Columnist.
WASHINGTON -- Last year President Obama ordered U.S. intervention in Libya under the grand new doctrine of "Responsibility to Protect." Moammar Gaddafi was threatening a massacre in Benghazi. To stand by and do nothing "would have been a betrayal of who we are," explained the president. In the year since, the government of Syria has more than threatened massacres. It has carried them out. Nothing hypothetical about the disappearances, executions, indiscriminate shelling of populated neighborhoods. More than 9,000 are dead.
WASHINGTON -- As the space shuttle Discovery flew three times around Washington, a final salute before landing at Dulles airport for retirement in a museum, thousands on the ground gazed upward with marvel and pride. Yet what they were witnessing, for all its elegance, was a funeral march. The shuttle was being carried -- its pallbearer, a 747 -- because it cannot fly, nor will it ever again. It was being sent for interment. Above ground, to be sure. But just as surely embalmed as Lenin in Red Square.
WASHINGTON -- Here we go again. At the beginning of his presidency, Barack Obama argued that the country's spiraling debt was largely the result of exploding health care costs. That was true. He then said the cure for these exploding costs would be his health care reform. That was not true. It was obvious at the time that it could never be true. If government gives health insurance to 33 million uninsured, that costs. Costs a lot. There's no free lunch.
"I'm confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress." -- Barack Obama, on the constitutional challenge to his health care law, April 2 WASHINGTON -- "Unprecedented"? Judicial review has been the centerpiece of the American constitutional system since Marbury v. Madison in 1803. "Strong majority"? The House has 435 members. In March 2010, Democrats held a 75-seat majority. Obamacare passed by seven votes.
WASHINGTON -- You don't often hear an American president secretly (he thinks) assuring foreign leaders that concessions are coming their way, but they must wait because he's seeking re-election and he dare not tell his own people. Not at all, spun a White House aide in major gaffe-control mode. The president was merely explaining that arms control is too complicated to be dealt with in a year in which both Russia and the U.S. hold presidential elections.
WASHINGTON -- Obamacare dominated the 2010 midterms, driving its Democratic authors to a historic electoral shellacking. But since then, the issue has slipped quietly underground. Now it's back, summoned to the national stage by the confluence of three disparate events: the release of new Congressional Budget Office cost estimates, the approach of Supreme Court hearings on the law's constitutionality and the issuance of a compulsory contraception mandate.
WASHINGTON -- Yes, of course, presidents have no direct control over gas prices. But the American people know something about this president and his disdain for oil. The "fuel of the past," he contemptuously calls it. To the American worker who doesn't commute by government motorcade and is getting fleeced every week at the pump, oil seems very much a fuel of the present -- and of the foreseeable future.
WASHINGTON -- It's Lucy and the football, Iran-style. After ostensibly tough talk about preventing Iran from going nuclear, the Obama administration acquiesced to yet another round of talks with the mullahs. This, 14 months after the last group-of-six negotiations collapsed in Istanbul because of blatant Iranian stalling and unseriousness. Nonetheless, the new negotiations will be both without precondition and preceded by yet more talks to decide such trivialities as venue. These negotiations don't just gain time for a nuclear program about whose military intent the IAEA is issuing alarming warnings. They make it extremely difficult for Israel to do anything about it (while it still can), lest Israel be universally condemned for having aborted a diplomatic solution.
WASHINGTON -- It's been a wild ride, but the storyline of the Republican race remains remarkably simple and constant: It's Mitt Romney and the perishable pretenders. Five have come and gone, if you count the Donald's aborted proto-candidacy. And now the sixth and most plausibly presidential challenger just had his moment -- and blew it in Michigan.
WASHINGTON -- Give him points for cleverness. President Obama's birth control "accommodation" was as politically successful as it was morally meaningless. It was nothing but an accounting trick that still forces Catholic (and other religious) institutions to provide medical insurance that guarantees free birth control, tubal ligation and morning-after abortifacients -- all of which violate church doctrine on the sanctity of life. The trick is that these birth control/abortion services will supposedly be provided independently and free of charge by the religious institution's insurance company. But this changes none of the moral calculus. Holy Cross Hospital, for example, is still required by law to engage an insurance company that is required by law to provide these doctrinally proscribed services to all Holy Cross employees.
WASHINGTON -- At the National Prayer Breakfast last week, seeking theological underpinning for his drive to raise taxes on the rich, President Obama invoked the highest possible authority. His policy, he testified "as a Christian," "coincides with Jesus' teaching that ‘for unto whom much is given, much shall be required.'" Now, I'm no theologian, but I'm fairly certain that neither Jesus nor his rabbinic forebears, when speaking of giving, meant some obligation to the state. You tithe the priest, not the tax man. The Judeo-Christian tradition commands personal generosity.
