Redstate

Posted at 5:04pm on May 30, 2008 Michael Kinsley Does Not Get It: The Real Victims of Obama's Radical Friends

Let's Try It This Way: Terrorists Are Bad. Decent People Should Not Befriend Them.

By Dan McLaughlin

Michael Kinsley thinks that Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn are not really such a big deal except to the extent they inadvertently helped Republicans:

Ayers and Dohrn never posed any real threat to U.S. national security. Their asinine chatter about killing people and their anti-American sloganeering were as ineffective as their bombs. But they did real harm. Their victims were liberals: the millions of people who were part of the mainstream antiwar movement and who later voted against Ronald Reagan...perhaps you can imagine how infuriating it was to the organizers of the big marches on Washington--struggling to keep them peaceful--that there were people of the left effectively in cahoots with the Nixon Administration, determined to undermine all those efforts.

Um, no. Kinsley admits right up front in the article the violent radicalism of the Weather Underground and its (and, specifically, Dohrn's) implication in, among other atrocities, the 1981 Brink's armored car robbery at the Nanuet Mall in my hometown, a robbery that killed Nyack Police Officer Waverly Brown, Nyack Police Sergeant Ed O'Grady and Brink's security guard Pete Paige, who collectively left behind three widows and six fatherless children, the youngest six months of age. I can promise you that I would not associate willingly with the likes of Ayers and Dohrn if they were on fire and I was carrying a bucket of water. Nor would most of the people who remember the Brink's case. Kinsley and Obama, perhaps, were still too angry about Nixon and Reagan to care.

The problem with folks like Ayers and Dohrn was not that they made the political lives of liberals difficult. Their real victims were the people killed by their organization. I vividly remember the Brink's robbery; it was the biggest news story ever in Rockland County. When I worked at the Rockland DA's office for a summer they took us to see the evidence, including the super-thick windshield glass from the armored Brink's truck that had a huge hole blown in it by their shotguns and M-16s.

So, maybe Ayers and Dohrn were not actually going to bring the United States to its knees. They did quite enough harm, thank you. Tim McVeigh never posed any real threat to U.S. national security, either. Nor did Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, or the Klu Klux Klan. Would Kinsley be unconcerned about a presidential candidate who counted those associations among his friends? Maybe next he'll just explain it away as a necessary part of politics, like pandering to Marxists.

Kinsley instead suggests that at worst Obama is sorely lacking in....judgment. Read On...

Posted in 2008 | Barack Obama | Bill Ayers | Michael Kinsley | murder | Obamafiles — Comments (38)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 3:20pm on Mar. 27, 2008 Newsflash: Mumia Abu-Jamal Still Guilty of Murder. Police Officer Daniel Faulkner Still Dead.

Justice Delayed, Again - But Pennsylvanians Can Rest Easy, Mumia Will Not Go Free

By Dan McLaughlin

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has affirmed yet again the 1982 conviction of the man who calls himself Mumia Abu-Jamal for murdering Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner, who Abu-Jamal took from his family more than 26 years ago. That conviction was upheld on direct appeal in 1989, an appeal the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear at the time, but has been the subject of successive habeas corpus petitions ever since, this one supported by the efforts of a flotilla of lawyers with apparently nothing better to do from, among others, Widener University School of Law, The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., and the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School (the latter appearing on behalf of the National Lawyers Guild, National Conference of Black Lawyers, International Association of Democratic Lawyers, Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice of Harvard Law School, Southern Center for Human Rights, and National Jury Project). The court did, however, vacate the death sentence handed down by the jury in 1982 and the death warrant signed by Governor Tom Ridge in 1995, and remanded for a new penalty proceeding. I have not plowed through the entirety of the court's 118-page opinion, which deals with Abu-Jamal's challenges to the jury selection and the prosecutor's closing argument as well as the penalty phase, but it's worth reading the introduction to be reminded just what a cold-blooded killer and political extremist Abu-Jamal was and is, and how utterly meritless is the suggestion that he is anything but guilty. I excerpt here at length:

Posted in Cop-Killers | Liberals | murder — Comments (4)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 11:20am on Feb. 18, 2008 To the left of Hillary [UPDATED]

By Erick

Hillary and Barack are scrambling to get to the left of John Edwards on a host of issues, but there is one issue on which Barack Obama has been consistently to the left of Hillary Clinton — the birth of children.

In partial birth abortion, a baby is born while the doctors are careful to leave the child partially in the birth canal. Then an incision is made in the back of the baby's head and its brains are vacuumed out. The child, being old enough, is aware and feeling.

Throughout his political career, Barack Obama has been a supporter of the procedure.

In 2004, as a candidate Barack Obama sent out a fundraising appeal against it.

U.S. Senate candidate Barack Obama's wife, Michelle, sent a fund-raising letter with the "alarming news" that "right-wing politicians" had passed a law stopping doctors from stabbing half-born babies in the neck with scissors, suctioning out their brains and crushing their skulls.

Michelle called partial-birth abortion "a legitimate medical procedure," and wouldn't supporters please pay $150 to attend a luncheon for her husband, who would fight against "cynical ploy[s]" to stop it?

In 2003, while in the Illinois legislature, Barack Obama chaired the Illinois Senate committee that dealt with the Born Alive Infant Protection Act ("BAIPA"), a measure beyond the PBA that any sane person should support. The act mandating live saving medical treatment for infants born alive, as some children are born even though an abortion has been attempted. Obama refused to allow the committee to consider the legislation. He *refused* a hearing and shelved the legislation.

That's to the left of Hillary Clinton's position and NARAL's position, which was neutral on consideration of the BAIPA.*

And some of you people would rather Obama than John McCain. Pitiful.

*Updated: As SIConservative notes here, I made the mistake of equating the PBA and BAIPA. Clinton, Ted Kennedy, etc. supported the BAIPA, though Obama opposed it. Both Clinton and Obama opposed the PBA. I have fixed the post to resolve the confusion and correct the error.

Put another way, Hillary and Obama agree that until a baby is fully from the womb, it can be slaughtered. But, Hillary believes that once the baby is all the way out, you cannot slaughter it. Obama disagrees and supports killing fully born children.

Posted in 2008 | Barack Obama | Hillary Clinton | John McCain | murder | Partial Birth Abortion — Comments (105)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 3:01pm on Nov. 9, 2007 Murder in Finland. (A shocker, despite permissive gun laws.)

By Mark Kilmer

Finland is become a firing range. Eighteen-year-old Pekka-Eric Auvinen rampaged through his high school Wednesday, killing six of his fellow students and two members of staff before turning .22 caliber pistol on himself.

Now, it should be noted that this most important part of this story from the BBC is that Finland's gun laws are nothing if not out-and-out LAX.

Posted in finland | Guns | Liberals | murder — Comments (0) / Email this page » / Read More »