Columnist.
The New York Times claims that the vaccine controversy we're all talking about raises important questions about "how to approach matters that have largely been settled among scientists but are not widely accepted by conservatives." Well, here's another question: How do we deal with the false perception that liberals are more inclined to trust science than conservatives? Also, how do we approach the media's fondness for focusing on the unscientific views of some conservatives but ignoring the irrational -- and oftentimes more consequential -- beliefs of their fellow liberals? Though outing GOP candidates as skeptics of science may confirm the secular liberal's own sense of intellectual superiority, it usually has nothing to do with policy. However, if you walk around believing that pesticides are killing your children or that fracking will ignite your drinking water or if you hyperventilate about the threat of the ocean's consuming your city, you have a viewpoint that not only conflicts with science but undermines progress. So how do we approach matters that have been settled among scientists but are not widely accepted by liberals?
At the World Economic Forum last week, Secretary of State John Kerry argued that though extremists may cite Islam as a justification for terrorism, the world should refrain from using the term "Islamic radicals." Extremism, Kerry maintained, is apart from Islam, and the millions who support or engage in violence in its name are driven by "criminal conduct rooted in alienation, poverty, thrill seeking and other factors." This soothing, half-baked philosophy is cant in the Obama administration. So when the Islamic State group took credit for the beheading of Japanese hostage Haruna Yukawa, it shouldn't have been surprising that the most important thing Rick Stengel, undersecretary of state for happy thoughts, could think to tweet to his followers was that there was "nothing religious about it."
Evidently, Republicans don't feel competent enough to make a case against infanticide. Why else would the GOP pull its 20-week abortion limit bill? Here's a short list of things that are less popular than banning late-term abortions: "Acting" on climate change. "Free" community college. Taxing the wealthy. Building the Keystone XL pipeline. President Barack Obama. Future President Hillary Clinton. Every Republican who's thinking about running for president. A new Marist poll finds that 84 percent of Americans favor some level of further restrictions on abortion. And regardless of their feelings about the legality of the procedure, 60 percent believe it to be "morally wrong." If you aren't keen on that poll -- it was sponsored by the Knights of Columbus, after all -- you can take your pick of others.
We heathens can leave the theological debate to others. But Pope Francis, the bishop of Rome and world leader of the Roman Catholic Church, has some ideas about laws governing the secular world. We expect Francis to defend the dignity of faith, to bring clarity to the Catholic position. Yet instead, the pope, while en route to the Philippines, offered a number of comments about freedom of expression, which ranged from the unclear to the contradictory. More than simply saying that poking fun at religion is ugly, he argued that there should be limits on freedom of expression and limits on mocking faith. (All this with the caveat that the pope's words were not misrepresented or taken out of context as they so often are by the media.)
If the Supreme Court dismantles a core provision in Obamacare, America will be plunged into a pre-2010 level of dystopia -- or worse. If Democrats were to be forced by the court to follow the law they wrote, then 36 states that aren't interested in hosting federal "exchanges" would no longer be forced to do so, and consequently, the American dream would be shattered. So needless to say, the pending Supreme Court challenge over the Affordable Care Act via King v. Burwell is the most significant decision since Hobby Lobby or perhaps Citizens United -- or whenever the most recent time was when the world was going to come tumbling down around us. And while pretending that the legal challenge is laughably weak -- a politically motivated charade that has absolutely no chance of success -- most left-wing pundits who've weighed in on the matter feel oddly compelled to urge SCOTUS to contemplate a whole host of factors that have nothing to do with the law.
The Obama Boom is finally here. Gross domestic product grew by a healthy 5 percent in the third quarter, the strongest growth we've seen since 2003. Consumer spending looks as if it's going to be strong in 2015. Unemployment numbers have looked good. Buying power is up. And the stock market closed at 18,000 for the first time ever. All good things. So what happened? Here's David Axelrod on Twitter: "Note: The quarter before Obama took office, the U.S. economy SHRUNK by 8.9 percent, worst since 1930. Last quarter it GREW by 5 percent, best since 2003." Note: Contrasting the most severe quarter of your predecessor's with the best one in your six-year presidency -- one filled with extravagant and unmet economic promises -- may strike you as a bit hackish. But let's go with it.
When Sen. Elizabeth Warren rallied beleaguered House liberals to push back against a bank-coddling omnibus bill and the spineless White House that enabled it, she showed us some of her dynamic appeal. Passing trillion-dollar pieces of legislation should never be easy, and disrupting the current cozy, bipartisan environment surely can't be a bad thing. As Warren was disrupting D.C., it's not difficult to imagine Hillary Clinton ensconced in her penthouse suite in whatever city she's about to give a six-figure lecture in, contemplating every conceivable political angle of this debate, tabulating every potential big-money donor's interests and asking obsequious staffers how polling looks before composing her own opinion on the matter. That's because Hillary is the Democrats' Mitt Romney. And Democrats would be engaging in a historic act of negligence if they allowed her to run unopposed for president.
