Don’t get caught flat-footed in front of the press!  Below is a quick rundown of today’s “must reads.” – John T. Doolittle, House Republican Conference Secretary

The Morning Murmur – Tuesday, December 13, 2005

1.  Democrats Show Again Why Voters Don’t Trust Them on Security – Roll Call, Mort Kondrake
Last week, the Democrats blew it again, demonstrating why, when there’s danger to the country, people think their party simply can’t be relied on.  The Democrat party is in effect, rooting for its own country’s failure.

2.  On balance – Washington Times Editorial
One mostly unremarked-upon sign of Iraq’s economic vitality is the estimated 50-fold increase in Internet use since the fall of Saddam Hussein, not to mention the 30,000 new businesses that registered with the Iraqi government in the last year.

3.  Tortuous Progress – Wall Street Journal
It's coming late in the game, but a little honesty has finally crept into the debate over interrogation in the war on terror.

4.  Immigration Hits Five-Year High, Report Says – Associated Press
A new report by the Center for Immigration Studies found that 7.9 million people moved to the United States in the past five years, the highest five-year period of immigration on record. 

5.  Alito: A Sampling of Misleading Media Coverage – National Journal
The systematic slanting of news reports has fuel a disingenuous campaign by liberal groups and senators to caricature Alito as a conservative ideologue. In fact, this is a judge who is widely admired by liberals, moderates, and conservatives who know him as fair-minded, committed to apolitical judging, and wedded to no ideological agenda other than restraint in the exercise of judicial power.

For previous issues of the Morning Murmur, go to www.GOPsecretary.gov

FULL ARTICLES BELOW:

1.  Democrats Show Again Why Voters Don’t Trust Them on Security – Roll Call, Mort Kondracke

December 12, 2005
By Morton M. Kondracke,Roll Call Executive Editor

American voters don’t trust Democrats on national security, for good historical reasons — the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, Jimmy Carter’s surprise at Soviet aggression, the party’s 1980s embrace of the nuclear freeze and its lack of support for the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

President Bush rode a 30-point GOP advantage on national security and fighting terrorism to re-election in 2004, but doubts about his Iraq policy have eroded that lead to the teens.

According to a Dec. 1 Gallup poll, voters trust Republicans over Democrats on national security by 48 percent to 32 percent and on fighting terrorism 46 percent to 33 percent. On Iraq, Democrats were preferred by 42 percent to 39 percent.

Last week, the Democrats blew it again, demonstrating why, when there’s danger to the country, people think their party simply can’t be relied on.

Parties choose their leaders and, in the force-averse tradition of George McGovern, Carter and Michael Dukakis, Democrats have chosen Howard Dean as their national chairman, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) as House Minority Leader and Sen. John Kerry (Mass.) as their latest presidential nominee.

Last week, just as Iraqis were preparing to risk their lives to run and vote in historic parliamentary elections, these Democratic leaders were seen pronouncing the war in Iraq a lost cause, urging immediate U.S. withdrawal and accusing U.S. soldiers of terrorizing Iraqi women and children.

Dean, in a Texas radio interview, said, “the idea that we’re going to win this war is an idea that unfortunately is plain wrong.”

After being attacked as defeatist by Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman — and for being impolitic by some fellow Democrats — Dean claimed his quote was “cherry-picked” and that he meant “we can only win the war, which we have to win, if we change our strategy dramatically.”

But Dean’s original statement was, “I’ve seen this before in my life. This is the same situation we had in Vietnam. ... We just didn’t have a victory” and lost 25,000 more lives “because we were too stubborn to recognize what was happening.”

Dean also tried to say that Bush has said the United States couldn’t win a victory — despite repeated Bush statements that he’ll accept nothing less. Bush once said victory wouldn’t come with a surrender as World War II did.

Bush’s pronouncements and policies all operate in the direction of U.S. withdrawals in the context of “victory” — a secure Iraq — whereas Democrats appear focused purely on withdrawal regardless of the consequences.

Last week, Pelosi personally backed the immediate withdrawal proposal of a disillusioned hawk, Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), and claimed that a majority of her House Democratic colleagues supported his position.

Seeking to mitigate political harm Pelosi caused, various colleagues claimed that Murtha was not really advocating an immediate pullout of U.S. forces. But in a response to Bush’s latest speech, Murtha said his alternative was “immediate re-deployment” of U.S. forces. “The sooner we get out, in my estimation, the better off we’d be,” he said, adding that withdrawal could be complete in six months.

Kerry, meanwhile, said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that “there’s no reason that American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and women and breaking historical customs.”

