Benghazi Goes Mainstream

A dung beetle would strain himself pushing around a misdirection so massive.

Even Jonathan Karl of ABC News has taken notice, and he has nothing kind to say about Obama administration “talking points” on Benghazi. Mr. Karl, it should be said, is not part of the putative conservative conspiracy against progressive Democrats.

Concerning the CIA “talking points” that then Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice pushed on several news outlets shortly after the American Consulate was overrun and destroyed by Islamic terrorists, Mr. Karl notes that “ABC News has obtained 12 different versions of the talking points that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack.”

According to Mr. Karl, the initial CIA report noted that “The Agency has produced numerous pieces on the threat of extremists linked to al-Qaeda in Benghazi and eastern Libya.  These noted that, since April, there have been at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi by unidentified assailants, including the June attack against the British Ambassador’s convoy. We cannot rule out the individuals has (sic) previously surveilled the U.S. facilities, also contributing to the efficacy of the attacks.”

This intelligence displeased State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland who, perhaps feeling pressure from higher-ups in the Obama administration, objected to the inclusion of such intelligence because such inconvenient truths, as she wrote in an email to officials at the White House “could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either?”

In a final revision, the offending paragraph was entirely deleted.

The CIA’s first draft had noted that the attack on the embassy appeared to be “spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo” – later found to be an incorrect assessment -- but pointedly noted as well, “That being said, we do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qaeda participated in the attack.” The first draft specifically identified the al Qaeda-affiliated group as Ansar al-Sharia, occasioning yet another objection from the State Department’s Ms. Nuland, who did not want to “prejudice the investigation” by the mention of specific terrorist groups.

Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes concurred and dispatched an email stressing that State Department’s concerns needed to be addressed: “We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don’t want to undermine the FBI investigation.  We thus will work through the talking points tomorrow morning at the Deputies Committee meeting.”

What no one will say about the several visions and revisions of a CIA document that certainly was more complete and accurate than the truncated final product at last given the nod at Foggy Bottom is this: The procrustean editing was necessary because a more accurate depiction of true events at Benghazi did not support presidential campaign election rhetoric which suggested falsely that al-Qaeda had been sufficiently degraded by Mr. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Most of the hard data and all of the insufficient explanations seem to point a finger in that direction. And it now becomes possible to ask: Is it possible that an embassy and the lives of those in it were put at risk because a president did not want his fictional campaign narrative to be overthrown by the truth?

In the days following the murderous assault on the American consulate in Benghazi by an invigorated and deadly al-Qaeda connected offshoot, presidential spokesman Jay Carney rose to a defense of the misleading remarks made by Ms. Rice at several media venues. Apparently not under oath, he told reporters at the White House press briefing on November 28, 2012:

“Those talking points originated from the intelligence community. They reflect the IC’s best assessments of what they thought had happened. The White House and the State Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those talking points by either of those two institutions were changing the word ‘consulate’ to ‘diplomatic facility’ because ‘consulate’ was inaccurate.”

Mary McCarthy once said of Lillian Hellman that every word she spoke was a lie, including “and” and “but.” That may more appropriately have been said about Jay Carnie’s media fish bait.

Mr. Karl’s report may be the first indication that, at least on Benghazi, mainstream reporters and commentator have had their fill of worms.

The Benghazi Cover-up, And Why It matters

“Terrible. I cry every night. I don't sleep at night. I need answers… Why was there no security for him? When they were supposed to have security and the security that they did have was called back. It just -- things do not add up and I'm just told lies.” So said Pat Smith, the mother of Sean Smith, a State Department information officer, one of four Americans murdered in Benghazi. The enduring agony of Mrs. Smith recalls the advice given by the blind prophet Tiresias to an obdurate King Creon in Sophocles’ “Antigone.”

Self-will must bear the guilt of stubbornness.

Yield to the dead, and outrage not a corpse

So long as the truth is scorned, Ambassador Chris Stevens and the brave people who died with him at the consulate in Benghazi will not be quiet in their graves. Honor must have a voice. The shattering truth about Benghazi will be told; blood will tell it. Whether the telling will change much is quite a different question. Power does have its privileges, and the Obama administration, in an attempt to subvert the truth, has buried it  behind a literal wall of obfuscation.

