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---"Never trust a person that doesn't like dogs,
... and never trust anyone your dog doesn't like".
and THE ULTIMATE ETHNIC JOKE !
"An Englishman, a Scotsman, an Irishman, a Welshman, a Latvian, a Turk,
a German, an Indian, several Americans (including a Hawaiian and an
Alaskan), an Argentinean, a Dane, an Australian, a Slovak, an
Egyptian, a Japanese, a Moroccan, a Frenchman, a New Zealander, a
Spaniard, a Russian, a Guatemalan, a Colombian, a Pakistani, a
Malaysian, a Croatian, a Uzbek, a Cypriot, a Pole, a Lithuanian, a
Chinese, a Sri Lankan, a Lebanese, a Cayman Islander, a Ugandan, a
Vietnamese, a Korean, a Uruguayan, a Czech, an Icelander, a Mexican, a
Finn, a Honduran, a Panamanian, an Andorran, an Israeli, a Venezuelan,
an Iranian, a Fijian, a Peruvian, an Estonian, a Syrian, a Brazilian,
a Portuguese, a Liechtensteiner, a Mongolian, aHungarian, a Canadian, a
Moldovan, a Haitian, a Norfolk Islander, a Macedonian, a Bolivian, a
Cook Islander, a Tajikistani, a Samoan, an Armenian, an Aruban, an
Albanian, a Greenlander, a Micronesian, a Virgin Islander, a Georgian,
a Bahaman, a Belarusian, a Cuban, a Tongan, a Cambodian, a Canadian, a
Qatari, an Azerbaijani, a Romanian, a Chilean, a Jamaican, a Filipino,
a Ukrainian, a Dutchman, a Ecuadorian, a Costa Rican, a Swede, a
Bulgarian, a Serb, a Swiss, a Greek, a Belgian, a Singaporean, an
Italian, a Norwegian and 2 Africans,
...Walk into a fine restaurant.
"I'm sorry," says the maître d', after scrutinizing the group
"You can't come in here without a Thai. "
You gotta love this guy if you are not sensitive to PC'ism and you have a modicum of irreverence!---
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Recently a Senator from Alabama lamely said he was voting for Hagel because he was the best we would get.
The article below suggests we are losing in Syria because Obama is unwilling to go with half a loaf.
Sometimes it is better to oppose what is not acceptable simply because that is the right and honorable thing to do.
As for Syria, as in Viet Nam, when you lose the hearts of the people you seek to help, because you have to make a hard choice which is not perfect, you have already lost.
Obama has a split personality when it comes to foreign affairs. Support the radical Muslim Brotherhood, surreptitiously arm renegades in Libya and then do not defend your own personnel when they are attacked. let Iran sneak in through the back door and obtain nuclear weapons while allowing 70,000 Syrians to be slaughtered as you dicker over arming renegades and run, not only the risk of destabilizing the region, but also creating conditions which could lead to the overthrow of Jordan.
Oh yeah, unilaterally disarm our nuclear stash as a pay off to Russia and call that your reset button approach.
Each foreign policy situation is different and the solutions may call for a different approach but when they are not driven by a central, core philosophy you lose because of the confusion created by your own confusion. Obama is inexperienced and it shows in every aspect of what he does.
When it comes to domestic destruction he is , however, very focused. (See 1 below)
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PJTV.Com :
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John Kerry faces a multitude of challenges as the new secretary of state. Foreign policy expert and PJ Media contributor Dr. Michael Ledeen joins Lt. Col. Allen B. West to discuss American diplomatic priorities. What key areas of the world should Secretary Kerry focus on? Dr. Ledeen gives a regional synopsis of the foreign policy threats we currently face."
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As previously noted, May 4, in Birmingham, the local bar will celebrate the accomplishments of some 28 lawyers, including my father, who helped turn Bull Connor out, changed the city's form of government and helped put Birmingham on a better path regarding Civil Rights for all its citizens.
I doubt my father, now deceased, did what he did envisioning these recent turn of events and certainly he and the other honorees would be crestfallen.
