Bush Greeted by Cheering Canadians

No, really. Not everybody up in Molson Land is like that crazy, jackbooted lady MP we told you about last week. Okay, sure, some of them are--like the estimated 5,000 Canadians (plus Bob Dylan) who turned out in below-freezing weather to jeer President Bush during his state visit to Ottawa last week. "There are people here representing a wide range of opinions," Canadian Broadcasting Corporation correspondent Paddy Moore observed of the protesters, without apparent irony: "from anti-globalization, 'no to Star Wars,' support for Palestine, Marxism, not [to] mention exclamations like 'Queers hate Bush.'" Before the day was through, the aforementioned "wide range of opinions" was energetically exercised--amid what another news account called "copious amounts of marijuana smoke"--by means of paint-filled balloons, sharp sticks, and hurled rocks. At least two Canadian police officers were sent to the hospital, one with "serious facial injuries." THE SCRAPBOOK prays for their full and speedy recovery.

And we are no doubt joined in this sentiment by a group of "Canadian pro-Bush activists" organized by Connie Wilkins and Mark Fournier, founders of FreeDominion.ca. (Which is sort of like the FreeRepublic.com of Canada, apparently.) "About 200 of us showed up to rally for Bush" at Ottawa's airport, stalwart Maple Leafer Pete Vere writes. And when the president caught sight of them as he drove by, "the biggest Texas grin you ever saw came over his face," and he "gave us the big thumbs up." Mr. Vere says he "cannot describe the euphoria we felt at that point. . . . Some young mother pointed the president out to her toddler and said 'That's what a real leader looks like, honey.'"

Incredible, eh?

THE SCRAPBOOK tips its hat, as well, to a 48-year-old engineer from Oshawa, Ontario, who marched through the downtown crowd of paint-bombers carrying a sign reading "Support President Bush." As the Ottawa Sun quite correctly points out, "John Al-Hassani is Canadian, too." But "I came to this country from Iraq," Mr. Al-Hassani tells the Sun. "I have family there. I talk to them all the time." So he consequently has little patience for those of his fellow Canadians who think it proper to jeer the president of the United States as a "murderer."

"Look at these fools," says Al-Hassani. "They have no idea. They are idiots. They are simple babies. The majority of Iraqis are glad Bush liberated them from Saddam Hussein. But you don't see that on TV, only the terrorist gangsters blowing people up. . . . These people have never suffered. They make me sick. . . . If Canada was a terrible dictatorship like Iraq was under Saddam, would these people tell Bush 'No, no, don't invade, we don't want you to give us freedom?'"

Dumb . . .

A divided three-judge panel of the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week enjoined enforcement of a 1996 congressional enactment known as the Solomon Amendment--which makes colleges and universities ineligible for federal funding if they refuse to cooperate with Defense Department recruiters. The plaintiffs in the case are a coalition of 25 leading law schools and some 900 individual law professors who complain that the Solomon Amendment, by pressuring them to cooperate in a violation of their own antidiscrimination policies and principles, violates their rights to free speech and association.

Practically speaking: The law school professors and administrators believe that the Solomon Amendment unconstitutionally abridges their prerogative to prohibit representatives of the Pentagon's Judge Advocate General's office--which restricts employment opportunities for openly homosexual attorneys--from conducting job interviews on campus. Or, as lead plaintiffs' attorney Joshua Rosenkranz crowed to reporters after the Third Circuit had announced it agreed with him: "In a free society, the government cannot co-opt private institutions as government mouthpieces."

Sophisticated readers will here recognize what is generally referred to as a "compelled speech" First Amendment argument. Sophisticated readers will also think it uncommonly stupid, for reasons that the following rough but eminently fair paraphrase of Mr. Rosenkranz's legal logic should make clear:

We, America's most famous and respected legal educators, have a First Amendment interest in promoting our views about gay rights by preventing our students from hearing job pitches from Defense Department attorneys. The Solomon Amendment, which we have heretofore carefully obeyed, requires us thereby to announce, in effect, that--all things being equal--our views about gay rights are really just a self-righteous pose, and we'd much rather have our federal money, gimme, gimme, gimme. It is embarrassing to be exposed as hypocrites like this. Embarrassing the nation's law schools is unconstitutional.

As we say, it's an uncommonly stupid argument. The case is very likely now headed to the Supreme Court. Whose justices will very likely give the Third Circuit--and the nation's law schools--the right good spanking they deserve.

And Dumber

Tuan Thai has been convicted of a string of violent crimes since entering this country from Vietnam in 1996. Here's Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals describing the circumstances of Thai's third-degree assault conviction: "He became angry at his girlfriend because she was singing about their relationship. He threatened to kill her. He knocked her down and punched her 10 to 20 times. He pushed a chair down on her and choked her with both hands, then bound her up with a cable around her wrists and ankles. He also stuffed a microphone into her mouth and turned up the radio."

Here's Judge Kozinski on Mr. Thai's third-degree rape conviction: "While his friend was out fishing in Alaska, he raped his friend's girlfriend repeatedly over the course of several months, beginning while she was six months pregnant. He . . . threatened to put cocaine in her vagina and harm her other children if she tried to kick him out, and threatened to kill her more times than she could remember." As Judge Kozinski also points out, Thai's cellmate at a "federal psychiatric facility reported that he had threatened to kill his INS judge and prosecutor after he was released."

Unfortunately, Judge Kozinski's terrifying description of this Tuan Thai fellow comes to us in the form of a stinging dissent from his Ninth Circuit colleagues' November 24 refusal to reconsider their earlier order that the federal government "return Thai to the Western District of Washington for his release" onto the streets of Seattle. A majority of Ninth Circuit judges apparently believe that Supreme Court precedents require them to free this maniac. This, too, is an uncommonly stupid judgment likely to be reversed.

But that probably won't make you feel any better if you live in Seattle.

Liberal Mullahs Mugged by Reality

"According to Iranian politicians and analysts," the Washington Post's Robin Wright reports, Tehran's government is abandoning reform amid signs of a "takeover by conservatives determined to restore the revolution's Islamic purity." As a result, "fear, intimidation and harassment have become instruments of the state in ways reminiscent of the early fervor following the 1979 revolution."

And, if the Post dispatch is any indication, the nomenclature nomenklatura has decided to call the currently dominant faction of mullahs in Tehran . . . yup, "neoconservatives." Iran's "neoconservatives," Wright explains, "have the largest presence in the new parliament, the judiciary, and the powerful Guardian Council, a body of 12 unelected clerics that can veto new laws and political candidates." Their "platform mixes religious ideology with aspects of modernity"--just like here in the States!--and emphasizes "Islamic thought, competent government and the private sector."

Opposing the neoconservatives, incidentally, are a group of "ideological conservatives" with more "puritanical" views, says the Post. These people are "sometimes called Kayhanis." Must be how you spell "paleocons" in Farsi.