The recent testimony of three direct witnesses before a Congressional committee, as well as prior news accounts of the assault by terrorists on the consulate in Benghazi, utterly destroys the order of operative assumptions churned out by the Obama administration, then in a campaign mode, before, during and after the murderous assault.

Even today, the Obama administration insists on the following discredited narrative: 1) Early real-time reports indicated that the assault on the consulate was a spinoff of a protest occasioned by a video that defamed the prophet Mohammed; 2) As the administration gained more access to accurate information, it abandoned an earlier view that Al-Qaida elements were not involved in the assault.

The truth is just the opposite. The earliest report – indeed, the very last words of Ambassador Stevens to his second in command, “Greg Hicks, who testified recently before a Congressional panel] we are under attack” – indicated right from the get-go that the embassy was under assault. No early on the spot report mentions a protest.

Even before the assaults had ended, intelligence officials had concluded, according to a report in the Weekly Standard written by Steven Hayes, “that al Qaeda-linked terrorists were involved. Senior administration officials, however, sought to obscure the emerging picture and downplay the significance of attacks that killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans. The frantic process that produced the changes to the talking points took place over a 24-hour period just one day before Susan Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, made her now-famous appearances on the Sunday television talk shows. The discussions involved senior officials from the State Department, the National Security Council, the CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the White House.”

Mr. Hayes’ report includes reproductions of two critical e-mails not previously made available to the general public.

The Weekly Standard story shows two revisions to an initial e-mail that provided the foundation of the Obama administration “talking points” on the Benghazi assaults.

An early cable sent by the CIA station chief in Libya on September 12, immediately after the attack on the consulate on September 11, a propitious day for terrorists, clearly stated that U.S. facilities in Benghazi had come under terrorist attack. It was this intelligence – very inconvenient to an administration that was in the process of insisting during a presidential campaign that the effectiveness of  Al-Qaida had been degraded “that top Obama officials would work so hard to obscure,” according to the Weekly Standard report: “The frantic process that produced the changes to the talking points took place over a 24-hour period just one day before Susan Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, made her now-famous appearances on the Sunday television talk shows. The discussions involved senior officials from the State Department, the National Security Council, the CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the White House.”

The laundering of accurate information – indeed, the tailoring of data to make the talking points conform to an Obama campaign procrustean bed – began after
Democrat Dutch Ruppersburger, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, requested unclassified guidance on what members of Congress could say in public comments on the assaults.

An initial draft prepared by the CIA’s Office of Terrorism Analysis asserted that the U.S. Government “know[s] that Islamic extremists with ties to al Qaeda participated in the attack.” The same draft noted that press reports “linked the attack to Ansar al Sharia. The group has since released a statement that its leadership did not order the attacks, but did not deny that some of its members were involved.”

This first draft, prepared in response to Mr. Ruppersburger request and widely distributed internally for comment at 11:15 a.m. on Friday, September 14, (Version 1) was itself subject to revision (Version 2).

According to The Weekly Standard report: “This initial [Version 1] CIA draft included the assertion that the U.S. government ‘knows[s] that Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qaeda participated in the attack.’ That draft also noted that press reports ‘linked the attack to Ansar al Sharia. The group has since released a statement that its leadership did not order the attacks, but did not deny that some of its members were involved.’ Ansar al Sharia, the CIA draft continued, aims to spread sharia law in Libya and ‘emphasizes the need for jihad.’ The agency draft also raised the prospect that the facilities had been the subject of jihadist surveillance and offered a reminder that in the previous six months there had been ‘at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi by unidentified assailants, including the June attack against the British Ambassador’s convoy.’”

A second [Version 2] CIA amended draft provided more information concerning the jihadist threat in both Egypt and Libya: “On 10 September we warned of social media reports calling for a demonstration in front of the [Cairo] Embassy and that jihadists were threatening to break into the Embassy… The Agency has produced numerous pieces on the threat of extremists linked to al Qaeda in Benghazi and Libya.” Tellingly, the second draft no longer specified “Islamic extremists with ties to al Qaeda” but mentioned only “Islamic extremists.” And the mention of “attacks” in the first more accurate draft was changed to “demonstrations.”

