Whether or not Senator Ted Cruz is a “political terrorist” (or simply a terrorist), as alleged by Chris Matthews, first carefully and second carelessly, but denied by several NRO contributors is, as it happens, a matter of which I write with unexpected authority. Some years ago I wrote an article on the definition of terrorism for UPI and NRO. My definition of terrorism was subsequently adopted by Canada’s Court of Appeals (with acknowledgments). Hence my authority. And since it may help to settle this latest brouhaha, here’s the definition: 

A terrorist is a man who murders indiscriminately, distinguishing neither between innocent and guilty nor between soldier and civilian. He may employ terrorism – planting bombs in restaurants, or hijacking planes and aiming them at office towers – in a bad cause or in a good one. . . . For his methods, however, the terrorist is always to be condemned. Indeed, to describe him objectively is to condemn him – even if his cause is genuinely a fight for freedom with which we sympathize.

There’s more, but that’s the gist or nub.

The first point to note is that Senator Cruz has murdered no one — neither a single person in a discriminating fashion nor a random section of people “indiscriminately.” If any of you know otherwise, please inform the authorities. 

The second point to note is that the definition does not include the word “political” which was Mr. Matthews’ initial attempt to protect his slander of the senator against criticism. The reason is that it would have been a redundancy. In 99.9 percent of cases the terrorist is “political.” He murders people indisciminately in pursuit of some political objective. In a handful of cases someone has randomely murdered people without such a political motive, but that is usually the result of his going mad, running amok, or being under the influence of drugs. Such a murderer is to be condemned, but he is not a terrorist. Almost always a terrorist is “political,” and so Mr. Matthews, in ascribing political terrorism to the senator, is accusing him of terrorism pure and simple. To be fair to him, however, he probably didn’t realise that.

Third, a terrorist is not someone who causes chaos or who sets out to do so, as Mr. Mattherws argues, though the terrorist may sometimes cause chaos as a result of his indiscriminate killings or as a means of putting pressure on governments to grant his objectives. Causing chaos is in general undesirable, but there are extreme circumstances where it is prefereable to maintaining an unjust stability. And besides, Senator Cruz is not seeking to cause chaos, or anything like it; he is attempting to change government policy. Since he is not murdering people indiscrimnately in pursuit of this aim, he is guilty not of terrorism but of democracy. 

It is Mr. Matthews who is seeking to cause chaos, in particular linguistic chaos, by his muddled accusation and even more muddled definition in defense of his accusation.

A moment’s thought might have saved Mr. Matthews from this catalogue of errors, but as Housman remarked, thought is a painful process and a moment is a long time.

Detroit — at one time a thriving industrial center, the heart of America’s auto industry, and one of America’s most important cities — has gone bankrupt. But the central fact of Detroit’s downfall — that it was the inevitable result of 50 years of liberal governance — has been studiously ignored by the mainstream media. And what is worse, the media is ignoring the fact that it is going to happen elsewhere.

That is the subject of Michael Auslin’s piece today. Auslin, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, says Chicago may soon join Detroit if it cannot reverse its slow-motion fiscal collapse.

But if Chicago has started down Bankruptcy Boulevard, the state of California as a whole is nearing that road’s dead end. The Manhattan Institute’s new book, The Beholden State: Reclaiming California’s Lost Promise, highlights the problems that have led to California’s decline and proposes various solutions that can make the Beholden State the Golden State once more.

In a promotional video, City Journal’s Joel Kotkin, Andrew Klavan, Heather Mac Donald, and Victor Davis Hanson all contribute their insights into the state’s many troubles. Out-of-control public-employee pensions are draining the state’s coffers, and the widespread and powerful unions want more. The green movement has hijacked the promise of the state’s abundant natural resources and made them inaccessible to investors and innovators; the untapped oil and gas in the Monterey Shale could spur a California energy renaissance — if Sacramento would allow it. The state’s universities, obsessed with diversity, have become bastions of bureaucracy, not economic freedom. And Hollywood has abandoned great art for propaganda.

