A group of "leading conservative lawyers" -- a phrase never confused with "U.S. Marines" -- has produced an embarrassingly pompous letter denouncing Liz Cheney for demanding the names of attorneys at the Justice Department who formerly represented Guantanamo detainees.

The letter calls Cheney's demand "shameful," before unleashing this steaming pile of idiocy:

"The American tradition of zealous representation of unpopular clients is at least as old as John Adams' representation of the British soldiers charged in the Boston Massacre."

Yes, but even John Adams didn't take a job with the government for another 19 years after defending the British guards -- who, in 1770, were "the police." He also didn't take a position with the U.S. government that involved processing British murder suspects.

I'd be more interested in hearing about the sacred duty of lawyers to defend "unpopular clients" if we were talking about clients who are unpopular with anyone lawyers know.

Every white shoe law firm in the country has been clamoring to take the cases of Guantanamo detainees, while young associates line up to be put on the case. This is even more fun than defending Ted Bundy!

As The Wall Street Journal put it in a 2007 article, a list of the law firms representing Guantanamo detainees "reads like a who's who of America's most prestigious law firms" -- which conveniently doubles as Santa's "naughty" list.

President Barack Obama obviously has no qualms about slandering people or industries that interfere with his agenda. In the same creepy manner he defamed the Cambridge Police Department without benefit of the facts, he is scapegoating the insurance companies based on his distorted version of facts.

In the past week, he has ratcheted up his war on insurance companies, who, he apparently figures, must be destroyed if he is to accomplish his Utopian dream of socialized health care. He made them the focus of his wrath again, in his umpteenth health care speech, Monday in Philadelphia. Even the White House blog, in a post titled "Moving Forward to Put the American People Ahead of Insurance Companies," frames this debate as between insurance companies and the people.

Who is Obama to be smearing health insurance companies for allegedly bankrupting people to increase their profits when his policy agenda is already bankrupting America to increase government power? As the late Milton Friedman asked the clueless leftist Phil Donahue, "Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest?"

It's not the insurance industry versus the American people; it is Obama's socialist leviathan versus the American people, with the insurance companies as necessary collateral damage.

Is it fair to accuse the insurance companies of arbitrariness when they refuse to cover what their contracts don't require them to cover? And isn't Obama implying that if the government were to take full control over health care, there would be no denial of coverage? We don't have to wait for his plan to take effect to know that's false. Everyone, including Obama, is aware of Medicare's denying or reducing reimbursements so drastically that an increasing number of doctors are refusing Medicare patients. Does he call that arbitrary?

In addition, whether or not you bristle at those suggesting Obamacare would usher in death panels, you are in fantasyland if you think Obamacare doesn't contemplate increased rationing -- by the government.

President Barack Obama's obsessive, opportunistic demonization of insurance companies in his quest to pass his not-yet-written health care proposal is growing tiresome. Aren't you getting sick of a president attacking American citizens and businesses as if they -- not Obama's beloved government -- were the enemy?

His repeated implication that insurance companies are the primary reason for rising health care costs is politically expedient, but it's still untrue. Government is the main culprit.

Throughout his yearlong push for Obamacare, he has called insurance companies every name in the book. He has blamed them for soaring costs, bludgeoned them for taking profits, condemned their executives' salaries and savaged them for denying coverage for pre-existing conditions.

He even says insurers are the final arbiters of who gets care and who doesn't: "And insurance companies freely ration health care based on who's sick and who's healthy, who can pay and who can't."

Obama has framed the entire debate as if it were an insurance problem. In his theatrical speech Wednesday -- while flanked from all sides by white-coated props -- he said, "We began our push to reform health insurance last March," as if the thrust of his health care efforts has been to rein in insurers and little else.

Though Obama surely hates insurance companies, we all know he is up to much more than just punishing them. This is about a government takeover, even if it takes several incremental steps. Vilifying insurers sells better than glorifying government to a center-right nation generally suspicious of government.

It looks like Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes is on track to win another endorsement from ACORN!

This week, Hynes announced that "no criminality has been found" after his investigation of the videotapes made by investigative journalists James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, which show ACORN employees counseling the pair on getting a mortgage for a house of prostitution.

(They got a choice of government loans: Phat Fannie Mae, Prince Freddie Mac or Barney Fresh Daddy Frank ... aka "Sir Fix-A-Lot.")

I'm just glad to know that Hynes conducted a thorough "investigation" first. Who did he have screen the videotapes, Gov. Paterson?

If his investigators had actually watched the videotapes, they would have found ACORN employees apparently advising a pimp and prostitute on how to defraud mortgage lenders, deposit prostitution money in a bank, hide money from the government and avoid detection while running a whorehouse with teenage girls from El Salvador.

I'm not a lawyer -- oh, wait, yes, I am -- but I count approximately a half-dozen state law crimes being discussed on those tapes, from money laundering to advancing prostitution.