Although the specifics are still hazy, The New York Times reports that a group of deep-pocketed Republican donors and bundlers has hatched a plan to clear the GOP field of all insurgents to make room for a favored "establishment" candidate -- preferably Jeb Bush, Chris Christie or Mitt Romney. But there can only be one. This strikes me as a dubious strategy for a number of reasons. But the main point of the Times piece is to inform everyone that Republican powerbrokers intend to get ahead of the intraparty squabbling that accompanies the long primary season because, in the end, all of that ugliness would only help elect Hillary Clinton: "For the first time in decades, the Republican Party is facing a wide-open primary with up to a dozen serious candidates representing virtually every branch of the party. Republican leaders, hoping to minimize damage to their eventual standard-bearer, have already sought to compress the formal primary season and reduce the number of candidate debates."
After news of the baffling decision by the New York grand jury not to indict a police officer in the killing of Eric Garner, I sent out a (slightly) hyperbolic tweet that wondered why Americans would want to entrust their free speech and health care to an institution that will kill you over failure to pay a cigarette tax. Since then, I've seen numerous tweets arguing that bringing up the tax is preposterous. It's something akin to blaming jaywalking for the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., touched on the issue in an interview with MSNBC yesterday and was, unsurprisingly, ridiculed for it by liberals -- because mentioning the circumstances of a violent act is preposterous, apparently.
For many in the media, the St. Louis County grand jury's decision was going to confirm the existence of deep American injustice one way or another. If it found there was insufficient evidence for an indictment against Darren Wilson -- the white police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, a black teenager, in August in Ferguson, Missouri -- it would mean that the American justice system is corrupt, unjust and rife with racism. If the grand jury decided to move forward with an indictment, it could only mean that American law enforcement is corrupt, unjust and rife with racism. Even if many of your grievances are legitimate, "justice" doesn't exist to soothe your anger. In the end, there wasn't probable cause to file charges against Wilson. And after all the intense coverage and buildup, the predictable happened. Even taking a cursory look at the evidence the grand jury saw and heard, the details of Brown's death were far more complex than what we heard when the incident first broke. Lawyers will, no doubt, analyze every morsel of evidence in the coming days. But if Wilson's testimony is corroborated by forensic evidence -- and much of it seems to be -- it seems unlikely that any jury would be able to convict him.
Nothing in history or current reality could possibly lead an honest observer to conclude that there's a viable path to peace between Palestinians and Israel. Barring some dramatic exogenous event, this isn't about to change. Give it up. After the murder of five Israelis (three of them American citizens and one of them a Druze) this week, people fired celebratory gunshots in the air "and praise for God and the attackers poured from mosque loudspeakers soon after the synagogue attack," reported The New York Times. Fatah officials in Lebanon chimed in to let us know that "Jerusalem needs blood in order to purify itself of Jews." There were congratulatory messages on Fatah's official Facebook page and festive post-murder spree sweets for the kids. This celebration of death -- whether dead babies or dead rabbis, it matters not -- not only illustrates the colossal moral gulf that exists between these societies but also reminds us that any Palestinian government inclined to entertain a viable agreement with Jews wouldn't last long anyway.
At a Beijing news conference, President Barack Obama called a new China-United States climate deal a "historic agreement." Grist assures us that the "new U.S.-China climate deal is a game changer." Bloomberg Businessweek concurred, explaining "why the U.S.-China emissions pact could be a climate change breakthrough." Vox took it even further and declared, "Obama's climate deal proves China is the biggest foreign policy success of his presidency." (Which may be true. And sad.) The rest of the media, unsurprisingly, offered comparable takes on the deal. I guess that when you're on the lookout for good news, any morsel will do. But there are two problems with treating the deal as big news. 1) We're not really doing anything we weren't going to do anyway. 2) Neither is China.
Guess what. Voters don't really hate "obstructionism." They hate the other party. If we're to believe the media-authored account of the past six years, the GOP has made rigid obstructionism of Barack Obama's policies its sole agendum. In victory and in concession speeches, candidates of both parties still claim that "dysfunction" has been the biggest problem in Washington. Where exactly have Republicans suffered for their stubbornness? The reality is that Republicans have been generously rewarded for their tenacity in stopping post-Obamacare progressive policy. Since 2010, the Republicans have pulled together a historic string of victories -- with scores of seats changing hands in the House. If anything, what we learned is that politicians are far likelier to be penalized by the electorate for passing unworkable and overreaching legislation than they are for stopping it.
