Columnist.
What are establishment Republicans so afraid of? Why are they so convinced that if they stand up to Obama -- even on issues the public agrees with them on -- they will be spanked at the ballot box? Playing it safe sure has paid big dividends, huh? Every time we've had a fight over a budget ceiling or a continuing resolution, the establishment has told us we must not allow the government to shut down because Republicans would be blamed for it. The actual facts of the particular situation don't matter -- even if the Republicans' position is justified, defensible or over an issue that aligns them with the electorate. The establishment has decreed that we couldn't possibly, ever, come out on top in such a battle.
In his new book, "The Liberty Amendments," my friend Mark Levin is offering a bold plan for the re-establishment of America's founding principles and a restoration of constitutional republicanism through a series of amendments to the Constitution. I know of no one who has a greater reverence for our Constitution and for the scheme of limited government and personal liberties it established. Mark has been a student of America's founding and its constitutional history since he was a young boy, when he and his friends would visit Philadelphia, where it all started, and study the history.
Instead of the GOP focusing all its energy on infighting over the so-called "tactical" decision of whether to defund Obamacare, how about remembering who the real enemies of freedom are and directing its energies toward the Democrats, who are propping up this monster? It is painful to witness the expenditure of so much negative energy among people who all say they oppose the law. This law is so bad and so unpopular and its negative consequences so apparent that we would have to be complete incompetents not to be able to make this case to the American people, the majority of whom already agree.
In President Obama's world, "fairness" seems to be of overarching concern. Too bad "fairness" means what he says it does rather than what Webster's specifies. You'll rarely hear Obama talk about economic growth -- even as an aspiration -- and not just because there's been a dearth of it under his miserable five years in office.
Sometimes I marvel at President Obama's apparent lack of an embarrassment sensor. How can he stand before the American people and deliver speech after speech making the same tired points and pretending he is delivering the speech of the century? Is he truly impervious to feelings of self-consciousness, or is he trying to play us for fools?
It seems to me that almost every time President Obama talks publicly about race, he stirs things up rather than calms them down. Whether intentional or not, it's unfortunate -- and damaging. It's difficult to express opinions on race that don't conform to the politically correct narrative, because race baiters are always lying in wait to denounce as a bigot anyone who dissents from their assessment. Indeed, many leftists who call for a national dialogue on race routinely brand conservatives as racists -- merely because they are conservative -- even when they remain silent on racially sensitive issues.
Bless The New York Times for, yet again, selflessly exposing the political fault lines of the GOP and encouraging it to become more like the Democratic Party so it can start winning presidential elections again. I'm trying not to laugh. In his piece "Has the G.O.P. Gone Off the Deep End?", Thomas Edsall lines up establishment Republican after establishment Republican to testify to the "extremism" of the dominant forces in the party. And he blames conservative talk radio, one of the few remaining bastions of sanity in this country, for the GOP's demise.
On the heels of the George Zimmerman verdict, when this nation deeply needs a tense situation defused and soothing, reassuring words of racial unity, the president and attorney general give us just the opposite. We desperately need to strive for racial harmony and unity, but our task is exceedingly more difficult when President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder repeatedly invoke race and stir racial tensions.
Wake up, conservatives -- and Christians. We're getting our rear ends handed to us, and we'll continue to if we don't do a better job of fighting back. I'm not just talking about electoral politics. Liberal and secular activist groups are as aggressive as ever and winning, energized and enabled by this most radical of administrations -- and equally so by deer-in-the-headlights conservatives. The latest episode in this particular series of unfortunate events involves the Y's rolling over to the relentless bullying of pro-abortion activists to evict Students for Life of America from its facilities.
Could the boondoggle we call "Obamacare" be a bigger disaster? Is there any better example of the arrogance, incompetence and remorselessness of top-down central planning? The very name of the law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, is a deceptive euphemism, as it neither protects patients nor makes health care more affordable. The law was born in hell. The premises upon which the bill was based, the promises its proponents made and the corruption and high-handedness in its legislative process tainted it from the outset.
