Most Democrats see every event through the filter of their hatred for President Bush. No matter what happens, anywhere in the world, their spin on events is that they discredit the President. Democrats and their media allies are like an armada of Ahabs, cruising the seas in their obsessive pursuit of the white whale who defeats them time after time, never giving up the chase. Here are a few samples from this morning's headlines.

In the Washington Post, Glenn Kessler sees Hamas's win in Palestine not as an indictment of Palestinian political culture, but as a refutation of the Bush administration's Mideast policies. His article is titled: "U.S. Policy Seen as Big Loser in Palestinian Vote":

The election outcome signals a dramatic failure in the administration's strategy for Middle East peace, according to analysts and some U.S. officials. [Ed.: Both the "analysts" and the "officials" are anonymous Democrats.] Since the United States cannot deal with an organization labeled a terrorist organization by the State Department, Hamas's victory is likely to curtail U.S. aid, limit official U.S. contacts with the Palestinian government and stall efforts to create an independent Palestinian state.

More broadly, Hamas's victory is seen as a setback in the administration's campaign for greater democracy in the Middle East.

But democracy for the Palestinians is a policy of the U.S. government that long predates the Bush administration. Yasser Arafat was elected to head the Palestinian Authority in 1996 precisely because he was the world's most famous terrorist. That Palestinians would vote for the most appalling candidates available is hardly a shock, and Kessler's suggestion that the Bush administration could somehow have induced them to vote differently is unpersuasive, to say the least.

This is the part, though, that is really reprehensible; Kessler tries to argue that the administration's support for democracy has generally been a failure throughout the region:

Elections in Iran, Iraq, Egypt and now the Palestinian territories have resulted in the defeat of secular and moderate parties and the rise of Islamic parties hostile to U.S. interests.

What a breathtaking bit of deception! The election in Iran was a sham, conducted by the mullahs and largely boycotted by reformist forces. The election didn't cause the "rise of Islamic parties;" the mullahs have controlled Iran since 1979. Blaming Bush for the election returns there is like blaming him for the Iraqi referenda in which Saddam Hussein used to receive 99% of the vote.

Egypt's election was barely more open, and the Egyptian government is not above arresting its opponents. But how did the election results represent a "defeat of secular and moderate parties"? President Mubarak, as secular as they get in Egypt, was overwelmingly re-elected, but the multi-party election--the first under his rule--was widely seen as a step on the road to democracy.

And then there's Iraq. Astonishingly, the Post is now trying to cast last year's Iraqi elections as a defeat for the Bush administration! The Iraqi government is still being formed, but Kessler's suggestion that the election will yield a regime "hostile to U.S. interests" is unfounded, if not downright absurd.

Here's the real tally, insofar as it relates to the Bush administration: In Afghanistan and Iraq, fledgling but fully functioning democracies are taking root. Lebanon, Egypt, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have all made progress, in varying degrees, toward popular rule. After centuries of autocratic misrule in the region, that's an astonishing record in a period of only three years.

Next, there's Eleanor Clift of Newsweek. In the context of next week's State of the Union address, she resurrects the old chestnut that Bush is a divider, not a uniter. That's another way of saying it's his fault that the liberal Ahabs harbor an obsessive hatred for him. Clift's prime evidence is the nomination of Judge Sam Alito:

After half the Senate Democrats voted to confirm Roberts, Bush figured he could lose a couple dozen votes and still get a conservative justice confirmed. Alito will be lucky to get three of the 45 Senate Democrats voting for him. To Bush’s way of thinking, that’s a bigger victory than the 22 Democratic votes Roberts received. Bush is a 50-plus-1 president; he’s not interested in winning bipartisan support for anything.

So the Democrats opposed one of the most qualified Supreme Court nominees of modern times because Bush isn't interested in "bipartisan support for anything." Clift has no comment on the fact that the Democrats' opposition to Alito represents an extreme and unprecedented application of the Senate's "advise and consent" role to judicial nominations. In Clift's view, Bill Clinton was a "uniter" when he nominated Ruth Ginsburg, former general counsel to the ACLU, to the Court. But Bush is a "divider" because he chose Sam Alito, an exemplary public servant with an apolitical record. As everyone who watched the Judiciary Committee hearings knows, the Democrats' objections to Alito have nothing to do with the nominee and everything to do with the Democrats' own extreme, out of the mainstream positions.

Then there is the New York Times, which rarely lets a day go by without front-page Bush bashing. Today, Eric Lichtblau and Adam Liptak led the charge with an article headlined "Bush Presses On in Legal Defense for Wiretapping." The article purports to be an even-handed treatment of the debate over the legality of the NSA international surveillance program, but it conveys no hint of the strength of the administration's legal arguments, or the extent to which they are accepted within the legal community.

