The liberal media pile-on over the Sanford and Ensign extra-marital affairs aren’t just a collaboration of double standards, they’re off base too.

Consider the New York Times’ Gail Collins:

I’m thinking it’s time for the Republicans to apologize for putting us through the Clinton impeachment. We seem to have pretty well established that sexual stone-throwing is a dangerous sport.

Gov. Sanford and Sen. John Ensign (R, NV) may be cheating idiots who didn’t have the decency to divorce their spouses first, but they weren’t found guilty by a federal judge for perjury and then use their office to obstruct justice — as did Clinton.

That’s the point: despite the historic revisionism by the liberal base the rationale behind the Clinton impeachment wasn’t that he was an immoral anathema to family values, but that he lied during a sworn deposition in which his prosecutors were establishing a pattern of abuse during a sexual harassment case. Once more the “feminists” at the NYTs and their ilk show they are only feminists when it’s politically convenient for them.

Here’s another point: the brazen double-standard liberals follow in cases of politicians sexual misconduct. This shouldn’t be “The Long Winter” for Republicans, as today’s Washington Post puts the outing of Sanford and Ensign. Family values and such topics are no more dead today than the day before. It’s not Republicans who are smeared, but Sanford and Ensign, as they should be. The difference is that these men are officially outcasts in the eyes of fellow Republicans, whereas Democrats who do the same are excused by their apologists in the liberal base — who instead just hope and pray for the next Republican to foul up in order to even the score.

Whether the party plank is family values, free-market economics, limited government (this being Gail Collin’s biggest beef with Mark Sanford), or other, when our Republican leaders let us down the answer isn’t to disqualify the issue, it’s to purge the offending politician from the ranks.

[Washington Post] Senior Obama administration officials are debating how to address a potential terrorist threat to U.S. interests from a Somali extremist group, with some in the military advocating strikes against its training camps. But many officials maintain that uncertainty about the intentions of the al-Shabab organization dictates a more patient, nonmilitary approach.

Al-Shabab, whose fighters have battled Ethiopian occupiers and the tenuous Somali government, poses a dilemma for the administration, according to several senior national security officials who outlined the debate only on the condition of anonymity.

The organization’s rapid expansion, ties between its leaders and al-Qaeda, and the presence of Americans and Europeans in its camps have raised the question of whether a preemptive strike is warranted. Yet the group’s objectives have thus far been domestic, and officials say that U.S. intelligence has no evidence it is planning attacks outside Somalia.

Gee, isn’t international waters “outside Somalia?” No matter. Team Obama is “mulling” their response. We can all take comfort in that. As can the families of victims terrorized and captured by Somali pirates. By “mulling” of course I mean weakness, which only encourages more acts of piracy. Obama is making Jimmy Carter look down right hawkish.

“The shores of Tripoli” isn’t just a rhyme in a patriotic song, it’s a solution President Thomas Jefferson offered his era’s piracy problems.

Wonder over what other events the Obama team is mulling?

Iran perhaps?

“Today, with the grace of God, Iran is a country controlling the entire nuclear fuel cycle,” proclaimed Iranian “President” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “Iran now controls the entire cycle for producing nuclear fuel with the opening of a new facility to produce uranium fuel pellets,” according to the Associated Press. It’s reportedly the last step in creating nuclear fuel.

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia successfully test-fired a Topol intercontinental ballistic missile on Friday as part of checks needed to extend its service life for up to 22 years, Russian media reported.

So much for Obama’s new arms control era.

And of course North Korea. It’s recent missile launching is “turning into an early test of the Obama administration’s U.N.-focused multilateralism.” In other words, Team Obama isn’t getting any further along with U.N. cooperation than Bush before him (or Clinton before him, and so on), did.

Just a few months ago Obama ridiculed his presidential opponent for needed to do more than one thing at a time. It’s a little harder when one is president though.

