Columnist.
Americans want to elect Daddy or Mommy. That's what this election has become. It hasn't been about competing or contrasting visions of government. It hasn't been about rooting out corruption in Washington or bringing change to the system. It certainly hasn't been about principle. No, this election has become a simple decision: Do you want the thickheaded loudmouth who understands your problems, or do you want the cold and calculating robotic manipulator who doesn't? Do you want the real-life Archie Bunker, or would you prefer Mary Tyler Moore in "Ordinary People"?
Last Friday, a splinter of the powerful Turkish military attempted a coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an Islamist with a taste for the authoritarian. Erdogan has spent the past decade purging the military of secularists and integrating his own brand of radical Islam into government; in the process, he's also accrued a $182 million fortune and three palaces, including a $650 million Saddam-esque monstrosity. He's cracked down on journalists, gone soft on the Islamic State group and threatened to get rid of the constitutional court. He is, in short, an aspiring dictator.
When it comes to the linkage between violence and rhetoric, I abide by a fairly simple rule: If you're not advocating violence, you're not responsible for violence. That doesn't mean your rhetoric is decent or appropriate; it may be vile, awful and factually incorrect. But it isn't the cause for violence. President Barack Obama also abides by a simple rule when it comes to linking violence and rhetoric: If he doesn't like the rhetoric, it's responsible for violence. And if there's violence associated with rhetoric he likes, then the violence must have been caused by something else.
On Monday America celebrated the 240th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, which condemned King George III for "(obstructing) the Administration of Justice." On Tuesday the American left celebrated as the federal government obstructed the administration of justice on behalf of one of its ruling families, the Clintons. Last week the attorney general of the United States met with former President Bill Clinton, whose wife and foundation were under FBI investigation. They both insisted nothing untoward happened. Days later The New York Times reported that Hillary Clinton might offer Lynch a position in her administration.
On Monday, the Supreme Court issued yet another politically driven leftist decision, this time over the contentious issue of abortion. The court explained that not only did the Constitution of the United States mandate that states not infringe upon the phantom right to abortion but that health regulations on abortion clinics in Texas had to be overturned if they made it less convenient for women to kill their babies at such clinics. To this decision, "The Daily Show" had but one well-considered response: "Celebrate the #SCOTUS ruling! Go knock someone up in Texas!" The right reacted without outrage; even the left found the tweet sufficiently indiscreet to merit a bit of tut-tutting.
Barack Obama is a dramatic failure. His economy has been a slow-motion train wreck. His domestic policy has driven racial antagonism to renewed heights and divided Americans from each other along lines of religion and sexual orientation. On foreign policy he has set the world aflame in the name of pretty, meaningless verbiage and a less hegemonic America. But there's good news: At least he controls the information flow.
President Obama took to the microphones on Tuesday to rant about the great evil facing Western civilization: Donald Trump's insistence that Obama use the phrase "radical Islam" in describing a radical Muslim's killing of 49 Americans at a gay club in Orlando, Florida. Obama's original comment on the attack consisted of some platitudes about gun control and some happy talk about "various extremist information that was disseminated over the internet." You know, like in those rogue "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" chat rooms.
For years, the left has been desperate to paint conservatives as the real danger to civil society. Back in 2009, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security called conservatives a threat to safety. In a report, it stated that those who oppose abortion and illegal immigration represent a serious domestic terror threat. After presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump reprehensibly justified violence against protesters, the media was awash with fears that conservatives would suddenly lose their minds and begin brandishing pitchforks in search of unlucky transgender individuals.
Last week, California State University, Los Angeles held a "healing space" event to provide a safe forum for students and professors to unleash their feelings about my campus speech in February, sponsored by the Young America's Foundation. That speech, you may recall, was originally canceled by university President William Covino. After I decided to go to the campus anyway, hundreds of screaming students blocked doorways, assaulted prospective speechgoers and pulled the fire alarm mid-speech. Professors egged on the protesters; one even threatened student organizers. I was forced to enter through a back door and exit surrounded by a full phalanx of armed and uniformed officers, thanks to the near-riotous conditions outside.
