Columnist.
On Monday, the Broward County Sheriff's Office in Florida released a public service announcement attempting to convince young people not to riot in case George Zimmerman, the man who shot and killed Trayvon Martin, was acquitted of second-degree murder. That likelihood remains high, thanks to the fact that the prosecution itself was weak and pushed forward by a breathless media desperate for a racial hot point to drive ratings. The sheriff's office announced that it was "working closely with the Sanford Police Department and other local law enforcement agencies" on a "response plan in anticipation of the verdict." Sheriff Scott Israel appeared in a video alongside a rapping duet of two teenagers, one a Hispanic female and another a black male, who tell the public, "Raise your voice, and not your hands! We need to stand together as one, no cuffs, no guns. ... I know your patience will be tested, but law enforcement has your back!"
Last week, Chief Justice John Roberts blatantly ignored the Constitution and the law, and he purposefully rewrote Obamacare in order to rule it legal. He called Obamacare a "tax" instead of an individual mandate; he then proceeded to blithely expand the government's power to tax to encompass a tax on breathing, which is what Obamacare is. Now, I had warned conservatives years ago that Roberts was a rotten pick for the Supreme Court. "Roberts is not an originalist," I wrote in 2005. "There is nothing in his very short jurisprudential record to indicate that his judicial philosophy involves strict fidelity to the original meaning of the Constitution." Nonetheless, Roberts' decision was stunning.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court of the United States doubled down on the newly popular perspective that same-sex marriage opponents are motivated by hate and nastiness. Making little pretense at legal reasoning, the Court declared that the Defense of Marriage Act was just a government attempt to "degrade or demean" homosexuals. While the Court ultimately declined to make same-sex marriage the law of the land, it paved the groundwork for such a decision. Meanwhile, public opinion polls now suggest that a majority of Americans support same-sex marriage. Make no mistake: Same-sex marriage will be the law of the land within the next several years.
On Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaida terrorists, on orders from their superiors based in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, flew U.S. commercial planes into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon. They would have targeted the White House or Capitol with a fourth plane if not for the heroism of the passengers on Flight 93. Overall, almost 3,000 Americans were murdered. Nine days later, President George W. Bush told the nation, "We condemn the Taliban regime. ... Our war on terror begins with al-Qaida." Our war on terror is now over. It's over not because President Obama says it is, though he has implied as much over the past several weeks. It is over because we have surrendered. As of this week, the United States of America is allying with the two main forces behind Sept. 11: We are sending guns to al-Qaida in Syria, and we are entering into bilateral negotiations with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
With leaker Edward Snowden revealing to the world that the National Security Agency has been both monitoring phone records for all Americans and obtaining emails, videos, voice chats and other private communications between American citizens and those outside the United States under the so-called PRISM program, controversy has broken out over the scope of government surveillance. Many on the right and the left have argued that these programs are necessary to curb terrorism. Both Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California and Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner of Ohio have proclaimed that Snowden is a traitor for revealing the existence of the programs. Both Republican House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Rogers of Illinois and President Barack Obama say that the programs have stopped terrorist attacks.
It must be nice to be a leftist. The solution to every problem is more of someone else's money. That's the favored solution over on the Democratic Party side of the aisle when it comes to the IRS' targeting of conservative non-profits. In a House Appropriations Subcommittee hearing, Democratic Rep. Jose Serrano of New York suggested, "There is no clearer way to promote more scandals than by cutting funding that could be used for oversight, training and reform. At the level of this subcommittee is funded right now, we're just asking for more trouble at the IRS and elsewhere."
In a hallmark speech last week, President Obama unilaterally declared the war on terror over. The end of that war, Obama stated, meant we could return to the halcyon days of the Clinton-era law enforcement, during which America experienced a spate of terrorist attacks ranging from the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 to the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996 to the bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 to the USS Cole bombing in 2000. What justified Obama's announcement?
America has major problems. Our economy has been stagnating for years on end, and the so-called recovery under way will have to continue at this pace for years simply to get us back to where we started. When it comes to the social ills plaguing America, the prospectus doesn't look any rosier: increased rates of unwed motherhood, continuation of vast killing of the unbor, and cycles of bad decision-making leading to generations of crushing poverty. None of the solutions to these problems can be found in greater government action. Yet the left suggests that only greater government can fix the issues that trouble Americans. That's because, according to the left, one grand, unifying problem underlies all the other problems: Americans are nasty.