But this often happens when those who have been oppressed gain control and revert . Just another reason why Obama and his racial attitudes and policies are bad for our nation. Pitting citizens against citizens is the way of tyrants and dictators.
I am in not in any way excusing white political corruption and petty, acial favoritism but time and again we find black mayors incapable of managing their cities and totally corrupt. This is not only true in Birmingham but , of late seem,s to be a sad norm in other cities.
Recently, in our own city, Meg Heap, a white qualified attorney unseated a black district attorney who was so incompetent even the black community were appalled but few spoke out.
We now have another black mayor who is heads and shoulders above the former black mayor who had a chip on his.
I guess time and maybe intermarriage will bring about the correction needed. Meanwhile, I am not surprised at 'black uppitiness' whites are experiencing because we have to work through the 'get back at whitey' phase as Obama and Holder lead the parade! (See 2 below.)
Abbas might feel right at home in Birmingham. (See 2a below.)
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Foreign Policy divergence already? (See 3 below.)
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When Democrats and their friends in the media and press are not busy attacking independent minded blacks who refuse to drink the liberal's 'cool aid' they turn their attack on white Republicans.
Anyone with a fresh idea that refutes Liberal orthodoxy becomes a magnet and target.. Sen. Cruz is highly educated thoroughly competent, so he better watch out. Can't have a white 'Uncle Tom' going un-abused! (See 4 below.)
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1)The Case for Arming Syrian Rebels
The faster Bashar Assad falls, the faster Iran loses its main conduit for shipping weapons to terrorist groups that attack Israel and other U.S. allies
By RACHEL KLEINFELD
Wars are ugly. They are deadly. They have unintended consequences and spillover effects. And yet, sometimes, putting a thumb on the scales of war is the lesser evil. Sometimes, dealing in arms is the right thing to do.
Arming the rebels of Syria is such a cause. But don't take my word for it. As Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, revealed this month in Senate testimony, they backed a plan last year to arm carefully vetted Syrian rebels. The plan was also backed by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then-CIA Director David Petraeus. They were vetoed by a White House that sees itself as tough and realistic—but is instead being myopic.
Why arm Syrian rebels? Let's start with Iran. The faster Syrian dictator Bashar Assad falls, the faster Iran loses its closest ally in the region and its main conduit for shipping weapons to terrorist groups that attack Israel and other U.S. allies. A Syria without Assad will further isolate Iran and could help force it to the nuclear negotiating table
Second, the war in Syria is destabilizing an already volatile region. Armed conflict has spilled into Iraq and Turkey. Refugees are creating tension in Jordan, Lebanon and other neighboring states. Syria's chemical weapons are hard to track—and the longer the civil war rages, the greater the risk that Assad will use them on his own people, or that they end up in the hands of terrorists.
Meanwhile, the rebels aren't waiting for Washington to decide. They are getting arms where they can—often from private individuals and Gulf countries that support the most radical Islamists within the rebel factions.
In other words, the longer we stand aside, the more power radical Sunni factions and rebel groups engaging in war crimes gain over more secular and nationalist groups. The latter are disgusted with our inaction. We will have few friends in Syria, a crucial country in a bad neighborhood, when this bloodletting—60,000 men, women and children killed so far—is over.
I respect the Obama administration's security credentials, and am glad that this White House heralds a tougher brand of liberalism, one that recognizes the necessity of national security and is comfortable with force.
But in this case, the realists are not realistic. The young people spearheading the Arab Spring are trying to decide what America stands for—whether it cares about their human rights and empowerment or is merely seeking cheap global oil and easy alliances. Inaction in Syria is not good for the U.S. in a region where more than 60% of the population is under age 30. America can lose this generation for the next 50 years if it is not on their side now.
Deciding how to intervene in Syria is by no means easy. In 2011 the U.S. and its NATO allies intervened in Libya, failed to secure weapons caches—and newly armed Islamists struck in Mali. Many of the insurgents in Syria are connected with radical Islamists, and the U.S. must be careful not to arm them (though they are growing stronger through our inaction). When Assad falls there will likely be bloody conflicts afterward between rebel and ethnic groups—bloodshed that may be exacerbated by our weapons.