Surprise, surprise: Another Obama intelligence community leader doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about:

Former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia and likely chair of the National Intelligence Council (NIC), Chas Freeman in 2002:

“I’m a very practical man, and my concern is simply this: that there are movements, like Hamas, like Hezbollah, that in recent decades have not done anything against the United States or Americans, even though the United States supports their enemy, Israel.”

Read the rest of the quote. Then note this by Thomas Joscelyn’s:

Freeman’s more noteworthy analytical error, in my view, is his description of the recent past. Read again the lines underlined above. How could Freeman claim — in 2002 — that Hezbollah has “not done anything against the United States or Americans, even though the United States supports their enemy, Israel” in “recent decades”?

In June of 1996, just six years prior to Freeman’s comments (that is, not even one decade in the past at the time), Hezbollah was directly responsible for the Khobar Towers bombing. There is no doubt over Hezbollah’s and Iran’s role in the attack. The Clinton administration, the Bush administration, the 9/11 Commission, the DOJ, and everyone else that I am aware of are in agreement: Iran was responsible for the attack. Al Qaeda may have also played a role, per the 9/11 Commission’s final report and other evidence. But this does not diminish the fact that Iran and Hezbollah were principally responsible.

The 2001 indictment of the Khobar Towers conspirators makes Hezbollah’s and Iran’s role clear. And, as former Clinton administration officials have repeatedly said, this was clear long before 2001 as well.

19 U.S. servicemen were killed at Khobar Towers. More than 370 others, including some Americans as well as civilians and workers of various other nationalities, were wounded. Yet, Chas Freeman was apparently unaware that the attack was executed by Hezbollah. He was evidently ignorant of this fact even though it took place inside the Saudi Kingdom, home to his controversial patron, the Saudi royal family.

The attack on Khobar Towers was not some minor blimp on the national security screen. It was a direct assault on the American forces that were stationed in the Gulf to maintain the Clinton administration’s dual containment of Saddam’s Iraq and the mullahs’ Iran.

Our intelligence professionals, especially those charged with stopping the terrorist threat, were certainly aware of all this in 2002. Chas Freeman apparently was not.

What we learned from President Herbert Hoover is that the worst thing one can do when in an economic slump, especially a big one such as the 1929 market crash, is to raise taxes. Raising taxes discourages growth, expansion, spending and most importantly, hiring. So, one must wonder what’s going to be the result of this policy:

Obama’s First Budget Seeks To Trim Deficit
Plan Would Cut War Spending, Increase Taxes on the Wealthy
By Lori Montgomery and Ceci Connolly
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, February 22, 2009; A01

President Obama is putting the finishing touches on an ambitious first budget that seeks to cut the federal deficit in half over the next four years, primarily by raising taxes on businesses and the wealthy and by slashing spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, administration officials said.

In addition to tackling a deficit swollen by the $787 billion stimulus package and other efforts to ease the nation’s economic crisis, the budget blueprint will press aggressively for progress on the domestic agenda Obama outlined during the presidential campaign. This would include key changes to environmental policies and a major expansion of health coverage that he hopes to enact later this year.

That’s the “side of Clinton” in the post title — Clinton cut defense spending from about 4.6% of gross domestic product in 1992 to just over 3%. That’s the only way they achieved any surplus, and the notion that Clinton’s tax increase did that is a bald-faced myth. Indeed, the economy under Clinton didn’t make its greatest jumps until he signed the Gingrich House Republicans capital gains tax cut in 1997.

So, Obama seems to be warming up his go-back machine, except with some new wrinkles: Free health care, curb energy consumption but we’ll slash the military budget to do that.

Crazy. At least Bill Clinton had some history on his side. The Cold War was finally over. That’s what the Reagan defense build up purchased Clinton, the opportunity to spend less on defense and create a surplus the only way Democrats knew how. But Obama isn’t going to get the grace Clinton received. 9-11 changed everything. Or did it? Apparently it didn’t change a thing for some.

Leahy Proposes Panel To Investigate Bush Era
U.S. Attorney Firings Among Issues
By Philip Rucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 10, 2009; A04

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday called for a “truth commission” to investigate controversial actions of the Bush administration, including the politically inspired firings of U.S. attorneys, the treatment and torture of terrorism suspects and the authorization of warrantless wiretapping.

