Columnist.
"The rise of Bernie Sanders is proving awkward for the Democratic Party," contends Politico in a recent piece about the surprisingly popular socialist presidential candidate. Well, maybe it's not *that* surprising. And it's probably not *that* awkward. Politico could have just as easily declared: The rise of Bernie Sanders is a completely predictable outcome of the Democratic Party's trajectory. Or, maybe: The rise of Bernie Sanders portends a socialistic future for the Democratic Party. After all, while the press had fun detailing every rightward lurch of the conservative movement, not only has the "socialist surge" been a restive force within Democratic Party politics during the Obama Age, but it's been making tremendous policy progress.
"[F]or [Chief Justice] Roberts, the law is a subordinate concern."
Here is John Roberts, chief oracle of the United States of America, from Thursday's King v. Burwell decision: "Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them. If at all possible, we must interpret the Act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the latter." What the statement illustrates is that for Roberts, the law is a subordinate concern. I know, I know, the Affordable Care Act is moral and decent and that's all that matters. Liberals demand we govern through empathy-based jurisprudence rather than anything resembling the antiquated tenants of founding principles. If you care about the latter more than you do the former, the fact that Supreme Court justices are aping the consequentialist arguments of the left and then working backward to make their legal justifications is probably the worst sign for checks and balances yet.
The Food and Drug Administration issued a final decision this week, giving the food industry three years to phase out bad trans fats, still used in a wide variety of products, such as Pillsbury's Ready To Bake cookies and cake frosting. Now, if you're ingesting large quantities of either, perhaps partially hydrogenated oils aren't your biggest concern in life. But if the government's goal is to prevent cardiovascular disease and preventing cardiovascular disease is all that matters, why stop there? The FDA alleges that phasing out trans fats will prevent about 7,000 premature deaths each year. (If you believe that these things can be quantified with that sort of precision, you have far too much faith in crusading bureaucracies. Years ago, I attempted to tally up the deaths that various studies, public interest groups and government agencies had attributed to obesity, smoking, salt, trans fats, meat, etc., and came up with a number larger than the number of all Americans who'd passed away that year.) But 610,000 Americans die from cardiovascular disease each year. Will 603,000 be left for corporate America to slaughter because we won't act? The negative externalities of allowing people to eat whatever they desire are huge.
Marco Rubio bought a bunch of stuff he probably couldn't afford. Welcome to America. So The New York Times has pulled together another hit piece — this one insinuating that Rubio, who the newspaper evidently believes is the GOP front-runner, is both a reckless spendthrift and a financial failure. The story — either clumsily or, more likely, deliberately — confuses offshore fishing boats with "luxury speedboats" and pickup trucks with SUVs to render a distasteful account of Rubio's financial life. But what we really learned is that though Rubio is not great with money, the senator from Florida has relatively modest desires, considering his fame. And his story features the kinds of struggles that middle-class voters often face when juggling bills, family and their investments.
If the Supreme Court were to decide not to allow retroactive legislating and uphold Obamacare as written, terrible things would happen to America. We might, for instance, find out what health insurance in fabricated, state-run "marketplaces" actually costs. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that the 37 states that have declined to set up exchanges would see an average spike of 287 percent should the King v. Burwell decision not go the Obama administration's way. It would be 650 percent in Mississippi — an amount that only proves that exchanges have not made insurance markets more competitive or more affordable as promised. Actually, the cost of insurance in federally run exchanges is already 287 percent higher. The difference is picked up by taxpayers.
If you're an intellectually curious person — and if you're a journalist, let's assume that you are — you are likely to have embraced a number of notions about how the world works, how it should work and who should be running it. This is natural. It's inevitable, then, that most journalists have formed some opinions about partisan politics. It's unrealistic to expect that even the most conscientious journalist can wholly divorce his or her professional work from his or her philosophical positions. And even if that person were to put forth the sincerest effort possible, biases are likely to manifest in the focus and tone of his or her work. And this doesn't even take into account editors and headline writers, often the worst culprits in one-sided political coverage.
You can't be more straightforward: "Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?" Fox News host Megyn Kelly asked presumptive GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush about the Iraq War. Without hesitation, Bush replied: "I would have." Bush went on to qualify his answer, adding that "so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody. And so would have almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got." Well, even if we give Bush the benefit of the doubt and concede that he was probably answering the question "Knowing what we knew then, would you have authorized the war?" rather than the one Kelly posed, it was still remarkably tone-deaf.