To do the most good, we would need to arm carefully chosen groups. Luckily, we have had intelligence assets on the ground for nearly a year vetting such groups to determine the most worthwhile options.
We should choose arms that are of the most use militarily and the least in civilian killing. This should include antitank weaponry calibrated to pierce lower-grade Syrian armor, not higher-level Israeli, NATO, and U.S. tanks. And we should be willing to provide the additional military support to ensure that those arms are used well. Half-measures can be worse than no action at all.
Many will protest that this more robust option leaves the U.S. owning a conflict it does not want to own. I agree that we don't want to own this conflict. Yet in the eyes of the Arab street, America already does. Many in the region believe that by doing nothing, the strongest country in the world has cynically chosen the current outcome: Assad in power and civilians in body bags.
I'm glad to see a new breed of tough Democrat. But the Obama administration's "realism" is creating a ticking time bomb in a region that is already spinning ever so slowly out of control.
Ms. Kleinfeld is the president and co-founder of the Truman National Security Project.
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2)Civil Rights and the Collapse of Birmingham, Ala.
By John Bennett
Birmingham, Alabama is considered by many to be the birthplace of the civil rights movement. Today, African-Americans in Birmingham benefit from a numerical majority in the population, corresponding majorities in government jobs, and political control of the city. But civil rights won't address what ails the city now.
Birmingham is recognized as one of the most violent and poorly-run cities in the nation. The city runs a massive deficit, and is county seat of Jefferson County, which recently cut a deal with a European bank as part of the largest government bankruptcy in U.S. history.
Underlying this fiasco is a mixture of problems, none of which can be solved by the civil rights agenda, or by liberalism in any form. This is not to suggest that those rights should be rolled back, but to point out that today's solutions will not come from civil rights.
Blacks in Birmingham have now obtained equal rights, special protection for those rights, preferential enforcement of those rights, a demographic majority, and a near monopoly on government employment. Moreover, that panoply of rights and benefits is funded by the nation's highest sales tax. The results should be a progressive success story. Instead, Jefferson County's bankruptcy stems in part from an epic and at times grimly amusing corruption scandal that resulted in the conviction of at least 22 people. Those convicted officials include the former mayor of Birmingham, Larry Langford.
Mayor Langford's style of governance seems to fairly reflect the norms of many city residents. The New York Times provided the tenor of "[s]ome residents" with regard to the mayor's conviction:
At a barbershop in a predominantly black neighborhood where the owner had hung a sign in the window reading, "We Support Our Mayor," Charles Hicks said he was disappointed by Mr. Langford's recent behavior but believed the former mayor was well-intentioned and was corrupted by wealthy businessmen.
"I'm just disappointed in the system," Mr. Hicks said. "Larry had great ideas, but he got caught up in the trap."
There is always a "trap" -- always someone else to blame. That resolute avoidance of personal responsibility, writ large, must be a major part of the city's problems. But such cultural and moral concerns are not part of the current civil rights agenda. Much more important was a program through which Mayor Langford provided laptops to children, in all government schools, in first through fifth grade.
An MIT study found that the results of this social policy were "disappointing." Ownership of the free government laptops "did not increase use of computers for academic or content-creation purposes." The MIT study further found that school-related laptop use somehow unbelievably actually decreased after students were given the free laptops: "The frequency with which students used a computer to create or listen to podcasts, do research, or do homework all decreased slightly from the pretest survey (before [free laptop] ownership) to the post test survey (after [free laptop] ownership)." An army of sociology professors and community leaders could start a cottage industry simply trying to come to grips with the causes of this social engineering farce, and the subculture underlying it.
Meanwhile, the Birmingham City Council is taking on challenges like the proliferation of payday loan businesses. Councilwoman LaShunda Scales complained that payday loans "are the number one product the city offers to its citizens."
