

Some pretty good comments over there too.

Sen. Reid Opposes Roberts, Citing Uncertainty as to the Relative Sizes of Certain Portions of Roberts’s Anatomy

Filed under: Judiciary,Morons — Patterico @ 8:54 pm



Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid announced today that he will be voting against John Roberts. When pressed for specifics, Reid said that Judge Roberts’s performance at his confirmation hearings was at an eighth-grade level, and nowhere near the standard of Justice Scalia’s dissent in the Hillside Dairy case.

Kidding! I just enjoy reminding people of Reid’s claim that Justice Thomas’s dissent in the Hillside Dairy case was inferior to Justice’s Scalia’s. For some reason, that always makes me laugh. I think it’s because Justice Scalia wrote no dissent in that case.

No, Sen. Reid gave a very serious and weighty reason for his opposition. Reid paid careful attention to E.J. Dionne’s piece from Sunday, which argued that “the doubts about Roberts have nothing to do with his good heart.” Taking the hint, Reid stated of Roberts: “I’m not too sure if his heart is as big as his head.”

See? It’s not the goodness of the heart. It’s the size.

Who says size doesn’t matter?

Now, Sen. Reid’s excuse strikes me as a trifle manufactured, since (except in freakish cases) a man’s head is generally much larger than his heart. To my knowledge, every living and former Justice has possessed a head noticeably larger than his or her heart. Indeed, for a candidate actually to possess a heart larger than his head would be a circumstance so extraordinary, even I might support a filibuster.

If Senators were required to possess larger hearts than heads as a qualification for their positions, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) would be required to have a heart the size of a prize-winning pumpkin. But when did Harry Reid ever make that point? Huh?

I heard excerpts of Reid’s statement today, and I don’t want to mislead you: the relative sizes of Judge Roberts’s head and heart were not Reid’s only issues. He was also very upset that Roberts once used the phrase “illegal amigos.” Also, he noted, Judge Roberts once used the phrase “illegal amigos.” And finally: small heart.

None of this should be surprising. When I made my recent prediction that Committee Democrats would mostly vote for Roberts, I was giving them (except for Kennedy) credit for being, well, smart. It goes without saying that no such credit was ever extended to Reid, nor should it be.

What remains to be seen is whether the rest of the Democrats will follow Reid’s example. I still have my doubts. Even the L.A. Times endorsed Roberts, saying: “It will be a damning indictment of petty partisanship in Washington if an overwhelming majority of the Senate does not vote to confirm John G. Roberts Jr. to be the next chief justice of the United States.”

If Reid’s party goes this route, they will show themselves to be utterly without any credibility. And the President will be able to bring on Judge Michael Luttig without any serious repercussions. That will be a sweet day, because Luttig is a great judge — even if his dissent in the Hillside Dairy case didn’t quite match up to Scalia’s.

P.S. Put succinctly, Harry Reid is stuck on stupid.

Blog Coverage of the California Convention

Filed under: Politics — Patterico @ 7:05 am



SactoDan was there with his camera. Same for Flap.

Xrlq was there too. He left his camera at home but brought his snark — for example: “[Schwarzenegger] also bragged about the increases in educational spending, and the allegedly Republican crowd cheered.”

Check out all three.

Bill Clinton, Then and Now

Filed under: General,Scum,War — Patterico @ 12:28 am



Power Line tells us that, according to an AFP report, Bill Clinton has been criticizing President Bush about Iraq:

Breaking with tradition under which US presidents mute criticisms of their successors, Clinton said the Bush administration had decided to invade Iraq “virtually alone and before UN inspections were completed, with no real urgency, no evidence that there were weapons of mass destruction.”

A Power Line reader notes this contradictory Clinton quote from July 2003: “[I]t is incontestable that on the day I left office, there were unaccounted for stocks of biological and chemical weapons.”

That quote is from an extensive interview Clinton did with Larry King, which I quoted at length in July 2003. I encourage you to go back and read everything I quoted, but I do want to highlight here some of the surrounding context to the quote supplied by the Power Line reader. I think it makes it even clearer that Clinton’s current criticism is cynical politics. Here’s what he said then:

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