“Hail! to the victors valiant…” (and More)

I didn’t post following the conclusion of yesterday’s rout in South Bend; it was simply too painful. OK, maybe not “painful,” but certainly a disappointment. A major disappointment. Michigan brought game into South Bend yesterday and they owned Notre Dame, totally. ND’s season may not be over at this point in time, but the hopes of a national championship have been dashed. It’ll be a blessing if ND doesn’t fall out of the Top 25.

YouTube is a wonderful thing, particularly when it comes to the profusion of home-grown military videos they have encouraged or facilitated. Mike claims VAW-116 has way too much time on their hands. Me? I think they’ve put that time to excellent use. BZ, VAW-116!

There’s a bit of a buzz around the ‘sphere on a potential al Qaeda nuclear strike on the US during Ramadan, which begins the end of this month. I first read of this last week but decided not to post on the subject because I don’t believe in fear-mongering…we have more than enough of that these days. However. Abu Dawood, the leader of AQ in Afghanistan, has supposedly warned all Muslims to leave the US prior to the strike and singles out New York and Washington, particularly. And the warning identified the AQ member who’s supposedly in charge of the operation, one Adnan G. El Shukrijumah. The government has a five million dollar bounty on El Shukrijumah. Gateway Pundit has a video of El Shukrijumah, in addition to the pictures featured on the FBI’s web site.

I doubt seriously if AQ or any other terrorist organization, for that matter, has the capability to detonate a nuclear device in the US or anywhere else. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of a “dirty bomb,” however. As the Wikipedia article mentions, the principal effects of a dirty bomb would be terror and panic, not mass casualties. One would also assume “terror and panic” includes severe economic repercussions. I shudder to think of what would happen to the economy if a dirty bomb were to be detonated at the corner of Wall and Broad in NYC. Or in the vicinity of Capitol Hill in D.C. And then there are the unknown ripple effects on each and every one of us as individuals, effects on the body politic, and the effect of such an action on the world-wide umma. All bad. Really, really bad.

My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy has more, as does Wizbang.

John Yoo, Berkeley law professor and former Bush administration deputy assistant attorney general, has an excellent op-ed (How the Presidency Regained Its Balance) in today’s NYT. Excerpts:

FIVE years after 9/11, President Bush has taken his counterterrorism case to the American people. That’s because he has had to. This summer, a plurality of the Supreme Court found, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, that Congress must explicitly approve military commissions to try suspected terrorists. So Mr. Bush has proposed legislation seeking to place the tribunals, and other aggressive antiterrorism measures, on a sounder footing.

But the president has broader goals than even fighting terrorism — he has long intended to make reinvigorating the presidency a priority. Vice President Dick Cheney has rightly deplored the “erosion of the powers and the ability of the president of the United States to do his job” and noted that “we are weaker today as an institution because of the unwise compromises that have been made over the last 30 to 35 years.”

[…]

To his critics, Mr. Bush is a “King George” bent on an “imperial presidency.” But the inescapable fact is that war shifts power to the branch most responsible for its waging: the executive. Harry Truman sent troops to fight in Korea without Congressional authority. George H. W. Bush did not have the consent of Congress when he invaded Panama to apprehend Manuel Noriega. Nor did Bill Clinton when he initiated NATO’s air war over Kosovo.

[…]

A reinvigorated presidency enrages President Bush’s critics, who seem to believe that the Constitution created a system of judicial or congressional supremacy. Perhaps this is to be expected of the generation of legislators that views the presidency through the lens of Vietnam and Watergate. But the founders intended that wrongheaded or obsolete legislation and judicial decisions would be checked by presidential action, just as executive overreaching is to be checked by the courts and Congress.

The changes of the 1970’s occurred largely because we had no serious national security threats to United States soil, but plenty of paranoia in the wake of Richard Nixon’s use of national security agencies to spy on political opponents. Congress enacted the War Powers Resolution, which purports to cut off presidential uses of force abroad after 60 days. It passed the Budget and Impoundment Act to eliminate the modest presidential power to rein in wasteful spending. The Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act required the government to get a warrant from a special court to conduct wiretapping for national security reasons.

These statutes have produced little but dysfunction, from flouting of the war powers law, to ever-higher pork barrel spending, to the wall between intelligence and law enforcement that contributed to our failure to stop the 9/11 attacks.

Hoo-Boy, but does the Left ever hate Mr. Yoo. I can’t think of anyone, save Dubya, Cheney, and Rummy, who attracts more ire than John Yoo. Yoo is widely and thoroughly disparaged for his alleged “torture memos” written during his tenure at Justice, among other things. The Left’s reaction to today’s op-ed is, therefore, quite predictable. TalkLeft is typical of the Lefty opinion of Mr. Yoo; read at your own risk. Some of us, however, think Mr. Yoo is quite correct and are hugely appreciative of his work, both now and in the past.

One thing puzzles me about Mr. Yoo, however. Why Berkeley, for crying out loud? Of all the possible places a conservative could teach, Yoo chose Berkeley. The man just has to be a closet masochist… (Please note: my tongue is firmly in my cheek.)

Today’s Pic: The Rio Grande Gorge, just outside of Taos, NM. Taken from the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge, which is something of a tourist attraction, believe it or don’t. It’s kinda scary out on that bridge when a semi or two rumbles by, too, coz the damned thing moves up and down more than a few inches. Not at all good for an acrophobic like myself. May 7, 2004.