From the top down, considering the racial breakdown of Birmingham city jobs, data indicate that blacks are fully empowered in the sphere of government. Whites are 22% of the city's population, and hold 27% of public jobs (1180 of a total of 4273). Blacks are 73.4% of the population and hold 71.3% of public jobs (3051).
On the surface, this is surprisingly close parity between population percentage and representation in government jobs. However, serious racial disparities remain within several city departments. For instance, the City Council has 35 black staff members, but only four whites; in the Mayor's office there are 75 black and 12 white employees; Municipal Court Department: 89 black and six white; Public Works: 827 black, 99 white; Parks and Recreation Department: 301 black, 43 white.
If the races were reversed, civil rights leaders would claim that whites were being favored in those departments. With whites on the other end of the disparity, however, there is no favoritism perceived, and the arc of justice is inverted.
Racial parity in Birmingham government jobs was reached -- in part -- by means of racial preferences and hiring quotas in some departments. The Birmingham fire department's racial quota system was one example. One black firefighter was asked what he thought about white firefighters who were disadvantaged by affirmative action. He responded:
So whites are saying, 'Yeah, they did 'em wrong, there's no doubt about that, but we don't want to do anything to help correct it. It wasn't our fault. I wasn't here.' Well, okay, if it wasn't your fault, and if you weren't the recipient of what your forefathers did, or whatever, then, why... when we [blacks] take a test, [do] you [whites] always come out number one?
Some, in the birthplace of the civil rights movement, evidently see equal test scores as an entitlement. A similar mentality might lie at the root of Birmingham's problems, including an ongoing discrimination lawsuit against the city.
In 2010, a white senior accountant for the City of Birmingham -- Virginia Spidle, a 24-year employee -- was fired for supposed racism. Her firing came shortly after she raised questions about the city's disastrous financial accounting. The county personnel board cleared her of the racism charge, and reinstated her employment. However, a week after returning to her job, her management fired her again for alleged incompetence.
Spidle filed a federal lawsuit against Mayor William Bell's administration in early January 2013, claiming "his administration was the true perpetrator of racial discrimination."
Spidle's attorney, Gayle Gear, said, "We are celebrating 50 years of progress in civil rights. In the year we are celebrating that, good people of Birmingham would not approve of mistreating a person because of their race," as The Birmingham News reported. "The city instigated and condoned a race-based hostile work environment in the city's finance department," the lawsuit reads. The City of Birmingham finance department has 108 employees; 70 percent are black and 30 percent are white.
The lawsuit seems to be one symptom of a larger problem. How did this sorry state of affairs come about? How can citizens and politicians fix Birmingham, and cities like it across the country? It doesn't appear that a civil rights agenda can answer these questions going forward. Nor can any amount of government-given "opportunities," resources, or any other euphemism for state involvement. Birmingham is simply past the point where legal, structural, or policy changes will ameliorate cultural pathology.
John T. Bennett (MA, University of Chicago, Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences '07; J.D., Emory University School of Law '11) is a former Army officer with tours of duty in Djibouti, Africa, as well as Iraq and Afghanistan. His writing has appeared in the American Thinker, Chicago Tribune, World Net Daily, Townhall.com, Accuracy in Media, and FrontPage Magazine, among others.
2a) Abbas by fomenting Palestinian unrest risks losing control
Day by day, Palestinian fury on the West Bank is stoked by one charge against Israel after another. The protesters of Hebron, Nablus and other West Bank towns and villages are in no mood to hear Israel’s version of the facts. Sunday, Feb. 24, Palestinian Authority officials alleged that Israeli mistreatment caused the death of a 30-year old Palestinian Arafat Jaradat in custody after taking part in rocking-throwing clashes with Israeli troops. Israel denied he was beaten and said he had died of heart failure. Israel’s forensic institute conducted an autopsy with a Palestinian physician in attendance with uncertain results. But the Palestinian street, demonstrating violently for the past week in solidarity with four Palestinian inmates on hunger strike, weren’t waiting. Tomorrow, there will be another trigger for protest and Israeli troops will disperse the rioters and stone-throwers with crowd dispersion measures.