Instead, Lichtblau and Liptak begin by quoting Professor Peter J. Spiro, who says the administration "do[esn't] have much to work with legally." But who is Peter Spiro, and why is he a credible critic of the administration? Spiro is a radical internationalist who complains that American constitutional law relies too much on the American Constitution--"an indigenous instrument"--and is a "laggard" in referring to international texts and influences. As for the war on terror, Spiro is not exactly on the administration's side. He has vociferously condemned President Bush's conviction that we are engaged in a war against the terrorists. Spiro says they are merely criminals:

The perpetrators of the World Trade Center attack are not enemies. They are criminals, and they are better treated as such. This may require some constraint in our response, but it will ultimately serve us better.

[W]e should aim to capture bin Laden rather than to kill him, if at all possible. Our sense of vindication will — or at least, should — be much greater if bin Laden ends up living out his days in a federal prison than if he dies on the wrong end of a cruise missile.

Even better would be a prosecution of bin Laden in an international tribunal, to rebut charges of biased American justice. ***

Finally, if we conceptualize our response to the attacks as a law enforcement operation, the response is less likely to result in the unnecessary curtailment of civil liberties at home. "War" plays the trump to individual rights, and sometimes rightly so.

It is hardly a surprise that the administration's legal case hasn't persuaded Spiro, whose point of view is to the left of pretty much everyone in the United States other than John Kerry. For the Times to cite him as an unbiased expert, without disclosing his adversary postion vis-a-vis the administration, is dishonest.

Of course, the Times could have balanced its presentation of Spiro's views by concluding its article with a quote from an adminstration defender. Instead, it gave the last word to the Democrats' house constitutionalist, Larry Tribe.

The most deeply misleading aspect of the Times article, however, is its treatment of the federal court precedents on the issue of Presidential authority. The chief embarrassment faced by those who try to claim that the NSA's international surveillance program is illegal, is the fact that at least five federal appellate courts have specifically held that the President has the inherent constitutional authority to order domestic warrantless surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes--let alone the international surveillance at issue in the NSA program. The Times reporters are well aware of these precedents, in part because we have repeatedly called them to their attention. This is their fraudulent attempt to deal with this unanimous body of judicial authority:

[John R. Schmidt, a Justice Department official in the Clinton administration] noted that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, made up of three federal appeals court judges, addressed this issue in 2002 and said that it took for granted that the president had the inherent constitutional authority to conduct searches without warrants. "It's utterly indefensible for people to say that there is no plausible legal justification when the only judicial statement on this is a flat statement that the president has this authority," Mr. Schmidt said.

Some legal analysts say, however, that the appellate court was giving its assessment of past decisions and that all of the earlier precedents examined surveillance before the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which set up wiretap laws in response to Watergate-era abuses.

Note that phrase, "some legal analysts." The Times quotes liberal critics of the administration repeatedly through the article, so why is it suddenly so coy on this critical point? Because there is no law professor in America--actually, no law student in America--who would allow his name to be associated with the Times' indefensible characterization of the 2002 opinion of the FISA appellate court. The Times tries to suggest that that court's statement that the President has the authority to conduct warrantless surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes lends only debatable support to the administration's case because "some legal analysts say" that the court was only talking about precedents that pre-dated the passage of FISA in 1978; therefore, the court's conclusion may not be operative post-FISA. That suggestion is completely untenable. The FISA appellate court specifically rejected the theory argued for by the Times:

We take for granted that the President does have that authority and, assuming that is so, FISA could not encroach on the President’s constitutional power.

So, on the key legal issue, the Times misrepresented the FISA appellate court's decision, and attributed its own misrepresentation to "some legal analysts" because no legal scholar, no matter how liberal, would be caught dead asserting the position argued for by the Times. The Times' coverage of this issue continues to be deeply dishonest. And it is worth mentioning that Lichtblau and Liptak purport to sit in judgment on the legality of the administration's conduct, without ever noting the fact that Lichtblau and the Times itself unquestionably violated federal law by publishing leaks about the NSA program. In the world of the antique media, illegality requires no explanation if it is directed against the Bush administration.

So there we have it: just another routine morning of Bush-bashing in the liberal press. There are too many Ahabs to count, all single-mindedly hunting the same whale, hurling their harpoons into the water and gnashing their teeth in frustration at the fact that, no matter how promising the target seems, they can't quite strike the fatal blow they are all hoping for.

Posted by John at 09:49 PM  |    |