An hour after the amended version was distributed to officials in the interagency vetting process, an official identified in the official House report only as a “senior State Department official” raised “serious concerns” about the draft. The senior official, since identified as Victoria Nuland, was concerned that members of Congress might use the talking points to assail the State Department for “not paying attention to Agency warnings.”

Addressing Ms. Nuland’s concerns, the CIA made some minor changes and cut all references to Ansar al Sharia. But Ms. Nuland was still not appeased.  She advised that the changes did not “resolve all my issues or those of my building leadership.” Her unnamed superiors, Ms. Nuland, wrote, were unhappy.

“In an attempt to address those concerns,” according to The Standard report, “CIA officials made minor tweaks. But in a follow-up email at 9:24 p.m., Nuland wrote that the problem remained and that her superiors—she did not say which ones—were unhappy. Moments later, according to the House report, ‘White House officials responded by stating that the State Department’s concerns would have to be taken into account.’ One official—Ben Rhodes, The Weekly Standard is told, a top adviser to President Obama on national security and foreign policy—further advised the group that the issues would be resolved in a meeting of top administration officials the following morning at the White House.”

The final snipping of the initial and more accurate CIA report fell to deputy director of the CIA Mike Morell, who made broad changes to the draft, according to sources cited in The Standard report: “Morrell cut all or parts of four paragraphs of the six-paragraph talking points—148 of its 248 words. Gone were the reference to ‘Islamic extremists,’ the reminders of agency warnings about al Qaeda in Libya, the reference to ‘jihadists’ in Cairo, the mention of possible surveillance of the facility in Benghazi, and the report of five previous attacks on foreign interests.”

In a series of revisions, the truth was rung out of the data available to the Obama administration. It was left to the hapless Susan Rice to present the limbless, truncated version of events to the general public in a series of television appearances, during the course of which it was stressed that the attack on the consulate and the murder of Ambassador Stevens and other American defenders of the consulate was inspired by a video that had enraged protestors.

For anyone who has bothered to examine the data now available, this convenient fiction, serviceable to the Obama administration as campaign filler, is more than preposterous; it is the wall of misinformation behind which Ambassador Stevens and other brave American yet lie, immured and silent.         

Obama’s Problem, And Ours

It happens to the best of presidents. Sometime during the second term of popular presidents, the American people begin to bid goodbye to their chief executive, at which point the president begins to think of his legacy and hires a ghost writer to memorialize his time in office for future generations. Ground is broken, if only in the president’s mind, for a future library.

President Barack Obama is a popular, twice elected president. Some of his programs, however, never have been universally admired even within his own camp, which now begins to show stress fractures. Mr. Obama’s political methodology is, unsurprisingly, that of a left wing Chicago street organizer. During his presidency, Mr. Obama has spent an inordinate amount of time on the bully pulpit attempting to sell round pegs to square-hole purchasers in Congress. And he’s spent a great deal of money he does not have.

This parting of the ways, the fond farewell, often begins in Congress when the usual shakers and movers are gathered together in a room with the president and an idea or strategy is broached that, in the president’s first term, might have been greeted with loud hosannas and exuberant assents. Now it hangs in the air, a danger to the future prospect of all in the room. The actors in the room then shoot furtive glances at each other, and all but one suddenly realizes that there is but one lame duck among them. Time will smile upon the lame duck; his admirers within the fourth estate will continue reverently to mention his name in whispers. But ice will be in the air. The purposes of the president and the purposes of his loyal partisans will no longer be the same.

Josh Kraushar of the National Journal, an offshoot of The Atlantic magazine, generally regarded as left-liberal, examined the failure of Democrats to pass a mild version of gun control legislation. Some Democrats look forward to using the defeated legislation in future campaigns against benighted Republicans; and indeed, President Obama started the ball rolling moments after Democratic Majority leader Harry Reid pulled the bill because he could not summon the requisite number of votes in the Democratic controlled U.S. Senate to pass it.

