I was away in Toronto and it's hard to start blogging since so much has happened and where do I begin.
But one thing that has been eating away at me is the civilian trial President Barack Obama is offering 9/11 terrorist attack mastermind Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed.
But a Mark Steyn column that links Obama's bowing and self-referential notion of history to the trial has helped put everything into perspective for me. Mark writes:
Which brings us to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11. He'd been brought before a military commission, and last December indicated he was ready to plead guilty and itching for the express lane to the 72 virgins.
But that wasn't good enough for Obama, who, in essence, declined to accept KSM's confession and decided to put him on trial in a New York courthouse. Why? To show "the world" – i.e., European op-ed pages and faculty lounges – that America would fight terror in a way "consistent with our values," and apparently that means turning KSM into O.J. and loosing his dream team on the civilian justice system. But, having buttered up Le Monde and the BBC and many of his own Lefties by announcing that Mohammed would get a fair trial, Obama then assured NBC that he'd be convicted and was gonna fry.
So it's like a fair trial consistent with "our values," except for the one about presumption of innocence? If the head of state declaring you guilty and demanding the death penalty doesn't taint the jury pool, it's hard to see what would. The KSM circus is not, technically, a "show trial": He could well be acquitted. But, even if he is, he's unlikely to be strolling out a free man like Frank Sinatra beating the rap in "Robin And The Seven Hoods" and standing on the courthouse steps to sing "My Kind Of Town (Manhattan Is)" – although I wouldn't entirely rule it out: In a world in which the self-confessed perpetrator of the bloodiest act of war on the American mainland in two centuries is entitled to a civilian trial, all things are possible. The other day, Attorney General Eric Holder promised us that it would be "the trial of the century" – and he said it like it's a good thing. Why would you do that?
Mark also writes about how "Obowma" does not know how to be president.
My radio pal Hugh Hewitt said to me on the air the other day that Barack Obama "doesn't know how to be president." It was a low but effective crack, and I didn't pay it much heed. But, after musing on it over the past week or so, it seems to me frighteningly literally true. I don't just mean social lapses like his latest cringe-making bow, this time to Their Imperial Majesties The Emperor and Empress of Japan – though that in itself is deeply weird: After the world superbower's previous nose-to-toe prostration before the Saudi king, one assumed there'd be someone in the White House to point out tactfully that the citizen-executives of the American republic don't bow to foreign monarchs. Along with his choreographic gaucherie goes his peculiar belief that all of human history is just a bit of colorful back story in the Barack Obama biopic – or as he put it in his video address on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall:
"Few would have foreseen on that day that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent."
Tear down that wall ...so they can get a better look at me!!! Is there no-one in the White House grown-up enough to say, "Er, Mr. President, that's really the kind of line you get someone else to say about you"?
One can see
Obama's behavior as
colossal incompetence: he doesn't know how to be president and Holder doesn't have a clue how to be AG. One can have nightmares over an unlawful combatant, admitted terrorist mastermind and enemy of humanity being granted all the bells and whistles of a civilian trial, designed to protect accused persons from the untrammeled power of the state. With protections built into our legal tradition such as innocent until proven guilty, the maintenance of a chain of evidence, and our adversarial system, there is a chance KSM could get off on a technicality or be found not guilty the way O.J. Simpson was. But those technicalities are a check against miscarriages of justice through evidence tampering, forced confessions, and other temptations to the misuse of force by the state. They are good things, even if we don't always like the results.
No, I think we're seeing something else here and it is not necessarily incompetence, though the result sure looks like incompetence. And the attitude towards the law and towards the presidency is all of a piece.
Postmodernism is all about narrative--a story--yet at the same time, it is all about dismantling and challenging old meta-narratives, such as the over-arching story of western civilization rooted in Judeo-Christian religious principles and tempered by Greek philosophy. To postmoderns of a certain ilk, the meta-narrative that made Americans like me see the United States as a "City on a Hill" and a beacon of light and freedom to the world, is merely the repressive, colonialist mentality of a bunch of dead white men who were slaveholders and now we have a live black man representing "the people" in power and now, not only is the narrative all about him, Obama can do as he pleases to all the other dead white men narratives such as the rule of law, the institution of the presidency or the Constitution of the United States.
It really is all about him and he can remake everything according to his new self-referential story, since, by postmodern lights, it is all about power, there is no objective, underlying reality of any kind, only what you make it out to be.
People like me and Mark Steyn are just trapped in the old paradigm. Poor us.
So all those niceties about the rule of law? In some ways, it would be better for KSM to have a genuine, old-fashioned trial by people with an objective sense of the rule of law, with a jury committed to serving justice rather than their own personal narratives. Yes, better even if KSM gets off and he is then free to fly to Pakistan to join Osama bin Laden in his compound.
Obama's postmodern attitude towards the rule of law is even worse than that. This is a show trial, full stop. There are a number of people who actually watched the OJ Simpson trial from gavel to gavel who can legitimately argue that the jury was right not to convict him because the evidence did not meet the standard our rule of law requires of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
He was later found guilty in a civil lawsuit on the lesser standard of the preponderance of evidence.
But the postmodern idea of justice is straight out of the peoples' tribunals you might have seen thrown up in the streets of China during Mao's Cultural Revolution. It's pure show, pure theatre, pure whatever the powers-that-be conjure up. That's beyond incompetence. Obama does not know how to be president, but he doesn't care. He is remaking the presidency of the United States and every other institution as he goes along. So by his lights, he is supremely confident, since it is all about him. This is deliberate. We have a new sheriff in town and he rejects the idea that America has anything good about it. That's why he bows, scrapes and apologizes.
While in Toronto, I got into a discussion with some friends about postmodern architecture and the fact that the
ROM's Chrystal has been ranked the 8th ugliest building in the world.
Though postmodern architecture can also be traditional, according to the whim of the architect in the "it's anything you want it to be" some postmodern styles go out of their way to defy such things as function, or, if they could get away with it, the very rules of gravity. Some of these buildings are known for their stairways to nowhere, their eschewing of any straight lines, etc. etc.
But an architect still has to consider basic laws of physics and engineering or else the building will collapse. So all the pretence is superficial, the structure must remain on a firm foundation--unless you are in a totalitarian country where the building code is eaten away by corruption and the rule of law does not exist.
Ezra wrote some interesting stuff about that here.To me, that perfectly encapsulates the difference between China's cities and Manhattan or Las Vegas. Part of China look modern and capitalist on the outside; but if you scratch beneath the surface, there is no cultural infrastructure that forms the hidden strengths of our system. Capitalism isn't just the ability to build a tower -- even the North Koreans can build tall things. But can they build foundations for them?
Foundations like the rule of law; property rights; sanctity of contract; government and corporate transparency; the ability to seek redress without fear of political repercussions. And what flows from all that is a culture of personal responsibility.
With Obama, all those things that have made the west great---those foundations---are so much dead white male narrative that they are irrelevant.
The problem for us all--Obama included---is that the dead white males---and not all of them were white---discovered truths about reality and passed their accumulated wisdom down to us. There is a big difference between discovering the truth and making it up as you go along, as if there is no truth.
Alas, what we are seeing is the latter. This is beyond incompetence. It is a sign of the utter decay of our civilization. Time to build that ark.