Rehnquist+ Katrina- Chavez= Liberal 'Logic'

Weekend Moonbat Watch

Instant Rehnquist Attacks, Katrina, Chavez Marxism



Far from sitting out the holiday weekend, lefty moonbats have been mighty busy, with speedy reactions to breaking news wherever they believed a stink could be made :


--- Huffington Post's Geoffrey R Stone was first out of the gate Saturday evening, so quickly that one wonders whether it was written well in advance of US Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist's passing:


What was William Rehnquist's legacy as a Justice of the Supreme Court? Many people will address that question in the days and weeks to come. Here is a straightforward analysis of his record in cases involving the First Amendment's "freedom of speech, or of the press."

In his more than 30 years on the Supreme Court, Justice Rehnquist participated in 259 decisions involving these freedoms.

In these cases, Rehnquist voted to support the First Amendment claim only 20 per cent of the time. In these same cases, the other justices with whom he sat (Blackmun, Brennan, Breyer, Burger, Douglas, Ginsburg, Kennedy, Marshall, O’Connor, Powell, Scalia, Souter, Stephens, Stewart, Thomas, and White) voted to uphold the First Amendment claim 53 per cent of the time.

Thus, Rehnquist’s colleagues were 2.6 times more likely than Rehnquist to hold a law in violation of “the freedom of speech, or of the press.”

But this only scratches the surface.

Even the Supreme Court has easy cases. These cases are best identified by unanimity. If all the justices agree that a law is constitutional or unconstitutional, an individual justice’s vote does not tell us anything very interesting about his views. Sixty-three of the 259 cases were decided by unanimous vote.

If we exclude those “easy” decisions, we find that Justice Rehnquist voted to reject the First Amendment claim an astonishing 92 per cent of the time.

In these same cases, the other justices voted to uphold the First Amendment challenge 55 per cent of the time. Thus, in non-unanimous decisions the other justices were 6 times more likely than Justice Rehnquist to find a law in violation of “the freedom of speech, or of the press.”


Did this break the record (set in 2004 when Reagan passed) for fastest postmortem attacks on American leaders? But wait, there's more:


From Pundit Guy:


MORE: Jeff Jarvis was watching FoxNews when the announcement was made. Susan Estrich was on camera saying that Katrina changes the landscape, therefore, Bush is weakened and will be under pressure to appoint a minority to the court.


From SkaroffBlog:


I guess we’ll all play the “what a great man he was” game but this is the guy who was against a woman’s right to choose, gay rights, privacy in the home, protecting rape victims, for executing minors and the mentally retarded, and presided over both impeaching Clinton for a blowjob and installing GWB in the White House in 2000.

Meanwhile, George W., the worst president ever, gets to choose two Supreme Court justices now.


The BBC's obit was surprisingly tame, except for a Nixonian smear attempt:


His reward finally came in 1972, when that arch-Republican, President Richard Nixon, nominated Rehnquist to the Supreme Court.

>During his time at the court, which he would head after being nominated to be the 16th chief justice by Ronald Reagan in 1986, William Rehnquist presided over a conservative transformation of what is arguably the most powerful institution in the United States.

Rehnquist's gut instincts - pro-states' rights, anti-big government and anti- affirmative action - informed his legal opinions.

He did not win every argument - voting, for instance, against the legalisation of abortion as an associate justice in 1973 - but his conservative world-view often prevailed as successive Republican appointees subtly shifted the Supreme Court to the right.


The media will always have Nixon to kick around, it appears. What exactly is an "arch-Republican"?


How Boston's ABC-5 Sunday news anchor began the Rehnquist news: "While women and minorites were often on the losing end of his decisions, Rehnquist....."


--- Not that the left has given up on their mindless Katrina-blame game, either. An angry Arianna Huffington blasts Bill Clinton, of all people, for refusing to join the moonbat antics:


What the hell was Bill Clinton thinking, standing there next to President Bush and providing verbal cover for the administration's ludicrous claims that the problems plaguing New Orleans were unforeseeable?