“But the failure of Democrats to pass gun legislation (in a Democratic-controlled Senate) for a future presidential nominee to use against Republicans,” Mr. Krausher wrote, “makes the issue a lot less potent. One can imagine Hillary Rodham Clinton trying to shame, say, Marco Rubio for opposing a gun law that could be later claimed to have reduced crime. But without any law passed, it’s hard to imagine the gun issue being nearly as resonant as it is today in the wake of the horrific killings in Connecticut. And with Democrats being a significant obstacle to its passage, it muddles the message even more… Simply using the bully pulpit and making emotional appeals isn’t enough–it takes legislative know-how and a good working relationship with Congress, two areas this White House has struggled with since its difficulties passing a health care law and persuading the public of its merits.”

Even Maureen Dowd, a reliably left of center columnist for the New York Times, found it “unbelievable that with 90 percent of Americans on his side, he [President Obama] could get only 54 votes in the Senate. It was a glaring example of his weakness in using leverage to get what he wants. No one on Capitol Hill is scared of him.”

A few of the more obvious dents in the president’s armor would include: the continuing recession, the failure of the Obama administration to stimulate the economy with crony capitalist artificial stimulants, the inability of the administration to honestly confront the murder of an American ambassador and others in Benghazi and Obamacare – a very expensive baby step in the long progressive road to universal health care, at the end of which healthcare in the United States may come to resemble the health care dispensed at the Veteran's Administration hospital in Newington.

The head of the US Veteran's Affairs, retired Army General Eric Shinseki, came to Newtown recently to tout a new computerized processing system that some expect will shorten seemingly interminable wait times on claims. Standing at his elbow, in sight of the cameras, was U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal: “Among the most common complaints I get is the seemingly endless delays," Mr. Blumenthal said.

Among Mr. Blumenthal’s complainants is veteran Paul Barron: “I've been waiting three years for disability, I'm trying for 100%. I got Hepatitis C from the shots they give you in the Army.”

Backlogs and government administered programs go together like “a horse and carriage,” as the song has it.

The gun control legislation recently passed in Connecticut has resulted in a spate of gun purchases and a paperwork backlog for state police, who must approve the purchases. The backlog on transfer applications for gun ownership has soared from 1,000 in December to 62,000 following passage of the most severe gun regulations in the nation.

State Police Col. Danny Stebbins, who has been in communication with Governor Dannel Malloy’s Office of Policy and Management  “every other week regarding how to address the backlogs” told a wide-eyed legislative committee, according to a report in CTNewsJunkie, that the backlog had not been anticipated. “All of these things are behind because we don’t have people to keep up… all this will come with a cost,” Mr. Stebbins said. Some of the tasks, he added, could be done by civilian personnel.

So it may be with Obamacare: Who knew?

Republicans Shown The Door Again

A newspaper reports that Republican leaders John McKinney and Larry Cafero, both of whom have professed interest in running for governor, are once again being shut out of budget negotiations by Governor Dannel Malloy.

This is getting to be a habit.

During Mr. Malloy’s first budget -- By the way, has Mr. Malloy’s budget EVER been in balance? – the governor unceremoniously showed the door to Republicans.

Mr. Malloy brought Republicans back to the table on two occasions: during a special session, when Mr. Malloy needed some help balancing his chronically out of balance budget, and during negotiations on a gun restriction bill following the mass murders in Sandy Hook.
 

On both occasions, Mr. Malloy and accommodating Republicans were praised by left of center commentators in the media for their show of bipartisanship. Here in Connecticut, it was said, bipartisanship was much in the air, and it was hinted that the U.S. Congress, deep in the mire of partisan deadlock, certainly could take a lesson from a state in which both parties came together to settle a budget deficit and pass the most restrictive gun regulations in the nation.

Republican players both times were happy to play. Now, as the General Assembly begins to tinker with Mr. Malloy’s second budget, Republicans once again find themselves sent to Coventry.

The exile of Republicans to Coventry, where they will be expected to bide their time in prayer and holy silence, does not bode well for the state. It means that Mr. Malloy and his confederates – most importantly state unions, who made out like proverbial bandits the last time Republicans were frozen out of budget negotiations – will be unobstructed in shaping their second biennial budget.

