The Political Fish

Senator Lindsey Graham injected *gasp* common sense into the political debate today. I have been pretty rough on Senator Graham on this blog, but will defintetely throw him a bone today after his questioning of Attorney General Eric Holder today in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Check out this video, its classic stuff. AG Holder one might think would have been prepared with an answer for this sort of question, but as you can see this administration is not operating under any sort of logic. Strictly ideology.

Enjoy.

Partial transcript via Newsbusters.

SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM, (R-S.C): Can you give me a case in United States history where a enemy combatant caught on a battlefield was tried in civilian court?

ERIC HOLDER, ATTORNEY GENERAL: I don’t know. I’d have to look at that. I think that, you know, the determination I’ve made –

GRAHAM: We’re making history here, Mr. Attorney General. I’ll answer it for you. The answer is no.

HOLDER: Well, I think –

GRAHAM: The Ghailani case — he was indicted for the Cole bombing before 9/11. And I didn’t object to it going into federal court. But I’m telling you right now. We’re making history and we’re making bad history. And let me tell you why.

Now, the real focus of this NPR piece was Graham’s subsequent question concerning whether or not U.S. officials would have to Mirandize Osama bin Laden if he was captured:

GRAHAM: If bin Laden were caught tomorrow, would it be the position of this administration that he would be brought to justice?

HOLDER: He would certainly be brought to justice, absolutely.

GRAHAM: Where would you try him?

HOLDER: Well, we’d go through our protocol. And we’d make the determination about where he should appropriately be tried. [...]

GRAHAM: If we captured bin Laden tomorrow, would he be entitled to Miranda warnings at the moment of capture?

HOLDER: Again I’m not — that all depends. I mean, the notion that we –

GRAHAM: Well, it does not depend. If you’re going to prosecute anybody in civilian court, our law is clear that the moment custodial interrogation occurs the defendant, the criminal defendant, is entitled to a lawyer and to be informed of their right to remain silent.

The big problem I have is that you’re criminalizing the war, that if we caught bin Laden tomorrow, we’d have mixed theories and we couldn’t turn him over — to the CIA, the FBI or military intelligence — for an interrogation on the battlefield, because now we’re saying that he is subject to criminal court in the United States. And you’re confusing the people fighting this war.

 

Apparently, according to our moderate progressive (refuse to call him conservative, as he wishes) Senator from South Carolina, he is also tired of the GOP being the party of “angry white men”.

While I am not a full steam ahead Ron Paul supporter, he bears much  more of a resemblance to what the Republican party says that it believes in, refusing to support ridiculous big government programs, spending, regulation, interference, and trampling on liberties. Senator Graham has not shown himself to be much in favor of these things based on his less than stellar conservative voting record. Watch the video below of the townhall meeting from Senator Lindsey Graham at Furhman University, and I will follow it with a Ron Paul response to Wolf Blitzer (that guy is still on tv??) interview for CNN.

And the response (this is where Ron Paul lays waste to Senator Grahams non-conservative record).

For many years, having an “R” next to your name was good enough. Generally speaking, conservatives in this country were asleep at the wheel, and assumed that the “R” behind your name meant that you were a Republican and were going to carry forward the ideals set by the party. Well, now the silent majority has been awakened at the idea of an overtly socialist administration looking to “radically transform” our nation from everything that made us great into everything else that makes us no different from any other country on the planet. American “arrogance” as President Obama calls it, has been based on the fact that the American ideal has always been seen as the beacon of light in a dark world, and that fact brought millions upon millions to our shores searching for that freedom and liberty. That is what America is all about, thats what the Republican party used to be about. That is what the conservatives in this nation wish the GOP was about, and it is certainly what Lindsey Graham is not all about.

The wishy-washy so called conservative recently wrote in the NY Times an op-ed with Senator John Kerry expressing his middle of the road spineless support for the so called “Cap and Trade” Waxman-Markey energy bill that Sen. Kerry has been the point-man in the Senate on drafting their version. From the Washington Examiner…

Periodically, a Republican senator is seized with desire to be the front man for the Democrats’ latest regulatory monstrosity in Washington. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is now in the throes of this pathological urge, which usually appears just when defeat seems imminent for a big-government scheme like the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade energy bill. Democrats and their liberal buddies in the mainstream media need only whisper the magic word “bipartisanship” and soon enough along comes a gullible GOPer to take the bait.

Graham made clear in a Sunday New York Times op-ed written with Sen. John Kerry, D-MA, that he will support cap-and-trade if Democrats agree to expand nuclear power and off-shore oil and natural gas development. Kerry is the Senate point man in the Democrats’ campaign to pass a Senate version of the 1,400-plus page Waxman-Markey bill approved earlier this year by the House. Graham’s approach sounds like a reasonable “let’s just split the difference” compromise. The problem is that no matter what Kerry and the Democrats agree to now in order to sucker Graham and similarly na?ve Republicans, environmental activists and sympathetic federal bureaucrats will file endless legal and administrative challenges to stall and ultimately veto more nuclear power production or development of America’s bountiful off-shore energy supplies. Meanwhile, the Democrats’ cap-and-trade bill will almost immediately begin inflicting devastating economic consequences that will be with us for decades.

Lindsey Graham, while claiming his conservative credentials is really nothing more than a big government Republican with only minor differences to the liberal Democrat party. He claims a pro-life stance, yet this summer we saw him as the only GOP’er to vote for Sonia Sotomayor, admittedly “against his own conscience”.  This gutless and naive behavior now moves forward with Cap and Trade which will decimate the United States economy, effectively crush manufacturing into oblivion, and create a government run energy market based around the junk-science that we know as global warming. Lindsey, what about your support equals conservative? A government controlled energy market is nothing more than a government takeover of a major segment of our economy. For those that don’t understand…federally manipulated markets are socialist. Free markets thrive, government controlled markets fail. Period. Cap and Trade we know is going to amount to an enormous energy tax, indirect as it may be, on every energy consumer in this country. Translated…EVERYONE. Yet Lindsey supports this 1400 page monstrosity. Enough from me, lets here from some other folks…starting with Glenn Beck.

Lindsey Graham, Olympia Snowe, John McCain and those like them are the reason for the decline of the GOP, and following their lead we will continue giving this country away to socialists to remake in the image of France.

We are now to refer to her as Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

I am not going to get into the details of why I think this is a catastrophe for our country. You can read my views here and here and here and here….or maybe here and here and here as well.

For a complete list of my Sotomayor opinions, just go here

I am not going to wax eloquent on this blog. She was confirmed, we are now going to be forced to live with her on the Court for many years. We have no one to thank but ourselves. The Constitution is under attack, how long shall we sit and observe it. It does not matter whether she is white, black, hispanic, Chinese, or even not of this world…she has shown in her career that the Constitution of the United States does not serve as her guide in judicial decision making. For that, we should not celebrate her confirmation, but lament the fact that the United States Senate enabled her to take this lifelong appointment.

For me, I will remember the name of Senator Lindsey Graham, the one Republican who sold his conscience on the Judiciary Panel.

Interesting line of questioning from Senator Lindsey Graham, followed by basically a non-answer from Judge Sonia Sotomayor…roll the tape!