Power Line Daily Digest Democrats: White Males Need Not Apply Democrats: White Males Need Not Apply 28 Days Later Hell to pay in Baltimore Notes on "Days of Rage" (1) Hillary Clinton, "Sid Vicious," and Libya Democrats: White Males Need Not Apply Posted: 20 May 2015 11:59 AM PDT (Steven Hayward) According to a story reported in the New York Daily News and other outlets, Hillary Clinton already has a list of prospective running mates, but there's only one name on it: A former top Clinton administration official predicted Sunday that Hillary Clinton will pick Julian Castro as her running mate if she wins the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. "What I am hearing in Washington, including from people in Hillary Clinton's campaign, is that the first person on their lists is Julian Castro, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, who used to be the Mayor of San Antonio," Henry Cisneros, the Housing and Urban Development Secretary under President Bill Clinton, said Sunday on Univision's "Al Punto" program. "They don't have a second option, because he is the superior candidate considering his record, personality, demeanor and Latin heritage," Cisneros added. The funny part is that Castro doesn't speak Spanish, but of course for liberals what counts today above all else is your melanin, and your gender.  Apparently all future Democratic presidential tickets must include a woman or minority. Why should we be surprised? It has been clear for a while now that Obama only considered women or minorities for Supreme Court appointments, and it is equally clear that no white males are acceptable as potential candidates to succeed Barbara Boxer out in California; we reported here previously that when Boxer announced her retirement, the Democratic ethnic groups fell into infighting over which group was entitled to the Senate seat on account of it being "our turn." The Democratic establishment is said to have told former LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa that he should defer to Attorney General Kamala Harris because he can be governor in 2018 instead. This is how the Democratic Party now operates.  (Ditto for Maryland.) Apparently Hispanic Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez didn't get the memo from party headquarters, and is challenging Harris for the senate nomination.  But her Native American "war-whoop" stunt at the recent California Democratic Party convention isn't going down too well, and how she's trying to run away from reporters faster than Hillary Clinton.  This two-minute video from KCRW TV tells the story admirably: The popcorn machines are working overtime this week.    28 Days Later Posted: 20 May 2015 09:30 AM PDT (Steven Hayward) 28 Days Later is one of the early zombie-apocalypse movies of the last decade (though as Danny Boyle thrillers go I prefer the flawed but still interesting Sunshine), but the title clearly fits the cater-to-the-zombie-vote strategy of Hillary Clinton, who went 28 days before taking a press question. You can see ABC's two-minute report on it here (though why is George Snuffulupagus still anchoring any political coverage at all?).  She took six questions. Whoa!  Save up! What's obvious is that her answers were carefully canned, since the questions were utterly predictable. How long, I wonder, did the campaign hash over this suite of answers? And must the media look like a bunch of neglected, panting puppies grateful for a handful of Milk Bones from her ladyship? But Hillary probably had to face the media after yesterday's dismal performance in blowing off a question from Fox's Ed Henry: Anyway, start the new press question clock at Day 1 as the Hillary Zombie Horror Show marches on. Remember that the sequel to 28 Days Later was 28 WeeksLater. Ah, art imitating life again.    Hell to pay in Baltimore Posted: 20 May 2015 08:28 AM PDT (Paul Mirengoff) The death of Freddie Gray drew outrage from Baltimore's Black community, and rightly so. Gray was alive and well when the police took him into their custody, and ended up dead. The resulting protests (but not the rioting) were a reasonable response. But police mistreatment of suspects is far from the most serious problem of violence that confronts Baltimore's Black community.  The Washington Post reports that during the period from mid-April to mid-May, 31 people were murdered in Baltimore. 39 others were wounded by gunfire.  Twice during this period, 10 people were shot on a single day. By mid-May, the city's homicide count was 91, 21 above last year at the same time. Lodging criminal charges against six police officers in the Gray case quelled the city's rioting. But it had no real impact on the murder rate. The victims of Baltimore's homicides are, in virtually all instances, African-American. They comprised 211 of the 216 homicide victims in 2014. The killers are also, almost invariably, African-American, as the city's political leadership acknowledges in its more sober moments. A month before Gray's death, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake held a summit to urge black men to help stop black-on-black killings. A great many of the murders, including the one featured in the Post's article, are drug related. It's reasonable to believe that such murders would increase if more drug dealers, even low-level