But “California is not lost,” says VDH. For his solutions, and those of his colleagues, check out the film, below.

For more information, go to www.city-journal.org/california.

Showing off her free phones, Jillian Kay Melchior appeared on Fox News last night to discuss her piece, “Me and My Obamaphones,” where she exposed the abuse and fraud of the Lifeline program. “I was not only able to get one — I was able to get three, and I wasn’t eligible for any of them,” Melchior told Greta Van Susteren​​.

Young people raised on Harry Potter will love the magic and suspense of Joshua Graham’s fiction. The rest of us may enjoy it even more. Entertainment and Christianity combined — rare in this genre of action and suspense. Terminus inclines toward C. S. Lewis and The Screwtape Letters but also Jimmy Stewart and It’s a Wonderful Life. 

Beyond Justice creates a tragedy so powerful that it can only be faced with the help of supernatural powers.

I’ve been looking for a writer in the tradition of Andrew Greeley, William Kienzle, and, of course, G. K. Chesterton/Father Brown. Now I’ve found him. 

Here is the extended interview at Aleteia.

Herewith, a suggestion.

A lot of people are complaining that Pope Francis’s comment about gays (the famous/notorious “who am I to judge”) represents nothing new. I think these complaints miss the point of what’s happening here. Of course, Christianity has always taught that one must love the sinner, because we are all sinners and stand in need of the grace of God. Of course, Christianity has always stressed the importance of mercy, charity, and pastoral care. There is no difference between Bergoglio and Ratzinger on this. But what’s different, indeed revolutionary, about Pope Francis is that he has managed to convince a great many in the secular media that he isn’t lying when he says these things!

I remember back in the old days, Jerry Falwell used to interrupt his speeches against homosexuality with the statement, Don’t get me wrong, I love the homosexuals. The secular culture would roll its collective eyes, and think, What a lying creep Falwell is. But because I shared Jerry’s basic faith commitment — I was not a fundamentalist/inerrantist Baptist, as he was, but I accepted Jesus Christ — I believed that he was sincere. He was either a) telling the literal truth, that he loved the gays, or b) saying what he was trying to make literally true (i.e., to the extent that, in the depths of his heart, he didn’t actually love the gays, he knew that this was a fault in him, that God wanted him to love the gays and that he needed to do better on this).

So along comes Pope Francis, making the exact same basic point as Falwell and Ratzinger — but saying it in a way that breaks through the hostility that’s out there against the Christian message.

At the very beginning of one of his most important books, Ratzinger movingly recounted Kierkegaard’s parable of the clown who tried to save a burning village. The clown, who was there with a visiting circus, saw that a serious fire had started — so he ran through the village trying to warn people. But the more he shouted, the less seriously the townspeople took him. Look at that clown, jumping up and down shouting that there’s a fire! Isn’t he hilarious? And the town burned . . . Which offers a pretty good analogy to the predicament of the Christian in a hostile secular world.

Ratzinger gets it. For this reason, I suspect that, while it’s somewhat unfair that Bergoglio is being played off against Ratzinger, Ratzinger himself, in his retirement, is not resentful of his successor’s popularity. I rather picture him watching the TV reports on Bergoglio, and saying, “Yes! Zat is exactly vat I vas trying to say.” Because what’s important to Ratzinger, as to any sincere advocate, is not who gets the credit — but that the message gets through. Christianity is a religion not of hate but of forgiveness. People will disagree with this or that specific moral teaching of this or that specific Christian denomination, but they need to know that what’s crucial in Christianity is the offer of redemption. All the specific arguments about whether it’s okay to drink, or dance, or be gay, or whatever, are pointless unless people are open to this central truth. Christians mean it when they say they, and God, love the world; and the attention Pope Francis is getting shows that the world may just be ready to give them a hearing.

