Columnist.
Over President's Day weekend, President Barack Obama took off for a mini-vacation in Florida. There, he participated in golf lessons with professional coach Butch Harmon -- Harmon normally charges $1,000 per hour, and Obama spent 8 hours with him -- and then he took to the links with disgraced golf icon Tiger Woods. The press was not allowed to cover any of this first-hand. And that made them fighting mad. Politico's Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen commented, "Barack Obama is a master at limiting, shaping and manipulating media coverage of himself and his White House." But VandeHei and Allen said that Obama's media mastery had nothing to do with the drool-cup-carrying media itself. Instead, Obama's *just that good*: "The mastery mostly flows from a White House that has taken old tricks for shaping coverage (staged leaks, friendly interviews) and put them on steroids using new ones (social media, content creation, precision targeting)..."
Last week, former LAPD officer Christopher Dorner went on a murderous rampage throughout Southern California, shooting seven people, including five members of law enforcement, killing three. Before he went on his spree, Dorner wrote a manifesto praising liberal policies on gun control, media personages including Piers Morgan and Chris Matthews and politicians including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. But the bulk of Dorner's manifesto centered on his hatred for the police department from which he had been fired in 2009. He claimed in the manifesto that the LAPD "has not changed since the Rampart and Rodney King days. It has gotten worse." He accused the LAPD of widespread racism and brutality. And he traced the LAPD's racism to broad societal racism: "My first recollection of racism was in the first grade at Norwalk Christian elementary school ... I made a life decision that I will not tolerate racial derogatory terms spoken to me." He continued: "I am here to change and make policy."
During the 2012 election cycle, Tea Partiers were told by their supposed betters that their ignorance of everyday politics meant that they should take a back seat to the Republican Party establishment. Brandishing the so-called Buckley Rule with quasi-religious fervor -- the notion that Republicans should run the most conservative candidate who can win -- the establishment GOP proclaimed that the *only* presidential candidate who could win was Republican Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts. They suggested that four-term former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson was a shoe-in for the Senate. They explained that the Tea Party was responsible for failed Senate candidates like Todd Akin (false) and Richard Mourdock (true). They knew best. The only trouble was, they didn't.
President Obama is a uniquely gifted demagogue. An orator of unparalleled skill supported by a gushing media, Obama has yet to present a major policy proposal geared toward solving specific problems. But he has won elections. And he has done so by implying -- over and over and over again -- that his opponents are morally deficient. It is truly astonishing just how thin President Barack Obama's playbook is. Since his re-election, Obama has boiled down that playbook to one play, which he runs with the regularity of a team quarterbacked by Mark Sanchez. It usually involves children. It always involves moral indignation. It invariably involves urgency calls for action. Action now. Action yesterday. Action overdue. The content of the action doesn't matter. All that matters it that those who oppose action are the bad guys.
On Monday, President Barack Obama delivered a monumental address to the nation. It wasn't monumental in terms of rhetoric -- in fact, it wasn't even memorable. It was monumental because it signaled for the first time just how grand Obama's ambitions for the left are. No longer is the left content to wage a war against Constitutional principles on behalf of a Marxist philosophical system. Now they will attempt to convince the American people that Constitutional principles dictate Marxism. Obama opened his address by quoting the Declaration of Independence: "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The Declaration of Independence sets forth a vision of limited government designed to avoid tyranny. But Obama, employing all the linguistic slight-of-hand in his multitudinous bag of tricks, had a plan to turn the Declaration inside out.
Last week, I appeared on CNN's "Piers Morgan Tonight." For the past few weeks, Morgan had been inviting gun rights defenders ranging from the reasonable to the nutty, and then slamming them by appealing to the memory of the children slain at Sandy Hook. And when I appeared with Morgan, that's precisely what I told him: "What you tend to do is you tend to demonize people who differ from you politically by standing on the graves of the children of Sandy Hook, saying they don't seem to care enough about the dead kids." Morgan could only stammer, "How dare you!" A few nights later, he invited me on again, specifically to stand once again on the graves of the children of Sandy Hook -- only this time, he would bring the parents of those children to make the imagistic point. His counterargument to accusation was to prove the veracity of my accusation.