ones, were put back into, or permitted to remain in, the street — as many criminal justice "reformers" favor. The Baltimore police force, which is roughly 50 percent African-American, represents a line of protection against the violence that is plaguing the Black community. But according to the Post, it has been left thoroughly demoralized by recent events: "Officers are coming up to me and saying, 'I'm afraid to do my job,' " said Lt. Kenneth Butler, a 29-year veteran and president of a group for black officers. He said officers, black and white, are "equally upset, their morale is low." Lt. Victor Gearhart, with 33 years of experience, said officers are second-guessing themselves, tamping down aggressive policing. "Now they have to think, 'What happens if this turns bad? What is going to happen to me?'" Police officers cannot, of course, be immunized from prosecution, whatever the impact on department morale. It may well have been reasonable to charge at least some of the officers who were involved with Gray on the night of his arrest. But the Baltimore police force has plenty of good reasons to be demoralized. First, the timing of the charges and the demagoguery that accompanied them made it look like the charges were designed to placate a mob, not deliver justice. Second, it appears that the prosecutor overcharged at least some of the officers. Third, the mayor did not permit police officers properly to defend themselves during the rioting. Limited essentially to shielding themselves from protesters throwing rocks, bricks and concrete slabs at them, nearly two dozen officers sustained injury. Fourth, the Gray episode is held out as emblematic of the way the police treats blacks in Baltimore's poor neighborhoods. To my knowledge, the evidence doesn't support this claim. In any event, the claim is demoralizing. If the police is going to do its job — to help make cities, including their poor communities, safer — it needs to be more active and vigilant. Yet, the loudest voices are urging it to be less so. More importantly, the incentives are being stacked in favor of less activity and vigilance. I expect there will be hell to pay. In Baltimore, it looks like there already is.    Notes on "Days of Rage" (1) Posted: 20 May 2015 04:28 AM PDT (Scott Johnson) Over the weekend I read Bryan Burrough's Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence. I read it in preparation for the brief interview we recorded with the author yesterday afternoon for the Power Line podcast posted here. I would like to share notes, thoughts and excerpts in a series of posts, of which this is the first of what I think will be three. My inspiration here is Jay Nordlinger and his Impromptus column at National Review. When Jay flips over a book or a movie or a conference or an interview, he uses his column to empty his notebook. (This past summer, for example, Jay devoted a three-part series of Impromptus to "D'Souza Nation.") That's what I'd like to do as long as my ammunition holds out. (Burrough's book has me thinking in metaphorical violence.) My goal is to interest you sufficiently in the book to buy a copy and read it. • Burrough is an outstanding reporter and Days of Rage is a gripping book. To employ another violent metaphor, the book blew me away. Much to my surprise, I found it riveting. • The book covers the period 1969-1985 in telling the story of six homegrown radical groups that conducted terrorist campaigns against the United States. Their operations in total included thousands of bombings of skyscrapers, federal buildings and businesses from coast to coast. Included among the targets are the Pentagon, the Capitol, a courthouse in Boston, a Wall Street restaurant packed with lunchtime diners, and, yes, indeed, the World Trade Center.  In 1972 alone, according to Burrough, there were 1,900 bombings in the United States, virtually all of them carried out by the radical homegrown groups. • The operations of the radical groups also included scores of bank robberies and assassinations of police officers. In the course of the book, police officers are murdered in New York, San Francisco and Atlanta. Among other aspects of the guerilla war conducted by the groups Burrough covers, the targeting of law enforcement by the Black Liberation Army in particular strikes a chord with current resonance. I was astounded by the history I didn't know and its relevance to current events. Looking around online, I found that Andy McCarthy's review of the book in the May 18 number of National Review stands out in bringing home this element of the book. The review is accessible in digital form to subscribers under the heading "A not-so-distant mirror." A not-so-distant mirror, indeed. That is Burrough's book. • This is Burrough's sixth book. In the author's note that prefaces the text, Burrough writes: "Without a doubt this is the most difficult project I have ever attempted. During more than five years of research, I thought of quitting any number of times. When I began the work in 2009, I had no idea of the challenges involved, or the complexities of dealing with veterans of the radical left." If you said I was naieve, well, I couldn't argue with you." • Did I mention that the book is exciting? It is of the can't-put-it-down variety. It features daring jailbreaks and more close escapes than The