Hillary Clinton is as pure as the driven snow, at least according to Hillary Clinton. Clinton will tell you how honest and transparent she is, right after cackling hysterically to stall for time. She will tell you that she always cooperates with law enforcement, that she has attempted to turn over all materials to relevant authorities, that it's just one giant coincidence her friends and family are constantly being swept up in prosecutorial dragnets.
On Tuesday, The Hill ran a piece with the hilarious title "Hillary's unlikely ally: The media." The media, of course, have been in Hillary Clinton's camp since the start. The vast majority of media figures are Democrats, and one of them, ABC News' George Stephanopoulos, has written openly of his love for his former boss. But here's the irony: The media have destroyed Clinton.
Trump is surely a shock to everyone but political commentator Ann Coulter and a few other Trump stalwarts. Now it's time to take away a few lessons.
For baseball fans, the performance of Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling in the 2004 American League Championships ranks among the most memorable gutsy plotlines of all time. The Red Sox, fighting a World Series winless streak dating back to 1918, were down three games to none to their archrival, the New York Yankees. The Sox then won two straight games. In the crucial Game Six, Schilling was slated to start, despite a torn tendon sheath in his right ankle that required medical staff to literally suture his tendon to deeper tissue. He proceeded to throw seven innings, giving up just one run, and giving us the immoral image of blood seeping through his sock as he dragged his team to victory.
Having devoured the meanings of the words "establishment" and "conservative" with some fava beans and a nice chianti, Donald Trump has spent the last several weeks cannibalizing yet another word that used to have meaning: democratic. Trump says that the delegate system is undemocratic; he says that caucuses that do not swing his way are undemocratic; he says that candidates cutting deals with one another to stay in or out of particular states is undemocratic; he says that if he does not win the Republican nomination while carrying a plurality of votes, that's undemocratic, too.
The rules of bigotry according to the left represent a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of nonsense. This week, we learned that if you don't want your small daughter peeing next to a giant man who thinks he is a woman, you are a bigot; if you are a woman who is uncomfortable with a man who thinks he is a woman whipping out his male genitalia to urinate in front of you, you are a bigot; if you are a religious person who doesn't want to participate in an activity you consider sinful, you are a bigot.
This week, the Bernie Sanders revolution finally ate its own. The vultures of the hard left forced former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to sink her own carnivorous beak into the withered flesh of her titular husband, former President Bill Clinton, denouncing his key legislative achievements and relegating him to the dustbin of history.
On Tuesday night, Senator Ted Cruz, R-TX, won a sweeping victory over 2016 Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump in Wisconsin. Cruz won virtually every demographic, nearly 50 percent of the vote and the vast bulk of the delegates. It's becoming increasingly clear that Trump could fail to reach the necessary 1,237 delegates in order to win the nomination outright on the first ballot at the convention. If so, there's no way he wins the nomination at all.
Donald Trump is a boor. He's a vulgarian, a liar, an ignoramus. He has only the most cursory grasp of policy, a stentorian voice and a great big set of self-assurance. He's winning the Republican nomination. Why? It is partly because of the Clintons. While the media point and laugh at the Trump reality show carnival, they forget that the Clintons originally took us all to the circus. This week, we found out that Hillary Clinton's email scandal now occupies the attention of 147 FBI agents, and that she will be questioned by the FBI. We found out that her pig husband allegedly snorted cocaine off the table of one of his former lovers in 1983, as well as gallivanted around her place wearing her nightie while playing the saxophone. And the indispensable Judicial Watch released information that the Obama administration is withholding draft indictments of Hillary Clinton, including an indictment over the Whitewater case during her husband's first term in office.
In 1959, Fidel Castro and his communist henchmen put a bullet through the head of freedom. Proclaiming the era of equality, they threw dissidents in jail or shot them, cracked down on free speech, closed their markets and seized private property. Thousands of Cubans fled to the liberty of the United States. Over the decades, hundreds of thousands of Cubans left the island any way they could. Learned men floated battered cars 90 miles toward Florida in the hope that they would reach land; young women smuggled their babies into rickety old boats in the desperate desire to escape perennial servitude.
For years, conservatives have told themselves the pretty bedtime story that they represent a silent majority in America — that most Americans want smaller government, individual rights and personal responsibility. We've suggested that if only we nominated precisely the right guy who says the right words — some illegally grown Ronald Reagan clone, perhaps — we'd win. Donald Trump's impending nomination puts all of that to bed.
