Many conservative pundits are criticizing President Obama for valuing empathy in his highly qualified Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor. But wanting a judge to understand the impact that rulings have on people isn’t new. President George H.W. Bush cited Clarence Thomas’ “great empathy” when announcing his nomination to the Supreme Court, Media Matters noted. And during his confirmation hearing, Thomas said that he believed he could “bring something different to the court,” in that he could “walk in the shoes of the people who are affected by what the court does.” At the time, GOP lawmakers praised this empathy. Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., said that Thomas’ “compassion and understanding of the impact that the Supreme Court has on the lives of average Americans” were just as important as his legal qualifications.
Though President Obama said Monday that the United States and its allies would “stand up” to North Korea, his options are limited, the New York Times reported. For the response to have a significant impact, China — which supplies about 90 percent of North Korea’s oil and 45 percent of its food — needs to go beyond the strong condemnation it issued Monday. The Clinton and Bush administrations were unsuccessful at getting China to put real pressure on North Korea. That’s because, according to Dan Blumenthal of the American Enterprise Institute and Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, China “fears a unified, democratic, prosperous Korea allied with the United States” and “wants a puppet state in North Korea.”
As a Bush administration holdover, Defense Secretary Robert Gates would seem to be in the crossfire of the Obama vs. Cheney skirmish over national security. It can’t help that President Obama flubbed Gates’ name last week, calling him “William Gates.” But Gates, a Wichita native and East High graduate who’ll speak at the school’s commencement tonight, is handling the issue with his usual candor and care, in a Wall Street Journal interview and otherwise.
On closing Guantanamo Bay prison and moving detainees to U.S. facilities, he decried the “fearmongering”: “If people begin to absorb the fact that we’ve got several dozen very dangerous terrorists in our jails right now . . . maybe a little greater perspective would be brought to the issue.”
On the military limiting its interrogations to techniques in the Army Field Manual: “We have as high a motive to get information that will prevent attacks on our soldiers as anybody does. . . . And yet we find the methods that we use are sufficient.”
Siding with Obama on security issues: “Having been in this business a long time, I think that you never can underestimate the power of American values.”
President Obama has drawn flak from his left for his flip-flop on releasing more photos showing abusive interrogations of prisoners in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the decision to withhold the photos was “absolutely correct,” declared Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass. “Far better to alienate the ACLU in Washington than to alienate people in Pakistan and Afghanistan,” Haass said. “When people in Washington get alienated, they write op-eds. When people in Pakistan get alienated, they plant IEDs and kill American soldiers.”
Still, many analysts predict that the administration will lose the court challenge and eventually be forced to release the photos.