UPDATE: Elizabeth Scalia has written that the Pope’s remarks are part of his strategic attempt to jujitsu the media. Some Traditionalist Catholics have responded by basically accusing her of naïveté and Pollyannaism. (Here is an example. Please do NOT go to the Traditionalist webpage at this link if you are easily offended. And please know that I do not endorse the writer’s attacks on gays, or his praise of Mussolini, or many others among his, shall we say, interesting, views. I merely offer the link as a particularly pithy illustration of the flak Lizzie Scalia is getting.)

I think Scalia is almost 100 percent right. The only point on which I would demur is that, by saying the Pope is “using” the media, and leading a blog post on the subject with a quote from Sun Tzu, she can be understood to be suggesting a rather calculated, Machiavellian attempt at manipulation on his part. I don’t get that impression from the Pope; I think he’s just being himself, doing what comes naturally to his personality — and that this happens to be an approach that works. Some of the Traditionalists pick up on the Sun Tzu stuff and think it shows Scalia is naïve – doesn’t she get the fact that it’s the media who are using the Pope, and not the other way around? But this is to buy into a false choice. Of course the media are engaging in spin to promote their own views. It was ever thus; what’s different is that this time, the religious side is getting through, too.

I almost always agree with Victor Davis Hanson. But I must disagree with his assertion in “The Death of Populism” that “no” politician speaks for the common man. Senator Jeff Sessions has clearly emerged as a leading conservative populist who is speaking directly for citizens not corporations, Republican voters not Republican elites. As John O’Sullivan noted yesterday on the Corner, it is time for conservative intellectuals and activists to start recognizing and championing the Alabama senator’s compelling political and moral arguments on immigration and a range of other issues.

CNN reports that there were allegedly “dozens” of CIA operatives on the ground during the Benghazi attack and the agency is doing its utmost to conceal its involvement.

CNN’s sources say that, since January, some operatives that were involved in the agency’s mission in Libya are being polygraphed monthly to determine who, if anyone, is talking to Congress or the media. Sources describe the efforts as pure intimidation, and say there are threats to end the careers of unauthorized leakers.

The news network quotes one insider as saying, “You have no idea the amount of pressure being brought to bear on anyone with knowledge of this operation.”

CIA spokesman Dean Boyd said in a statement that the agency “has worked closely with [Congress’s] oversight committees” and that “CIA employees are always free to speak to Congress if they want.” He said the agency was unaware of any retaliation against any employee, or of any employee’s being prevented from “sharing a concern with Congress about the Benghazi incident.”

One source tells CNN that there were 35 Americans at the Benghazi mission, and up to seven were wounded in the attack, some seriously. Another says 21 were working in the “annex” building, which is believed to have been run by the CIA and to which Americans fled after the State Department’s diplomatic installation was attacked on September 11, 2012. The CIA would not comment on speculation that U.S. agencies in Benghazi were moving portable surface-to-air missiles out of Libya, through Turkey, and into the hands of Syrian rebels; the State Department has denied that any of its employees were involved in such an operation, saying they were only helping the new Libyan government to secure such weapons within the country.

An update in the case SPLC vs. JONAH, in which the Southern Poverty Law Center has sued a New Jersey group aiming to offer sexual-orientation therapy: Professor Nicholas Cummings, rather a giant in the field of psychology who gave a deposition in this case, published an op-ed Wednesday in USA Today: 

I missed this NPR story, called “Unfit For Work: The Startling Rise Of Disability In America,” when it aired but it’s very interesting. It looks at the incredible increase in disability-insurance enrollment in the last 30 years (thanks to Jason Fichtner for the pointer). The story starts with this:

In the past three decades, the number of Americans who are on disability has skyrocketed. The rise has come even as medical advances have allowed many more people to remain on the job, and new laws have banned workplace discrimination against the disabled. Every month, 14 million people now get a disability check from the government.