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) said his proposal is meant to launch a fact-finding inquiry into key decisions of George W. Bush’s presidency, including intelligence matters before and during the Iraq war and scandals at the Department of Justice. He said such a commission would not seek to prosecute former administration officials but would have the power to subpoena them to testify.

“Rather than vengeance, we need a fair-minded pursuit of what actually happened,” Leahy said as he outlined his proposal during a speech at Georgetown University. “Sometimes the best way to move forward is getting to the truth, finding out what happened, so we can make sure it does not happen again.”

Leahy likened the proposed commission to the “truth and reconciliation” panels that investigated the apartheid regime in South Africa and the 1979 Ku Klux Klan massacre in Greensboro, N.C. He said the commission could be made up of “a group of people universally recognized as fair minded and without axes to grind.”

George W. Bush = Apartheid.

Dick Cheney = KKK.

Yeah, no axes to grind there…

While we’re on the topic, perhaps Sen. Leahy can investigate himself and fellow House and Senate Democrats, because many of them as members of the House and Senate Select Intelligence Committees were informed of and, one assumes by their years of silence on the matter, agreed to the government’s decision to both warrantless wiretapping (what is oft erroneously termed domestic wiretapping) and harsh interrogation methods. Also, the senator should investigate himself for years of leaking classified intelligence to the media (he was even stripped of intelligence duties in the 1980s before his rebirth as head witch-hunter).

Next, Leahy’s committee could investigate Leon Panetta, President Obama’s pick for the director of CIA. Panetta, it seems, agreed to outlaw torture except when the government decides it “absolutely necessary to find out what information that individual has,” which is a nice way of saying that his CIA actually won’t outlaw torture. (The WSJ rightly termed this the “Jack Bauer exception.”)

Perhaps Leahy could investigate former President Bill Clinton, who instituted rendition as a U.S. policy? And while he’s investigating Clinton for rendition, he could also investigate Clinton for firing every U.S. attorney (whereas Bush only fired some).

Finally, Sen. Leahy needs to investigate Attorney General Eric Holder and President Obama himself, because according to The Washington Post, Obama and Holder “invoked the same ‘state secrets’ privilege as its predecessor [Bush] in federal court in San Francisco yesterday in opposing the reinstatement of a lawsuit that alleges that a Boeing Co. unit flew people to countries where they were tortured as part of the CIA’s ‘extraordinary rendition.’”

This puts Obama’s CIA in the same place as Bush’s CIA. It would seem that it’s far easier to criticize intelligence gathering as a candidate than it is as a president, whom the public holds accountable for their safety. This, in part, explains why Obama wants little to do with Leahy’s ridiculous fishing expedition.

Courtesy of the New York Times, the sheer scale of their “Bush caused the mortgage crisis” lie is staggering. That the New York Times engages in purposeful amnesia over the 1970s to the 1990s, the Clinton Administration, the Community Reinvestment Act, or that Democrats in Congress blocked every attempt to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac leaves me speechless. To paraphrase the Nazis, if you’re going to lie, lie big… I guess.

There are plenty of culprits, like lenders who peddled easy credit, consumers who took on mortgages they could not afford and Wall Street chieftains who loaded up on mortgage-backed securities without regard to the risk.

But the story of how we got here is partly one of Mr. Bush’s own making, according to a review of his tenure that included interviews with dozens of current and former administration officials.

From his earliest days in office, Mr. Bush paired his belief that Americans do best when they own their own home with his conviction that markets do best when let alone.

He pushed hard to expand homeownership, especially among minorities, an initiative that dovetailed with his ambition to expand the Republican tent — and with the business interests of some of his biggest donors. But his housing policies and hands-off approach to regulation encouraged lax lending standards.

