Despite repeated, uxorious, absurdly one-sided endorsements from the liberal media, the February 4 vote on President Obama’s year-old nomination of “darling of the left” Dawn Johnsen to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) has mercifully been postponed. The OLC, whose main duty is to defend the president’s authority in wartime, also advises intelligence and counterterrorism agencies.
Johnsen endeared herself to Obama and his followers by fervently urging during the presidential campaign, at Slate, that we “restore our nation’s honor” by condemning the U.S.’s “past transgressions” and rejecting “Bush’s corruption of American ideals.”
This – in particular, Johnsen’s zealous stand against the Bush Administration’s counterterror policies on matters such as interrogation methods as well as against its alleged excessive secrecy – resonated powerfully with anti- anti-terror progressives.
Slate contributor Glenn Greenwald, for example, effusively hailed Johnsen’s call for national breast-beating and purification, praising her nomination as “Obama’s best yet, perhaps by far.” When the Democrats first began to lag in mustering the votes to approve the nomination, Greenwald took umbrage:
Dawn Johnsen is probably someone who is actually too good for Washington, or at least too good to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. It’s still possible that her confirmation can be engineered — Christy lists some phone numbers that might be worth calling — but, at this point, at least, it looks doubtful. Examining Johnsen’s apparent inability to get confirmed, and contrasting it with those who are hailed as the Serious centrists in Washington, reveals all anyone really needs to know about our political establishment.
But then reality, one might say, dawned. The harsh requirements for battling flesh-and-blood terrorism repeatedly struck home – at least for people of common sense – in the form of the attempted Christmas Day airliner bombing, the Hasan mass murder at Fort Hood, the outrage about the Obama administration’s plan to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Manhattan, and its impractical and slapdash plan to close down Guantanamo.
The administration’s mishandling of Abdulmutallab’s attempt to blow up a Northwest flight, above all, sparked discussion in the conservative press
about its competence. William McGurn, for instance, observed that the debate over Miranda rights especially fueled concerns that the president’s decisions on security “have more to do with protecting terrorists’ legal rights than protecting Americans.”
In light of these harrowing events, as the Wall Street Journal concluded, Johnsen and her tea-and-sympathy approach to national security appeared more than ever “out of touch” with what it really takes to fight terrorists and “better suited to the pot-shotting needs of a party in opposition.”
Contrarily, the Washington Post, unashamedly dismissing considerations of Johnsen’s ability to guard us from terrorism, called shortly before this past Christmas for a Senate “courtesy” vote for her appointment. The Post called the vote’s delay “perhaps the greatest nominations travesty” and – with a metallic ear to the public’s distress about recent terror-related incidents – pronounced with no analysis whatsoever there was “no legitimate reasons to withhold confirmation” of Johnsen’s appointment.” Inanely, the Post enjoined senators to “show some goodwill for the holidays by approving” it.
The New York Times, even after the attempted Christmas day bombing, recklessly echoed the Post‘s opinion, accusing Republicans of “raising baseless concerns about Ms. Johnsen’s fitness to guide the war on terror.” The Times did not bother to state what these concerns might be, why they might be baseless, or to argue against them. Ironically, given its eschewal of logic and evidence, the nation’s erstwhile leading paper of record named its editorial “An Unreasonable Delay.”
Later, after Scott Brown’s election to the Senate in Massachusetts, Sam Stein, in the Huffington Post, similarly begged the question of Johnsen’s capacity to counter terrorism. Instead, he aired laments by her backers that the “decidedly pro-water-boarding” Brown, likely to vote against her, placed her nomination “in peril.”
The MSM have also regularly refused to address in any substantive way Johnsen’s views on abortion. The Washington Post, to give one example, made light of concerns on the matter by perfunctorily asserting that “abortion would not regularly factor into her DOJ job.”
What the Post and its ilk left unsaid is, as Life News reports, that her stand on abortion is so radical that she has described women as “fetal containers” and likened pregnancy to “slavery.” Thus, in a brief filed in the Supreme Court, Johnsen maintained that any restrictions on the accessibility of abortion are equivalent to “involuntary servitude” because they force “a woman to provide continuous physical service to the fetus in order to further the state’s asserted interest [in the life of the unborn].” A woman, she wrote, “is constantly aware for nine months that her body is not her own: the state has conscripted her body for its own ends.” Such “forced pregnancy,” she concluded, violates the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibits slavery.
The MSM has also glossed over Johnsen’s attempt in the late 1980s to take away the tax exempt status of the Roman Catholic Church because, states Catholic League president Bill Donohue, “she wanted to silence the Church’s voice on abortion.” Responding to the New York Times‘ pronouncement that objections to Johnsen’s appointment are “baseless,” Donohue rightly chastised the paper for its “audacious” use of double standards as well as Johnsen for bigotry:
If someone were nominated to serve in a major legal position in a Republican administration who previously tried to take away the tax exempt status of Islamic mosques and institutions–for purely political reasons–everyone knows that he or she would never be given a hearing …
Since when are objections to proven instances of bigotry considered “baseless”? Would it be “baseless” to object to someone who wants to deny Muslims the same tax exempt status afforded Catholics, Protestants, Jews and others? Would not such a person be branded a bigot who is unfit to serve in any administration, especially in a high post in the Justice Department?
The MSM’s ignoring and trivializing of facts and arguments that challenge leftist orthodoxy are so ubiquitous as largely to escape notice. Their roseate treatment of Dawn Johnsen’s nomination, which obscures its grave importance, deserves all the attention it can get. Matters of life and death – her outlook on counterterror policies that place us all at greater risk of more terrorist attacks and her militant disregard for the unborn – are at stake. The MSM’s political pandering at the expense of serious debate in this case is, in a word, inhumane.
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