The federal government spends more money each year on cash payments for disabled former workers than it spends on food stamps and welfare combined. Yet people relying on disability payments are often overlooked in discussions of the social safety net. The vast majority of people on federal disability do not work.[1] Yet because they are not technically part of the labor force, they are not counted among the unemployed.

As you may remember, a few months back, I posted this chart looking at the issue.

As you can see the trend has been ticking upward for a while. I also noted that:

Interestingly, the main reason for DI termination is that people reach full retirement age and begin collecting normal Social Security benefits. Only 4 percent of the terminations are due to improvement in people’s medical condition — which could be a potential place for some reform — and only 6 percent is due to people going back to work. 

A few months ago, Senator Coburn had a report called “Social Security Disability Programs: Improving the Quality of Benefit Award Decisions.” The report explains that the program’s process for deciding who is disabled is so bad it could be that as many as 25 percent of the decisions made are the wrong ones. Who wouldn’t be in favor of putting an end to that problem? The increase in the number of beneficiaries and the decrease in termination rate puts a tremendous stress on the agency’s resources and personnel. As a result, disabled Americans are waiting longer and longer before receiving the benefits they deserve. Many now wait as long as two years before having their application finalized. This system isn’t working and it should obviously be reformed. 

On a related point, the NPR story points out that in 2011 33.8 percent of people getting disability insurance suffer from back pains and other musculosketal problems. In 1961, only 8.3 percent did.

The granting of “temporary asylum” to Edward Snowden by Russia should finally put to rest any hope that Russia will cooperate with the U.S. on security matters.

Snowden needs to be returned to the U.S. not only because he has broken the law, but because a proper damage assessment by the NSA is only possible if Snowden is in American custody.

By sheltering Snowden, Russia makes such a damage assessment impossible. Instead, it creates the conditions for him to be milked for secret information by Russian intelligence. According to the Russian press, this process is already taking place.

There is an irony in Snowden’s seeking protection from a country that does not respect human rights and does not have the rule of law. But, in fact, it is also only logical that a computer geek who sought notoriety by violating his country’s trust would end up in one of the few countries that would glorify behavior by Americans that it would never tolerate in one of its own citizens.

Alexander Litvinenko, a former agent of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) who broke with the agency over an assassination attempt and presented evidence that the 1999 apartment bombings that helped bring Putin to power were carried out by the FSB, was poisoned in 2006 with radioactive polonium. The Russian authorities refused to cooperate in the investigation of the case and when the British requested the extradition of the principal suspect, Andrei Lugovoi, a former KGB agent, the Russians not only refused the request but organized Lugovoi’s election to the Russian parliament.

President Putin has said that Snowden would have to stop harming “our American partners” in order to receive asylum. But leaks have continued while Snowden was under Russian control, with the latest appearing only days before the announcement that Russia is giving him asylum.

In fact, Russia’s true intentions should have been clear after the Boston Marathon bombings. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older of the bombers, was in contact with members of the radical Islamic underground in Dagestan during the six month period in 2012 when he was in the region. Two of his contacts were killed during this period by the Russian forces. None of this, however, was communicated to the CIA or FBI. Tsarnaev left Russia for the U.S. without interference and began preparing for the attack that, had the Russians been forthcoming, might have been prevented.

If there is any positive result of the Snowden affair it is that the U.S. may now begin to assess Russia realistically. The Russian authorities are determined to treat the U.S. as an enemy to distract Russians from their government’s own massive corruption. This is why the atmospherics associated with the “reset” policy were always futile. We need to see Russia as it is. And Snowden may also have an opportunity to discover something, too. His Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, said that Snowden needs times to “adapt to Russian realities.” Once he does, he may finally begin to grasp the helplessness of his situation and the enormity of what he has done.

— David Satter is an adviser to the Radio Liberty and a fellow of the Hudson Institute and Johns Hopkins University. His latest book is It Was a Long Time Ago and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past. 