For a guy who touts himself as bipartisan and demands bipartisanship from Republicans, President Barack Obama had a funny way of showing his bipartisanship during last week's health care summit.

Obama has repeatedly promised an open, honest and bipartisan process on health care reform, but from the beginning, he has quarterbacked a highly partisan, closed-door and dishonest campaign.

In his opening remarks at the "summit," he said he wanted to make sure the participants didn't just trade "talking points" or engage in "political theater." He said, "If we've got an open mind, if we're listening to each other, if we're not engaging in sort of the tit for tat trying to score political points during the next several hours ... we might be able to make some progress."

He then proceeded to a) open the curtains for his own political theater, with one anecdotal Democratic sob story after another about the horrors of American health care; b) deliver his own talking points throughout the day, including his obligatory "tit for tat" following almost every Republican speaker; and c) demonstrate his own partisanship through (i) patronizing dismissals of the Republicans' substantive contributions as "talking points"; (ii) volleying partisan barbs at Republicans; (iii) mischaracterizing his positions and those of the Republicans; and (iv) accusing Republicans of not showing a good-faith willingness to make any movement in his direction when he made no effort to compromise with them.

Former Education Secretary William Bennett is chiding those who are advancing the notion of forming a “third party.” And he is absolutely right for doing so. Such a rift within the conservative movement at this critical moment would do more to propel the liberal Democrat agenda to uncontested political dominance than any ploy envisioned by the left. Yet it appears that, despite such a risk, the movement is continuing to effervesce among the grassroots.

At last week’s CPAC convention, some prominent speakers, including Glenn Beck, adamantly insisted that both major parties had become indistinguishable, and that a third party would be the only means of extricating national politics from the mire of Beltway thinking. To counter Beck’s claim, Bennett held up Senators Jim DeMint (R.-SC) and Tom Coburn (R.-OK), along with Congressmen Mike Pence (R.-IN) and Paul Ryan (R.-WI) as bastions of true conservatism.

Unfortunately, certain other “Republicans” are working overtime to undermine Bennett’s argument. Chief among them is former Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson. In a predictable move last week, Barack Obama impaneled a “Debt Commission” ostensibly to identify the means of reining in the spending outrages of the federal government. Of course Obama knew that the presence of a “Republican” would lend the needed pretense of “bipartisanship” to his ruse. And Simpson was only too willing to cooperate.

Long held as an icon of the GOP, Simpson is no conservative, and in truth has never been one. More significantly, he has devoted a large part of his political career to denigrating true conservatism, and attempting to expunge it from the Republican Party. Simpson was keynote speaker at the 1994 Wyoming State Republican Convention, using the occasion to castigate real conservatives as “a blight on the Republican Party.”

Inasmuch as Obamacare has a snowball's chance in hell of passing (but did you see how much snow they got in hell last week?), everyone is wondering what President Obama is up to by calling Republicans to a televised Reykjavik summit this week to discuss socializing health care.

At least they served beer at the last White House summit this stupid and pointless.

If the president is serious about passing nationalized health care, he ought to be meeting with the Democrats, not the Republicans.

Republicans can't stop the Democrats from socializing health care: They are a tiny minority party in both the House and the Senate. (Note to America: You might want to keep this in mind next time you go to the polls.)

As the Democratic base has been hysterically pointing out, both the House and the Senate have already passed national health care bills. Either body could vote for the other's bill, and -- presto! -- Obama would have a national health care bill, replete with death panels, abortion coverage and lots and lots of new government commissions!

Sadly, as the president's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has noted, the Democratic base is "@#$%^ retarded."

The reason massive Democratic majorities in Congress aren't enough to pass socialist health care is AMERICANS DON'T WANT SOCIALIZED MEDICINE!

How long will it take for every last American to realize President Barack Obama is not about bipartisanship, reconciliation (other than as a process to cram his health care bill through Congress) and uniting Americans? As his latest gyrations on health care demonstrate, he will not be deterred in his quest to saddle Americans with socialized medicine, even if it greatly increases the likelihood he won't be re-elected.

Here we have Obama, frenetically busy with at least three of his hands, pushing different buttons and sending mixed signals. I guess being a self-perceived messiah means you don't have to worry about being flagrantly inconsistent, even on the same day or in the context of one speech.

He's invited Republicans to a bipartisan summit on health care, intending to create the illusion that he's interested in conservative ideas on the subject.

But at the same time -- he can't even pretend long enough to let this ruse play out -- he is threatening Republicans that if they filibuster current congressional health care proposals, he will urge Congress to pass Obamacare by bastardizing the reconciliation process.

But wait, just like a Ginsu knife infomercial, there's more. Obama has also unveiled the outlines of his own new health care proposal, but it is hardly a model of bipartisanship.