This week saw the utter implosion of the Obama second term. First, a hearing for whistleblowers over the Benghazi terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2012, revealed that the White House had failed in their duty to provide security to Americans on the ground in Libya. Then, ABC News reported that the Obama administration had manipulated talking points to minimize the organized nature of the terror attacks. The Obama administration's response: "sideshow!" Next, the Internal Revenue Service acknowledged that during the 2012 election cycle, it gave heightened scrutiny to non-profit applicants who happened to have the words "tea party" or "patriot" in their titles. The media quickly reported that the discrimination went deeper than that: Any group that wanted smaller government, pushed Constitutional education or even wanted to improve quality-of-life found itself under the IRS microscope. Then, it turned out that the IRS hadn't merely been targeting conservative groups -- it had been targeting Jewish groups that didn't meet the Obama administration's foreign policy criteria of being ambivalent about the state of Israel. The Obama administration's response: "low-level staffers!"
Last week, President Obama traveled to Ohio to speak at the Ohio State University commencement. There, he trotted out his new favorite line of attack against Second Amendment advocates: He said it is unpatriotic to believe in the possibility of government tyranny. Why? According to Obama, the Founding Fathers created our government. The American dream and American government are one and the same. By definition then, believing in the possibility of government tyranny means opposing the Founding Fathers and the American dream. Here's how Obama expressed this nasty notion. He said that the Founders left us "the keys to a system of self-government, the tools to do big things and important things together that we could not possibly do alone ... To conquer fascism and disease; to visit the Moon and Mars; to gradually secure our God-given rights for all our citizens, regardless of who they are, or what they look like, or who they love."
On Monday, former Washington Wizards center Jason Collins revealed to the world that he is gay, prompting a complete media meltdown. Collins appeared on Good Morning America; he made the cover of Sports Illustrated; he became the lead on Huffington Post. The president of the United States congratulated him at a press conference, and the former president of the United States congratulated him via Twitter. So did the first lady, the commissioner of the National Basketball Association and a bevy of pundits and athletes across the spectrum. Which leaves one question: What's the big deal? Tennis star Martina Navratilova, the best player of her era, came out in 1981. Ellen Degeneres came out on national television in 1997. The president and CEO of the Golden State Warriors, Rick Welts, is openly gay. Top politicians, rock stars, athletes, movie and television stars and business moguls are gay. Gay Americans have been announcing their sexual orientation for decades. Why the hubbub?
The American public now knows the identity of the Boston marathon bombing suspects. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was a former boxer and Chechnyan immigrant, radicalized in the United States by an Islamist mentor. He turned against the West in liberal Cambridge, Mass. His younger brother, Dzhokhar, 19, was a pot-loving college student at the University of Massachusetts. Last Friday, Tamerlan was killed during a shootout with police after his brother reportedly ran him over with a car. Dzhokhar was captured hours later hiding in a boat. Few who knew Tamerlan seemed surprised at the news that he had masterminded the bombings of the Boston Marathon. "Of course I was shocked and surprised that he was Suspect No. 1," said Elmirza Khozhugov, the ex-husband of Tamerlan's sister, Ailina. "But after a few hours of thinking about it, I thought it could be possible that he did it."
In the aftermath of the murderous terrorist attacks on the Boston Marathon this week, commentators across the landscape have rightly praised the heroic first responders and police, the civilians who ran to help and the civilians who ran to give blood. Many have also suggested that the presence of these heroes shows that America will never give in to evil, that the presence of good in our world outweighs the presence of evil. Nothing could be more wrongheaded. Everyday good will generally outweigh everyday evil. Finding people to respond with goodness to magnificent tragedies is not difficult -- most people will, if faced with the carnage of a young child maimed by a bomb, try to help regardless of circumstance. Finding people willing to maim children is a far more difficult task than finding people willing to give blood for that same child.
For decades, members of the left have insisted that the right is fighting a war on science. But when it comes to the issues of abortion and homosexuality, it is the left that fights a consistent and ridiculous war with reality. This week, Wesley Smith of the Weekly Standard reported that California would be considering AB 460, a bill that would mandate group insurance coverage for so-called gay and lesbian "infertility." What in the world does that bizarre phrase mean? It doesn't mean situations in which two members of a lesbian couple are both infertile and incapable of conception using some third party's sperm. It doesn't mean situations in which two gay men are both infertile and incapable of impregnating a surrogate mother. It means situations in which gay or lesbian couples can't make a baby by having sex with each other.
