I suppose it was inevitable. Last week, Ed Whelan, not content with simply comparing Elena Kagan's handling of military recruiters at Harvard with prostitution, compared it to treason:
At a time of war, in the face of the grand civilizational challenge that radical Islam poses, Kagan treated military recruiters worse than she treated the high-powered law firms that were donating their expensive legal services to anti-American terrorists.
So just to reiterate, Harvard had a policy of only allowing employers with nondiscrimination policies to hire through their Office of Career Services. The policy, which was not originally directed at the military and was dropped after the Department of Defense threatened to withhold federal funding, was reinstated by Kagan after a successful court challenge. After the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the government on appeal, Kagan allowed the military to use OCS again. Throughout this time, military recruiters were allowed to recruit on campus through other means, so despite widespread conservative belief to the contrary, there was no "ban on military recruiters."
Instead of a policy that only offers OCS access to employers with nondiscrimination policies, Whelan would apparently have rather had a ban on law firms that did pro-bono legal work he didn't like. Whelan, like his colleague Andy McCarthy, seems to have serious trouble with the very idea of people accused of crimes having legal representation. There are countries where the accused don't have such rights, but I suspect Whelan would wisely prefer not to live in one. Or perhaps, Whelan would prefer such rights were not extended to Muslims.
At any rate, Whelan's effort to extend a scurrilous smear campaign directed at attorneys who represented detainees accused of terrorism (which has already been condemned by other high-profile conservatives) strikes me as pretty sad. But it's also indicative of the rather startling incentives for conservative pundits to say the most outrageous thing they can think of rather than offer anything resembling thoughtful analysis. Whelan gets the thumbs up from John Yoo today, who steals his argument without attribution. Here's a tip John, stay away from arguments involving the phrase "moral injustice of the first-order."
I also can't get the phrase "grand civilizational challenge" out of my head. The only people who seem to have a more inflated view of terrorists than the terrorists themselves are the writers at National Review.
-- A. Serwer