WASHINGTON -- Imperial regimes can crack when they are driven out of their major foreign outposts. The fall of the Berlin Wall did not just signal the liberation of Eastern Europe from Moscow. It prefigured the collapse of the Soviet Union itself just two years later. The fall of Bashar al-Assad's Syria could be similarly ominous for Iran. The alliance with Syria is the centerpiece of Iran's expanding sphere of influence, a mini-Comintern that includes such clients as Iranian armed and directed Hezbollah, now the dominant power in Lebanon; and Hamas, which controls Gaza and threatens to take the rest of Palestine (the West Bank) from a feeble Fatah.
WASHINGTON – Once upon a time, small ball was not Barack Obama's game. Tuesday, it was the essence of his State of the Union address. The visionary of 2008 -- purveyor of hope and change, healer of the earth, tamer of the rising seas -- offered an hour of little things: tax-code tweaks to encourage this or that kind of behavior (manufacturing being the flavor of the day), little watchdog agencies to round up Wall Street miscreants and Chinese DVD pirates, even a presidential demand "that all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn 18." Under penalty of what? Jail? The self-proclaimed transformer of America is now playing truant officer? It sounded like the Clinton years with their presidentially proclaimed initiatives on midnight basketball and school uniforms. These are the marks of a shrunken presidency, thoroughly flummoxed by high unemployment, economic stagnation, crushing debt -- and a glaring absence of ideas.
WASHINGTON -- It's the campaign line of the year, and while the author won't be carrying it into the general election, the eventual nominee will. The charge is straightforward: President Obama's reckless spending has dangerously increased the national debt while leaving unemployment high and the economy stagnant. Concurrently, he has vastly increased the scope and reach of government with new entitlements and oppressive regulation, with higher taxes to come (to offset the unprecedented spending). In 2010, that narrative carried the Republicans to historic electoral success. Through most of 2011, it dominated Washington discourse. The air was filled with debt talk: ceilings, supercommittees, Simpson-Bowles.
WASHINGTON -- There are two stories coming out of New Hampshire. The big story is Mitt Romney. The bigger one is Ron Paul. Romney won a major victory with nearly 40 percent of the vote, 16 points ahead of No. 2. The split among his challengers made the outcome even more decisive. Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich were diminished by distant, lower-tier finishes. Rick Perry got less than 1 percent. And Jon Huntsman, who staked everything on New Hampshire, came in a weak third with less than half of Romney’s vote. He practically moved to the state -- and then received exactly one-sixth of the vote in a six-man contest. Where does he go from here?
WASHINGTON -- After every other conservative alternative to Mitt Romney crashed and burned (libertarian Ron Paul is in a category of his own), from the rubble emerges Rick Santorum. But he isn't just the last man standing. He is the first challenger to be plausibly presidential: knowledgeable, articulate, experienced, of stable character and authentic ideology. He'd been ignored largely because he appeared unelectable -- out of office for five years, having lost his Senate seat in Pennsylvania by a staggering 17 points in 2006. However, with his virtual tie for first in Iowa, he sheds the loser label and seizes the momentum, meaning millions of dollars' worth of free media to make up for his lack of money. He's got the stage to make his case, plus the luck of a scheduling quirk: If he can make it through the next three harrowing primaries, the (relative) February lull would allow him to build a national campaign structure before Super Tuesday on March 6.
WASHINGTON -- Huge excitement. Two Earth-size planets found orbiting a sun-like star less than a thousand light-years away. This comes two weeks after the stunning announcement of another planet orbiting another star at precisely the right distance -- within the so-called "habitable zone" that is not too hot and not too cold -- to allow for liquid water and therefore possible life. Unfortunately, the planets of the right size are too close to their sun, and thus too scorching hot, to permit Earth-like life. And the Goldilocks planet in the habitable zone is too large. At 2.4 times the size of Earth, it is likely gaseous, like Jupiter. No earthlings there. But it’s only a matter of time -- perhaps a year or two, estimates one astronomer -- before we find the right one of the right size in the right place.
WASHINGTON -- Now that Congress appears finally to have reached a compromise on what must be one of the worst pieces of legislation in years -- the temporary payroll tax holiday extension -- let's survey the damage.
WASHINGTON -- Fair enough. Barack Obama didn't appease Osama bin Laden. He killed him. And for ordering the raid and taking the risk, Obama deserves credit. Credit for decisiveness and political courage. However, the bin Laden case was no test of policy. No serious person of either party ever suggested negotiation or concession. Obama demonstrated decisiveness, but forgoing a non-option says nothing about the soundness of one's foreign policy. That comes into play when there are choices to be made. And here the story is different. Take Obama's two major foreign-policy initiatives -- toward Russia and Iran.
WASHINGTON -- In the first month of his presidency, Barack Obama averred that if in three years he hadn't alleviated the nation’s economic pain, he'd be a "one-term proposition." When three-quarters of Americans think the country is on the "wrong track" and even Bill Clinton calls the economy "lousy," how then to run for a second term? Traveling Tuesday to Osawatomie, Kan., site of a famous 1910 Teddy Roosevelt speech, Obama laid out the case.