This week's column is brought to you by the word "a--holes." It's one of the left's favorite words these days, fond as they are of shutting down the debate and casting their political opponents out like lepers. Take, for example, the website Gawker. The website is liberal. And as liberal Obama backers, they feel the necessity not only to support the Obama agenda, but also silence those on the other side through bully tactics. Hence their decision this week to publish a full list of all the registered gun owners in New York City. The title of their big reveal: "Here Is a List of All The A--holes Who Own Guns in New York City." That's an inaccurate title, of course -- the worst people who own guns in New York City likely own them illegally. But it fits with the leftist conceit that those who disagree on gun policy are just bad people.
Progressivism in America has always been a thuggish ideology. It rests on the notion that laws require no evidence to support their implementation, that intentions are all that matter and that those who oppose "change" of the sort progressives like are morally deficient. Progressivism requires Americans to separate off certain groups in American life as evil -- the rich ("greedy!"), gun owners ("hooligans!"), traditionally religious people ("sexists!"), Constitutional government advocates ("bigots!"). It requires that certain Americans be cast as good -- racial and ethnic minorities, low income earners and women ("victimized!"), irreligious people ("rationalists!") and big government advocates ("experts!"). Progressivism in America is actually regressivism. Progressivism sends us back to a time when philosophical differences were seen as rebellion against God-given monarchic authority. It sends us back to a time when the law of the community invariably outweighed the rights of the individual, rather than building government on the basis of protection of individual rights.
On Christmas Eve, seven people were shot in the city of Chicago. The media made little mention of the shootings, since they're now routine in Chicago -- the city has seen some 500 shootings in 2012 alone. The vast majority of the shooters are black, and the vast majority of the victims are black. Many of the victims are under the age of 18: Anton Sanders, 15, shot on Jan. 20; Deshun Winfert, 15, shot on Feb. 5; Damion Rolle, 14, shot on Feb. 21; George Howard and Albert Guyton, both 15, shot on Feb. 27 and Feb. 28; the list goes on. A few are under age 10. You've never heard of any of them. But when an evil white person with a history of mental instability shoots up a school, killing 20 children, most of whom were white, the media is suddenly concerned with gun control.
The horror of the massacre of innocents at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. struck at the fabric of the American tapestry. Virtually every American has spent the last few days in a haze -- shocked at the nature of evil, confused and frustrated by the inability to prevent such an atrocity, fearful at the possibility of such a monstrous occurrence repeating itself. It is only natural in such times to discuss what we can do differently to prevent such things from happening. Nobody wants to see dead children, grieving parents or bullet-riddled schools. Nobody. We may disagree about what the proper solutions are, but we all want solutions. So why can't those on the left admit that?
"I'm in the top two percent," said Peter Schiff, CEO of Euro Pacific Capital, this week on CNBC. "Right now, I'm paying 45 percent of my total income in income taxes ... You tell me, what's fair about that when medieval serfs pay 25 percent, I'm paying half? I don't care what the majority voted to do, they don't have a right to steal my money just because they vote for it." But according to most Americans, they do. And that's the problem. As America racks up more debt than God has ever seen on this earth, Barack Obama prepares to right all wrongs by taxing the top 2 percent of income earners in America. What right does he have to their money? Well, says Obama, it's only fair and just -- they make the most money, so they should foot a disproportionate burden of the tax load.
In the original "Star Wars", Jedi Obi Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness) and Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) have to smuggle two droids into the criminal-infested, Empire-guarded city of Mos Eisley. The Empire has been looking for the droids, which contain secret information. But Obi Wan has a solution: when our heroes are confronted by emissaries of the Empire, he simply waves his hand. "These aren't the droids you're looking for." The weak-minded Stormtrooper promptly waves the group through. Obi Wan was using an old Jedi mind trick. Welcome to America, 2012.
America is about to plunge over the so-called fiscal cliff -- and Americans are fighting mad about it. According to the latest polls, 77 percent of Americans believe that the fiscal cliff -- a combination of automatic tax increases and spending cuts set to kick in at the beginning of 2013 -- will hurt them personally. A full 70 percent of Americans want a compromise solution. And 67 percent believe that political leaders will act like "spoiled children." Most important, though, Americans blame Republicans for the situation. While just 34 percent of Americans blame President Obama for the current fiscal cliff impasse, 45 percent blame Congressional Republicans. This seemingly makes no sense: it's Obama who has incentive to watch America fly off the fiscal cliff, raising taxes and slashing the military budget in his wake. Republicans would prefer to avoid both eventualities. Actually, Republicans want to avoid the fiscal cliff so much that they're talking about eliminating tax deductions, even as Democrats refuse to put a single spending cut on the table. Democrats are the roadblock to a solution here.
