Luke Ford

BigHeadDC reports: "“A federal grand jury has indicted prominent attorney Richard “Dickie” Scruggs on criminal charges that he and other lawyers engaged in a scheme to bribe a judge,” the AP reports. Scruggs is the brother-in-law of Sen. Trent Lott, who abruptly announced his resignation from office on Monday with little explanation. A gay escort later alleged on Big Head DC a possible relationship with the soon-to-be ex-senator."

Perry Bacon writes for the Washington Post:

In his speeches and often on the Internet, the part of Sen. Barack Obama‘s biography that gets the most attention is not his race but his connections to the Muslim world.

Since declaring his candidacy for president in February, Obama, a member of a congregation of the United Church of Christ in Chicago, has had to address assertions that he is a Muslim or that he had received training in Islam in Indonesia, where he lived from ages 6 to 10. While his father was an atheist and his mother did not practice religion, Obama’s stepfather did occasionally attend services at a mosque there.

Despite his denials, rumors and e-mails circulating on the Internet continue to allege that Obama (D-Ill.) is a Muslim, a "Muslim plant" in a conspiracy against America, and that, if elected president, he would take the oath of office using a Koran, rather than a Bible, as did Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), the only Muslim in Congress, when he was sworn in earlier this year.

In campaign appearances, Obama regularly mentions his time living and attending school in Indonesia, and the fact that his paternal grandfather, a Kenyan farmer, was a Muslim. Obama invokes these facts as part of his case that he is prepared to handle foreign policy, despite having been in the Senate for only three years, and that he would literally bring a new face to parts of the world where the United States is not popular.

The son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya, Obama was born and spent much of his childhood in Hawaii, and he talks more about his multicultural background than he does about the possibility of being the first African American president, in marked contrast to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), who mentions in most of her stump speeches the prospect of her becoming the first woman to serve as president.

Dennis Prager writes:

One of the most widely held beliefs in the contemporary world — so widely held it is not disputed — is that, with few exceptions, the world hates America. One of the Democrats’ major accusations against the Bush administration is that it has increased hatred of America to unprecedented levels. And in many polls, the United States is held to be among the greatest obstacles to world peace and harmony.

But it is not true that the world hates America. It is the world’s left that hates America. However, because the left dominates the world’s news media and because most people, understandably, believe what the news media report, many people, including Americans, believe that the world hates America.

That it is the left — and those influenced by the left-leaning news and entertainment media — that hates America can be easily shown.

Take Western Europe, which is widely regarded as holding America in contempt, but upon examination only validates our thesis. The French, for example, are regarded as particularly America-hating, but if this were so, how does one explain the election of Nicolas Sarkozy as president of France? Sarkozy loves America and was known to love America when he ran for president. Evidently, it is the left in France — a left that, like the left in America, dominates the media, arts, universities and unions — that hates the U.S., not the French.

The same holds true for Spain, Australia, Britain, Latin America and elsewhere. The left in these countries hate the United States while non-leftists, and especially conservatives, in those countries hold America in high regard, if not actually love it.

Take Spain. The prime minister of Spain from 1996 to 2004, Jose Maria Aznar, is a conservative who holds America in the highest regard. He was elected twice, and polls in Spain up to the week before the 2004 election all predicted a third term for Aznar’s party (Aznar had promised not to run for a third term). Only the Madrid subway bombings, perpetrated by Muslim terrorists three days before the elections, but which the Aznar government erroneously blamed on Basque separatists, turned the election against the conservative party.

There is another obvious argument against the belief that the world hates America: Many millions of people would rather live in America than in any other country. How does the left explain this? Why would people want to come to a country they loathe? Why don’t people want to live in Sweden or France as much as they wish to live in America? Those are rich and free countries, too.

The answer is that most people know there is no country in the world more accepting of strangers as is America. After three generations, people who have emigrated to Germany or France or Sweden do not feel — and are not regarded as — fully German, French or Swedish. Yet, anyone of any color from any country is regarded as American the moment he or she identifies as one. The country that the left routinely calls "xenophobic" and "racist" is in fact the least racist and xenophobic country in the world.

Given that it is the left and the institutions it dominates — universities, media (other than talk radio in America) and unions — that hate America, two questions remain: Why does the left hate America, and does the American left, too, hate America?

The answer to the first question is that America and especially the most hated parts of America — conservatives, religious conservatives in particular — are the greatest obstacles to leftist dominance. American success refutes the socialist ideals of the left; American use of force to vanquish evil refutes the left’s pacifist tendencies; America is the last great country that believes in putting some murderers to death, something that is anathema to the left; when America is governed by conservatives, it uses the language of good and evil, language regarded by the left as "Manichean"; most Americans still believe in the Judeo-Christian value system, another target of the left because the left regards all religions as equally valid (or more to the point, equally foolish and dangerous) and regards God-based morality as the moral equivalent of alchemy.

It makes perfect sense that the left around the world loathes America. The final question, then, is whether this loathing of America is characteristic of the American left as well. The answer is that the American left hates the America that believes in American exceptionalism, is prepared to use force to fight what it deems as dangerous evil, affirms the Judeo-Christian value system, believes in the death penalty, supports male-female marriage, rejects big government, wants lower taxes, prefers free market to governmental solutions, etc. The American left, like the rest of the world’s left, loathes that America.

