Columnist.
LONDON -- During the Second World War, a future prime minister, Harold Macmillan, said America is "the new Roman empire and we Britons, like the Greeks of old, must teach them how to make it go." How goes the tutoring of Rome by Athens? We are in the fifth month of the Libyan intervention that Barack Obama's administration said would involve "days, not weeks," an undertaking about which Prime Minister David Cameron was much more enthusiastic than Obama, who rarely mentions it. The intervention resulted from Cameron's and French President Nicolas Sarkozy's sudden zest for waging humanitarian war.
WASHINGTON -- Fifty years ago, a metaphor became concrete. Beginning on Aug. 13, 1961, along West Berlin's 27-mile border, the Iron Curtain became tangible in a wall of precast slabs of concrete. It came down 22 years ago, but the story of how it rose, as told in Frederick Kempe's book "Berlin 1961," compels an unflattering assessment of John Kennedy. His serial blunders that year made it the most incompetent first year of any presidency. In a State of the Union address just 10 days after his inauguration, Kennedy seemed exhilarated by hysteria. He said that "in this brief 10-day period" he had been "staggered" by "the harsh enormity" of the "trials" ahead:
LONDON -- The chancellor of the exchequer has a dry, sly sense of humor. George Osborne, 40, says Britain escaped the sort of housing bubble and crash that staggered America because, whereas America recklessly expanded its housing stock, "We were saved by the fact that you can't build anything in this country." He exaggerates, somewhat, Britain's regulatory impediments to dynamism, just as he exaggerated, somewhat, his prediction, when he became chancellor 15 months ago, that in six months he would be Britain's most unpopular man. His and Prime Minister David Cameron's wager is one that should interest Americans -- the bet that Britain can simultaneously shrink the state and stimulate the economy.
WASHINGTON -- Being in politics, said Eugene McCarthy, is like coaching football: You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it is important. The game of presidential politics is especially arcane in the cunning weirdness of the Ames straw poll, a quadrennial fundraising event for Iowa's Republican Party.
WASHINGTON -- The story is that as Mark Twain and novelist William Dean Howells stepped outside one morning, a downpour began and Howells asked Twain, "Do you think it will stop?" Twain answered, "It always has." The debt- ceiling impasse has, as things generally do, ended, and a post-mortem validates conservatives' portrayal of Barack Obama and their dismay about the dangers and incompetence of liberalism's legacy, the regulatory state. For weeks, you could not fling a brick in Washington without hitting someone with a debt-reduction plan -- unless you hit Obama, whose plan, which he intimated was terrifically brave, was never put on paper. In a prime-time spill of his usual applesauce about millionaires, billionaires and oil companies, he said, yet again, that justice demanded a "balanced" solution -- one involving new revenues. His whistle into the wind came after Washington's most consequential Democrat, Harry Reid, proposed a revenue-free solution.
WASHINGTON -- August is upon us, beaches beckon, and Michele Bachmann has set the self-improvement bar high. She recently told The Wall Street Journal, "When I go on vacation and I lay on the beach, I bring von Mises." The congresswoman may be the first person ever to dribble sun lotion on the section of Ludwig von Mises' "Human Action" wherein the Austrian economist (1881-1973) discussed "the formal and aprioristic character of praxeology." Autodidacts less exacting than Bachmann should spill sand on the pages of "The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America" by Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch. These incurably upbeat journalists with Reason magazine believe that not even government, try as it will, can prevent onrushing social improvement.
WASHINGTON -- Between 6 p.m. Friday and 4 p.m. Sunday, the nation began a constitutional course-correction. The current occupant's vanity and naivete -- a dangerous amalgam -- are causing the modern presidency to buckle beneath the weight of its pretenses. And Congress is reasserting its responsibilities. At his Friday news conference-cum-tantrum, President Obama imperiously summoned congressional leaders to his presence: "I've told" them "I want them here at 11 a.m." By Saturday, his administration seemed to be cultivating chaos by suddenly postulating a new deadline: The debt-ceiling impasse must end before Asian markets opened Sunday evening Eastern time, lest the heavens fall.
