Presidential Signing Statements and North Korea

Two letters I fired off to the Boston Globe in the last few days:

Editor,

I'm not a constitutional law professor at Harvard and I don't play one in letters to the editor, but I had to laugh at the following sentence in Mr. Lawrence H. Tribe's rant against the President (Bush stomps on Fourth Amendment, May 16, A15), " . . . this President's defiance of statutes by the dozen is constitutionally alarming." Oh, really?

First, thank you to the Boston Globe and Mr. Charlie Savage for the excellent series on the use of signing statements by the last three Administrations.

Second, as I said above, I'm not a constitutional law professor at Harvard but Mr. Tribe certainly was during the Clinton Administration. According to the Boston Globe series, President Clinton challenged ("challenged" is my word; liberal extremists insist on "ignored", but only if the President is a Republican) 140 laws passed by Congress. That is just less than twelve dozen. I simply don't recall Mr. Tribe's concern for the U.S. Constitution during the Clinton years. I don't recall it because it simply wasn't there.

Add Presidential signing statements to the growing list of issues on which liberal newspapers and liberal commentators have no credibility. (End of first letter.)


Editor,

Now you have me more confused than ever.

In "The Khadafy Paradigm (editorial, May 16)", the Boston Globe acknowledges that in the nuclear disarmament negotiations with Libya, Britain "played a key role". Then, not even three sentences later, the editorial continues, "(The President) will have to negotiate directly (with North Korea) and make them offers they should not want to refuse" when addressing nuclear disarmament negotiations with North Korea.

In dealing with North Korea, President Bush has steadfastly insisted on six-nation talks with North Korea. His argument is that China, Japan, Russia and South Korea are neighbors of North Korea and each has a vested interest in the negotiations and may even be able to bear some pressure on North Korea. During the Presidential Debates, the Great Equivocator, Sen. John F. Kerry, chided the President for not going it alone with North Korea.

President Bush built a coalition of 31 countries to combat Iraq. The criticism from the Boston Globe and her sisters in the liberal print media is that the U.S. acted unilaterally in Iraq, though, as we all know, this criticism is a lie. The families of British, Polish and Australian soldiers killed in Iraq certainly don't think the US acted alone. Oops, there I go with the facts again.

Returning to North Korea, is the Boston Globe really arguing that the President should not build a coalition to deal with a rogue country that has nuclear weapons? Does the Boston Globe suggest the President act unilaterally in Iran instead of working through the UN, the EU, and NATO as he has?

Add coalition building and foreign affairs gravitas to the growing list of issues on which liberal newspapers and liberal commentators have no credibility. (End of second letter.)

I can end each letter the way I did because, well, the sentence is accurate and there is no chance both letters get published.