Two Cabinet nominations

As soon as the Senate can confirm them, two new occupants will take over the two most important Cabinet positions: Seretaries of State and Defense. It would appear that President Obama originally thought that any African-American woman named Rice would be a shoo-in for Secretary of State. But Susan Rice, though one might think qualified — she has been Ambassador to the United Nations — is no Condoleezza. And her conduct in the face of the killing of our Ambassador and several others in Benghazi was so disgraceful that she was led to realize her chances were hopeless, and she begged off before her name was formally submitted to the Senate. The proposed nominee is John Kerry, the Massachusetts Senator and Presidential candidate of the Democrats in 2004. Although, to me, it seems like an overly partisan choice, Kerry seems to be popular among his fellow Senators and looks likely to be confirmed. Apparently the other Senators seem to think he will represent us well before the world. (And among Republicans, the chance that the resulting vacancy will be filled by Scott Brown seems a plus.)
The other position, Secretary of Defense, is more problematic. A former Senator, Chuck Hagel, is President Obama's choice. As a Republican, this even looks as though the President is making an attempt to reach out to the GOP. The problem is that Hagel, though a moderate on domestic affairs, has a record on foreign policy that shows him as quite hostile to Israel — some call him anti-Semitic, though at least one posting I saw says that calling him by that adjective goes farther than is justified. It does not matter whether Hagel is a true anti-Semite; he will not be confirmed, since the Senate is more sensitive to Israel policy than President Obama is. It is obvious that the President will have to come up with another name.

How's that again?

Rick Bayan has a blog he calls The New Moderate, which I read from time to time, which frequently makes a lot of sense. But this time, I think he fails to get something. Yesterday's post, entitled “The Prophet Motive: Islamists on the Rampage,” begins with some unexceptionable truths:

The Islamic world is ablaze, and once again the target of the Islamists’ wrath is (guess who) the United States. The protests started in Egypt and quickly spread to Libya, where popular American ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others died when a band of miltants torched the U.S. consulate. Now the wildfires have spread to a dozen nations within Mohammed’s realm, that harsh and stony empire of fanatical faith that stretches from Morocco in the West to Indonesia in the East.

Why the sudden outpouring of hatred and vengeance in lands that were supposed to have been transformed by last year’s Arab Spring? Did the U.S. government offend Muslim sensibilities by admitting Israel to the union, or by declaring a holy war against Iran… or by outlawing the construction of an Islamic recreation center near Ground Zero? No, the Islamists have been on the rampage because a lone American con man and ex-convict made an amateurish, disjointed, absurdly dubbed, almost incomprehensible 14-minute video, “Innocence of Muslims,” that denigrated the holy reputation of the Prophet.

The supreme irony is that the filmmaker is an Egyptian living in the United States. Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, who went by the pseudonym Sam Bacile and claimed to be an Israeli, had a legitimate ax to grind with Islam: he’s a Coptic Christian, member of an ancient church that Islamists have been targeting in Egypt for decades. The assaults escalated after Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak fell from power, and dozens of Copts have died during attacks on churches (as well as from lethal force used by police during the resulting protests).

Nakoula Nakoula’s film begins with such an attack: Muslims terrorizing Christians in contemporary Egypt. Forced into hiding, a Christian family attempts to make sense of the violence, and the filmmaker suddenly cuts back to the time of Mohammed. The young prophet is portrayed by a handsome enough actor… but of course any visual portrayal of Mohammed is considered a crime against the Muslim faith. (If Christians had implemented such a rule for depictions of Jesus, every notable Renaissance artist would have been beheaded.) The film goes on to portray Islam’s founder as an increasingly promiscuous, intolerant and violent fanatic — a portrayal that, for obvious reasons, wouldn’t go over well in the Islamosphere.

Most of us would be justifiably angered to see Jesus or Moses portrayed in such a light. But here’s the point: we wouldn’t shed the blood of innocents because of an objectionable movie. It would be nearly impossible to imagine Presbyterians, Methodists or Reform Jews setting mosques ablaze after watching a stupid 14-minute video. That’s the difference between Islam and the two older Abrahamic religions.

The more fanatical followers of Islam — and their numbers are too great to be dismissed as a fringe element — still believe in collective guilt, that savage and primitive relic of Old Testament justice in which the sons can be blamed for the sins of their fathers, and the innocent can be punished along with the evildoers. It’s a nasty ancient tradition. Think of Jehovah cleansing the world of virtually its entire human population — babies, granddaddies and all — during the Great Flood… think of the plagues visited upon the innocent firstborn sons of Egypt… think of the wanton, divinely-sanctioned slaughter of Midianites and other tribes that stood between the Israelites and their Promised Land. Think of the centuries-long persecutions of Jews by the Catholic Church, based on the senseless notion that all Jews were to be held culpable for the crucifixion of Jesus.