As for his "bipartisan" summit, why would anyone believe he is interested in the Republicans' ideas on health care? Has he given any indication he is through this nearly yearlong process? Has he not shut Republicans out of the entire process until tendering this counterfeit overture -- after wholesale repudiation of his plan by the American people?

Barack Obama has initiated yet another response to his declining popularity. Only a year into what was once trumpeted as perhaps history’s greatest electoral promise of “hope and change,” the Obama Administration finds itself on the ropes. The American public is angry and energized as it has not been since 1994, and Democrats in the Senate and House are looking with ever greater apprehension towards the November elections.

Amazingly, every possible excuse is being offered, and new plans for the restoration Obama’s public image are floated almost daily. New villains are concocted, while old ones, such as former Vice-President Dick Cheney, are resurrected as the root cause of Obama’s problems. Yet the entire leftist political cabal, of which Obama is clearly the ideological head, steadfastly refuses to admit or even acknowledge the true underlying problem, which is the abhorrent nature of the liberalism that they seek to advance.

On February 16, White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer announced plans to improve the quality of news being released from the Oval Office. He also spoke of his intention to respond more quickly to Republican criticism. The underlying message was, of course, that the Obama agenda has always been a marvelous scheme and would have been a resounding success, were it not for the eroding effects of those nasty right-wing partisans who simply refuse to give credit where it is due.

When you're president of the United States and your primary claim to fame is your economic prowess but your economic record fails by all objective measures, what do you do? You call on your skills as a virtuoso propagandist.

With the perceived catastrophic economic crisis of 2008-09, President Barack Obama captured the presidency at the perfect time in America's modern history for him to unleash his grandiose socialist policies -- policies so ambitious that the American people would never have tolerated them under any other circumstances.

With the nation in near panic over the impending doom of the economy, Obama presented his now-infamous "stimulus plan" to artificially create government demand by spending more than $800 billion of borrowed money to "jump-start the economy."

Being a die-hard Keynesian, Obama probably believed his program would create jobs. But given his attitude about the wealthy being undeserving of their good fortune, he probably wasn't risking too much in the event it didn't work. The funds would redistribute wealth to those less fortunate and whom society, in Obama's view, has cheated. It would also force allocations of money to "green" enterprises that would never be pursued if left to the sanity of private-sector consumer demand, further expand the public sector in general and provide ample slush money to reward unions and other supporters to shore up his re-election efforts.

According to Keynesian theory, as I understand it, it doesn't matter much where the government spends other people's money -- just as long as it spends it. Once the money is injected into the economy (never mind that an equal amount is taken out of the economy from the private sector), a multiplier effect unfolds to stimulate economic growth and jobs.

The only man causing President Obama more headaches than Joe Biden these days is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (who, coincidentally, was right after Biden on Obama's short-list for V.P.).

Despite Obama's personal magnetism, the Iranian president persists in moving like gangbusters to build nuclear weapons, leading to Ahmadinejad's announcement last week that Iran is now a "nuclear state."

Gee, that's weird -- because I remember being told in December 2007 that all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies had concluded that Iran had ceased nuclear weapons development as of 2003.

At the time of that leak, many of us recalled that the U.S. has the worst intelligence-gathering operations in the world. The Czechs, the French, the Italians -- even the Iraqis (who were trained by the Soviets) -- all have better intelligence.

Burkina Faso has better intelligence -- and their director of intelligence is a witch doctor. The marketing division of Wal-Mart has more reliable intel than the U.S. government does.

After Watergate, the off-the-charts left-wing Congress gleefully set about dismantling this nation's intelligence operations on the theory that Watergate never would have happened if only there had been no CIA.

Ron Dellums, a typical Democrat of the time, who -- amazingly -- was a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, famously declared in 1975: "We should totally dismantle every intelligence agency in this country piece by piece, brick by brick, nail by nail."

It was an odd week for a staunch conservative to be in agreement with Barack Obama. In the wake of Republican Scott Brown’s dramatic Senate victory in Massachusetts, Democrat leaders were stunned and shaken. But as usual, they quickly gathered themselves and coordinated a strategy of interpreting Brown’s election in terms that they hoped would minimize damage to their agenda. And this effort was led, of course, by Obama himself.

In keeping with this ploy, the Narcissist in Chief attempted to proffer the absurd notion that somehow, a hard-right turn in Massachusetts was actually a ringing endorsement of him. According to Obama, “The same thing that swept Brown into office swept me into office.” And for those who might have missed his meaning he added, “People are angry and they are frustrated. Not because of what’s happened in the last year or two years, but what’s happened over the last eight years.”

Nevertheless, the lone grain of truth in Obama’s statement vastly overshadows his transparent attempts at obfuscation and self-aggrandizement. The towering reality of this situation is that his ascendancy did not result in any way from those overblown speeches of the last year or two (Obama’s empty promises of “hope and change”) but from a public rejection of the general national course plotted by President Bush and those all-too-compliant Republican “moderates” in the Senate and House.