In the aftermath of the re-election of President Barack Obama, conservatives searched the heavens and the earth for answers. Some suggested that Mitt Romney lost because Republicans didn't reach out more to Latino voters; some suggested that Romney lost because his "get out the vote" system fell apart on Election Day. Romney himself said that he lost because President Obama separated voting groups with particularly calibrated "gifts" designed to curry their favor. In truth, Mitt Romney lost for the same reason that traditional marriage lost on Election Day: America is becoming a less religious country. And that bodes ill for the future of the United States. It's not that religious voters didn't turn out for Romney. They did in droves. Fully 26 percent of voters -- 3 percent more than in 2004 -- were white evangelicals who supported Romney 79 to 21. Fifty-three percent of the electorate identified as Protestant; another 25 percent identified as Catholic.
You've heard the old adage that sex sells. But as we're recognizing more and more often, sex wins elections. Here's the brutal truth: the American people seem far more interested in what happens in the bedroom than they do what happens on the battlefield. How else to explain the media's fascination with CIA Director David Petraeus' steamy sex scandal, even as they ignore the ramifications for the investigation of four murdered Americans in Benghazi, Libya? Two days after President Obama won re-election, Petraeus submitted his resignation letter to Obama, supposedly over an affair with biographer Paula Broadwell. The FBI had been investigating the affair; another four-star general had gotten tangentially entangled in the investigation. The story was juicy.
Will Republicans ever win the presidency again? In the aftermath of the reelection of the worst president since James Buchanan, the question must be asked. Clearly, the Republican Party is on the downswing. But why? There are two easy answers. Neither of them is correct. The first answer is advanced by proponents of liberalism. They say that the 2012 election was an ideological election, the seminal, long-awaited decision of the American public to fully embrace their inner socialists. This argument posits that Mitt Romney was an extreme conservative, Barack Obama was an extreme liberal, and the American people cast their lot with the liberal.
It has become an accepted truism in American politics that both Democrats and Republicans want the same things: a prosperous America, a strong America, an America true to principles of freedom and liberty. Perhaps 50 years ago that was true. Today, it no longer is. The fact is that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are no longer arguing over means; we are arguing over ends. Democrats know that economic prosperity for the broad swath of the United States cannot be bought with higher taxes; even Bill Clinton recognized as much in the 1990s, which is why he lowered capital gains taxes dramatically after raising personal income taxes just as dramatically. Instead, Democrats argue, as President Obama did in 2008, that taxes must be raised "for purposes of fairness."
President Obama was on the ropes in the polls after the first presidential debate. After the second presidential debate, he hit the mat in the polls. And after the third presidential debate, he looks to be down for the count. The question, of course, is why. Looking at the debates alone doesn't tell the full story. Romney surely won the first debate -- in fact, he cleaned President Obama's clock -- but in the second debate, he fought President Obama to a draw. And in the third and final debate, which centered on foreign policy, Romney pulled his punches.
During the second presidential debate, moderator-turned-Obama-advocate Candy Crowley helped President Obama make the case for why he'd been a true leader on the murder of our ambassador and three other brave Americans in Benghazi, Libya. Obama was asked a simple question: "We were sitting around, talking about Libya, and we were reading and became aware of reports that the State Department refused extra security for our embassy in Benghazi, Libya, prior to the attacks that killed four Americans. Who was it that denied enhanced security and why?" President Obama jumped into a memorized sermon about how much he cared about our ambassadorial staff, how the buck stopped with him, and most of all, how Mitt Romney had turned "national security into a political issue." Nowhere did he explain why our ambassador was given no real security in Benghazi; nowhere did he explain why, for weeks on end, spokespeople for the administration, including Obama, insisted that the attacks in Libya had been caused by a YouTube video.
Last week, after the first presidential debate, I spoke at an architecture school in downtown Los Angeles. One of the questions the moderator asked was about American exceptionalism. The foam flecked to his lips at the very phrase. What, pray tell, was American exceptionalism, he asked? I answered by referencing the Founding Fathers and the freedoms they guaranteed us via the American Constitutional System of checks and balances. What makes us unique guardians of liberty, I said, is that our system is designed to counterbalance interest against interest -- we only act together with the full power of unity when we're actually unified. We prize the individual over the collective.