WASHINGTON -- The tea party, the most welcome political development since the Goldwater insurgency in 1964, lacks only the patience necessary when America lacks the consensus required to propel fundamental change through our constitutional system of checks and balances. If Washington's trajectory could be turned as quickly as tea partyers wish -- while conservatives control only one-half of one of the two political branches -- their movement would not be as necessary as it is. Fortunately, not much patience is required. The Goldwater impulse took 16 years to reach fruition in the election of Ronald Reagan. The tea party can succeed in 16 months by helping elect a president who will not veto necessary reforms. To achieve that, however, tea partyers must not help the incumbent achieve his objectives in the debt-ceiling dispute.
WASHINGTON -- The Republicans' 2012 presidential nominee will run against Alibi Ike. Lardner, a Chicago sportswriter, created that character ("His right name was Frank X. Farrell, and I guess the X stood for 'Excuse me.'") who resembles Chicagoan Barack Obama. After blaming his predecessor for this and that, and after firing all the arrows in liberalism's quiver -- the stimulus, cash for clunkers, etc. -- Obama seems poised to blame the recovery's anemia on Republican resistance to simultaneously raising the debt ceiling and taxes. So the Republican nominee's campaign theme can already be written. In 1960, candidate John Kennedy's theme was: "We can do better." In 2012, the Republican candidate should say "Is this the best we can do?"
WASHINGTON -- The louder they talked about the disadvantaged, the more money they made. And the more the financial system tottered. Who were they? Most explanations of the financial calamity have been indecipherable to people not fluent in the language of "credit default swaps" and "collateralized debt obligations." The calamity has lacked human faces. No more.
WASHINGTON -- The fate of Arizona's Clean Elections Act, which the Supreme Court on Monday declared unconstitutional, was foreshadowed March 28, during oral arguments. Lawyers defending the law insisted its purpose was to combat corruption or the appearance thereof. The court has repeatedly said this is the only constitutionally permissible reason for restricting the quantity of political speech. The law's defenders insisted its purpose was not to "level the playing field" by equalizing candidates' resources, which the court has declared an unconstitutional reason for regulating speech. But Chief Justice John Roberts replied: "Well, I checked the Citizens Clean Elections Commission website this morning, and it says that this act was passed to 'level the playing field' when it comes to running for office." Game over.
SAN ANTONIO -- In the 1850s, on the steps of the Waco courthouse, Wallace Jefferson's great-great-great-grandfather was sold. Today, Jefferson is chief justice of Texas' Supreme Court. The governor who nominated him also nominated the state's first Latina justice. Rick Perry, 61, the longest-serving governor in Texas history and, in his 11th year, currently the nation's senior governor, says these nominations are two of his proudest accomplishments. French cuffs and cowboy boots are, like sauerkraut ice cream, an eclectic combination, but Perry, who wears both, is a potentially potent candidate for the Republican presidential nomination because his political creed is uneclectic, matching that of the Republican nominating electorate.
WASHINGTON -- Elevating the fallacy of the false alternative to a foreign policy, John McCain and a few others believe Republicans who oppose U.S. intervention in Libya's civil war -- and who think a decade of warfare in Afghanistan is enough -- are isolationists. This is less a thought than a flight from thinking, which involves making sensible distinctions. Last Sunday on ABC's "This Week," McCain warned that the GOP has always had "an isolation strain." He calls it "the Pat Buchanan wing," which he contrasts with "the Republican Party that has been willing to stand up for freedom for people all over the world." Rather a lot turns on the meaning of "stand up for."
WASHINGTON -- America's intervention in Libya's civil war, the most protracted and least surreptitious assassination attempt in history, was supposed to last "days, not weeks," but is in its fourth month and has revealed NATO to be an increasingly fictitious military organization. Although this war has no discernible connection with U.S. national security, it serves the national interest, in three ways. It is awakening some legislators to their responsibilities. It is refuting the pretense that the U.N. sets meaningful parameters to wars it authorizes -- or endorses, which is quite different. And it is igniting a reassessment of NATO, a Potemkin alliance whose primary use these days is perverse: It provides a patina of multilateralism to U.S. military interventions on which Europe is essentially a free rider.
