Just a couple of thoughts on the unseemly and pathetic Senator Craig kerfuffle:

Reporting that a sitting U.S. Senator was arrested, charged, and plead guilty to a misdemeanor is obviously entirely legitimate. But the idea that a newspaper reporter dug around in the man’s personal life for a year, asking numerous people, all the way back to his college days, if the Senator is gay, is out of line. The newspaper wisely decided not to run the story, until the arrest and guilty plea came to light, but why do the investigation in the first place, while there were no allegations involved of corruption or criminality?

The word “hypocrisy” – one of the most misused and misunderstood words in the English language – is being thrown around once again with great glee from the left, which seems to define the word mostly as “disagreement with leftist positions”. Craig is subject to the charge because he has publicly supported traditional values positions while apparently not, shall we say, fully living them in his personal life. Many on the left seem to find it particularly upsetting when a person is suspected of being gay, is not open about it, and does not support the whole agenda of gay liberals. Jonah Goldberg at National Review Online nicely debunks the left’s position, noting : “That being anti-gay marriage and anti-gay are synonymous is a entirely a political argument that people are confusing for a philosophical truth.”

Exactly right. There’s no hypocrisy at all in being gay while simultaneously respecting the traditional definition of marriage and not wishing to redefine it. Are single people who support the institution of marriage hypocrites? Are childless couples who support programs to help children hypocrites? Would a single mother who concluded that it’s better for children to have a mother and a father be a hypocrite? Are supporters of traditional marriage bigoted toward single people? Of course not. Supporting institutions or policy positions that don’t benefit you personally is not hypocrisy.

But it’s all about the politics. Again, from Mr. Goldberg: “If Craig’s personal conduct really offended liberals, Jim McGreevey – a seedier man personally than Craig by any conventional standard – wouldn’t be a hero. But, no, it’s Craig’s political conduct, not his personal conduct, that offends the left. And so, they take up the well-worn hypocrisy cudgel not to condemn cruising bathrooms, but for voting against gay marriage.”

In fact, the only real hypocrisy in the whole “Craig in the Crapper” scandal, and it is glaring, is coming from the left. These are the same people who are always preaching tolerance, compassion, acceptance of dissent, privacy, etc. And all that’s out the window because they can joyously humiliate a man and score some cheap political points against him and his party because he disagrees with their political positions.

From The Oregonian, (Via Dennis Prager’s Townhall blog):

MCMINNVILLE — A judge dismissed charges this morning against the two Patton Middle School teens accused of sexual harassment for swatting girls on the buttocks.

Judge John L. Collins said he acted “in the interests of justice” after both prosecutors and the boys’ defense lawyers said four alleged victims had signed a civil compromise in the case, which drew national attention. The victims said they want to drop the charges.

Now what happened to Mike Nifong in North Carolina needs to happen to prosecutor Bradley Berry. We commend the judge for finally doing the right thing. Better late than never.

Others:
Michelle Malkin
The Corner
Dennis Prager

Wow. We knew John Edwards is oily, disingenuous, and phony to the core, but we did not know he is also apparently a real ignoramus. Via the Captain’s Quarters blog:

“I’m going to be honest with you — I don’t know a lot about Cuba’s healthcare system,” Edwards, D-N.C., said at an event in Oskaloosa, Iowa. “Is it a government-run system?”

Tune in next week as Edwards asks, “I don’t know, is the Pope Catholic?”

How can anyone take the man seriously as a candidate for the highest office in the land? Thankfully, so far a minority of Americans seem to be falling for the con. Hopefully this positive trend will continue.

Remember when, in the 2000 campaign, George W. Bush was attacked mercilessly for not knowing the names of a few obscure foreign leaders? Let’s sit back and watch now to see if the “non-partisan, fair and objective” DeMSM will pounce on Edwards for this glaring ignorance of such a well-known fact. We would not advise holding your breath.

Meanwhile, we can apply the “shoe on the other foot test” — imagine what the response would be from the press (not to mention the nutroots/Angry Left blogs!) if Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney asked if the health care system in Cuba was government-run.

In a partial victory for justice, most of the serious charges were dismissed against the two 13-year old boys in McMinnville, Oregon who are the targets of abusive prosecutor Bradley Berry.