The shape of Mr. Malloy’s second budget may be deduced from his first. On that occasion, it should be recalled, Democratic leaders in the General Assembly pre-approved Mr. Malloy’s budget prior to his negotiations with SEBAC, an organization of unions authorized to negotiate contracts with the state. One commentator wrote that leaders in the Democratic dominated General Assembly conferred upon the governor plenipotentiary powers to negotiate contracts that would impact the budget nine years out.

The negotiations were messy but profitable in the end for unions. The “savings” in Mr. Malloy’s first budget were amorphous, the tax increases painful. Progressive Democrats were tolerably satisfied with Mr. Malloy’s first budget. The tax increases, job investment money removed from the private sector and delivered to government coffers, gave crony capitalist progressives enough funds to “invest” in enterprises that in the future would pay out dividends, in the form of votes and political contributions, to Democrats.  Frozen out of the process, Republicans were free to assail a budget that had no Republican fingerprints on it.

A fairly comprehensive review of Mr. Malloy’s second budget by CTMirror is riven with doubts and fears. One always snaps to when one happens upon a budget review entitled “Promises, Gimmicks and a Historic Shortfall.”

After imposing on the state the largest tax increase in its history, Mr. Malloy made a firm vow to forego further tax increases.

“With a gap of $1.2 billion projected for the fiscal year that starts in July,” CTMirror advises, “Malloy not only is seeking more sacrifices, but he's also turning to taxes and some of the gimmicks he swore off of two years ago.”

The gimmicks include an extension of expiring tax increases on businesses and power plants, a reduction of tax credits for working poor families, funding cuts to colleges and universities at a time when higher education continues to increase tuition and fees, deep cuts both to hospitals and health coverage for thousands of low-income adults, a raid on the transportation fund and, that old standby, borrowing hundreds of millions of dollars to pay ongoing bills -- all this from an administration that boosted taxes considerably while it publically scorned prior administrations for resorting to discreditable methods in balancing budgets.

It does not help at all that the national economy continues to founder under the ministrations of Barack Obama, the most progressive president in modern history. Had Mr. Obama concentrated during his first term in office on rebuilding the shattered mortgage market, the American economy would have surged forward. But instead, Mr. Obama grasped for a national health care brass ring first proposed in the 1912 national election by the father of the modern progressive movement, Teddy Roosevelt. Obamacare, payment for which has now come due, is but a baby step on the road to nationalized health care. Should anyone care to preview the final product, a Veteran Administration hospital is on view in Rocky Hill, Connecticut.  

In a high tax, over regulated, foundering economy, tax receipts simply dry up. Investments in the private economy also dry up as investors, hampered by excessive regulation and punishing taxes, hoard their dollars waiting for relief from a redistributionist minded government.

The late Maggie Thatcher, Prime Minister of Britain, use to say that “the problem with socialism is that, sooner or later, you run out of other people’s money.” The government of Connecticut – yet a far cry from the socialist utopia envisioned by Eugene Debs, the Socialist candidate for president in 1912– is running out of the money its governor hopes to be able to “invest” in crony capitalist enterprises that mollify the state’s clamorous left of center interests.

It’s a problem.

No Thatcher In Sight Among State Republicans

The trouble with Connecticut Republicans has always been the same: There is no Maggie Thatcher among them.

The pre-Thatcherite Tory Party in Britain resembles to a “T”the “go long to get along” Republican Party in Connecticut.

The late Mrs. Thatcher wrote in her memories, “Almost every postwar Tory victory had been won on slogans such as ‘Britain Strong and Free’or “Set the People Free.” But in the fine print of policy, especially in government, the Tory Party merely pitched camp in the long march to the left. It never seriously tried to reverse it… The welfare state? We boasted of spending more money than Labor, not of restoring people to independence and self-reliance.”

So too in Connecticut the Republican Party, more often than not, has been content to serve as the handmaiden to Democratic Party orthodoxy.

Mrs. Thatcher, who could run rings around the opposition in debate, relished all the epithets thrown at her by Labor. But she was especially fond of the term “reactionary.”