Kerry added that responsibility for home raids should be turned over to Iraqi security forces, but his quote was used by right-wingers to recall his Vietnam-era allegations that U.S. forces routinely committed rape, torture and mutilation.

Kerry advocates a more politically popular policy than immediate withdrawal — a strict timetable for pullouts — but his bottom-line message still is that the U.S. goal should be exiting Iraq, not leaving behind a stable country.

That’s true even for “New Democrats,” whose House leader, Rep. Ellen Tauscher (Calif.), has drafted a “statement of principles,” calling for the United States to stop assisting Iraqis in fighting domestic insurgents, but battle only foreign terrorists, and to draw down to 50,000 troops by the end of 2006. Even her proposal makes no mention of “victory.”

The Democratic Party once had a tradition of strong foreign policy leadership, established by Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. It exploded over Vietnam and hasn’t been put together since.

Nearly the lone remaining representative of that tradition is Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), who last week stated, even more forcefully than Bush has, the consequences of U.S. failure in Iraq.

“The cost of defeat would be disastrous,” he said, “in the collapse of the new Iraqi regime, civil war in Iraq, regional wars beyond its borders, a victory for [terrorist leader Abu Musab al] Zarqawi and al Qaeda, which would embolden them to attack other Arab countries and our American homeland, the rollback of the democratic advances in other countries of the Middle East and the painful realization that the lives of American soldiers who have died in Iraq were given in vain.”

Democrats now divide into six basic groups on Iraq. Lieberman is alone in defending U.S. resolve. A small group of “constructive critics,” including Sen. Joseph Biden (Del.), advocates specific changes in Bush policy to achieve success. Bush lately has shown willingness to adopt some suggestions from this group.

A large group, led by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.), is content to concentrate on Bush failures, without offering positive recommendations. And there are two groups advocating withdrawal — one phased, the other immediate.

A sixth group might be characterized as “floaters” — moving from one group to another. These include the party’s 2008 presidential frontrunner, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), who previously supported the war but has been forced by loud criticism from the left to join the Reid bloc of nonconstructive critics.

With a few exceptions, the Democratic Party has put itself in the position of being invested in U.S. defeat in Iraq. The main body of party leaders seems so hostile to Bush and his policy that it wants to be vindicated by collapse.

It’s a terrible place for a political party to be — in effect, rooting for its own country’s failure. And it’s utterly unnecessary. If Democrats believe that Bush is destined to fail, all they would have to do is wait and reap the political benefit. Why do they act as defeatists? The only explanation is: They can’t help themselves.
http://www.rollcall.com/issues/kondracke/

2.  On balance – Washington Times Editorial

December 13, 2005

Yesterday, Ambassador Dan Speckhard, head of the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office in Washington, reported that 30,000 new businesses have registered with the Iraqi government in the last year. "And who knows how many unregistered business starts there were?" he remarked to American Forces Press Service. "There is a huge 'gray market' that brings significant revenue."

One mostly unremarked-upon sign of this vitality is the estimated 50-fold increase in Internet use since the fall of Saddam Hussein. According to the Brookings Institution's Iraq Index, there are now more than 147,000 Internet users in Iraq, not counting Internet cafes, where hundreds of thousands more go online. That compares to 4,500 Internet users in Iraq before the war.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20051212-094442-8465r.htm

3.  Tortuous Progress – Wall Street Journal
A little honesty in the interrogation debate.

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

It's coming late in the game, but a little honesty has finally crept into the debate over interrogation in the war on terror. To wit, the critics are at last having to explain what they really object to, as opposed to their typically vague and inaccurate accusations of "torture."

Credit here goes to Vice President Dick Cheney and a few media dissenters, who have insisted that the critics confront the practical and moral realities of fighting terrorism. Specifically, they (and we) have opposed Senator John McCain's Amendment that would establish the Army Field Manual as the standard for Defense Department interrogations and otherwise (that is, for the CIA) reinforce prohibitions on "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment. Everyone understands that this would effectively forbid some interrogation methods now being used, at least by the CIA.

Mr. Cheney's stand is smoking out the critics, who for months have hid behind incantations first about Abu Ghraib, which numerous probes have proved had nothing to do with interrogations, and then the so-called "torture memos," which sanctioned no specific interrogation techniques. So congratulations of a sort to the Washington Post, perhaps the most vociferous promoter of the "torture narrative," for finally admitting in a Sunday editorial what so offends its editors.

It turns out to be "waterboarding," a rare interrogation technique reportedly used against the hardest al Qaeda detainees. The method involves immobilizing a detainee and inducing a feeling of suffocation. The Post says it should be banned both as torture and contrary to the U.S. Constitution. That's certainly worth debating, though the Post may get an argument from U.S. servicemen who've endured the waterboard as part of training to resist interrogation--proof that, if practiced properly, it does no lasting physical harm.