​Betsy Woodruff went on The Cycle this afternoon to discuss her piece from earlier this summer, “My So-Called Bitcoin Life,” where she lived off Internet-based currency for a week. “The main thing I learned is that, as of right now, Bitcoin life is not the most glamorous way to be,” she quipped, as well as highlighting its impact on the financial system, its pros and cons, and future regulatory concerns.

A woman on Long Island says that her family was visited by authorities yesterday because of their Internet search history, according to the Guardian.

Michele Catalano says her family had searched for information on pressure cookers (she wanted to learn how to cook lentils), backpacks, and the Boston Marathon bombings (her son is a news junkie), all of which combined to create what she called a “perfect storm of terrorism profiling.”

Though Catalano says her family made those searches “weeks ago,” her house was visited for 45 minutes yesterday morning by authorities (members of the Suffolk County and Nassau County police departments, according to the FBI). Catalano, a writer, put a full recounting of the events on her blog. The cops looked over most of the house and asked her husband probing questions (e.g., “Do you own a pressure cooker?” and “Have you ever looked up how to make a pressure cooker bomb?”).

This is apparently pretty routine; according to Catalano, the cops told her they do this “about 100 times a week,” but “99 of those visits turn out to be nothing.”

“I’m scared,” Catalano writes. “And not of the right things.”

The Chattanooga Times Free Press has fired an editor for titling a recent editorial “Take your jobs plan and shove it, Mr. President” the morning of the president’s speech in the city. The headline has been changed on the paper’s website and now reads ”President Obama’s policies have harmed Chattanooga enough.”

According to the newspaper, editor Drew Johnson changed the original headline approved for publication, and management deemed the one he ultimately used “inappropriate.” In a statement, the Free Press made it clear that Johnson’s firing “had nothing to do with the content of the editorial,” which criticized the president’s past job plans and his policies’ negative impact on Chattanooga.

Johnson took to Twitter after his termination earlier today:

I just became the first person in the history of newspapers to be fired for writing a paper’s most-read article. http://t.co/BPOTzihZoT

— Drew Johnson (@Drews_Views) August 1, 2013

Any time the paper wanted to change the headline online (which is how most people read the editorial), they could’ve.

— Drew Johnson (@Drews_Views) August 1, 2013

The policy I “broke” did not exist when I “broke” it. It was created after people complained about the headline & was applied retroactively.

— Drew Johnson (@Drews_Views) August 1, 2013

I need a job.Resume: Columnist & opinion pg editor, founded thriving free market think tank, exposed Al Gore’s home electricity consumption

— Drew Johnson (@Drews_Views) August 1, 2013

Chris Christie won’t be taking the olive branch Rand Paul offered yesterday anytime soon. The New Jersey governor declined Paul’s invitation to grab a beer to “patch things up” after their verbal skirmish between the potential 2016 rivals over the last week, and had a few other choice words.

“I really don’t have time for that at the moment,” said Christie on his “Ask the Governor” radio show, citing his upcoming campaign for reelection and “dealing with the other issues that invariably come on the desk of a governor when you’re responsible for actually doing things and not just debating.”

But Christie left the door open for a possible get-together: “If I find myself down in Washington, I’ll certainly look him up, but I don’t suspect I’ll be there anytime soon.”

Christie also shrugged off Paul’s calling him “the king of bacon” earlier the week over his “gimme, gimme, gimme” attitude for federal benefits in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, calling the senator’s name-calling “juvenile” and “childish.”

He clarified that he never directly cited Paul in his comments that sparked the conflict, pointing out that the reporter who asked him the question mentioned Paul while he was answering. “It really had nothing to do with Senator Paul, but Senator Paul wanted to make it about Senator Paul, so that’s fine,” he said.

“He’s not the first politician to use me to get attention in the national media, and I’m sure he won’t be the last,” Christie added.

Further to my posts on the paramilitarized bureaucracy and the US Government’s Bunny Team Six (the Seal Team Six for real men) comes the news that the State of Wisconsin has a Deer Team Six. It took no fewer than nine crack commandoes from the Department of Natural Resources plus four deputy sheriffs to swoop down on the Society of St Francis in order to euthanize a fawn.