Christians and Jews have left those ugly relics behind, but the Muslim world seems to be stuck in a medieval time warp. Moderate Muslims, civilized and educated, tend to keep their voices down and hope that the rabid element simply goes away. It makes sense: they’d rather not live with a fatwa dangling over their heads.

But a couple of paragraphs down, he shows that he really did not get it:

Meanwhile, in the West, right-wing Obamaphobes (not to mention the ostensibly “moderate” Mitt Romney) were ganging up on the president for “apologizing” to the terrorists. Internet message boards buzzed with rabid denunciations of our purported Muslim-in-Chief. Sorry, folks… it was the American embassy in Cairo that made the conciliatory remarks, not Obama.

Sorry, Mr. Bayan, but the embassy is supposed to represent the President. Article II, Sect. 2 of the Constitution states:

he shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States, whose appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by law

This clause has always been understood to imply that “ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls” are the personal representatives of the President. What an embassy says is understood as representing the President's official position. (As Harry Truman once said, “The buck stops here.”) And thus, Governor Romney was absolutely justified in considering the apology of the Cairo embassy as coming from the President. And if you, Mr. Bayan, do not read that statement as an apology (as implied by your quotation marks around “apologizing”), I am curious as to what you would consider an apology.

Respect???

Several days ago, just after the Republican convention, my wife and I were sitting in a bus shelter waiting for the bus, when an African-American woman sitting next to me struck up a conversation. She asked what I thought of the political events going on, and I made some sort of neutral remark, not being in the mood at the time to strike up a political argument. (Given her race, I suspected that she and I would be on opposite sides — not a guarantee, given such people as Condoleezza Rice — but the odds were that way.) She pressed harder, saying that it seems that the candidates were saying the same thing over and over, and I remarked that they are campaigning on their issues. Finally she pushed harder and I was forced to stop my neutral talk, and made some remark that we need to get rid of this president and put Mitt Romney in his place. She then went on the defensive, claiming that Barack Obama has made the world respect us again. That strained credulity, I thought. I pointed out how Iran hardly respected us, going forth with its nuclear program despite our entreaties. I could have mentioned North Korea as well, but didn't think of it.

That conversation ended when our bus arrived, but now my mind went back to this conversation as I am thinking about recent events which show how little Barack Obama's America is respected in the world. In Egypt, they tear down the flag on our embassy and put up an al-Qaeda banner. In Libya it's even worse: our ambassador is murdered! Barack Obama has brought us the world's respect? Hardly — it looks more like contempt than respect!

What will the Obama administration do about Chen Guangcheng?

We have been reading about the blind Chinese political activist, Chen Guangcheng, who recently escaped from house arrest and sought asylum in the embassy in Beijing. The Obama administration is now on the spot. Will he somehow stay in China under US protection? (He'd have to stay in our embassy; otherwise he'd be under Chinese sovereignty and they could do whatever they wanted to him.) Or will he be taken to the U. S.? (He apparently repudiated the earlier quote that he wanted to stay in China, though the Obama administration still claims that it was genuine.)

The Obama administration will have to make up its mind, as to what matters more to it: good relationships with the Communist regime in Beijing, or the U. S.'s reputation as a place where the politically persecuted can get a safe haven. I await the outcome.

Libertarianism and isolationism

Some people who care deeply about freedom, and would be, on that account, termed libertarians, also seem to be fervent isolationists. I don't see the connection — in fact, as I said in an earlier post, I cannot see why freedom is good, but exporting it is bad. But we all know how much of an isolationist Ron Paul is, and he's one of the most extreme libertarians around. Today I saw another example.

The Washington Examiner, as I have said in the past, is a conservative paper, not only in its own editorial policies, but in its choice of columnists. Almost all its columnists would be described as more conservative than I am. But two of the columnists, John Stossel and Gene Healy, are better described as libertarians than conservatives. (Healy is a vice-president at the Cato Institute, certainly a libertarian credential.) And today, Healy's column showed that, like Paul, he qualifies as an isolationist.

Today's Gene Healy column was entitled: “Is Rubio running for veep, or Globocop?” And in it he takes Sen. Marco Rubio to task for advocating what Healy terms a “neoconservative” foreign policy. (Read Healy's column: here.)

Perhaps I too am a “neoconservative.” (I'm not quite sure what that means!) But to me, helping people attain freedom, not just in the USA but all over the world, is a good thing. And there's where I part company with Gene Healy.