There's also last week's ABC News report that 11 of 12 captured al Qaeda kingpins who have talked only did so after being waterboarded. This would appear to contradict so many glib suggestions, such as those in an open letter yesterday from Congressmen calling themselves the New Democrat Coalition, that such techniques "just plain don't work." The truth is that sometimes they do work.

But let's say waterboarding were banned. The critics are still conveniently vague about just what interrogation techniques they would allow. The Post frowns on "other CIA pressure methods." Well, what are they? Sleep deprivation? Exposure to hot and cold? Stress techniques such as kneeling for a long time? Or how about good cop-bad cop interrogation of the kind practiced in the average American police precinct? That can certainly be "degrading" and "cruel" if you interpret those words in the most expansive manner.

Part of the problem with interpreting those words is that they depend on the context. All things being equal, we can't think of a worse human rights abuse than blowing someone to bits with a Hellfire missile. Yet no one objected when that happened to al Qaeda leader Hamza Rabia in Pakistan two weeks ago. If certain individuals can be ethically targeted for death in a war, then wouldn't the same hold true for rough interrogation methods? A strange code of morality would allow the killing of Rabia but not his stressful questioning to prevent further murders he might plan against innocent civilians.

Some of the more sophisticated critics recognize this, as well as the possibility of "ticking bomb" scenarios. That includes Senator McCain, who has written in Newsweek that on occasion "an interrogator might well try extreme measures." But he opposes writing any guidance into law or regulation--the way the Bush Administration has done--suggesting instead that the interrogator should go ahead and do what he thinks is needed and then depend on "authorities and the public" to "take \[context\] into account when judging his actions."

In other words, Mr. McCain admits that what lies at the heart of his Amendment is moral hypocrisy: We're supposed to ban rugged interrogation in general to make us feel better about ourselves, but only until such interrogation is required; then do whatever it takes. We prefer the Bush Administration's candor in approving certain practices in certain cases--all the more so because, in the real world, bureaucratic and political imperatives will almost certainly put an end to all such methods if the McCain Amendment becomes law.

And don't forget "rendition"--the turning over of captured terrorists--to the likes of Egypt or Syria, the practice favored by the Clinton Administration because it lacked the nerve to handle captured terrorists outside the criminal justice system. We trust the CIA more than Egyptian intelligence, but where are the "torture" critics on the morality of this practice? The truth is that if the McCain Amendment passes, rendition will almost certainly increase. Perhaps this will be the next liberal target, until every al Qaeda detainee is treated no differently than a common thief.

We realize that our views on this subject won't carry the day, at least not until the U.S. suffers a more serious attack. The Bush Administration is already backing down from Mr. Cheney's earlier position, holding out in this week's negotiations on the McCain Amendment only for immunity for the past actions of U.S. interrogators. We still wish the President would take his case to the public, and perhaps even request hearings next year on Capitol Hill, because Americans are more sophisticated about the reality of what it takes to break these terrorists than are most journalists.

But at least the Administration has been willing to admit that protecting Americans takes more than denouncing "torture" at the top of one's lungs. Once the McCain Amendment becomes law, perhaps the torture moralists will continue their creeping honesty and let us know what U.S. interrogators can do to break the next Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007673

4.  Immigration Hits Five-Year High, Report Says – Associated Press

By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER
Monday, December 12, 2005

WASHINGTON – Immigration - both legal and illegal - continues to boom as Congress grapples with how to better control America's borders.

A new report by the Center for Immigration Studies found that 7.9 million people moved to the United States in the past five years, the highest five-year period of immigration on record.

The report, released Monday, comes as the House prepares to take up a bill to curb illegal immigration by boosting border security and requiring workplace enforcement of immigration laws.

There are 35.2 million foreign-born people living in the United States, according to the report, which is based on the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey from March. The report said an estimated 9 million to 13 million are here illegally.

"The 35.2 million immigrants living in the country in March 2005 is the highest number ever recorded _ two-and-a-half times the 13.5 million during the peak of the last great immigration wave in 1910," said the report by Steven Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates tougher policies on illegal immigration and favors attracting immigrants with needed job skills.

About 12.1 percent of the current U.S. population was born in another country, the highest percentage since 1920, according to Census figures.

The report's estimate of the overall number of immigrants living in the United States is consistent with other analyses. But experts warn that it is difficult to accurately measure the number of people entering the country each year.

A recent study by the Pew Hispanic Center found that immigration levels peaked around 2000, then dipped in 2002 and 2003. Nevertheless, Jeffrey Passel, a research associate at the Pew Hispanic Center, said immigration levels remained high, compared with historic levels.