Said the lady, who was “not for turning” in a 1979 speech,“Well, there’s a lot to react against.”

Britain’s social-democratic consensus threw in the towel after her third electoral victory. She defeated that consensus on many key issues of the day: labor union reform, the privatization of 26 major state owned industries, to mention only two of her important victories. Under the moral weight of her administration – with a little help from a reinvigorated United States, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the foremost writer of his day, and a Polish Pope – the Soviet Union collapsed in ashes.

Mrs. Thatcher is not hated by the left in Europe today because she failed; the failed politician rarely inspires such vigorous contumely as was hurled at Mrs. Thatcher’s corpse. No, only success brings out the worst in what John O’Sullivan, a former editor of National Review, recently called “the Caliban left.”

Ten years after losing office, Mrs. Thatcher found herself surrounded by a bunch of mini-Calibans shouting “Thatcher, Thatcher, Thatcher, fascist, fascist, fascist, out, out, out,” at which she turned to her former speech writer, Robin Harris, and exulted, “Oh Robin, doesn’t it make you feel nostalgic.”

It is unlikely that any Connecticut Republican should similarly feel the affectionate tug of nostalgia, because in Connecticut there have been no obvious victories over the liberal-progressive status quo. Even worse, there has been no sustained and principled opposition to a progressive putsch within the state Democratic Party that has displaced antique moderate Democrats with bullish leftists.

The weary and spent pre-Thatcherite Tory Party in Britain winked at the welfare state, possibly because it had not the moral imagination to overcome a set narrative that pictured governmental aid as the solution to every social problem in Great Britain. It fell to Mrs. Thatcher to point out that the solutions exacerbated the problems: One does not become self-reliant by relying wholly upon the kindness of strangers.

Before she could change her country, Mrs. Thatcher had to change and invigorate her party, and the pre-Thatcherite moderate Tory Party was very comfortable in its own skin. Its leaders simply could not understand why the Tory Party should change. Were the grey heads in the party not successful? Had they not been returned time and again to office? Cooperation with the reigning regime certainly had benefited them, had it not? Why could not others trod their effortless path to victory? The greatest bar to victory in politics is the success of compromised office holders who by venturing nothing gain nothing for others.

Any political party that considers only the short run will lose in the long run. Old victories do not presage new victories.

The moderate Republican Party in Connecticut has been losing ground to Democrats and Independents for more than 20 years. Surely these loses carry a message.

One can only imagine how Mrs. Thatcher would have characterized an opposition party that was responsible for the largest tax increase in state history, presided over the exodus of young entrepreneurial talent to other less rapacious states and couldn’t for the life of it balance a budget. Whatever would she have said about an opposition party that, seeking to make life easier for low paid workers, continually raised the minimum wage, thereby killing potential jobs for low paid workers, mostly forgotten young urban African Americans thirsting for self-reliance? She certainly would not have been content with an opposition party that practices crony capitalism on a grotesque scale. Nor would she have been content with a phony conservatism at ease with pragmatic measures that left in place a progressive opposition party and an emasculated Republican Party loyal only to the status quo?

A little spine and a few OPERATIVE principles – social principles as well, for the end of all politics is social betterment – might carry Republicans out of their doldrums towards a fruitful campaign, if only there were a Thatcher among them.

The Banality Of Kermit Gosnell

“He just calmly watched and occasionally took notes with a vague hint of a smile on his face from time to time.” Thus did a reporter describe Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s demeanor in court at his trial. The imperturbable Mr. Gosnell was referred to trial by a grand jury after law enforcement officers had raided his office on a complaint that the doctor had engaged in drug dealing, and what the officers found on arrival shocked them. More than forty fetal bodies were stuffed in “bags, milk jugs, orange juice cartons, and even cat food containers.” Some were found frozen in an office refrigerator, and Mr. Gosnell maintained “rows of jars” containing several baby feet.