He even defended the administration's catastrophic response to Katrina. When asked on CNN whether the federal response was fast enough, Clinton bobbed, weaved, and fell back on this utterly absurd claim: "You and I are not in a position to make any judgment because we weren't there." C'mon, Bill, "...we weren't there"?

I know this sucking up business is hard, but you've got to do better than that.

This disaster has been extraordinarily revealing, exposing not only Bush's failure of leadership, and the deadly consequences of his distorted priorities but also the many, many years of political neglect of the poor and the needy by both political parties.

You couldn't get a much clearer illustration of the myriad ways that we have indeed become Two Nations than the stories and pictures coming out of New Orleans this week. Not too many Bush Pioneers were forced to wallow in their own feces at the Superdome.

But it's mighty hard to have a teachable moment when you have Bill Clinton, still the reigning symbol of the Democratic Party, failing to connect the dots between the Bush administration's chronic abandonment of the poor and its recent abandonment of the poor in the Big Easy -- as well as the dots between the war in Iraq and the undermining of our security here at home. And as if all this wasn't enough, there he was defending the indefensible.

"I'm telling you," he said in a White House sit-down with CNN (along with Bush, Sr.), "nobody thought this was going to happen like this...they had problems they never could have foreseen." Which is absolutely, incontrovertibly, and provably untrue (many, many times over). And he is too smart not to know it.


The Beeb also gets into the "poor and downtrodden" act, with a loaded AP photo to boot:


Images from the stricken city of New Orleans show that many of those suffering in its streets and shelters are mainly black and poor.

The plight of those stranded amid the filth and the dead has highlighted a side of the city most tourists did not see - one in which two-thirds of its residents are black and more than a quarter live in poverty.

Some say the chaos in Katrina's aftermath has exposed deep divisions in both the city and US society. "We cannot allow it to be said by history that the difference between those who lived and... died... was nothing more than poverty, age or skin colour," Congressman Elijah Cummings said.

'Paycheck to paycheck'

Correspondents say New Orleans' glamorous reputation has always concealed a high level of deprivation.


While it's great to see the BBC can spell "paycheck" in American English, they obviously have a strange view of New Orleans. Who exactly was under the impression it was a wealthy or "glamorous" city?


Refreshingly, a pretty reasonable approach from liberal Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr:


Don't use Katrina to justify your hate

Does it really matter?

The city is flooded, people are homeless and hungry and scared and dead. Shouldn't this be a time for giving money and saying prayers? Should we really care about the color of the people looting in the hurricane zone? Or that Louisiana is a red state? Or that some of the dead are gay?

Apparently, that kind of thing matters to some of us. It matters, for instance, to a black man who posted a note in an online forum saying he is embarrassed by news footage showing that most of the looters are black. It matters to the white people who've sent me notes daring me to explain why blacks are "running amok."

It matters to the author of a note circulating on the Internet who says it would be a "problem" for a liberal in a blue state to send relief money to a red state.


Sadly, moonbats aren't succeeding in winning over the American public. This new ABC poll explains:


Sept. 4, 2005 — Americans are broadly critical of government preparedness in the Hurricane Katrina disaster — but far fewer take George W. Bush personally to task for the problems, and public anger about the response is less widespread than some critics would suggest.


--- Meanwhile Venezuelan thug Hugo Chavez, a particular darling of the left after Pat Robertson recently slammed him, is taking advantage of a distracted America to speed up his push for South American marxism. This from the BBC:


The Venezuelan government is reported to be planning to insist that all private banks appoint two state representatives to their board.

Such a move is likely to be part of the country's forthcoming new banking law, according to the UK's Financial Times.

A continuation of left-wing President Hugo Chavez's aim to create "socialism of the 21st Century", a number of foreign banks would be affected.

Among them are Spanish institutions Banco Santander and BBVA.

Both own Venezuelan banks - Banco de Venezuela and Banco Provincial respectively.


Sure enough, the American left stopped caring about Venezuela's future as soon as it no longer offered ammo against conservatives.



For updates on Hurricane relief efforts in the blogosphere, see Hugh Hewitt's site. Check here for the latest.

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