Audrey Singer, an immigration fellow at the Brookings Institution, said, "There's no doubt that we are at a high in immigration to the United States." Singer said immigrants are attracted by economic opportunities and social ties to people already living in the United States.

"Look at places where people come from, these are places with very limited economic opportunities," Singer said.

Mexico is the largest supplier of immigrants to the United States, followed by East Asia, Europe, the Caribbean, Central America and South America, according to the report.

A divided House Judiciary Committee approved a bill last week that would enlist military support in border surveillance and set new mandatory minimum sentences on smugglers and people convicted of re-entry after removal. Illegal presence in the country, now a civil offense, would become a federal crime.

The full House is expected to take up the measure this week, before it adjourns for the year.

President Bush has proposed a guest worker program that could allow illegal immigrants to stay in the country temporarily to fill jobs unwanted by Americans.
The guest worker provision is not part of the House bill.

Activists have been arguing for years that America needs to better secure its borders against illegal immigrants, while others argue that the American economy would collapse without the cheap labor provided by undocumented workers.

The Center for Immigration Studies report says that immigrants, on average, are less educated and more likely to live in poverty than people born in the United States.
The Pew Hispanic Center, however, says that education levels are improving among recent immigrants.

Camarota said the U.S. should work harder to expel people who are in the United States illegally.

"The obvious thing is to enforce the law, at the border and at the work site, and to deny access to bank accounts and driver licenses," Camarota said.

But Angela Kelley, deputy director of the National Immigration Forum, said it would be impossible to deport as many as 11 million illegally immigrants, who make up about 5 percent of the U.S. work force.

"There isn't fairy dust that is going to make the 11 million people go away," Kelley said. "It would be far more sensible to have them come out into the light of day ... and give them a chance to join the American family on a permanent basis."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/12/AR2005121200449.html

5.  Alito: A Sampling of Misleading Media Coverage – National Journal

Stuart Taylor Jr.
December 10, 2005

A sometimes subtle but unmistakable pattern has emerged in major news organizations' coverage of Judge Samuel Alito's Supreme Court nomination.

Through various mixes of factual distortions, tendentious wording, and uncritical parroting of misleading attacks by liberal critics, some (but not all) reporters insinuate that Alito is a slippery character who will say whatever senators want to hear, especially by "distancing himself" from past statements that (these reporters imply) show him to be a conservative ideologue.

I focus here not on the consistently mindless liberal hysteria of the New York Times' editorial page. Nor on such egregious factual errors as the assertion on C-SPAN, by Stephen Henderson of Knight Ridder Newspapers, that in a study of Alito's more than 300 judicial opinions, "we didn't find a single case in which Judge Alito sided with African-Americans ... [who were] alleging racial bias." This, Henderson added, is "rather remarkable."

What is remarkable is that any reporter could have overlooked the at least seven cases in which Alito has sided with African-Americans alleging racial bias. Also remarkable is the illiterate statistical analysis and loaded language used by Henderson and Howard Mintz in a 2,652-word article published (in whole or in part) by some 18 newspapers. It makes the highly misleading claim that in 15 years as a judge, Alito has sought "to weave a conservative legal agenda into the fabric of the nation's laws," including "a standard higher than the Supreme Court requires" for proving job discrimination.

The systematic slanting -- conscious or unconscious -- of this and many other news reports has helped fuel a disingenuous campaign by liberal groups and senators to caricature Alito as a conservative ideologue. In fact, this is a judge who -- while surely too conservative for the taste of liberal ideologues -- is widely admired by liberals, moderates, and conservatives who know him well as fair-minded, committed to apolitical judging, and wedded to no ideological agenda other than restraint in the exercise of judicial power.

Here are some other examples of slanted reports about Alito, not including those noted in my November 5 and 19 columns:

* A December 3 Washington Post front-pager by Charles Babington stressed Alito's supposed effort to "distance himself" from two 1985 documents in which he had asserted that (among other things) "I am and always have been a conservative" and "the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion." Babington added that this distancing "may expose him to accusations of insincerity or irresolution, advocates said."

Indeed. Articles such as Babington's have fueled a clamor about Alito's supposed "credibility gap" by liberal groups and attack-dog senators like Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. Liberal editorialists and columnists have joined in.

Such suggestions of insincerity are not based on anything that Alito has said. They are based on misleading characterizations by reporters of what senators say Alito has said in private meetings with them. Needless to say, some of these senators are spinning their own agendas.

