Really quick Sunday afternoon round-up and Open Thread

Victorian posy of pansiesJust a few more links to round out the day.

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Walmart gets huge kudos for its charming, but still pointed, fact-filled response to a grossly biased — indeed, defamatory — New York Times opinion piece.

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Rand Paul nails it: The federal government should not be concerning itself with an NFL team name.  This is another reminder of the terrible damage the civil rights movement did to American politics.  Because the federal government belated worked its way to the moral position on the issue, DemProgs have forever since believed that the government is their Leftist moral sword.  It shouldn’t be.

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Reading about this the travails Christian converts suffer in Muslim lands is precisely like reading the old martyrdom stories from the earliest days of Christianity. Just as with the original Christians in pagan lands, these new converts are the most devout, brave people one can imagine. This generation’s St. Sebastians and St. Catherines are living now in Muslim lands.

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Methinks Cheney speaks the truth when he says another 9/11, only far worse than before, is headed our way. As I’ve said before, I do not agree that he was wrong in 2003 when he backed the Iraq war. The joker in the deck wasn’t WMDs, or insurgents, or anything else — it was the anti-War Left at home that made sure that the U.S., despite its massive military advantage and on-the-ground support from ordinary Iraqis, could not win. Ours was a fifth column failure, with Barack Hussein Obama driving the final nail into that coffin.

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DemProgs are trying to say that Republicans cannot critique Hillary’s laughing retelling of the way in which she maligned a 12-year-old to save a rapist because Todd Akin. What they don’t understand is (a) that Todd Akin was a fool, but not a hypocrite; and (b) that Republicans disavowed him with head spinning speed. Hillary, however, has built her entire career on being “the women’s politician.” To hear her cheerfully cackle about destroying a 12-year-old is appalling. Speaking as a lawyer, here are a few things to understand:

  1. Even bad guys are entitled to a defense. The beauty of our criminal justice system is the principle that, when an individual faces the awesome majesty and power of the law, he is presumed innocent and you are allowed a friend, in the form of a lawyer, at his side. This recognizes that, no matter how bad a criminal is, the government is much scarier and more dangerous.
  2. There is nothing wrong with a young lawyer taking on a criminal case (see the reasons stated in 1., above).
  3. There is nothing wrong with a lawyer giving her all to a case once she’s taken it on. Indeed, doing so is a professional, ethical obligation.
  4. Giving your all to the case does not mean lying . . . and the way Hillary speaks about that affidavit libeling a 12-year-old rape victim makes it sound very much as if Hillary made up those vague accusations out of whole cloth.
  5. There is something terribly disturbing about hearing a lawyer laughingly explain how she got a known rapist off by slandering a child victim. Assuming there was no attorney-client privilege in effect then (which might have been the case if the rapist was dead when she gave the interview), she should have spoken of the matter in subdued, measured tones, explaining the points I made in 1-3 above.
  6. The disturbing aspects of the interview rise to epic heights when the lawyer is someone who has billed herself as a champion of women’s rights. It reminds us how she venomously slandered as crazy or sluttish the women that Bill Clinton assaulted, raped, and harassed, as well as the women with whom he had adulterous affairs.

To get a fullest picture of Hillary’s hypocrisy, not to mention the stand-alone awfulness of her conduct, as well as the equally heinous hypocrisy of her supporters, read Sultan Knish on the matter.