As Bing Crosby so wisely advised, “I surrender deer.“

Somewhere in Waziristan Mullah Omar is thanking Allah that he’s not an unlicensed doe.

A group of House Republicans led by Majority Leader Eric Cantor has agreed on a revision to the food stamps portion of the farm bill that Cantor believes will broadly unite the GOP conference.

A senior Republican aide tells National Review Online the group has found a relatively limited change to food-stamp work requirements that could net $20 billion in savings, doubling the spending reductions of the overall bill.

As part of welfare reform in 1996, able-bodied adults without dependents (i.e., kids) are required to engage in work activities for at least 20 hours a week or are subjected to a food-stamp time limit of three months out of every three years.

However, a provision in the law allows states to apply for a waiver to this requirement, and 40 states and Washington, D.C., have received such a waiver.

President Obama’s stimulus law in 2009 actually provided a nationwide waiver for this requirement, and since that expired, the waiver has been awarded generously. In the meantime, that group of food-stamp recipients has spiked from 6.6 percent of all food-stamp recipients in 2007 to 9.7 percent of beneficiaries in 2010, the last year numbers are available. There are 4 million people who fit this category.

Cantor and House Agriculture Committee chairman Frank Lucas arrived at the solution after meeting together weekly with a group of over 20 members that formed a “cross-section” of the GOP conference, according to the aide. The provision, which is currently being drafted into legislative language, does not have an official Congressional Budget Office score yet, but top GOP policy hands are confident at the surprisingly robust savings it could provide.

The recent passage of pro-life legislation in both Texas and North Carolina has generated plenty of media coverage on state-level pro-life efforts. In the past month, a number of news outlets have commissioned polls on abortion attitudes. Many of these polls confirm what pro-lifers have known for a long time. Specifically, incremental pro-life measures — including banning abortion after 20 weeks of gestation — enjoy the support of at least a plurality of Americans.

However, this week Pew Research Center released an informative poll that breaks down abortion attitudes by geographic region. Unsurprisingly, it finds that areas in the South and Midwest are more supportive of pro-life laws than the rest of the country. Specifically, 52 percent of those who live in the South Central region and 47 percent of those who live in the Midwest feel abortion should be illegal in most or all cases. The national figure is only 40 percent in this poll.

The Pew survey also finds that the regional gap in public opinion has widened over time. The percentage of southerners and Midwesterners who feel that abortion should be illegal in all or most cases has increased by around 5 points since the mid 1990s. However, during the same timespan, the percentage of New Englanders who feel abortion should be illegal in all or most cases actually declined by a similar margin.

This geographic polarization has important implications for the pro-life movement. Since the 1990s, Republicans have won majority control of both chambers of the state legislature in nearly every southern state. The political success of Republicans coupled with the strong pro-life sentiment in the South has resulted in many southern states taking the lead in promoting laws that offer even greater protection to the unborn — currently, all southern states are enforcing both a parental-involvement law and an informed-consent law.

However, pro-lifers should also remember that state abortion policy was not always neatly divided by ideological or geographic lines. For instance, during the 1980s the first group of states to enact pro-life parental-involvement laws included such liberal bastions as Minnesota, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. As such, the increasing polarization on sanctity-of-life issues – both political and geographical – poses both a challenge and an opportunity to the pro-life movement.