Meanwhile, Palestinian officials keep the heat up by accusing Israel of “murder, racism, and brutality.”
Clearly, Abbas (Abu Mazen) and his henchmen are prepared to risk matters getting out of hand on the West Bank.
Clearly, Abbas (Abu Mazen) and his henchmen are prepared to risk matters getting out of hand on the West Bank.
The motive:
Abbas appears to count on reining in the violence whenever he decides it has exhausted its political usefulness. The Palestinian Authority chairman seems to believe that he only has to give the order for the seven special commando battalions subservient to the PA for the forces to go into action and restore order to the Palestinian street. But Western and Israeli military circles familiar with the situation in Ramallah think his calculus is flawed, because he is doesn’t seem to realize that parts of the PA commando force have established relations with Hamas, the rival group which rules the Gaza Strip.
This takes the Palestinian military structures into a period of uncertainty which recalls the early months of their second uprising (intifada) in 2000. It was hard then to make out which Palestinian units and security arms served which Palestinian strongman. The militias of the day, including the one under the command of Jibril Rajoub – a close Abbas aide today – divided their loyalties and their time between different Palestinian masters. At times, this was contingent on how much they were paid.
Military sources estimate that if the current unrest is allowed to continue unchecked, Abbas will be swept aside by the turbulence. Faceless officers will take over and the force will break up into militias and the Palestinian Authority sink into anarchy.
Already Abbas’s relevance among the Palestinians at large is ebbing along with the welcome mat and donations extended him in most Arab capitals.
Even if Abbas does manage to squeeze another settlement construction freeze out of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, along with the release of jailed prisoners, and even revive the stalled flow of funds to the bankrupt Palestinian Authority, he will still face a tough impediment from the Gaza Strip.
To solve it, he would have to turn the clock back to November, 2012 and reverse a process launched then after the Israel Gaza Operation. The US, Turkey, Qatar, Egypt, Hamas and Israel, struck a deal, which ended the operation with a ceasefire and boosted Hamas domestically and internationally by ending the Israeli siege on the Gaza Strip and promoting cooperation between the Palestinian fundamentalists and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
Mahmoud Abbas clearly hopes that by fostering spiraling anti-Israel unrest on the West Bank, he can catch up with Hamas’s enhanced standing and recover a strong bargaining position for resumed talks with Israel in time for US President Barack Obama’s visit next month to Jerusalem and Ramallah. But he is skating on very thin ice.
This visit in any case may be postponed if Netanyahu fails to set up a post-election government coalition by March 20.
3) Kerry's divergence from Obama on foreign affairs raises questions
By Paul Richter
John Kerry opened his diplomatic mission to Syria in 2009 with a decidedly undiplomatic question for President Bashar Assad: Why did so few Arab leaders trust Assad?
One month into President Obama's first term, the then-chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was in Damascus to explore the possibility of Syrian-Israeli peace talks. But minutes into their meeting, Kerry pressed the Syrian autocrat to explain why other Middle Eastern rulers said Assad always "says one thing and does another ... or he says he will do something then doesn't do it."
Assad, clearly startled by the question, demanded examples. "I need to know this," he said, according to a State Department memo later disclosed by the website WikiLeaks.
With Kerry off on his debut trip as secretary of State to nine nations in Europe and the Middle East, his blunt exchange with Assad offers insight on his determination to use whatever it takes -- even insults -- to help resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, his personal passion.
Kerry has made it clear he wants to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, a long and sporadic process whose latest collapse occurred during Obama's first term. He is well aware that failed attempts tarnished the reputations of elder statesmen and presidents for decades, including Obama.
He is not deterred.
"We need to try to find a way forward," Kerry said at his Senate confirmation hearing last month. He said the window to create an independent Palestinian state and to ensure Israeli security soon "could shut on everybody, and that would be disastrous."
