••can ye pass the acid test?••

ye who enter here be afraid, but do what ye must -- to defeat your fear ye must defy it.

& defeat it ye must, for only then can we begin to realize liberty & justice for all.

time bomb tick tock? nervous tic talk? war on war?

or just a blog crying in the wilderness, trying to make sense of it all, terror-fried by hate radio and FOX, the number of whose name is 666??? (coincidence?)

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

wall street journal reveals ignorance

i've put this off because i hate reading long-winded op-ed pieces (especially from wsj) like sirreene [thanx, darlin'] sent me a week ago, but i finally forced myself, so here goes.

she left out the byline, which is just as well: i'd rather not know who i'm about to put down.

i'll give you the last sentence first, not because i want to ruin it for you, but because it tells you where the author is headed:

That kind of individual initiative is what has made the U.S. a great country.
the headline is "What Are the Lessons of Katrina?" [9/13/05]

if you're anything like me, you're probably rubbing your eyes in disbelief that that title and that conclusion come from the same piece.

the author lists six "lessons," none of which have anything to do with the unsound environmental practices that actually caused the katrina calamity.

i'll skip the first two, an attack on bureaucracies and one on lawyers, because both are essentially moot and because i really want to get to #3, in which the author shows his/her ignorance of the constitution.

first, the offending paragraph:

Some of those limitations were built into the Constitution's limits on federal powers. President Bush could not nationalize the Louisiana National Guard without the consent of Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, which was not immediately forthcoming.
apparently neither the author nor wsj's fact checker has ever taken the trouble to read the constitution: no such limit exists anywhere in the document.

if you want to check that, go to any online US constitution, open your browser's edit menu, click on "find," and look for the word "militia" (without the quotes, of course), which is the generic word for what came to be called the national guard. you'll find it 6 times, 2 of which are in the amendments. the relevant clauses are in article i, section 8, paragraphs 15 & 16 and article ii, section 2, paragraph 1, plus, perhaps, the 5th amendment.

i,§8,¶15 says

[The Congress shall have Power] To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union....
ii,§2,¶1 says

The President shall be Commander in Chief...of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States;...
only i,§8,¶16 (where the word appears twice) gives states any militia-related power, as follows:

...reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;...
the word "militia" also appears earlier in ¶16, saying congress may "...provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States...;" in the 2nd amendment's justification for the right to keep and bear arms; and in the 5th's exception to the requirement for grand jury indictments in criminal cases:

...in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger;...
when i said the 5th might be relevant to the issue, it was because those last 3 words are the constitution's only direct suggestion that the guard may be used other than as a fighting force.

it's not impossible for congress to enact a law that makes the president get a governor's consent to federalize a state's national guard, and for all i know such a law exists, but it's not part of the constitution.

[by the way, did bush get consent from governors before he sent national guard troops to iraq?]

wsj may be the classiest member of the gop noise machine, but that's no excuse for putting a flawed interpretation of the constitution in its pages.

look, i could go on, but the rest of the op-ed is a mixed bag of facts, inaccuracies based on anachronism and misinformation, and blaming local and state dems, most of which i've already dealt with in prior posts.

it sounds as if mayor nagin ordered evacuation not on saturday, before the monday storm, but on tuesday, after the flood began. the author treats events as if they all happened the same day and yet as if everybody had all the time in the world to do everything that had to be done.

i forget who said "you're entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts." the fact that something is an opinion piece is no excuse for printing it when it contains flawed information.

i know i'm not perfect in that department. sometimes memory seems to play tricks on me. but, just as i hope bloggers will correct my errors here, if i sent an op-ed piece to a major newspaper i'd expect them to check my facts.

wsj ought to clean up its act.

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