If the folks in Hollywood didn't allow their rabid hate-America passions to overcome the functioning of their business brains when they watched the Blackwater hearings in Congress yesterday (10/02)*, they must have been transfixed by Blackwater CEO Erik Prince and seen nothing but dollar signs.

It was a scene straight out of a movie.  The witness was straight out of central casting - Hollywood handsome, all-American clean-cut wholesome, a rawhide-tough former Navy SEAL who can easily think faster and smarter than anyone in the room.

Up against him was a collection of Democrat contributors to Congress' record low 11% approval rating, determined to demonstrate how they earned such public disgust, and led by that quintessence of corruption, Henry Waxman (D-CA), whose eyes bulging out of his sockets and huge buck teeth bulging out of his mouth below his hairy lips make him look like a creepy rat.

Hollywood casting again.

If you watch Erik's face closely (the hearing was broadcast on C-SPAN3*), you can see how hard he is trying not to grimace in revulsion or laugh out loud at the charade.  You just know what he really wanted to say:

"Congressman Waxman, I would like to ask you a question:  Why are you in league with the chief Shiite terrorist in Iraq, Moqtada al-Sadr?  He controls the Ministry of the Interior (MOI), and it was MOI police who attacked us on September 16.  All of the "witnesses" claiming we opened fire and killed 11 Iraqi civilians are Iraqi police with the MOI.  Are you just using their lies to smear us or are you in active cooperation with al-Sadr to hurt the war effort in Iraq?  If so, perhaps you would be more appropriately addressed as Congressman Moqtada al-Waxman."

[Note: Yesterday, June 26, the Supreme Court issued its decision in United States v. Windsor, ruling 5-4 that DOMA, The Defense of Marriage Act, is unconstitutional.  Justice Kennedy provided the decisive vote, siding with the Court's four dependably liberal justices, Ginsberg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan. 

Justices Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and Scalia dissented.  The link above is to the Pdf file of the entire decision, which is where the Scalia dissent is to be found.  TTP here presents, as a public service, the extraordinary dissent of Justice Scalia in its entirety, of over 8,000 words, in easily readable form.  It is quite possibly the most blistering, scathing moral denunciation of a majority opinion by a dissenting justice in Supreme Court history.

He condemns the Court majority for "formally declaring anyone opposed to same-sex marriage an enemy of human decency," for accusing "the Congress that enacted this (Defense of Marriage) law and the President who signed it of... act(ing) with malice - with the ‘purpose to disparage and injure' same-sex couples."

Scalia is stunned by the majority's vitriol at "simply for supporting an Act that did no more than codify an aspect of marriage that had been unquestioned in our society for most of its existence-indeed, had been unquestioned in virtually all societies for virtually all of human history. It is one thing for a society to elect change; it is another for a court of law to impose change by adjudging those who oppose it hostes humani generis, enemies of the human race."

This is a brilliant exercise in judicial, constitutional, and moral reasoning.  It is worth reading entire. -JW]  

This case is about power in several respects. It is about the power of our people to govern themselves, and the power of this Court to pronounce the law. Today's opinion aggrandizes the latter, with the predictable consequence of diminishing the former. We have no power to decide this case. And even if we did, we have no power under the Constitution to invalidate this democratically adopted legislation. The Court's errors on both points spring forth from the same diseased root: an exalted conception of the role of this institution in America.