Sometimes, probably because he's such an affable media presence, I forget why I dislike the political version of Mike Huckabee so much. Maybe it's the aw-shucks populism, which isn't substantively very different from the class conflict rhetoric we hear from so many on the left these days. Or maybe it's that Everyman Huckabee has been running for one political office or another for the past 25 years — a fact that might escape the attention of anyone listening to the nuggets of blue-collar wisdom found in his speeches and those God-guns-grits-and-gravy books he writes. Since his previous run for the presidency, Huckabee has hosted a national radio show and television show, and he's endorsed all sorts of interesting products, including "secret biblical cures for cancer" to, no doubt, some unfortunate and desperate people — because Huckabee, like all of those selfish plutocrats he likes to denounce, is out to make a buck.
If a person happens to point out that Baltimore's criminally inept government has been run exclusively by Democrats since 1967 (with one Republican mayor since 1947) and features not a single city councilor who isn't a liberal, he may be called a lazy apparatchik. Because not everything, you see, is reducible to mere party politics. Now, if an economic renaissance sparked by the progressive policies of Stephanie Rawlings-Blake had lifted Baltimore from poverty, I imagine Democrats would be eager to claim credit for the accomplishment. Entire political debates are predicated on the effectiveness of partisan ideas. We blame presidents for recessions they probably have little to do with, yet according to liberal pundits, the party overseeing a city riddled with poverty, failing schools, high crime rates and racial tension bears no responsibility for what's happening.
Near the end of a recent New York Times article detailing the imaginary populist roots of Hillary Clinton — the original Elizabeth Warren, her people would have you believe — the reader crashes into this implausible scene: "In a meeting with economists this year, Mrs. Clinton intensely studied a chart that showed income inequality in the United States. The graph charted how real wages, adjusted for inflation, had increased exponentially for the wealthiest Americans, making the bar so steep it hardly fit on the chart. "Mrs. Clinton pointed at the top category and said the economy required a 'toppling' of the wealthiest 1 percent, according to several people who were briefed on her policy discussions but could not discuss private conversations for attribution."
Sen. Marco Rubio announced his candidacy for president of the United States at the Freedom Tower in Miami on Monday, highlighting his family's hardscrabble immigrant roots and embracing traditional values but also vowing to usher in a "new American century." As a matter of political pragmatism, is there any convincing reason Rubio shouldn't be the Republican to take on Hillary Clinton in 2016? Because when it comes to natural political talent, it's unlikely the GOP could do better. For starters, Rubio is the most compelling speaker in the Republican field. Sen. Mike Lee says Rubio "can bring grown men to tears." This is something voters value, apparently. Not only does Rubio sound as if he believes that American exceptionalism is genuine but also his populist sensibilities allow him to credibly broach the subject of inequality — mostly because he has a captivating family story to lean on.
Lena Dunham received plenty of criticism for her insufferable New Yorker piece titled "Dog or Jewish Boyfriend? A Quiz." In it, the creator of "Girls" weighs the pros and cons of getting a pet or keeping her Jewish boyfriend: "He doesn't tip," and "he never brings his wallet anywhere," and so on. The jokes may tell us something about her comedic abilities, her audience and The New Yorker, but despite much hand-wringing, it tells us nothing about anti-Semitism. The Anti-Defamation League's national director, Abraham Foxman, the unelected voice of American Jewish conscience, argued, "The piece is particularly troubling because it evokes memories of the 'No Jews or Dogs Allowed' signs from our own early history in this country, and also because, in a much more sinister way, many in the Muslim world today hatefully refer to Jews as 'dogs.'"
As an atheist, I suppose I should be deeply troubled by Ted Cruz's God-heavy presidential announcement. Although the Texas senator's blast of old-fashioned American exceptionalism garnered most of the chortling media's attention, it's what troubles me the least about his aspirations. If the politicians treated the ideals of the Enlightenment as if they were handed down from heaven rather than a pliable set of guidelines perpetually bending to accommodate the vagaries of contemporary politics, I imagine the world would be a better place. They don't. As one reporter for Yahoo! News asked during Cruz's speech on Twitter: "Bizarre to talk about how rights are God-made and not man-made in your speech announcing a POTUS bid? When Constitution was man-made?"
