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Nationalreview Today on NRO JONAH GOLDBERG: The UVA rape story was the perfect outrage to further feminist activists’ ideological agenda. The Feminist Power Grab. THE EDITORS: Rape is too serious to be left to deans. Rape and Rolling Stone. CHARLES C.W. COOKE: Harvard law students have been taught to think like spoiled children. Social Injustice Ate My Homework. JAY WEISER: There’s a middle ground between prohibition and commercial production. Crony Consumerism. SLIDESHOW: The Winter War. Morning Jolt . . . with Jim Geraghty December 10, 2014 Gruber Offers a Look at Democrats’ Own ‘47 Percent’ Philosophy Take a good look, America. If you can’t stand that smug twerp Jonathan Gruber, refusing to tell you directly about how much money he’s made from his contracts with the White House and state governments even when questioned under oath . . . you have to realize this is perfectly fine with Barack Obama and Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. This is not some bolt out of the blue, some unbelievable turn of events causing things to go wrong in progressive liberal governance. The only thing that really went “wrong” in their mind is that Gruber was particularly explicit and publicly stated their shared contempt for voters, their facile understanding of Obamacare, and their naïve belief in the promises used to sell it. Americans, you got really upset about Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comment. It’s understandable; you figured that the candidate was saying something nice about the voters as a whole when in public, and writing off a lot of voters as hopeless and hapless when behind closed doors. That is exactly what Jonathan Gruber did. Over and over again. “It’s a very clever, you know, basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter,” Gruber said at the Honors Colloquium 2012 at the University of Rhode Island. At the University of Pennsylvania in 2013 (which you can see here) Gruber said, “If you had a law which said healthy people are going to pay in -- if you made it explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed, okay? Just like how people -- transparent -- lack of transparency is a huge advantage. And basically, you know, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever. But basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.” At Washington University in St. Louis in 2013, Gruber said “They proposed it and that passed, because the American people are too stupid to understand the difference.” This is not a gaffe. This is not a “speak-o”, as he called one of his earlier statements that later proved deeply inconvenient to the Obama administration’s legal arguments. This is who the guy is. And the only thing unique about Gruber is that he says out loud, and in public, what most elected Democrats think. Stop buying what they claim about how they care about the little guy. Somehow, Jonathan Gruber had the cojones to claim you’re not entitled to know how much he had been paid by taxpayers. “Gruber testified and did not disclose he was being paid by the Obama administration. That is deception at its highest form,” yelled Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). “Give me a dollar amount. You’re not going to answer the question? You’re under oath and you’re not going to answer the question.” Gruber, consulting with someone in the audience at least twice, said his written financial disclosure was a matter committee staff should broach with his legal team. “I’ve been informed by counsel that my disclosure is in compliance with the House committee rules,” Gruber said. Another member of the committee, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), called for a subpoena to get documents related to Gruber’s contract work. “We only received $100,000 in disclosures, which were three grants,” Issa said. “In other words, the gentleman’s disclosure is incomplete.” Gruber replied that he was only required to provide details from this fiscal year and the previous two. When a guy won’t tell you how much he’s being paid by state agencies, it’s because the number is really embarrassing to somebody. Why the Shock that Post-9/11 Interrogation Systems Were Set Up ‘Very Fast’? We could ask who’s really troubled by the waterboarding of a guy like Khalid Sheik Mohammed. We could ask why the Senate Democrats didn’t talk to any of the CIA directors or deputy directors in charge when the interrogation techniques and treatment that they label “torture” occurred. We could ask if any of this is really news, and what purpose it serves to drag all of this out, again, after we’ve already seen waterboarding used as a plot device in the movie of the bin Laden raid. We can ask if the moral preening of Senate Democrats is worth any risk to Americans attacked or killed in the coming days in response to this report. We could ask if it’s really a better policy -- for either America’s national security interests or the jihadis themselves -- to drone-strike them to death and dismemberment, instead of capture them and use interrogation methods like these. We could ask if waterboarding captured terrorists is really a worse sin than, say, civilian casualties of drone strikes, such as the couple hundred children killed in them. We could ask why the Obama administration is so quiet about this report, and why Senate Democrats are contradicting a CIA director that President Obama appointed and that almost all of them voted to confirm. CIA Director John Brennan strongly disagreed with the finding. “Our review indicates that interrogations of detainees (subject to enhanced interrogation) did produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives,” he said. “The intelligence gained from the program was critical to our understanding