So what America does the American left love? That is for those on the left to answer. But given their beliefs that America was founded by racists and slaveholders, that it is an imperialist nation, that 35 million Americans go hungry, that it invades countries for corporate profits, and that it is largely racist and xenophobic, it is a fair question.

From the Times of India Nov. 29:

Huma Abedin, who is now 32, is the only daughter of parents of pre-partition India. Her father Syed Zainul Abedin was an alumnus of Aligarh Muslim University and came to the United States for graduate studies. He worked at the Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, where Huma was born to his wife Saleha, a Pakistani who also came to the United States for graduate studies.

The couple left US for Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, when Huma was only 2, but she returned to Washington DC as a young woman, graduating from George Washington University. In 1996, she found placement as an intern in the White House, and was assigned to the First Lady’s office, where she was eventually hired as a staff assistant to Hillary’s chief of staff, Maggie Williams. For several years, she was the backup to Mrs Clinton’s permanent personal aide, Allison Stein, and she officially took over as Hillary’s aide during the 2000 Senate race.

Some stories have cast Huma as Hillary’s chief political aide and a future White House chief of staff. But the projection is clearly overblown and off-the-mark.

From all accounts, Huma is more of a "body person" a constant shadow who handles Hillary’s travel and appointment, although other Clinton supporters speak highly of her intellect and have predicted a bright political future for her. Her presidential campaign title is "traveling chief of staff". (Incidentally, the Clinton campaign’s policy director is also an Indian-American, Neera Tanden, who, like Hillary, is a graduate of Yale University) Huma’s organization talents are so great that she virtually runs the scheduling aspects of the Clinton campaign, although it is Neera who runs the think-tank. So cool and poised is she that the inside joke in the campaign is to figure out "whether Huma is human".

Predictably, it is Huma’s proximity – physical and otherwise – to Hillary Clinton that has fuelled vicious rumours among right-wingers of a lesbian relationship between the two. Much of that has been deduced from the mundane fact that Huma has picked up the phone at the candidate’s house at all odd hours.

But so toxic is the political atmosphere in the United States with almost a year of campaigning left in the presidential elections that it is a field day for rumours. Everything from Barack Obama’s "extremist connection" to Rudy Giuliani’s "mafia links" is fair game to bloggers.

Huma herself is under scrutiny now for her years in Saudi Arabia, and everything that her father wrote, including some tracts about communal violence and the Muslim minority in India, is being studied carefully.

Brilliant at Breakfast writes:

Can you imagine if a Democratic presidential candidate had as a business client someone who harbored Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, otherwise known as "the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks"?

Well, if Rudy Giuliani wants to run as the candidate who knew since the 1993 World Trade Center attack that a single network was behind it; as the only candidate with the knowledge and toughness to keep Americans safe from terrorists, he has some ‘splainin’ to do about why, when there’s cash involved, he’s perfectly OK with doing business with those who harbor terrorists.

This article by Wayne Barrett in the Village Voice this week ought to be the beginning of the end for Rudy the Saint of 9/11:

Three weeks after 9/11, when the roar of fighter jets still haunted the city’s skyline, the emir of gas-rich Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifah al-Thani, toured Ground Zero. Although a member of the emir’s own royal family had harbored the man who would later be identified as the mastermind of the attack—a man named Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, often referred to in intelligence circles by his initials, KSM—al-Thani rushed to New York in its aftermath, offering to make a $3 million donation, principally to the families of its victims. Rudy Giuliani, apparently unaware of what the FBI and CIA had long known about Qatari links to Al Qaeda, appeared on CNN with al-Thani that night and vouched for the emir when Larry King asked the mayor: "You are a friend of his, are you not?"

"We had a very good meeting yesterday. Very good," said Giuliani, adding that he was "very, very grateful" for al-Thani’s generosity.

[snip]

The contradictory and stunning reality is that Giuliani Partners, the consulting company that has made Giuliani rich, feasts at the Qatar trough, doing business with the ministry run by the very member of the royal family identified in news and government reports as having concealed KSM—the terrorist mastermind who wired funds from Qatar to his nephew Ramzi Yousef prior to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and who also sold the idea of a plane attack on the towers to Osama bin Laden—on his Qatar farm in the mid-1990s.

This royal family member is Abdallah bin Khalid al-Thani, Qatar’s minister of Islamic affairs at the time, who was later installed at the interior ministry in January 2001 and reappointed by the emir during a government shake-up earlier this year. Abdallah al-Thani is also said to have welcomed Osama bin Laden on two visits to the farm, a charge repeated as recently as October 10, 2007, in a Congressional Research Service study. Abdallah al-Thani’s interior ministry or the state-owned company it helps oversee, Qatar Petroleum, has worked with Giuliani Security & Safety LLC, a subsidiary of Giuliani Partners, on an undisclosed number of contracts, the value of which neither the government nor the company will release.

More here.

It’s no wonder that there’s a growing perception of Giuliani as the Bush family-approved successor. His campaign is loaded with neocons that are even further to the right of those surrounding George W. Bush; he’s even more of a secretive authoritarian, AND he has the required connection with terrorists so as to make a good tag-team to keep Americans afraid.