Neither the 2006 mid-term Democrat gains nor the 2008 electoral catastrophe represented any national shift to the left. Rather, they embodied a widespread backlash against a Republican Party that had done too little to combat such treacherous ideas. On one major issue after another, from outrageous spending binges (which admittedly, now seem minuscule in comparison to the abominable fiscal excesses of the Obama/Reid/Pelosi cabal) to the attempts at granting amnesty and defacto citizenship to the twelve million plus illegal aliens, to the abject abandonment of constitutional principle in implementing campaign finance “reform,” Heartland America felt completely betrayed and forsaken by virtually the entirety of the GOP.

It's not a good idea for Republicans to accept President Barack Obama's invitation to a "bipartisan" health care summit, because it would not advance acceptable health care reform. The only thing it likely would advance would be Obama's propaganda message -- and, thus, his socialist agenda.

Everyone knows Obama wouldn't be considering such a move if the American people had not so resoundingly rejected Obamacare.

From the very beginning, he has approached this issue more as a dictator than one interested in hearing genuine input from the other side. Nor has he shown good faith, having broken his cynical promise to televise the debates on C-SPAN and having misrepresented his plan in a number of particulars.

When called on the C-SPAN pledge, he glibly replied that most of the process has been televised in regular sessions of Congress and committee hearings, knowing full well that's not what anyone understood him to mean when he made his promise.

He has been as highhanded and dishonest in dealing with this issue as he has been with any other, which is quite a mouthful. He has ridiculed Republicans for their alleged obstruction and for not offering ideas of their own, when it was Republicans who first called for bipartisan talks last May and who did offer alternative plans, which Obama summarily rejected.

He looked us straight in the eye and told us, disingenuously, that in his plan, there would be no federal funding for abortion, no rationing, no interference in the doctor-patient relationship, no forcing people out of their private plans, no bill that was not budget-neutral, no single-payer plan and no decrease in patient choice with his public option.

The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are bristling with the news that Republicans have decided now is the time to suck up to Wall Street. As the saying goes, there is no truer friend than a Wall Street arbitrageur -- they are the salt-of-the-earth, the most loyal men who ever drew a breath!

What are Republicans thinking? While not every money-manipulator on Wall Street deserves to be treated like a heroin dealer, lots do. Could the Republicans be a little more discriminating in picking up the Democrats' old friends?

The Democrats are acting as if they want to punish everyone in the financial services industry, including the innocent, while the Republicans seem to want to protect everyone on Wall Street, including the guilty.

How about just punishing the guilty? The Democrats can't do that because the list of Wall Street's biggest offenders may turn out to be eerily similar to the list of Obama's biggest campaign contributors.

Employees from Goldman Sachs gave more to the Obama campaign than any other organization except the University of California -- with Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase quickly following in sixth and seventh place.

Whatever Obama has in mind for punishing the financial industry, I promise you, he won't punish his friends. After JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon took a $17 million bonus this week, and Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein got a $9 million bonus, Obama said he didn't begrudge them their bonuses, saying, "I know both those guys."

Obama seems to be hoping that his vague bluster about "obscene profits" will lure Republicans into embracing Wall Street welfare recipients -- thereby losing Americans forever.

Never bet against Republicans being outwitted.

Conservatives understand that liberals often demonize their opponents rather than debate the merits of the issues because the tactic works. But you have to wonder whether another reason they lash out is that they are angry that reality doesn't cooperate with their ideologically driven solutions and it's easier to blame others than to face up to the unpleasant truth of their failed ideas.

It's not just the tirades of liberal talk show host Ed Schultz, who said he would cheat to keep Scott Brown from winning his Senate election, or Chris Matthews, who said Republicans indoctrinate their members in the same way Cambodian communists re-educated their subjects, or the nasty outbursts of presidential adviser Rahm Emanuel.

I was also reminded of this, on a subtler level, when reading a Washington Post piece on David Plouffe, Barack Obama's presidential campaign manager, who recently returned to the Obama camp to quarterback the Democrats' election efforts in 2010 and beyond.

Plouffe said: "Politics is a comparative exercise. This isn't just a referendum on Democrats. ... It's a choice. ... Republicans right now are just sitting back and slinging arrows. We need to ... shine some light over their side of the fence."

Plouffe said he would remind voters that Democrats have spent two years trying to fix problems, whereas Republicans want to wheel a "Trojan horse" into Washington and spill out bankers and health insurance executives. Sure, why not vilify bankers and insurers when it helps your guy avoid accountability for his policies?

It's shamelessly Machiavellian of Democrats to accuse the GOP of going negative, when Democrats use Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" (e.g., "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it") as an instruction manual. But hey, they're out of fresh ideas, so what other choice do they have?