Kerry will accompany Obama next month on the president's first visit to Israel since entering the White House. They won't present a U.S. peace plan, aides said, but will gather ideas, serve notice that Obama is again considering the issue and make it clear that Kerry speaks for him.
Yet Kerry and Obama have sharply different attitudes and approaches to foreign crises. The differences raise questions, if not doubts, about how far Kerry can go to achieve a diplomatic breakthrough.
Kerry is fired by a desire for a diplomatic success in the Middle East that could secure his legacy. Obama is chiefly focused on winding down America's wars overseas and preventing other conflicts from spreading.
Daniel C. Kurtzer, who served as U.S. ambassador to Israel and Egypt, interprets Obama's high-profile trip and other White House signals as "a cautionary approval" for Kerry to try again on restarting talks.
Obama is "saying let's be careful, so if there is no opportunity here we won't be too exposed," said Kurtzer, now at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.
Marwan Muasher, a former Jordanian foreign minister who has dealt frequently with Kerry, admires him but sees daylight between America's new top diplomat and the president.
"Frankly, I'm skeptical that the president has yet made a commitment on the Middle East," said Muasher, research director of the nonpartisan Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "And for anything to be accomplished, a presidential commitment will be needed."
Kerry's commitment is clear. He made his first official phone calls as secretary to Israeli and Palestinian leaders. His predecessor, Hillary Rodham Clinton, made her first trip to East Asia.
Some of Kerry's advisors envision him at some point beginning frantic Henry Kissinger-style shuttle diplomacy between Middle East capitals to nail down a deal.
Kerry, 69, is no global diplomacy neophyte. While in the Senate, he served as an unofficial diplomatic troubleshooter for Obama in Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan, Pakistan and elsewhere. In some cases, he drew political flak for his efforts.
In February 2009, he and two House members were the first U.S. lawmakers to visit the Gaza Strip after its takeover by the Hamas militant group two years earlier. The goal was to assess humanitarian needs after a three-week Israeli military offensive, but critics said Kerry was giving undeserved legitimacy to Hamas, a group the State Department had labeled a terrorist organization.
Kerry also came under fire for meeting five times with Assad from 2009 to 2011, part of Obama's effort to reach out to countries that were shunned during the George W. Bush administration. The White House saw a huge potential payoff if Kerry could help move Damascus toward peace with Israel and break its alliance with Iran. But the effort fizzled, and conservative critics mocked a photo of Kerry, Assad and their wives dining in Damascus, as well as Kerry's later praise of his host as "very generous."
Since then, Assad has presided over a civil war that has claimed almost 70,000 lives in the last two years and has defied calls for him to step down.
Kerry's persuasive skills and endurance drew praise in 2009 when he was sent to Afghanistan to persuade President Hamid Karzai to take part in a runoff election that the White House viewed as a key test of democracy. Kerry spent 20 hours over five days with Karzai in marathon walks, dinners, visits to mosques and talks with political rivals. Karzai ultimately agreed, and won the runoff.
Kerry is more inclined to sweet talk than browbeating in his negotiations. And the secretary, who was among the wealthiest members of Congress and has Champagne tastes, sometimes schmoozes far from the conference room.
After a recent meeting with Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh, Kerry recounted how they enjoyed fine meals together in Jordan, visited a posh resort at Wadi Rum and rode motorcycles by the Dead Sea.
Kerry's previous views on Middle East policy didn't always align with the White House. For example, he called for the administration to arm opposition rebels in Syria and to help protect them by establishing "safe zones," ideas the White House rejected as too aggressive.
He also criticized Obama's failed effort to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks with a demand that Israel freeze settlement construction on land it seized during the 1967 Middle East War, saying the White House "wasted a year and a half on something that for a number of reasons was not achievable."
Kerry, who fought in the Vietnam War, is confident he can deal with the formidable diplomats of the Middle East. Some officials are intimidated by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a burly former army commando. Kerry isn't awed by the Israeli's combat past.