DALLAS -- For a conservative Texan seeking national office, it could hardly get better than this: In a recent 48-hour span, Ted Cruz, a candidate for next year's Republican Senate nomination for the seat being vacated by Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison, was endorsed by the Club for Growth PAC, FreedomWorks PAC, talk radio host Mark Levin and Erick Erickson of RedState.com. And Cruz's most conservative potential rival for the nomination decided to seek a House seat instead. For conservatives seeking reinforcements for Washington's too-limited number of limited-government constitutionalists, it can hardly get better than this: Before earning a Harvard law degree magna cum laude (and helping found the Harvard Latino Law Review) and clerking for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Cruz's senior thesis at Princeton -- his thesis adviser was professor Robert George, one of contemporary conservatism's intellectual pinups -- was on the Constitution's Ninth and 10th Amendments. Then as now, Cruz argued that these amendments, properly construed, would buttress the principle that powers not enumerated are not possessed by the federal government.
WASHINGTON -- Here, however, is a paradox of sovereignty: The sovereign people, possessing the right to be governed as they choose, might find the exercise of that right tiresome, and so might choose to be governed in perpetuity by a despot they cannot subsequently remove. Congress did something like that in passing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. The point of PPACA is cost containment. This supposedly depends on the Independent Payment Advisory Board. The IPAB, which is a perfect expression of the progressive mind, is to be composed of 15 presidential appointees empowered to reduce Medicare spending -- which is 13 percent of federal spending -- to certain stipulated targets. IPAB is to do this by making "proposals" or "recommendations" to limit costs by limiting reimbursements to doctors. This, inevitably, will limit available treatments -- and access to care when physicians leave the Medicare system.
WASHINGTON -- Because government is inherently dangerous and often mischievous, the Constitution's framers provided, and congressional rules have multiplied, mechanisms for blocking government action. These mechanisms can, however, also be used to force action. One is being so used in a dispute that has two remarkable facets. President Obama is sacrificing economic growth and job creation in order to placate organized labor. And as the crisis of the welfare state deepens, he is trying to enlarge the entitlement system and exacerbate the entitlement mentality.
NEW YORK -- Although his Park Avenue office is as quiet as an empty stadium, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell sits atop a seething volcano of fans who will erupt if training camps do not open in July. Fans care nothing about the details of the labor dispute that threatens to keep stadiums empty into September and perhaps beyond: There have been no serious negotiations since March 11; the court hearing this past Friday might -- weeks from now -- result in a decision that will restart negotiations. Even if, however, you think football is one of America's dispensable frills, the NFL's agony is a fascinating illustration of how things can spin out of control.
WASHINGTON -- Donald Trump's pathological political exhibitionism has ended, Newt Gingrich has incinerated himself with an incoherent retraction tour, Mitt Romney has reaffirmed his enthusiasm for his Massachusetts health care law, rendering himself incapable of articulating the case against Obamacare and the entitlement state generally, Haley Barbour, Mike Huckabee and Mitch Daniels, aware of the axiom that anyone who will do what must be done to become president should not be allowed to be president, are out. Watching this from his new home in Washington's tony Kalorama neighborhood and his office at 1455 Pennsylvania Ave., Jon Huntsman, 51, former Utah governor and recently resigned ambassador to China, contemplates moving his office two blocks west. The Republican contest may soon acquire a photogenic family and a distinctive foreign policy voice.
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. intervention in Libya's civil war, intervention that began with a surplus of confusion about capabilities and a shortage of candor about objectives, is now taking a toll on the rule of law. In a bipartisan cascade of hypocrisies, a liberal president, with the collaborative silence of most congressional conservatives, is traducing the War Powers Resolution. Enacted in 1973 over President Nixon's veto, the WPR may or may not be wise. It is, however, unquestionably a law, and Barack Obama certainly is violating it. It stipulates that a president must terminate military action 60 days after initiating it (or 90, if the president "certifies" in writing an "unavoidable military necessity" respecting the safety of U.S. forces), unless Congress approves it. Congress has been supine and silent about this war which began more than 70 days ago.