For a guy who's not a fan of certain foreign leaders, Barack Obama sure does place a tremendous amount of trust in the good will of other nations. For legacy-building purposes, for example, the administration trusts that Iran will police its own nuclear ambitions -- or, as John Kerry might put it, we've entered into a nonbinding agreement that is also not based on trust. The same goes for the Chinese government, whom we will soon have to trust so the president can get his legacy-building global-warming deal. As it's been reported, Obama is working hard to nail down what he hopes will be one of his "signature achievements": a wide-ranging global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. If all things go according to plan, the agreement will be signed in December. And as with most of the president's triumphs since 2010, this one will be nonbinding and unenforceable, accomplished with unprecedented executive fiat. If he keeps this up, Obama's single most notable achievement will be circumventing checks and balances with more regularity than any president in history.
Though it's unsettling to imagine such a scenario, both the republic and the Democratic Party would likely survive if Hillary Clinton were not to become president. Now, if the Clintons have proved anything over the years, it's that they are resilient in the face of scandal. So in all likelihood, Hillary hangs tight on the State Department email fiasco and waits for Democrats to rally behind her. And judging from the trial balloons -- "if you were a man today, would all this fuss being made be made?" -- I imagine it ends with liberals generating a political melodrama that casts Hillary as the victim of the hyper-partisan He-Man Women Haters Club. It's nearly unthinkable that after all this time, work and scheming, Hillary would simply abandon her quest -- unless some unforeseen wrongdoing emerges that makes her unpalatable for Democrats. But if we suspend our disbelief for a moment and imagine that unethical behavior could catch up with her, the result would hardly be the tragedy many liberals would envision or the boon many conservatives would anticipate.
One aspect of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to Congress that really seemed to get under the skin of many Obama loyalists was his contention that the Jews are facing another 1938. And of course, the historical analogy is imperfect because historical analogies are almost always imperfect. The problem for the Jews is that in this case, there simply isn't a better one. Across the media, Netanyahu's reference to the greatest tragedy in Jewish history was treated as some kind of political stunt. It was kind of like ... well, I guess, like questioning a president's patriotism. "At the end of it, when I think he really veered off into political territory, don't know if it was on a delay at that point, but when he sort of raised the specter of the Holocaust and 'never again' and Elie Wiesel, I mean, there was this great -- Ari Fleischer could have done this great political speech," explained Gloria Borger on CNN.
The Obama administration values a future relationship with Iran more than it values the historic relationship it has with Israel. Unless there's a reversal in the reported deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran, all the superficial talk about this extraordinary friendship between Israel and the United States isn't going to mean much. And the histrionics surrounding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's planned speech in front of a joint session of Congress only confirm that there are plenty of people who are happy about it. First, Americans were supposed to be outraged because Netanyahu engaged in a breach of protocol. Then we were supposed to be outraged because the speech would be given too close to the upcoming Israeli elections. (Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., is still using this excuse for his own boycott.) But if the Israeli elections -- and President Barack Obama's done about everything possible to weaken Netanyahu's position -- are so problematic, then the controversy should be centered on the behavior of the prime minister, not the substance of his argument. That's not the case, is it?
President Barack Obama gave a speech at the White House's summit on countering violent extremism this week, which was crammed with predictable feel-good ideas for combating the imaginary root causes of Islamic extremism. And in the midst of arguing that radicalism is principally driven by anger over colonialism, illiteracy and unemployment, Obama proposed an idea that we should have abandoned trillions of dollars and many years ago: more democracy. Here's how the president laid it out in the Los Angeles Times: "Efforts to counter violent extremism will only succeed if citizens can address legitimate grievances through the democratic process and express themselves through strong civil societies."
It's pretty simple. If you lie, lie about the right things. It's not difficult to imagine a pro-choice candidate winning the presidency. But imagine, if you can, a president whose position on abortion "evolves" after the election. Imagine this president advocating that all innocent human life is worth protecting. Imagine that she appoints judges to solidify her new pro-life attitude. And then imagine that the president's top adviser informs us that the president was a pro-lifer all along. I imagine that would be a pretty big story. Politicians break their promises and modify their positions all the time, of course. They BS us about their opinions and carefully craft identities that are palatable to the average voter. When a person enters this political universe, we need to accept that most of the things we hear are, at best, poetic truths.
