Claude Cartaginese

While crowds of admirers in Europe and the Islamic world are fawning over President Barack Obama on his “Disparage America Tour,” Vice President Joe Biden has publicly taken issue with his predecessor Dick Cheney’s assertion that the Obama administration’s national security policies are making the United States less safe. 

“I don’t think he [Cheney] is out of line, but he is dead wrong,” Biden said. “… The last administration left us in a weaker posture than we’ve been any time since World War II: less regarded in the world, stretched more thinly than we ever have been in the past, two wars under way, virtually no respect in entire parts of the world. And so we’ve been about the business of repairing and strengthening those. I guarantee you we are safer today, our interests are more secure today than they were any time during the eight years” of the Bush administration.

This is the same Joe Biden who opposed former President Ronald Reagan’s defense buildup, which ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet Union; the same Joe Biden who subsequently voted against the MX missile, the B-l bomber and the Trident submarine; the same Joe Biden who opposed Reagan’s “continued adherence” to the goal of developing the Strategic Defense Initiative missile-defense system, calling it “one of the most reckless and irresponsible acts in the history of modern statecraft.”

Indeed, this is the same Joe Biden who, in 2007, voted against a bill to prohibit illegal aliens convicted of serious crimes from gaining legal status; the same Joe Biden who received an 8 percent rating from the U.S. Border Control because of his open-borders positions on immigration issues; and the same Joe Biden who received an “F” rating from the National Rifle Association for his consistent record of voting to limit the rights of gun owners and manufacturers.

The Joe Biden who laments that the Bush-Cheney administration made America less safe is now working hard to protect us by joining Barack Obama in closing the Guantanamo Bay detention center and relocating the 200-plus jihadists who are currently housed there; referring the recent North Korean missile launch to the impotent United Nations; announcing huge cuts in America’s defense budget—at a time when countries like China and Russia are increasing their defense budgets and publicly flexing their military muscle; and courting new allies such as the island Gulag of Communist Cuba, the terror-sponsoring government of Syria, and the terror-sponsoring mullahs and jihadists of Iran.

I’m not feeling any safer. Are you?

Wesley Cook, the icon of the left who is better known as Mumia Abu Jamal, has lost his bid to retry the case of Danny Faulkner, the Philadelphia police officer whom Jamal murdered in cold blood 28 years ago. Jamal’s hopes rested on whether he could persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to agree that his original trial was unfair because some blacks had been excluded from the jury, but yesterday the Court announced that it will not hear Jamal’s case. Jamal’s attorney, Robert Bryan of San Francisco, calls this latest decision “a mockery of justice” and vows that he will seek a rehearing by the high court.

 

What was the original crime that led to this “mockery”?

 

When white police officer Daniel Faulkner made a traffic stop of William Cook, Jamal’s brother, on a Philadelphia street back in 1981, Faulkner ended up with a bullet in his back after Jamal (a former Black Panther thug) ambushed him. As Officer Faulkner fell, he drew his own gun and managed to shoot Jamal in the chest, wounding but not killing him. Jamal then fired repeatedly at Faulkner, finally executing him at close range with a bullet to the head. In 1982 a racially mixed jury—which Jamal himself helped select—deliberated for three hours and returned a guilty verdict.

 

After that, however, things got perverse.

 

A new legal team acting on Abu Jamal’s behalf challenged most of the facts in the case and waged an international propaganda campaign to rehabilitate their client’s image. The leading attorney on the team was Leonard Weinglass, a Fidel Castro supporter who once served as Co-Chairman of the International Committee of the National Lawyers Guild, a veritable appendage of the Communist Party. Following Weinglass’s lead, a bevy of prominent leftists rallied to Jamal’s defense, depicting him as an unfortunate casualty of America’s racist criminal-justice system.

 

“Free Mumia” rallies were held to cheering throngs across the United States and Europe. Among the luminaries convinced of Jamal’s innocence were: pro-Castro socialist actor Ed Asner; America-hating university professor Noam Chomsky; America-hating activist Ramsey Clark (affiliated with the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party); actress/antiwar activist Susan Sarandon; film critic Roger Ebert; actor/antiwar activist Mike Farrell; Marxist professor Howard Zinn; socialist writer Norman Mailer; Robert Meerepol (the son of Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg); America-hating filmmakers Michael Moore, Spike Lee, and Oliver Stone; longtime communist radical Angela Davis; and the late actor Ossie Davis. The city of Paris went so far as to make Jamal an honorary citizen.

 

And just when you thought it couldn’t get any more perverse, Jamal began receiving invitations to be a guest speaker at college commencement ceremonies—in each instance delivering his comments from the confines of his prison cell. Likening himself to persecuted social-justice crusaders of the past, he told the graduates that he was a revolutionary seeking to raise public consciousness about America’s repression of blacks and other minorities.

 

Fortunately, as a result of yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling, Mumia Abu Jamal will stay right where he belongs: in prison, pending a new death penalty hearing.