Fugitive as well as more thrilling car chases than Popeye Doyle's in The French Connection. • Burrough notes that Malcolm X declared war and called for guerilla warfare on the United States in 1965. He also quotes Malcolm X responding to a question about the assassination of President Kennedy. He responded: "Chickens coming home to roost never make me sad; they make me glad." That struck a chord with current resonance too. • The radical groups covered by Burrough include the Weatherman (as the originally group called itself) or Weather Underground (1969-1977), the Black Liberation Army (1971-1973), the Symbionese Liberation Army (1973-1975), the FALN (1974-1980), Sam Melville Jonathan Jackson Unit or United Freedom Front (1976-1984), and the Mutulu Shakur Group or "The Family" (1977-1981). Each is interesting in its own way. • Burrough demonstrates that the FALN was probably the most adept of the groups in its terrorist operations. Burrough strikes a chord with current resonance again and leaves the reader's blood at high boil as he notes in his epilogue: "Eighteen members of the FALN served lengthy prison sentences for their roles in the group's two campaigns. In the mid-1990s, a clemency campaign drew the support of former President Jimmy Carter and ten Nobel laureates. In 1999, with his wife, Hillary, seeking the support of Hispanic voters for a senatorial campaign in New York, President Bill Clinton offered clemency to sixteen of those imprisoned; all but two accepted." • Drawing on memoirs, narrow histories (such as Kirpatrick Sale's history of SDS), his own interviews, and unpublished monographs, Burrough pieces together the story of the six groups from both sides: from the side of the terrorist perpetrators, and from the side of law enforcement striving, mostly impotently, to apprehend them. "This book," Burrough writes, "is intended to be a straightforward narrative history of the period and its people." I believe it is the first book to attempt something like a comprehensive account from both sides of the story. • I intend to devote the third post in this series to the New York Times and its review of the book. Having mentioned Andy McCarthy's excellent NR review above, I would also like to note the excellent Wall Street Journal review by Peter Hellman, "A pestilence of bombs." Hellman is the coauthor, with the late NYPD chief of Detectives Albert Seedman, of Chief. Seedman appears in the book in connection with the bombings of 1969 with which the book kicks off. • Burrough credits Peter Collier and David Horowitz for their essential reportage on the Weather Underground in 1982, a long piece originally published in Rolling Stone. The piece is collected in Peter and David's altogether essential book, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties, which leads off with a profile of Fay Stender, a radical lawyer who makes a cameo appearance in Burrough's book. • I emailed David as I was reading the book over the weekend to ask him for his impression. He observed: "On balance I would say it's an important step towards re-establishing a reasonable historical record. Until now, virtually all the books on Weatherman and the Panthers etc. have been leftwing mythology. How does he treat Assata Shakur and the BLA? She is a cold blooded killer and at the same time a hero of the current Baltimore lynch mob." We have barely scratched the surface so far. We will get to Assata Shakur, another figure who gives the book its current resonance. I want to leave off here for now lest this become too unwieldy.    Hillary Clinton, "Sid Vicious," and Libya Posted: 19 May 2015 09:15 PM PDT (Paul Mirengoff) The New York Times presents an account of Sidney Blumenthal's memos to Hillary Clinton concerning Libya. For the benefit of our younger readers and those with short memories, I should say that during Bill Clinton's presidency, Blumenthal was probably the slimiest of Team Clinton's operatives, earning the nickname Sid Vicious. For example, according to Christopher Hitchens, once Blumenthal's good friend, vicious Sid spread defamatory stories about Monica Lewinsky. Hitchens swore in an affidavit that Blumenthal had told him this. Blumenthal denied both smearing Lewinsky and admitting it to Hitchens.  I was never a fan of Hitchens. But I'd back him in a swearing contest with Blumenthal 100 times out of 100. I'd also back Hitchens in a war of words with almost anyone. In a review of Blumenthal's book The Clinton Wars, which Hitchens titled "Thinking like an apparatchik," he described Bill Clinton's use of Blumenthal this way: He threw away the plum and kept the pit, of which this book is the ground-up residue. Blumenthal reprised his role as Clinton hatchet man during the 2008 campaign. Team Obama came to despise Blumenthal so much that President Obama barred Hillary Clinton from giving him a spot at the State Department. Which brings us to 2011 and Libya. According to the New York Times account, a group of U.S. businessmen who hoped to do business in post-Qaddafi Libya retained Blumenthal. From all that appears, the Clintons' hatchet man had zero experience with Libya or with the businesses the Americans hoped to establish there. Plainly, Blumenthal was retained because of his connection to Secretary of State Clinton. The Times points out that the projects contemplated by