"He's been there. He's unimpressed," said a former Kerry aide who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
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4)Jane Mayer’s McCarthyist Attack on Ted Cruz
On The Marx
The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, in a pair of blog posts, served up the latest attempted Democratic Party talking point on freshman Texas Senator Ted Cruz: that Senator Cruz is the second coming of Joe McCarthy. (ThinkProgress coordinates with a predictable illustration for those too simple-minded to get Mayer’s point). As it happens, I have some firsthand knowledge of the subject of Mayer’s vague, thinly-sourced hit job. She’ll have to do better next time, because Ted Cruz is right about Harvard Law School in the mid-1990s. If she’d talked to more people, she might have figured that out.
Here’s the part of Cruz’s remarks at a 2010 event that Mayer presents as shocking evidence of Cruz’s mendacity:
He then went on to assert that Obama, who attended Harvard Law School four years ahead of him, “would have made a perfect president of Harvard Law School.” The reason, said Cruz, was that, “There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists! There was one Republican. But there were twelve who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.”
Leaving aside Mayer’s failure to check a fairly basic fact in the president’s biography (Obama graduated in the spring of 1991; Cruz entered HLS in the fall of 1992), Cruz is absolutely right on the basic point here: there were multiples more Marxists on the Harvard Law faculty at the time than open Republicans. I know because I was there. I was a year behind Ted at Harvard, and was president of the HLS Republicans in 1994-95, when Ted was a third-year law student. I can’t say I knew Ted well at the time (he was more involved in the Federalist Society and Law Review), but we crossed paths a few times, and even then everyone knew he was a superstar who was going places in life. He was undoubtedly reflecting on the same things I saw in those days.
Aside from a generic denial by a current Harvard spokesman, Mayer’s only source for the original article is Charles Fried, my old constitutional law professor who was – at the time – the faculty advisor for the HLS Republicans, but has in more recent years become a vocal spokesman for all things Obama. On the one hand, Fried argues that Cruz has understated the GOP presence in the extensive Harvard faculty:
I can right offhand count four “out” Republicans (including myself) and I don’t know how many closeted Republicans when Ted, who was my student and the editor on the Harvard Law Review who helped me with my Supreme Court foreword, was a student here.
Ironically, given the tenor of Mayer’s article, she never asks Fried to name any of these people, but just takes him at his word that he has a list of Republicans on the faculty. Now, closeted Republicans may have been known to Fried in the faculty lounge, but they were of little help to those of us in the student body, seeing as how both the liberals and the left-wing radicals were all very open and vocal. At the time, I was aware of only one other Republican or conservative of any stripe on the faculty besides Fried: Mary Ann Glendon, who was busy during much of 1994 and 1995 with activities on behalf of the Vatican (which she represented at a 1995 conference in Beijing). The fact that we had so little representation on the faculty was a running joke among conservative students; I still have the t-shirts we printed after the 1994 elections:
When Fried was appointed to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 1995, we legitimately feared that we would not be able to find a faculty advisor, which of course any student group needs; as it turned out, Professor Glendon stepped in with Fried’s departure. It may be the case that there were two other Republicans on the faculty, but to this day I have no idea who they were; I assume Ted Cruz didn’t either.
Of course, the more controversial part of Senator Cruz’s equation is his charge that there were Marxists on the faculty. Mayer weakly allows:
It may be that Cruz was referring to a group of left-leaning law professors who supported what they called Critical Legal Studies, a method of critiquing the political impact of the American legal system. Professor Duncan Kennedy, for instance, a leader of the faction, who declined to comment on Cruz’s accusation, counts himself as influenced by the writings of Karl Marx. But he regards himself as a social democrat, not a Communist, and has never advocated the overthrow of the U.S. government by Communists. Rather, he advocated widening admissions at the law school to under-served populations, hiring more minorities and women on the faculty, and paying all law professors equally.
