Columnist.
As more Americans, especially the unemployed, come to rely on government to take care of them, we risk losing our independence. The Washington Times reports American reliance on government is at an all-time high. This is not our Founders' America. We seem to have declined from a "can-do" spirit, to "can't do" -- at least without government -- and soon, unless we change our ways, "won't do." Our forebears practiced self-reliance, living within one's means and helping neighbors.
Plagiarism, as defined by dictionary.com, is "the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work." In 1987, then-senator and presidential candidate Joe Biden was accused of plagiarizing from a speech by then-British Labour Party Leader Neil Kinnock. Biden eventually withdrew after a media firestorm, which was egged on by the eventual 1988 Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis. Now Vice President Biden is involved in a more serious act of plagiarism. He is trying to take credit for progress in the Iraq war, which he, then-Senator Barack Obama and many Democrats opposed, calling it a failure.
"What experience and history teach is this -- that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it." (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, "The Philosophy of History," 1837) Last week, the Newark Star-Ledger reported that New Jersey lost $70 billion in wealth over the past five years. The reason? Affluent people have moved to states with a lower tax rate or no income tax at all.
In the midst of the usual glut of Super Bowl commercials with messages about beer, cars and women with impossible bosoms, on Sunday there will be one 30-second message that has some people upset, even angry. It is a message by 2007 Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow and his mother, Pam, who, after a difficult pregnancy, decided to give Tim a chance to live, though she was advised to have an abortion.
Suppose Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, the Christmas Day underwear bomber, had succeeded and blown up Northwest Airlines flight 253, killing nearly 300 people on board and perhaps others on the ground? Would the response of the Obama administration have been different? The president probably would have attended memorial services for the dead, expressed "strong condemnation," persuaded the United Nations to issue more worthless resolutions, but little more. That's because the president isn't fighting -- or speaking -- as if we are at war.