In his pursuit of overarching gun control legislation in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook massacre, President Barack Obama has been dogged. He's been relentless. He's been demagogic, too, whether flanking himself with schoolchildren (the implication being that his political opponents don't care about dead kids) or suggesting that if just one life can be saved by his legislation, we ought to buy into it wholeheartedly (a proposition that would justify almost any sort of government overreach). But on Wednesday, President Obama took his gun control push a step further: He admitted that only the Constitution stands between him and full gun confiscation. Rejecting concerns that new background checks might be a prelude to gun seizures, Obama suggested that worries about gun seizures were empty, and were only designed to feed "into fears about government. You hear some of these folks: 'I need a gun to protect myself from the government. We can't do background checks because the government's going to come take my guns away.' The government's us. These officials are elected by you. ... I am constrained as they are constrained by the system that our founders put in place."
The farce that is the Supreme Court of the United States has now taken up a new cause: same-sex marriage. To push that cause, the anti-Constitutional members of the Supreme Court prepared to declare that the federal government cannot define marriage for the purpose of federal benefits under the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). This is the same Supreme Court that declared last year that the federal government *can* force individuals to buy health insurance. To simplify, then: The federal government can't define how federal cash gets spent, but it can define how *your* cash gets spent. There is no logical principle that undergirds any of this. Little or no legal argument took place at the Supreme Court this week. Justice Elena Kagan instead made a moral argument, stating that it was unthinkable for anyone to consider homosexuality immoral, and adding that morality could not be the basis for law (which should come as a shock to every major political philosopher for the last several millennia). Justice Anthony Kennedy made the argument that marriage has traditionally been the purview of the states, even though he argued just a decade ago that homosexual sodomy could not be regulated by the states based on tradition.
Within the next few months, Justice Anthony Kennedy will likely rule that same-sex marriage is mandated by the Constitution of the United States. The ruling will offend both common sense and Constitutional law. But it will nonetheless become the law of the land. With it, states will be forced to recognize same-sex marriages; same-sex marriage will enter the public school lexicon; religious institutions will be forced to recognize same-sex marriages or lose their tax-exempt status. Religious Americans will be forced into violating their beliefs or facing legal consequences by the government. The First Amendment's guarantee of religious liberty will largely become obsolete. There is only one way to stop this development: Get the government out of the business of marriage. Right now.
When Israel took action against Hamas in the Gaza Strip last year, the world media did its damndest to try to paint the Jewish state as a human rights violator. One of their chief cards in this effort was a photo of BBC video editor Jehad Misharawi holding his son Omar's body. Supposedly Omar had been killed in an Israeli missile strike. The picture quickly went viral. The Washington Post ran with the story. The BBC suggested that Israel was responsible for the death. BBC Middle East bureau chief Paul Danahar tweeted, "Questioned asked here is: if Israel can kill a man riding on a moving motorbike (as they did last month) how did Jihad's son get killed." The story became ubiquitous, a sign of Israeli brutality in an impoverished area of the world. There's only one problem: the story wasn't true.
For years, conservatives have been split on whether President Barack Obama is incompetent or whether he is malicious. Mitt Romney ably made the argument for incompetence during the 2012 election cycle, when he stated that President Obama was ---. Romney's view symbolized the majority view on the issue. Until now. With the advent of sequestration, it is now clear that President Obama is willing to throw Americans under the bus in pursuit of his vision of a transformed America. He is more than content to break eggs to make his utopian omelet. That uncomfortable reality became clear during the sequestration debate when Obama showed zero predilection for actual negotiation, and instead decided to roam the countryside babbling about the End Times should the 2.4 percent reduction to future spending he originally proposed take place.
President Obama is one of the great political knife-fighters in modern history. He is a failed president -- his economy is bleak, his foreign policy bleaker, his vision for American even bleaker still. But he wins. He wins by losing. President Obama has only had two major policy victories during his tenure: the stimulus package and Obamacare. Both are massively unpopular. The stimulus package launched the tea party movement. Obamacare led to the Republican wipeout of 2010.