Cruz’s spokeswoman confirmed, in response, that this is precisely the faculty clique he referred to, and Mayer does not dispute their numbers on the faculty. But her description is a rather serious whitewash of what Kennedy and the other “Crits,” as they were colloquially known on campus, professed and taught: a menu of class conflict, false-consciousness theory and subversion of property rights that would have fit comfortably on the syllabus at Patrice Lumumba University. Here’s how one of Harvard’s own courses describes the movement:
A self-conscious group of legal scholars founded the Conference on Critical Legal Studies (CLS) in 1977. Most of them had been law students in the 1960s and early 1970s, and had been involved with the civil rights movement, Vietnam protests, and the political and cultural challenges to authority that characterized that period. These events seemed to contradict the assumption that American law was fundamentally just and the product of historical progress; instead, law seemed a game heavily loaded to favor the wealthy and powerful. But these events also suggested that grassroots activists and lawyers could produce social change.Fundamentally convinced that law and politics could not be separated, the founders of CLS found a yawning absence at the level of theory. How could law be so tilted to favor the powerful, given the prevailing explanations of law as either democratically chosen or the result of impartial judicial reasoning from neutral principles? Yet how could law be a tool for social change, in the face of Marxist explanations of law as mere epiphenomenal outgrowths of the interests of the powerful?Hosting annual conferences and workshops between 1977 and 1992, CLS scholars and those they have influenced try to explain both why legal principles and doctrines do not yield determinate answers to specific disputes and how legal decisions reflect cultural and political values that shift over time. They focused from the start on the ways that law contributed to illegitimate social hierarchies, producing domination of women by men, nonwhites by whites, and the poor by the wealthy. They claim that apparently neutral language and institutions, operated through law, mask relationships of power and control. The emphasis on individualism within the law similarly hides patterns of power relationships while making it more difficult to summon up a sense of community and human interconnection. Joining in their assault on these dimensions of law, CLS scholars have differed considerably in their particular methods and views.Many who identify with the critical legal studies movement resist or reject efforts to systematize their own work….Some critical scholars adapt ideas drawn from Marxist and socialist theories to demonstrate how economic power relationships influence legal practices and consciousness. For others, the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and its attention to the construction of cultural and psycho-social meanings are central to explaining how law uses mechanisms of denial and legitimation. Still others find resonance with postmodernist sensibilities and deconstruction, notably illustrated in literary and architectural works. Some scholars emphasize the importance of narratives and stories in devising critical alternatives to prevailing legal practices. Many critical legal scholars draw upon intellectual currents in literature, pop culture, social theory, history, and other fields to challenge the idea of the individual as a stable, coherent self, capable of universal reason and guided by general laws of nature. In contrast, argue critical scholars, individuals are constituted by complex and completing sources of ideology, social practice, and power relationships.
Now, it’s something of a hyperbolic flourish to describe armchair radicals of this sort as people “who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government,” and as Fried notes, the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 had necessarily pushed a lot of previously proud Marxists to go underground and readjust their rhetoric. But as even Matt Yglesias conceded, “[t]he conclusion that …a follower of Marx’s ideas is, like Marx, a Communist seems perfectly plausible.” The fact that the fall of Communism made the Crits somewhat abashed about their intellectual heritage and its logical conclusions is no reason to discount the thorough Marxist influence in their work, or shrink from asking why arguably the nation’s leading law school should employ several times more of them than Republicans.
Cruz made quite clear who he was talking about and why, and any fair-minded observer can draw their own conclusions – unlike, say, when the Senate Majority Leader last summer claimed an unnamed, anonymous source who told him Mitt Romney hadn’t paid his taxes. Cruz didn’t stretch to connect people via tenuous associations, like those who tried to paint Sarah Palin as a secessionist for a marginal political party her husband briefly joined or Rick Perry as a racist for something written on a rock by a person who sold land to his father. He called a bunch of Marxist professors Marxists, and while he may have thrown in a rather excessive dramatic flourish, his speech drew the obvious conclusion to where Marxism necessarily leads. If Mayer had done her homework, she would have recognized what pitiful support this provides for the talking points she was laboring to shore up.
But for a freshman Senator to draw the kind of fear that generates this type of assault from the New Yorker, he must be doing something right.
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