Mr. Bush did foresee the danger posed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage finance giants. The president spent years pushing a recalcitrant Congress to toughen regulation of the companies, but was unwilling to compromise when his former Treasury secretary wanted to cut a deal. And the regulator Mr. Bush chose to oversee them — an old prep school buddy — pronounced the companies sound even as they headed toward insolvency.

“There are plenty of culprits,” but we’ll blame Bush. The loan policies were intended to help minorities, but since we had planned a series of stories calling him a racist had he not tried to expand the program we’ll just blame the crisis on him instead. Congress refused to oversee Fannie and Freddie, but we’ll blame Bush.

Un-Bel-ievable. The notion that everybody should own a home didn’t start with Bush, it started with Jimmy Carter, was radically expanded under Clinton, and bipartisanly in Congress throughout the 1990s.

To propagate that “how we got here is partly one of Mr. Bush’s own making” is a stinking lie, wrapped in manure, stuck inside a land fill.

But like I said below, when you betray your own base it encourages your enemies to grandiose proportions.

“Citi never sleeps,” says the bank’s advertising slogan. But its directors apparently do. While CEO Vikram Pandit can argue that many of Citi’s problems were created before he arrived in 2007, most board members have no such excuse. Former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin has served on the Citi board for a decade. For much of that time he was chairman of the executive committee, collecting tens of millions to massage the Beltway crowd, though apparently not for asking tough questions about risk management.

The writers at the Deal Journal blog remind us of one particularly egregious massaging, when Mr. Rubin tried to use political muscle to prop up Enron, a valued Citi client. Mr. Rubin asked a Treasury official to lean on credit-rating agencies to maintain a more positive rating than Enron deserved. What signal will President-elect Barack Obama send if his Administration, populated with Mr. Rubin’s protégés, allows this uberfixer to continue flying hither and yon on the corporate jet while taxpayers foot the bill?

– Wall Street Journal.

We just learned this week that CitiBank was one of the four failed banks that paid Bill Clinton “$2.1 million for 13 speeches he delivered on their behalf between 2004-2007.” So, in effect, your tax dollars from the bailout go in part to Bill & Hillary Clinton.

Ain’t life grand!

Meanwhile, Barack Obama’s idea of “change,” is to fill his cabinet with former Clinton administration people, the very same people who created this Fannie/Freddie-Community Reinvestment Act nightmare.

Funny, but I recall the legions of Obamamessiah backers claiming that an Obama-Clinton ticket would undermine his image of bringing “change” to Washington; “New Politics” and all that recycled junk.

Low and behold, “Thirty-one of the 47 people so far named to transition or staff posts have ties to the Clinton administration, including all but one of the members of his 12-person Transition Advisory Board and both of his White House staff choices.” That includes, of course, Rahm Emanuel, and possibly (probably) now a Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

This is change?

Throw in the name Gregory Craig as White House Chief Counsel. Craig’s resume?

In the early 1980s, [Craig] was an attorney for John Hinckley, the man who shot President Reagan and three others. Craig helped put together an insanity defense that led to Hinckley’s acquittal. Nine years later, he advised Ted Kennedy in the Palm Beach rape case involving the senator and his nephew, William Kennedy Smith. …

Craig orchestrated a 1984 [Senate] hearing for Kennedy on alleged human-rights abuses committed by Nicaragua’s rebels, the Contras. He worked with groups closely tied to the Sandinista regime to find witnesses for the forum, which led to a round of anti-contra news coverage in the U.S. Soon afterward, however, Joshua Muravchik, currently of the American Enterprise Institute, exposed a fraud: The most compelling witnesses — three Miskito Indians — had been served up by the Sandinistas.

And a fourth participant, Father Alfredo Gundrum, an American priest living in Nicaragua, had been asked to play the role of honest broker — to place the testimony “into some kind of perspective,” as Kennedy put it. Gundrum, described as “totally apolitical” in background material distributed by Kennedy’s staff, told of how the Contras launched vicious raids on Indian villages “almost every day.” Yet Gundrum had been the subject of a San Francisco newspaper article just one month before the hearing. He was photographed standing before his church with a Soviet-made rifle in his hands and quoted as saying, “To me it was a day of grace the day the Sandinistas took over, and I really mean it.”