The Grand Jury found that Mr. Gosnell was possessed of a macabre sense of humor, joking that one of the corpses found at his abortion clinic– Baby A, weighing 6 pounds – was so large that he could “walk me to the bus stop.” After Mr. Gosnell had snipped the baby’s spine with a scissors, the method preferred by Mr. Gosnell to dispatch babies born alive after botched abortions – baby A’s remains were stuffed into a shoebox, its arms and legs trailing out. Another child, Baby C, was deposited on a countertop while Mr. Gosnell attended to the child’s mother. It lay for 20 minutes calmly breathing and waving its arms before an assistant snipped its neck.

The Grand Jury found that Mr. Gosnell had during his long career snipped the necks of hundreds of babies. The fates of Babies A and C “were not even the worst cases.” Many late term abortions were performed by Mr. Gosnell and his wife on Sundays, when no staff was on the premises to bear witness. These case files Mr. Gosnell prudently destroyed at his home. “We may never know,” the Grand Jury concluded, “the details of these cases.”

The expression “the banality of evil” was first coined by Hannah Arendt in a 1962 work entitled “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.” Her working thesis was that the great evils of history as a general rule were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths but rather by ordinary people who, for whatever reason, accept as normal the operative conditions of their state and time.

How else to account for Mr. Gosnell’s “crimes,” as viewed by the Grand Jury?

Mr. Gosnell’s almost weary smile says it all: Why am I here when you who now sit in judgment upon me have made everything I have done permissible and even necessary? To be sure, my office was a bit untidy. But I am performing a legal and necessary social service, a service very much in demand. So then, apart from the shoe boxes, what exactly is the problem?

In the minds of men who lack moral imagination, great evil is necessarily reduced to banality – a question of law rather than a question of ethics; and this is especially true in times and places in which it is assumed that ethics is a product of the law, for in that case, everything that is legally permissible must also be morally right. Such moral dissonance is essential in the understanding of both Eichmann and Gosnell.

 

When some of Mr. Gosnell’s adult victims went to Planned Parenthood to complain of Mr. Gosnell’s house of horrors, they were told by staff to write a letter if they had not enjoyed Mr. Gosnell’s unsanitary – not to mention murderous – abortion factory.

Coincident with the prosecution of Mr. Gosnell, President Barack Obama, never one to retreat an inch in a battle in which he is leading from the front, bestowed at a conference in Washington some kind words upon Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the United States. Mr. Obama’s views on abortion while a U.S. Senator and president are consistent enough to have earned him a 100% approval vote from NARAL: He voted against a ban on partial birth abortion  in 2007, proposed a born-alive treatment law in 2008 and blocked a Born-Alive Infant Protection Act.

Continuing a theme stressed during his last presidential election, Mr. Obama told the group that the Republican “war on women” is still in full flower. "The fact is, after decades of progress, there's (sic) still those who want to turn back the clock to policies more suited to the 1950s than the 21st century. And they've been involved in an orchestrated and historic effort to roll back basic rights when it comes to women's health."

Mr. Gosnell’s post-third trimester abortion factory had not had a public inspection for 17 years before the grand jury returned indictments against him, one of the reasons his war on born infants continued so long without interruption. A 281 page report on Mr. Gosnell’s house of horrors concluded, “We have no idea how many facilities like Gosnell's have remained out of sight, out of mind of DOH for decades," because “ "officials [from the Philadelphia Department of Health had “concluded that inspections would be 'putting a barrier up to women' seeking abortions."

One may wonder whether Mr. Obama, at the rick of receiving a less than 100% rating from NARAL, would consider frequent inspections of abortion facilities as part of an unfortunate return to the 1950s, a time when the birth of the future president and staunch advocate of Planned parenthood was ten years short of a glint in his daddy’s eye.

The Democrats’ 10 Percent Solution With Malloy as Firewall

The split between Connecticut’s two major parties is most dramatic on the question of spending.

Governor Dannel Malloy took a pledge early in his administration, after he had imposed upon the state the largest tax increase in its history, reminiscent of a pledge made by former President H.W. Bush: No new tax increases. Internal pressures were such during the Bush administration that the president reneged on his pledge.

The pressures are always there, especially in tax prone Connecticut. It was the fashion during the administration of Republican Maverick turned Independent Lowell Weicker to regard deficits as revenue rather than spending problems; and, of course, the solution to a revenue problem is to boost revenue.