The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg has written a piece detailing the deteriorating relationship between Israel and the Obama administration. The chief purpose of Goldberg's piece is to humiliate Benjamin Netanyahu. None of this is especially shocking, considering the antagonism the administration has shown toward the Jewish state from the start. Most people have focused on the name-calling, and Goldberg keeps a list of pejoratives used by U.S. officials to describe Netanyahu, including "aspergery." On that front, it's worth noting that the person repeatedly being called "chickens--t" by anonymous officials volunteered for the Israel Defense Forces, saw combat and was the leader of an elite special forces unit deployed on numerous missions -- including the freeing of a hijacked Sabena flight in 1972, where he was shot. Granted, this may not be so courageous as hopping the Amtrak from Delaware to D.C. each day or rallying the troops at a fundraiser in Greenwich, Connecticut, but God knows we can't all be heroes.
This week, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected gay marriage appeals from Indiana, Oklahoma, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin, in essence allowing lower courts to legalize same-sex couples. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, an institution that has vigorously opposed gay marriage for some time now, conceded that the political battle over marriage is over. "As far as the civil law is concerned," the Mormon church admitted, "the courts have spoken." Actually, nothing is over until God says it's over. At least, this is my understanding of how religion operates. So though I don't want to accuse Mormons of being a bunch of serial quitters, let's just say this isn't the first time they've folded in the face of adversity. Luckily, every time a door closes...
Most Americans don't really care about contemporary political issues or the rudimentary workings of their government. But they sure do love voting. And the biggest fans of "democracy" treat this orgy of vacuous lever pulling as if it were sacred or patriotic. It is neither. In 2013, President Barack Obama, who's often argued that voting should be easier, issued a decidedly undemocratic executive order to create a commission that was tasked with investigating how to expand participation. The report, for example, suggests that no one in the country should have to wait longer than 30 minutes to cast a ballot -- or, in other words, voting should entail 15 minutes less exertion than ordering Chinese takeout. Nowhere within the recommendations -- or elsewhere, for that matter -- do we ever ponder whether voters have a civic responsibility to know who the vice president is before getting an "I voted" sticker.
Of the countless lessons we've learned from liberals over the past few years, none is more critical than this: If Democrats find an issue important enough and if doing something feels like the "right thing," Barack Obama has the power to act without any regard for separation of powers. So what makes anyone believe that war would be any different? This week, the president OK'd airstrikes against Islamic State targets -- allying us with Bashar Assad, possibly Iran and definitely Qatar -- using an unrelated 13-year-old authorization for use of military force as his legal mandate. Seems like a big deal. It may even be a good idea. Yet even though Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, informed the Senate that ground troops could be needed to finish the job -- whatever that job may be -- the president didn't bother to ask for permission.
Remember when the media freaked out for three days over Sarah Palin's completely innocuous use of the term "blood libel"? Nearly every major media outlet took a deep dive on this critical outrage. Millions of Americans learned more about how Jews in the Middle Ages were sometimes falsely accused of kidnapping and murdering Christian children so they could use the blood for ritualistic baking. But more significantly: What did Palin mean? Was she sending a veiled message to evangelical voters? Was it just anti-Semitism rearing its ugly head again?
We are, as it always seems, "at a pivotal moment in American history." At least that's what Sens. Tom Udall and Bernie Sanders maintained in a melodramatic Politico op-ed last week as they explained their efforts to repeal the First Amendment. Let me retort in their language: It's true that building the United States has been long, arduous and rife with setbacks. But throughout the years, the American people have repelled efforts to weaken or dismantle the First Amendment. We have weathered the Sedition Act of 1918, a law that led to the imprisonment of innocent Americans who opposed the war or the draft. Since then, we have withstood numerous efforts to hamper, chill and undermine basic free expression in the name of "patriotism." We have, however, allowed elected officials to treat citizens as if they were children by arbitrarily imposing strict limits on their free speech in the name of "fairness."
The new season of "19 Kids and Counting" is here. And I'm excited. So what? Generally speaking, I enjoy the most salacious, violent and depressing television shows I can find. Maybe it's just a perverse form of escapism, maybe it's the high quality of shows being produced these days, but I can't resist "prestige" television -- "The Wire," "Breaking Bad," "Fargo," "The Sopranos," "Game of Thrones," "House Of Cards," "The Walking Dead" and so on. For that matter, I also hung around for four seasons of "The Killing" and watched every episode of the "Halt and Catch Fire." So, apparently, whatever you make, I' y for watching such dreck -- and I never left. I can't remember when it happened exactly, and I don't know if I'll be able shake this bizarre feeling, but I do know that I'm hooked on what has to be the most countercultural show on TV these days.