Craig is even tied to the Elian Gonzalez case.

Of course, a lot of people on the Left think going back to the 1990s would be great.

Maybe, but I guess it depends how you remember the 1990s. For instance, maybe you remember the IT boom. Then again, maybe you remember the peace that never was.

Surprise, surprise, in a headline titled, “Secret order lets U.S. raid Al Qaeda around the world,” the New York Times leaks more U.S. intelligence to our enemies.

The United States military since 2004 has used broad, secret authority to carry out nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks against Al Qaeda and other militants in Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere, according to senior American officials.

These military raids, typically carried out by Special Operations forces, were authorized by a classified order that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed in the spring of 2004 with the approval of President George W. Bush, the officials said. The secret order gave the military new authority to attack the Qaeda terrorist network anywhere in the world, and a more sweeping mandate to conduct operations in countries not at war with the United States.

… The 2004 order was a step marking the evolution of how the American government sought to kill or capture Qaeda terrorists around the world. It was issued after the Bush administration had already granted America’s intelligence agencies sweeping power to secretly detain and interrogate terrorism suspects in overseas prisons and to conduct warrantless eavesdropping on telephone and electronic communications.

Moving beyond the NYT’s motives, that last paragraph got me wondering how a President Barack Obama might deal with current U.S. counter-terrorism and intelligence policies, particularly regarding wiretapping and extraordinary renditions, what with all the talk of how pragmatic the man supposedly is.

The bottom line is this: On the morning of September 12, 2001 nobody ever thought we would go 8 years without another terrorist attack on U.S. soil. The question was “when,” not “if.” And no amount of liberal revisionist history or demonizing Bush and Cheney policies will change that.

Barack Obama could on his first day in office, with the stroke of a pen, erase these policies. But there’s a major risk in him doing so — any attack on U.S. soil after that and he’d be legitimately attacked by the public. Such an action could ruin a president.

After all, despite the misinformation from the New York Times, both the warantless wiretap and rendition programs were created prior to George W. Bush.

The Reagan administration used renditions to grab Royal Jordanian Flight 402 hijacker Fawaz Yunis.

President Bill Clinton expanded the rendition program in 1995 to allow U.S. agencies like the FBI or CIA to capture terrorist suspects and transfer them to Egypt (a country whose lack of civil liberties was quite known to the Clinton administration). Former CIA agent Michael Scheuer brought this revelation to light in December 2005, which was naturally ignored by the mainstream press.

In his book “Against All Enemies,” former Clinton-era counter-terrorism Czar Richard Clarke quoted then laughing Vice-President Al Gore arguing for the policy, saying, “That’s [rendition] a no-brainer. Of course it’s a violation of international law, that’s why it’s a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass.”

So when the New York Time’s cites Bush’s “sweeping power to secretly detain and interrogate terrorism suspects in overseas prisons,” it is actually referencing Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan prisons all run by the U.S. military, not renition to foreign countries. The policy of extradition to foreign powers (primarily Egypt) had already been established by Bill Clinton six years before 9-11.

Similarly, despite all the bellyaching surrounding Bush’s witetap program, he simply enacted through The Patriot Act what other presidents had attempted or used through executive order. In July of 1996 the Clinton Administration identified gaps in the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) law that allowed terrorists and enemies of the state to exploit U.S. counter-terrorism efforts. Blogger A.J. noted at the time the document came to light, “Everyone in the Clinton Administration is now on record from 1996 claiming that if these things are not done, we are in greater danger.”

Optimistically, we can speculate that a President Obama won’t attempt to weaken our counter-terrorism policies, in light of his June decision to back legislation — since passed — making permanant many of the Patriot Act provisions that were set to expire.

Of course, back then Obama was running for president. It remains to be seen if Obama will now tack hard left on foreign policy rather than stay in the center.

This tells you two things. First, once you become an ex-president you have a little more freedom to be objective and centrist. And, two, Obama has really pissed off the Clintons.