This misperception – always encouraged by politicians uncomfortable with spending cuts – had tripled the bottom line of Connecticut’s budgets within the space of three governors. Focused on revenue boosts, Mr. Weicker and succeeding Republican Governors John Rowland and Jodi Rell rarely were put in the uncomfortable position of having to disappoint powerful union interests. Spending inched inexorably up.

When Mr. Malloy was installed as governor, it was generally supposed that the spending tap would be turned wide open. The so called“firewalls,” Republican governors who had offered a mild resistance to spending increases, were gone: Laissez les bons temps rouler, as they say during Marti Gras in New Orleans that precedes an abstemious Lent .

Democratic leaders in the General Assembly, impatient with the snail’s pace progress of a self-proclaimed progressive governor, have now proposed changes in the Malloy budget that increase spending by 10 percent. There is every reason to believe that Democrats stuck on stupid are still in a “let the good times roll” frame of mind.

And why not? Moderate Republican office holders in Connecticut have been washed away by the onrushing progressive high tide. Consider the number of Republican moderates who have fallen in recent years under the boots of the progressive hordes in Connecticut. Within Connecticut’s all Democratic U.S. Congressional delegation alone, three moderate Republicans– Nancy Johnson, Rob Simmons and Chris Shays, the last moderate Republican in New England before he surrendered his seat to current Democratic U.S. Representative Jim Himes -- had been replaced by ambitious progressives. Mr. Malloy and his Lieutenant Governor Nancy Wyman proudly march cheek by jowl with striking union workers, and no one winces. The largest tax increase in Connecticut history was accompanied with a union deal that assured salary and benefit increases to state workers of 3 percent nine years out, an arrangement at first rejected by union representatives, which rejection was characterized by Edith Prague, a longtime supporter of Connecticut unions, as a form of unthinking madness.

Despite a stalled economy, the progressive parade in Connecticut marches merrily and heedlessly on. Occasional disputes with leaders in the opposition party are imperiously brushed aside by Democrats who outnumber Republicans in the state by a commanding two to one majority. The difference in sheer numbers relieves Democrats of the necessity of quibbling over crucial economic points imperfectly grasped by an easily distractible media in the grip of an economic vise that has considerably reduced its own numbers.

What all this really means is that Mr. Malloy has now become Connecticut’s spending “firewall.”And the governor is surrounded by progressive Democrats quite certain that more spending will hasten the arrival of better times, a philosophy of governance to which Mr. Malloy also subscribes. On matters upon which there are some discernible differences between Mr. Malloy and the Democrat dominated General Assembly –say, education reform – Mr. Malloy’s programs have been refined by progressive leaders in the legislature. Both President Pro Tem of the Senate Don Williams and Speaker of the House Brendan Sharkey have had a good deal of practice in curbing the modest ambitions of past Republican governors, and there is no reason to suppose they will not employ their talents to frustrate a governor who proves to be insufficiently progressive on matters they consider ideologically important – like, to fetch for one example, ramping up the progressive income tax on Connecticut Gold Coast millionaires.

While Mr. Malloy has said he is averse to tax increases, he has moved steadily in the direction of increasing state revenue through a series of measures – borrowing money to pay off budget expenses, reneging on a gentleman’s agreement with “bad” energy producers to liquidate a “temporary” tax on the production of electricity, boosting the notorious gross receipt tax on gasoline, and short-sheeting hospitals, to cite but four examples – that most charitably may be described as revenue enhancers.

All eyes in the General Assembly are fastened on the governor. Given an inch, progressive legislators have now demanded a yard – a ten percent increase in spending. It is precisely incremental increasing in spending of this kind that has tripled the bottom line of Connecticut budgets since the imposition of the state income tax in 1991, a short two decades ago. Progressives in the General Assembly are betting that while the governor’s no tax increase spirit is willing, his progressive Democratic flesh is weak. Because taxing and spending are inextricably connected, the easiest way to drive up taxes by 10 percent is to increase spending by 10 percent. And the red ink, in progressive strategy, is little more than an inducement to impose a steeper progressive tax on greedy hedge fund managers living the life in Fairfield County.