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Five Sept. 11 Suspects to Face Trial in New York

The Obama administration has announced it will try 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other 9-11 Gitmo detainees in a civilian federal court in New York, allowing them the protections of the U.S. Constitution even though they are not U.S. citizens.

Do you agree with this?

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Four Radical Chinese Muslims Transferred to Bermuda

Four Chinese Uighers (radical Chinese Muslims) were recently transferred to Bermuda. Do you think it's a good idea to release Gitmo detainees to idyllic vacation retreats?

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Not Sure

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June 3, 2008

Exclusive: An Open Letter to Senator John McCain

John Dendahl

The Hon. John McCain
Somewhere on the Campaign Trail
United States of America

Dear Sen. McCain:

Please count me among those needing and wanting your help in deciding what to do on Election Day, November 4, 2008.

This isn't about making a choice between you and the Democrat Party's nominee. Hell will freeze over before I'd vote to put an even worse Clinton in The White House. Too, I would not give my vote to someone with no - that's zero - relevant leadership experience, whose beliefs are mostly shrouded in mystery, and who lives in a household where the pants are pretty obviously worn by the pretty obviously America-hating Michelle Obama.

It is, however, about making a choice to vote or not to vote. I haven't done the latter since I attained voting age nearly 50 years ago, and I earnestly hope you will help me not to make 2008 a personal first.

Four years ago, Edward Koch, the Democrat former mayor of New York City generally regarded as a liberal, surprised many of us when he announced he was supporting President Bush. He said this:

"I intend to vote in 2004 to reelect President Bush. I will do so despite the fact that I do not agree with him on any major domestic issue, from tax policy to the recently enacted prescription drug law. These issues, however, pale in importance beside the menace of international terrorism, which threatens our very survival as a nation. President Bush has earned my vote because he has shown the resolve and courage necessary to wage the war against terrorism."

To vote for you, I don't have to cross the partisan divide as we're both members of the Republican Party. I would, however, have to cross an ideological divide just about as wide as that described by Koch.

Like Koch, I consider the menace of international terrorism (I'll settle for his term in the hope we're talking about the same thing, and I'm pretty confident we are) remains the most important issue we face today. Your senatorial record as to this is solidly favorable - and entirely consistent with the commitment you have made during the campaign to continue warring against radical Islamists and others who choose to be enemies of the United States.

I like it that you might second the observation expressed so well by former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, "No people in history have ever survived who thought they could protect their freedom by making themselves inoffensive to their enemies."

Your record in the U.S. Senate is also fine in the area comprising spending, earmarking and other profligacy that has gotten too many elected Republicans into deep, uh, yogurt. You have even demonstrated some capacity to learn in that you now speak favorably of tax policies advocated successfully by President Bush that you previously opposed.

Our ideological divide consists in protected speech, socialism masquerading as environmentalism, and the conditions under which we permit the nationals of other countries to become United States residents and, later, citizens.

Apparently hoping that the Supreme Court would fix the problem, President Bush delivered on the impulsive campaign promise he made to you in 2000 to sign campaign finance reform legislation if he were elected and if you got it to his desk. As a state Republican Party chairman before and after your Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act was enacted, I opposed that action and was part of Sen. Mitch McConnell's group that sued the Federal Election Commission to have it declared unconstitutional. I remember well the report of a Republican National Committee task force that met with you in 1996 to discuss the myriad problems such legislation would create and its constitutionality. That group found you both uncivil and poorly informed as to details of the proposed law that bore your name (McCain-Feingold in those days).

My testimony in McConnell v. FEC, like that of others, predicted just the sort of unregulated chaos that has ensued. Exactly as Justice Sandra Day O'Connor implied in her opinion for the Supreme Court (hers being the swing vote that allowed this disaster to remain law), big money has continued its inexorably growing flow into our political process. Your sole accomplishment was to shove the money into far less regulated and transparent channels.

It would be a fine thing to pick up a paper and read you now understand two things: that the first purpose of the First Amendment's speech protection clause was to protect political speech, and that BCRA has done a great deal more harm than good.

In a recent column discussing global warming and the government's decision to list polar bears as endangered by it, George Will noted, "Today's ‘green left' is the old ‘red left' revised." When a number of years ago you first introduced legislation to address global warming, perhaps a generous observer would credit you with taking seriously what appeared then to be some good science. The green left has succeeded in building an enormous empire on that issue and is proceeding apace to enact local, state and federal legislation having inestimable, but likely ruinous, costs. Yet it becomes clearer by the week that the global warming panic is no better supported by good science than was the scandalous but overwhelmingly popular eugenics a century earlier.

Are you sufficiently open-minded to wonder just a bit whether the global warming juggernaut is relying more and more on politicized science? Ignore the advocates' panicky claims that "the debate is over" - the debate is just getting well started.

I am encouraged to read that you acknowledge the message citizens gave you last year when they pretty much forced the president, you, Sen. Kennedy and others in Congress to drop so-called comprehensive immigration reform. You now say that border security has to come first, and I agree with that. There's more, however. I'm among those who want to know that your ideas about immigration have been informed by, for example, the dismal history following our last amnesty legislation in 1986, the Simpson-Mazzoli Bill. From what I read, former Sen. Alan Simpson, co-sponsor of that legislation, understands that the promised amnesties happened, all right, and that the number (three million or so - seems a piddling number today, no?) was substantially more than estimated on passage, but virtually all the rhetorical commitment to control migration into the United States all went the way of a wink and a nod.

Without meaning to impugn your spectacularly apparent patriotism, I hope to find you more resolute as to what it means to be an American vis-à-vis our policies on whom to admit, at what rate and with what conditions. Insistence on assimilation would be a good starting point. The waves of past immigration that helped make America great didn't take place in the balkanizing atmosphere of today's multiculturalism.

You have earned respect for speaking frankly, even in the face of what might have appeared to be contrary popular opinion. Let us see more evidence that you want an America with less government intervention and more reliance on the fineness of the aggregate of its individual citizens' decisions and efforts in their own behalf. In simpler words, more liberty.

Respectfully,

A fellow American patriot

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