the U.S. businessmen — creating hospitals and building schools — would have required State Department sign off (but they never got that far). Blumenthal began writing memos to Hillary Clinton about the situation in Libya. The existence of such memos became known due to the efforts of a Romanian hacker. Otherwise, given Hillary's document non-retention policy, the memos probably would never have come to light. According to the Times, Blumenthal sent at least 25 Libya memos to Hillary. One of them praised the efforts of Libya's new prime minister to stabilize his government by choosing officials experienced in dealing with Western governments and businesses. Blumenthal singled out one official as particularly influential. But he did not disclose that his business associates were hoping that this official would finance their projects. In this instance, Blumenthal's "intelligence" seems to have been driven by a business agenda. And, indeed, the Times reports that much of the information Blumenthal provided to Clinton "appears to have come from a group of business associates he was advising as they sought to win contracts from the Libyan transitional government." Did Hillary Clinton take Blumenthal's "intel" seriously? You bet. According to the Times, she frequently circulated his memos to her chief of staff, Jake Sullivan, and told him to distribute them to other State Department officials. They were often sent to U.S. diplomats in Libya, including the ambassador, the late Christopher Stevens. But the quality of Blumenthal's "intel" appears to have been poor. Some of it consisted of rumors that diplomats knew to be false. "Not infrequently," says the Times, Hillary's subordinates responded to the memos with "polite skepticism." Sullivan once derided a Blumenthal offering as a "conspiracy theory." Such theories have long been Blumenthal's stock-in-trade. As The Guardian said of Blumenthal's book Clinton Wars, "conspiracy theorists everywhere should read Sidney Blumenthal's version of Clinton's presidency." No wonder Hillary ("vast right-wing conspiracy") Clinton likes his work. Stevens himself challenged Blumenthal's assessment that the Muslim Brotherhood was poised to do well in 2012 parliamentary elections. As it turned out, the Brotherhood fared poorly. The Times report will add to Blumenthal's legacy as one of the most unsavory characters in American political history. But what are its implications for Hillary Clinton? First, I doubt that Blumenthal's pathetic intel can, on the current record, be tied to Hillary Clinton's decision to support the toppling of Qaddafi. The Times says that some of Blumenthal's memos predate the death of Qaddafi. But I gather from the report they don't predate our intervention. According to the Times, the American businessmen for whom Blumenthal worked became interested in Libya only after it looked like Qaddafi was done. This doesn't mean that Blumenthal's memos did not influence other important (but lesser) decisions by Secretary of State Clinton. But nothing in the Times report shows that this was so. Perhaps Trey Gowdy's investigation will shed light on this matter. Second, Clinton will be criticized for the irregularity of using a back channel source. However, as a general matter, I don't have a problem with this.  Her responseto the Blumenthal story is correct in principle: Top government officials shouldn't necessarily rely exclusively on what their bureaucrats tell them. Trusted outsiders may have something to offer. But third, Clinton showed incredibly poor judgment in thinking that Blumenthal's reports added value. As shown above, Blumenthal had a business interest in Libya and was getting his information from business associates. Did Clinton know about Blumenthal's business interest? The Times apparently is unable to say. If she did know, then it is inexcusable that she burdened her underlings with Blumenthal's musing. But even if she didn't know, her reliance on Blumenthal is problematic. Former CIA official Paul Pillar told the Times that Blumenthal's reports aped the style of official government intelligence reports but without assessing the motives of his sources (for obvious reasons). Thus, "the sourcing is pretty sloppy in a way that would never pass muster if it were the work of a reports officer at a U.S. intelligence agency." On their face, then, Blumenthal's reports were unworthy of the attention Hillary Clinton paid to them. And everyone who read them seems to have recognized this — except Hillary. Finally, let's keep in mind that President Obama had banned Blumenthal from a role at the State Department. Yet Hillary let him into the tent. Does the Blumenthal story constitute a serious Hillary Clinton scandal? Based on what we know so far, I would say no. But at a minimum, it represents another count in the case against Clinton's judgment and, arguably, even her competence. And it may add to the sense of Clinton fatigue many may already be experiencing (inevitably, Blumenthal turns out to have been employed by the Clinton Foundation while he was providing "intelligence" to Hillary). At this point it's more than fair to wonder (1) whether Hillary can do anything by the book and (2) whether there is any instruction from her boss, the president of the United States, that she didn't try to skirt.    [category Power Line]