Michael Mukasey has a good article today in the Washington Post on the Obama administration’s handling of the “Christmas Day bomber”, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, debunking many of the disingenuous talking points coming from the administration..

Contrary to what the White House homeland security adviser and the attorney general have suggested, if not said outright, not only was there no authority or policy in place under the Bush administration requiring that all those detained in the United States be treated as criminal defendants, but relevant authority was and is the opposite. …

Perhaps the most dishonest, but most repeated, of the Democrats’ talking points is the comparison to Richard Reid. Mukasey quickly debunks it:

What of Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber,” who was warned of his Miranda rights and prosecuted in a civilian court? He was arrested in December 2001, before procedures were put in place that would have allowed for an outcome that might have included not only conviction but also exploitation of his intelligence value, if possible. His case does not recommend the same procedure in Abdulmutallab’s.

It’s especially shameless for all these Democrats to use the actions of the Bush administration as the standard in defending their own policies, after spending the last eight years demonizing every move made by the Bush administration.

So Sarah Palin gave a pretty good speech before an enthusiastic crowd at this weekend’s Tea Party Convention in Nashville, with C-SPAN and several cable news outlets carrying the speech live to a nationwide audience (C-SPAN video here). Her performance helped redeem an event that had a shaky start.

There was nothing ground-breaking in the speech, but she has the basic values and principles of American Constitutional government right, in sharp contrast to the present occupants of the White House. As the Obama administration continues to demonstrate, it’s going to be difficult to get the details of policy correct when you start off with incorrect foundation principles.

Any good public speaker, at such a high profile event, would want to be sure she hit all the points she wanted to make in the speech. Many speakers would jot down a few keywords or bullet points on a note card. But some speakers might eliminate the possibility of misplacing their notes before an important speech by writing their keywords on their hand. Seems like a smart and creative idea. We’d use a note card, but it’s not nutty or a sign of stupidity or any such thing to do it Palin’s way. It’s not as if she wrote the verbatim text of her address on her arms.

Lots of left-wing blogs are making a big fuss about this. They seem to think it confirms their own deranged prejudices about Palin, or that it rebuts all the jokes about President Obama’s reliance on TelePrompters, or something. We really haven’t the expertise to analyze their thinking further, with no training in the subject beyond an Introductory Psychology class in college.

UPDATE: Palin gives her “critics” some of the mockery they deserve. Perfect.

If conservatives want to guarantee permanent control of Congress for Nancy Pelosi and re-election for Barack Obama in 2012, one great way to help them towards that goal is for conservatives to appear to the average voter as a bunch of angry crackpots. Unfortunately, this seems to be the unofficial theme of this weekend’s “National Tea Party Convention”.

Exhibit One:

“I have a dream,” he [WorldNutDaily founder Joseph Farah] said. “And my dream is that If Barack Obama even seeks re-election as president in 2012 that he won’t be able to go to any city, any town, any hamlet in America without seeing signs that ask ‘Where’s the Birth Certificate?’”

(According to this account, Andrew Breitbart was at the convention, and forcefully argued against the birthers. So there was at least one adult in the room.)

Exhibit Two:

On Thursday night, giving the opening address, former U.S. representative Tom Tancredo (Colo.), who ran for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination as an anti-immigration candidate, railed against Obama and “the cult of multiculturalism.” Americans could be “boiled to death in a cauldron of the nanny state,” he said. “People who couldn’t even spell the word ‘vote,’ or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House.”

When Tancredo said, “His name is Barack Hussein Obama,” the audience booed loudly.

Come on, the contemptuous reciting of the President’s middle name was played out in 2008. And attacking people who don’t speak English well, many of whom are citizens or legal residents of the United States, will turn off many voters as mean-spirited and divisive. You don’t win elections by division, you win by addition.

It’s perfectly legitimate to point out Obama’s left-wing ideology, but tone and presentation are vitally important in building a majority political coalition. (A majority of Democrats polled by Gallup say they have a positive view of socialism, so Democrats can’t turn around and claim “socialist” is some kind of smear.)

This may be a way for a few hundred people in a meeting room in Nashville to feel better; it is not any way to build a majority of voters to throw Pelosi and company out of their leadership positions. Of course the DeMSM are going to try to portray all conservatives as angry, intolerant fringe figures. But there’s nothing to be gained by helping them do it.

Angry rants, purity tests, conspiracy theories, etc. from the right, all help Democrats get re-elected and maintain their majority. No doubt there are a lot of good people at the convention who have legitimate concerns about the continuing damage the Democrats have planned for America. But politics is about building a majority coalition in order to win elections. The Tea Party movement can’t lose sight of that fact and succeed.

So the partisan Democrat, left-wing NAACP doesn’t like Republicans who oppose their left-wing agenda? And this is news?

Of course, calling every liberal political position “civil rights” doesn’t make it so.