One who seemed to play it straight was California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, a good bet to vote against Alito. She reported that Alito had told her: "First of all, it was different then.... I was an advocate seeking a ... political job. And that was 1985. I'm now a judge.... I'm not an advocate; I don't give heed to my personal views. What I do is interpret the law." Added Feinstein: "I believe he was very sincere."

Feinstein did not say that Alito had implied that his 1985 application had been anything other than a sincere expression of his beliefs at the time. And an administration supporter with knowledge of the private meetings tells me that Alito has made clear to senators that he stands by what he wrote then.

Alito has also, of course, told senators that the 1985 documents are less relevant than his 15-year record of apolitical judging and respect for precedents -- especially precedents that (like Roe v. Wade) have been reaffirmed repeatedly since 1985. Nothing "insincere or irresolute" about that.

The December 3 Babington article stressed that Alito had written in 1985 that he was " 'particularly proud' of fighting affirmative-action programs." But Alito had not used the words "affirmative action." He had expressed pride in opposing "racial and ethnic quotas." (Babington noted this in a second reference, without making it clear that this was all that Alito had said.)

The distinction is important. The vast majority of Americans share Alito's opposition to quotas. By falsely suggesting that Alito had condemned all forms of "affirmative action" -- a broader and more benign-sounding phrase -- Babington added a we-don't-like-him spin.

* In a December 1 Washington Post front-pager, Amy Goldstein and Jo Becker found it remarkable that Alito had "referred to a doctor who performs [abortions] as an 'abortionist' and railed against a ... decision that had struck down an ordinance that he said was 'designed to preclude the mindless dumping of aborted fetuses into garbage piles.' "

But some abortion doctors call themselves abortionists. Alito's memo used "abortionists" once, while referring to such specialists as "doctors" or "physicians" some 15 times. And in the words of Edward Whelan, head of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center: "If we can refer to a doctor who does podiatry as a podiatrist and a doctor who does cardiology as a cardiologist, why can't we refer to a doctor who does abortions as an abortionist?"

"Railed against" is, of course, a phrase often used to imply ranting and raving -- the antithesis of the thoughtful analysis in the Alito memo. And that colorful quote about "mindless dumping of aborted fetuses"? Those were not Alito's words, as the reporters asserted. He was dutifully quoting the city's explanation of its own ordinance.

* A December 5 New York Times front-pager by David Kirkpatrick focused on how "Judge Alito has often invoked his father's legacy to help deflect questions from skeptical Democrats." Portions of the article can be read as reflecting well on Alito. But it also contains strange and utterly unsupported insinuations that Alito is perhaps being insincere in touting his father as a role model -- even that he may have fabricated stories about his father to make himself look good.

"Still," Kirkpatrick writes, "some colleagues and friends of the elder Mr. Alito, who died in 1987, said they had never heard some of the stories his son has recounted," including a story that his father had "in college once defended a black basketball player from discrimination on the team."

I read this as implying that Alito, to pad his racial-sensitivity resume, had perhaps made the whole thing up. So I was surprised to find that Kirkpatrick had dug up hard evidence that this story was true -- and had cited it for the benefit of those readers who managed to make it to his 16th paragraph. The evidence is a 1935 editorial in the campus newspaper denouncing the college for benching the black player for a game with a segregated teachers college. Alito's father was editor-in-chief of the newspaper.

* A December 6 Boston Globe front-pager by Michael Kranish breathlessly reported that Alito was noted as "present" when the 12-judge U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit declined to rehear a three-judge panel's decision in the case of one Larry Kopp, in 1992.

Why is this front-page news? Well, reports Kranish, Alito had signed Kopp's bank fraud indictment five years before, as U.S. attorney for New Jersey. And on taking the bench, he had promised not to participate in the case. So if he participated, he broke his promise!

One problem: It seems quite unlikely that Alito did participate. Most petitions for rehearing simply die automatically without a vote in the 3rd Circuit, because usually no judge requests a vote. And court clerks often mark judges "present" at such sessions whether they vote or not, or are recused.

Then there is the little problem with the headline. It reads: "Alito's policy on recusals is questioned." But the article identifies nobody (other than Kranish) who has questioned Alito's supposed role in the Kopp case.

To be sure, many critics have questioned Alito's participation in other cases -- without citing a shred of evidence of any conflict of interest, ever. That's a story for another day.

Meanwhile, lest this column be dismissed as pro-Bush propaganda, I hereby associate myself with a comment by Walter Murphy, the distinguished constitutional scholar who was Alito's thesis adviser at Princeton University:
“I confess surprise that a man so dreadfully intellectually and morally challenged as George W. Bush would want a person as intellectually gifted, independent, and morally principled as Sam Alito on the bench.”

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