of al Qaeda continues to inform our counterterrorism efforts to this day.” But let’s just go back to this particular criticism, coming from our own president: “I think overall, the men and women at the CIA do a really tough job and they do it really well,” Obama said later Tuesday in an interview with Telemundo. “But in the aftermath of 9/11, in the midst of a national trauma, and uncertainty as to whether these attacks were gonna repeat themselves, what’s clear is that the CIA set up something very fast without a lot of forethought to what the ramifications might be.” No kidding, Sherlock. Of course the CIA set this up very fast -- they had to! How the hell do you think the American people would have responded if their government had said they were taking a patient, deliberate, cautious approach to building an interrogation system for captured al-Qaeda? There was no playbook for this. There was no pre-existing system for how you get lunatics driven by an apocalyptic worldview to spill the beans on what their buddies are planning. Our government had to make up the solution as it went along -- and almost every other Western government on earth signed on to the plan. You want to see multilateralism? Fifty-four other countries assisted, hosted, or participated in the post-9/11 system of capture, rendition, and interrogation -- including Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Thailand and Turkey. Opportunistic politicians around the globe may be complaining now, but dozens of governments knew about this and signed on. And let’s not let Obama get away with this “uncertainty as to whether these attacks were gonna repeat themselves” line. There were more attacks! The anthrax mailings started in October -- not perpetrated by al-Qaeda, but neither the government nor the public would know that for years. Al-Qaeda’s shoe bomber tries to blow up American Airlines flight 63 in December 2001. On July 4, 2002, an Egyptian shoots up the El Al counter at Los Angeles International Airport. In October 2002, the Beltway sniper attacks begin. And this doesn’t include the numerous attempts to kill Americans abroad: In October 2002, al-Qaeda launches the Bali bombing, killing 202 people, including 7 Americans. In May 2003, an attack on a compound on Riyadh, Saudi Arabia kills 9 Americans. In November 2003, two truck bombs blow up huge chunks of downtown Istanbul, including outside the British Consulate. Madrid 2004, London 2005, the Islamabad Marriott in 2008, Mumbai 2008, the attempt to bomb the flight into Detroit in 2009, Benghazi 2012 . . . We’re setting ourselves up for a world where after the next attack hits, everyone assigned the task of stopping the perpetrators and their allies will be wondering if they’ll become the villain du jour within a couple of years. Obamacare Is Cancelling Plans; Patients Going without Tests Pay attention to the important stuff. Wyoming Republican Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) provided a poignant moment. Here’s what she said: On October 24, the week before election, my husband went to sleep and never woke up. He had a massive heart attack in his sleep at age 65. A perfectly, by all accounts, healthy man. Come to find out, in a conversation with his physician after he died, he chose not to have one of the tests, the last tests, his doctor told him to have. This happened to coincide with the time that we were told that we were not covered by Obamacare. I’m not telling you that my husband died because of Obamacare. He died because he had a massive heart attack in his sleep. Lummis’s husband was Alvin Wiederspahn, a former Democratic state legislator and a lawyer and rancher. They married in 1983. When he died, Lummis released this statement, which mentions the couple’s only child: “Last night, my husband, Al, passed away peacefully in his sleep in our home in Cheyenne. Annaliese and I know that God has taken Al home to heaven, but right now our hearts are broken.” Her statement about her husband in the Gruber hearing wasn’t so much a question as much as it was a raw accusation about the Affordable Care Act, a statement she ended by asking for some compassion.”I want to suggest that regardless of what happened to me personally, that there have been so many glitches in the passage and implementation of Obamacare that have real-life consequences on peoples’ lives,” she said, almost choking up. “The so-called glibness that has been referenced today has direct consequences for real American people. So get over your damn glibness.” ADDENDA: You may recall a long, long, time ago, in a political environment that was a metaphorical galaxy far away, The American Spectator’s Jeff Lord called me a servant of the ruling class. (Irish Alzheimer’s: When you forget anything but a grudge.) But that was a long time ago, and Jeff recently wrote something quite nice, calling my points about the danger of narrative journalism prescient over at Newsbusters. NationalReview Sail with National Review Join your favorite writers for National Review’s 2015 cruise to Alaska — a once in a lifetime opportunity for you and your family. Learn more here. What National Review is reading — order your copy today! The Maid of Orleans By Sven Stolpe Love National Review online? Save 75% off the newsstand price and subscribe to National Review magazine — print or digital versions available! Looking for the perfect gift for that special conservative in your life? Give the gift of National Review or shop the NR store! To manage your National Review e-mail preferences, click here, or to read our privacy policy, click here. This e-mail was sent by: National Review, Inc. 215 Lexington Avenue, 11th Floor New York, NY 10016
Posted on: Wed, 10 Dec 2014 14:36:16 +0000

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