As one who supports traditional values and a conservative political agenda, I'm more worried about the right wing's erosion of resolve and moral courage than I am about the left's relentless assault on our values and ideas. Surely, no one can dispute that the political left has been tirelessly chipping away at America's foundational values for years and ruthlessly demonizing conservatives. But if Republicans truly believed in themselves and fought with the same conviction as Democrats, it would be a different story.
The totalitarian political left proves every day its relentless determination to complete President Obama's stated goal of fundamentally transforming this country. The political right can either wake up to this reality and unite in promoting a better vision or stand by and watch its children's future disintegrate. The left criticizes the right for its alleged partisanship, extremism, intolerance and angst, when the left dwarfs the right in all these characteristics. Contrary to leftist propaganda, mainstream conservatives haven't grown more strident or extreme -- unless you define extremists as those who are valiantly trying to preserve America's greatness and prevent the left from steamrolling its agenda against the will of the people.
As time has passed and the immigration bill's proponents have become more breathless, my opposition to the bill has increased. Let me count the ways. Proponents tell us we have an immigration crisis. Exactly how does one define crisis? They told us we had a health care and health insurance crisis, too, and they gave us Obamacare, making matters worse on both counts. We do have a national debt crisis and the most anemic economic recovery since World War II, yet proponents ignore these genuine crises while demanding we act immediately on immigration reform. They say that this bill would not constitute amnesty, that we already have de facto amnesty today. But they also tell us that some 11 million illegals are living in the shadows. Which is it? They can't have it both ways. If they have amnesty, they're not living in the shadows.
It's as if President Obama believes he's still in the faculty lounge at Harvard glamorizing leftist ideals, seemingly oblivious that he is actually president now and that his duties require him to work on truly pressing matters instead of fantasizing about Utopia. He is finally approaching the hot seat. Endless scandals are dogging his Teflon. The young voter demographic is going south on him. The foreign media are lampooning him. The economy still tanks. But in Berlin, with the disposition of Alfred E. Neuman, the blind destructiveness of Mr. Magoo and the flimsily emulated elegance of JFK, he lectured the world on the urgency of adopting his slightly modified faculty lounge agenda.
Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson attacked my brother, Rush, and my good friend Mark Levin (and former Rep. Ron Paul) in a recent column for their various comments concerning the National Security Agency's surveillance data collection operation and other administration activities. I find it noteworthy that Gerson -- who holds himself out as measured and reasonable, as one who abhors sloppy thinking and expression, and as one who decries the politics of personal destruction -- has gone out of his way to personally attack Limbaugh and Levin. He challenged their conservatism, patriotism, integrity and honor instead of simply registering his disagreement with their opinions. To make his case, he conflated and distorted their statements.
The Obama administration's handling of its multiple scandals paints a picture of those who believe they are above the law. There's a pattern of arrogance, dismissiveness, denial, scapegoating, stonewalling, lying, false professions of ignorance, assurances of accountability and punishing whistle-blowers. The numerous parallels in the administration's handling of the Fast and Furious and Internal Revenue Service scandals alone are too striking to be coincidental. The recurring theme is that the buck never stops at the Obama White House.
Isn't it ironic that President Obama, having acquired the highest office in the land by agitating -- all his political life -- against privilege and discrimination, is now systematically wielding his executive power lawlessly to favor his friends and punish his enemies? We are witnessing an unmistakable pattern from Obama and those under his command of establishing different rules for different groups of Americans. I'm not just referring to his opportunistic championing of the "poor" and his vendetta against the "wealthy" or his relentless vilification of "fat cat banks," big corporations, private jet owners and the insurance, oil, coal, natural gas and nuclear power industries. It goes well beyond that.
Just try to wrap your arms around the magnitude of defiance and chutzpah that led to and accompanied President Obama's appointment of the discredited Susan Rice as national security adviser. But don't let this outrage distract you from his equally disturbing appointment of leftist Samantha Power to replace Rice as UN ambassador. Though Democrats and their supporting liberal media, with a few notable exceptions, have aggressively downplayed the multifaceted Benghazi scandal, none of them has laid a glove on the irrefutable claim that Rice delivered the talking points that had been altered by the administration to distort the facts in order to mitigate any damage to Obama's reelection efforts.