Last week, [Circuit Judge John L.] Collins threw out misdemeanor sex abuse charges against the boys, a decision that means the pair no longer face lifetime registration as sex offenders should they be convicted.

But they still face trial for harassment charges, which the judge inexplicably refused to dismiss.

Defense lawyers Mark Lawrence and Rachel Negra are pressing to have the rest of the case tossed. They argued that prosecutors, who initially charged the boys with felony sex abuse, overreacted and unfairly singled them out from other Patton students — boys and girls — who also admitted swatting friends on the buttocks.

Collins rejected both lines of reasoning. He said there was no evidence the district attorney’s office set out to be vindictive and that prosecutors applied a “reasonable set of standards” when deciding what charges to file.

But there is no “reasonable set of standards” that would prosecute two young boys for horsing around at school. By any reasonable standard, the abuse that is being heaped on these boys by the prosecutors, and now being abetted by this judge, is ridiculous and disgusting. The legal system in McMinnville, Oregon has become an enemy of justice and reasonable standards.

Apparently attending law school causes many to lose all common sense and the basic ability to think like normal, decent human beings. What is being done to these boys is simply shameful.

Previous:
Another abusive, out-of-control prosecutor

Best shot of the week against the Democrats’ feckless foreign policy views goes to Mitt Romney from the Republican debate Sunday morning. Via Yahoo News:

Mitt Romney, who leads many Iowa polls but trails Rudy Giuliani and Sen. John McCain nationally, mocked Democratic candidate Barack Obama’s recent foreign policy statements, which sparked a sharp dispute with Democrat front-runner Hillary Clinton.

Obama, an Illinois senator, has said he would be willing to meet without preconditions leaders of nations such as Iran and Syria and that he would be willing to launch strikes against al Qaeda targets in Pakistan if Islamabad took no action.

“In one week, he went from saying he’s going to sit down, you know, for tea, with our enemies, but then he’s going to bomb our allies,” said Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts. “I mean, he’s gone from Jane Fonda to Dr. Strangelove in one week.”

On the debate generally, it was like there were two debates going on on the same stage – McCain, Giuliani, and Romney having a serious conversation about the issues, and the also-rans trying to horn in and get some scraps of attention. This continues to be unhelpful.

It will really help the overall campaign when Tom Tancredo, Sam Brownback, Tommy Thompson, Ron Paul, etc., do the right thing for their party and their country and go back to the kids’ table so the adults can talk without being interrupted.

We noted a few weeks ago how incoherent Barack Obama’s last big foreign policy pronouncement was, and now he’s decided to make another, less coherent, foreign policy pronouncement. His goal seemed to be to sound like a tough guy to show he’d be strong on national security as president, but he didn’t seem to give much thought to the consequences of his ideas.

Via Yahoo News:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Wednesday that he would possibly send troops into Pakistan to hunt down terrorists, an attempt to show strength when his chief rival has described his foreign policy skills as naive.

The Illinois senator warned Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf that he must do more to shut down terrorist operations in his country and evict foreign fighters under an Obama presidency, or Pakistan will risk a U.S. troop invasion and losing hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid.

….

Obama said that as commander in chief he would remove troops from Iraq and putting [sic] them “on the right battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

But wait – to paraphrase what the Democrats have kept telling us about Iraq: Pakistan did not attack us on 9/11. If we can only fight “the real war on terror…in Afghanistan” as the Democrats keep saying, then there’s no basis for going into Pakistan.

But many of the al Qaeda terrorists that we’re fighting in Afghanistan have fled to Pakistan, so it’s the same people, you might object.

But the same can be said of Iraq – Zarqawi, for just one example, was in Afghanistan before he fled to Iraq. It’s just incoherent to talk about abandoning the fight against the al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq to go after those in Pakistan (which we know has nukes, incidentally. Obama doesn’t seem to have taken all of the consequences of his “plan” into account.).

Just imagine if President Bush had given a speech yesterday indicating he was thinking about invading Pakistan. Imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth that would come from the Democrats in that case. Here we go again with the out-of-control, war-mongering cowboy routine… And unlike President Bush, Barack Obama never served in the military.

Somebody was right when she referred to Obama as “irresponsible and naive”.