Nifty trick liberals have. “Of course I support this commonsense position and decry the Supreme Court when it enshrines extreme leftists positions as part of our Constitution. Please avert your eyes from the fact that I will appoint justices who do the thing I decry.”

Of course, if you read the story, plainly NARAL hears the dog whistle. They back Obama despite his adoption of his heterodox position, because they know that what he thinks (or, really, what any of us think) won’t matter once there are a couple more Ginsburgs on the Court.

Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments. This is both historically and logically true. Of course the government can help to sustain ideals and can create institutions through which they can be the better observed, but their source by their very nature is in the people.

The people have to bear their own responsibilities. There is no method by which that burden can be shifted to the government. It is not the enactment, but the observance of laws, that creates the character of a nation.

Calvin Coolidge’s whole speech is worth reading, so here it is.  A sample:

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

So please, read it all.

Your move CNN.

But what, after all, makes for an effective political insult?

The answer is style. Too coarse, and the abuser sounds malicious. Too unimaginative, and the words evaporate en route. Too petty, and the insulter is harmed more than the insultee. Too distant from truth, and it just won’t stick. Bill Moyers’s jibe that “hyperbole was to Lyndon Johnson what oxygen is to life” is an attempt at wit; the real thing is Bill Buckley’s remark that LBJ was a man of his last word. Is Jimmy Carter the worst president the U.S. ever had, or, as William Safire put it, the “best U.S. president the Soviet Union ever had”? Gore Vidal calling Ronald Reagan a “triumph of the embalmer’s art” seems itself the triumph of a curdled soul; but even Reagan could laugh when Gerald Ford quipped, “No, Reagan doesn’t dye his hair. He’s just prematurely orange.”

It is one thing for our semiliterate intellectuals to sneer at the current president’s locution, and another to remark, as H.L. Mencken did of Warren Harding, that his speech “reminds me of a string of wet sponges . . . It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.” Compare this to Sen. Harry Reid’s feeble attempt at scathing wit against President George W. Bush in 2005: “I think this guy is a loser.

Joesph Tartakovsky is only partially right.  Style is certainly part of what we’ve generally lost in politics.  But without any substance, all the style in the world won’t help much.  Let’s compare Buckley’s putdown of LBJ with Reid’s putdown of GWB.

First, Reid inserts himself: “I think this guy is a loser.”  Buckley lets his phrase stand on its own: “Johnson is a man of his last word.”

Second, Buckley took a cliche and gave it a twist that illuminates Johnson’s contradictions; Reid relies on a cliche that only adds to the fog of confusion around Bush’s presidency.

Third, Buckley’s gibe is a specific criticism of Johnson’s tendency to pander to his audiences and his rapid changes in policy due to what’s popular; it’s telling that summarizing takes more words than Buckley’s actual epigram.  Reid’s criticism, however, is vague and depends on his listener sneering at Bush in the same way Reid does.

People usually claim to dislike politics because it’s nasty.  But since so many issues, from wars to waste management, are intrinsically nasty, getting the nastiness out of politics—getting the politics out of politics, so to speak—is probably impossible.  Perhaps the problem with politics today isn’t that there’s no style, but that there’s no substance behind the sneer.  Without the redemption of substance, the nastiness has become an end in itself.

To be clear, this applied both to people arrested on the street and to people captured on the battlefield. And, to be clear, this prospect made the commenter giddy.

The longer Boumedeine sets in on me, the more it becomes apparent that it may very well be the single greatest shift of power from one branch to another that our government has ever seen. It happened without a vote being cast, and there are those in this country who have allowed their dislike of the current president to lead them to cheering on the Supreme Court’s usurpation of war fighting powers.

For the first time, I’ll define a Supreme Court decision as scary. Both in its hamstringing of a legitimate war effort, and the in the inter-branch power struggle that will most assuredly result from it. If the judiciary insists on maintaining the unstated premise of Boumedeine - that they are supreme over the wartime decisions of the president regarding how to fight a war - they will lose.

The Founders defended the lack of limits placed on the federal judiciary by pointing out that it was naturally the weakest branch, controlling neither the military nor the treasury. Some on the court seem to remember how ill-prepared they are for a real fight with the other branches. That the wisdom of the Founders is lost on the current Court should come as no surprise.

But the American Civil Liberties Union and several advocacy groups have filed an amended complaint to their lawsuit against the U.S. Secret Service and the city and county of Denver that says protestors and demonstrators may have their First Amendment rights violated by security restrictions.

The ACLU has said it wants to avoid the conditions that existed during the 2004 convention in Boston, where protesters were caged, infuriating First Amendment advocates.

The first phase of the lawsuit asked the court to compel the city and the Secret Service to disclose the information on protest restrictions.

During today’s hearing before Judge Marcia S. Krieger, the attorney for the groups, Steve Zansberg, said the city and the Secret Service had provided the information sought in Phase One.

The second phase of the lawsuit will address whether the restrictions are unconstitutional.

Much as I would enjoy seeing the fence taken down so hooligans could wreck havoc at the convention, I’m forced to side with the DNC on this one.  I think preventing your convention from being disrupted is defending your First Amendment right against people who might not respect these rights.  Republicans, take note: if this lawsuit declares fences unconstitutional, your own convention in Minneapolis will face much worse than the Democrats face in Denver.