— Michael J. New is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Michigan–Dearborn, a fellow at the Witherspoon Institute, and an adjunct scholar at the Charlotte Lozier Institute. Follow him on Twitter @Michael_J_New

Consider me fully in the Andrew McCarthy camp on the legality and potential effectiveness of a properly structured and run NSA metadata program, but the NSA program — as with all intelligence-gathering efforts — ultimately depends on an administration and government elite that is actually willing to let the men and women on the ground pull the triggers they’ve been trained to pull.  Consider these three vignettes:

First, from former attorney general Michael Mukasey, writing in the aftermath of the Boston bombing:

Tamerlan Tsarnaev is the fifth person since 9/11 who has participated in terror attacks after questioning by the FBI. He was preceded by Nidal Hasan; drone casualty Anwar al Awlaki; Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad (born Carlos Leon Bledsoe), who murdered an Army recruit in Little Rock in June 2009; and David Coleman Headley, who provided intelligence to the perpetrators of the Mumbai massacre in 2008. That doesn’t count [underwear bomber Umar Farouk] Abdulmutallab, who was the subject of warnings to the CIA that he was a potential terrorist.

Next, here is one of the rules of engagement reportedly in effect the day that Dakota Meyer won his Medal of Honor in Afghanistan:

The directive from the high command was clear: do not employ “air-to-ground or indirect fires against residential compounds defined as any structure or building known or likely to contain civilians, unless the ground force commander has verified that no civilians are present.”

Finally, CNN can find suspected Benghazi terrorists, but our multi-billion national security machine can’t be bothered?

On Wednesday, CNN aired a portion of an interview one of the network’s reporters was able to conduct with a man accused of participating in the September 11, 2012, attack on an American diplomatic consulate in Benghazi. The individual accused of participating in that attack was not in hiding and said that American investigators were not looking for him. 

Our leaders are betraying the men and women who risk their lives on the front lines (the core of the Benghazi scandal is the betrayal of the courageous by the cowardly — those who risked everything were forsaken by those who risked nothing more than a negative news cycle), and they’re betraying the civilians they’re supposed to protect. And for what? Our enemies are not impressed by our restraint. They laugh at us even as they eagerly exploit every self-made weakness. The more malleable, uncommitted masses in the Muslim world aren’t impressed either — especially when our restraint costs innocent lives and empowers the most oppressive and ruthless jihadists. Our “friends” blackmail us into writing ever-larger checks while we consistently waive even the most basic human-rights conditions on aid.  

I have first-hand experience with the failure of will even when equipped with outstanding intelligence, and that was during the surge when rules of engagement were far looser, and the administration more aggressive. The reward for our restraint was death and heartache.

Those of us in the “national-security Right” (to borrow Mr. McCarthy’s excellent phrase) seek a national defense that is both constitutional and effective, but a defense establishment that lacks the strength of will to act even on the best of intelligence will be utterly ineffective no matter the metadata.

As we approach the next anniversary of 9/11, here is the Obama administration’s national-defense legacy: Less privacy, less security, fewer allies, and billions more in wasted American aid.

This sort of thing ought to be left to the Westboro Baptist Church.

The Washington Free Beacon reports that a Chicago judge has intervened on behalf of SCI Illinois Services, Inc., a national funeral-home chain, and ordered the local Teamsters chapter to suspend picketing at 16 funeral homes in the area. What prompted the legal action?

The company testified in its filing that union members blocked grieving family members from leaving its parking lot, used bullhorns to shout obscenities at workers and mourners, and unleashed a German Shepard on a dead woman’s daughter and husband.

The funeral home was eventually forced to call the police when picketers allegedly disrupted a child’s funeral with laughter. The officer asked the Teamsters to leave, but protesters returned when he drove away.

“We will be here for the visitation; we will be here for your funeral,” Teamster driver Lester Plewa allegedly shouted into a bullhorn as a funeral director met with a dying man planning his arrangements with family members.

The Teamsters have been striking for higher wages since July 1. They rejected a proposed 9 percent raise for all union members over the next two years.

The explanation that Chris Matthews offers for his obscene and idiotic slander against Senator Ted Cruz is rather like saying, “The purpose of a rapist is to make women reexamine their preconcieved notions, therefore I’m comfortable calling Chris Matthews a rapist.”

Terrorism is the intentional targeting and killing of innocent civilians to achieve political objectives through widespread terror. Matthews knows that. He’s only pretending to be stupid because he knows what his audience likes.