Columnist.
A new chapter in American politics has begun. Millions of Americans on the right and left have lost faith in their political parties, their government and even the economic system. Only 1 in 4 Americans are satisfied with the way things are going. Policy experts will offer various arguments why at least some of these people are wrong to feel this way, but the discontented will not tolerate arguments that amount to "don't believe your lying eyes — or wallets." In politics, feelings are more important than hard numbers.
It happened sooner than even the doomsayers predicted. The era of artificial intelligence is here. A computer has become self-aware, a moral agent responsible for its own actions. This breakthrough didn't happen in Silicon Valley or at MIT. It happened, of all places, in Chappaqua, New York. And the person responsible isn't even a computer scientist, but a lawyer and politician: Hillary Clinton. Clinton's critics say a lot of things about her, but who would've believed she was Skynet's mother?
"We are trying to be reasonable," an organizer for Bernie Sanders' Seattle rally said. The black female protesters who stormed the stage became enraged. "We aren't reasonable!" they shouted back. "If you do not listen to [us], your event will be shut down," one of them declared to the crowd. Sanders caved to the protesters from the Black Lives Matter movement and gave activist Marissa Johnson the microphone. "I was going to tell Bernie how racist this city is, even with all of these progressives, but you've already done that for me. Thank you," she said, apparently in response to members of the crowd who booed her. I suppose if you've already conceded that you aren't reasonable, it's not hard to argue that booing an uninvited rabble-rouser is "racist."
The GOP-controlled Congress is taking up the cause, once again, of defunding Planned Parenthood. This latest effort comes in response to macabre hidden-camera videos shot by the Center for Medical Progress of staff at Planned Parenthood talking about the grisly practice of chopping up fetuses for parts. There's a debate over whether the videos prove the center's claim that Planned Parenthood is ghoulishly trying to make a profit selling baby lungs, livers and hearts.
It's been a hard time for politicians not named "Trump" to get any attention, but Mike Huckabee managed it. He did it by comparing Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler. At least that's what I gathered from headlines like this one from Gawker: "Mike Huckabee Compares Obama to Hitler" I don't put huge amounts of stock in Gawker headlines (or really any headlines on the Internet), but then I saw that CNN's Wolf Blitzer said Huckabee had "essentially likened [Barack Obama] to Adolf Hitler." National Journal's Ron Fournier went on a tear on Twitter, insisting that Huckabee apologize for comparing Obama to Hitler. And of course, Hillary Clinton and Obama himself denounced Huckabee for making a Hitler comparison. Clinton even said she was "really offended personally," as if her feelings are what really matters.
I had a lot of summer jobs. I was a foot messenger in New York for a couple of summers. I worked as a receptionist and mail room flunky. Before my junior year of high school, I briefly sold ice cream snacks — sort of yuppie bonbons — on the street for a company called Love Bites. The uniform was a tight red T-shirt (with a cupid over the heart), a straw hat, cane and snug brown shorts. When my manager asked me to work weekend nights in the (famously gay) West Village, I defected to a company that sold Italian ices. First, I didn't want to work nights. But at 16, I also wasn't ready to say, "Hey mister, would you like a Love Bite?" to the gang leaving the Stonewall Inn. Truth be told, all I wanted out of most of these gigs was beer money. Today, however, psychologists, educators and economists all talk about the benefits of summer jobs in the context of acquiring "life skills."
Surely this wasn't what Barack Obama had in mind.
Donald Trump stakes much of his fortune on the alleged value of the Trump brand. Hillary Clinton's candidacy rests on a similar assumption about the Clinton name.
I wonder what John Rawls would think of the market for fetal livers. The great liberal philosopher isn't quite a household name, but his influence on contemporary American liberalism and political philosophy is hard to overstate. Before his death in 2002, Rawls was arguably the foremost proponent of "distributive justice." In "A Theory of Justice," he offered a thought experiment. Imagine you and a group of other people were in a kind of metaphysical limbo, tasked with designing a society from scratch. But you exist behind what Rawls called a "veil of ignorance." You will be "born" — "placed" is probably a better word — into that society, but you don't know where on the socio-economic ladder you will land. You don't know whether you will be born a man or a woman, black or white, young or old.
"Nice flag!" the woman shouted sarcastically, adding: "F— you!" The woman was seated on the patio of a restaurant overlooking Main Street in this famously liberal capital of this famously liberal state when a truck sporting the Confederate emblem passed by. I could understand the sentiment (particularly given the fact that her lunch partner was an African-American man). When the woman saw my daughter and her friend, she apologized for her profanity. And while I could have done without the f-bomb around two 12-year-old girls, my real objection was something different. The young woman's outburst was exactly the reaction the buffoon in the truck was hoping for. After all, Vermont is the heart of union territory (and the first state to ban slavery in 1777). Even without the recent controversies, there's no reason to fly a Confederate flag in downtown Montpelier except to offend.
Hillary Clinton lies. This is a widely acknowledged fact among people who pay attention and aren't on her payroll. Nearly 20 years ago, New York Times columnist William Safire wrote: "Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our first lady — a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation — is a congenital liar." Younger folks probably have little to no memory of the lies Safire had in mind, though some might have heard about Hillary Clinton's infamously implausible explanation for how she managed to make a 10,000 percent profit in cattle futures simply by reading The Wall Street Journal.
Poor Donald Trump. It wasn't supposed to be like this. For years, wherever The Donald went, he met people who told him he should run for president. His retinue of sycophants surely saw little to gain from explaining that "birthers," celebrity worshippers and devotees of "The Apprentice" are not a statistically meaningful sample of the electorate. Nor did it dawn on him that some people say "you should run for president" the way you tell your long-winded uncle "you should write a book." History is full of failed men who mistook flattery for insight. In the past, Trump always pulled back from the brink. Why risk his beloved TV show? Why endure the embarrassment of revealing he's not as rich as he pretends? Better to play a Cincinnatus who won't relinquish his plow — or in this case, his line of cologne. Flirt but don't commit was the rule.
Ben Wattenberg died this week at the age of 81. He gave me my first job in Washington, as his research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank. (I returned to AEI as a fellow a few years ago, my office just a few doors down from where Ben used to work.) Ben was one of the last star pundits of what might be called the Old Order, before cable news and the Internet transformed the landscape. When everyone was rushing to CNN to shout at each other on "Crossfire," he launched a PBS show called "Think Tank" that aimed at high-minded conversation above the din. (I produced the show for several years.)
I loved reading the "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie" books to my daughter. The somewhat Aesopian theme is that if you give the mouse what it wants — a cookie — it will just want more: a glass of milk, a straw, etc. The story came to mind last week, a week that began with many vowing to inter the Confederate flag and ended with the Supreme Court mandating that there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. As far as culture war victories go, the flag news was big, but the marriage ruling was tantamount to VE Day.
Let me get this straight. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren is something of a dashboard saint to American liberals, principally for her retrograde leftism on economics. It was alleged a few years ago that she spent much of her professional career lying about her fictitious Native American roots. Warren listed herself as a minority in a professional directory and identified herself as a Native American. There was no evidence to support her claim, other than her own family lore and her personal conviction that she feels part Indian. And yet, when Republicans criticized her for it, they were denounced as racist by many defenders. Touré, a professional expert on all things racial, wrote in Time magazine, "Warren has every right to define herself" as part Native American. "The only way we could truly gauge Warren's Indian-ness would be to see how much being an American Indian means to her," he explained.
"Lots of folks expected us to do something strange and break out in a riot. Well, they just don't know us," the Rev. Norvel Goff told the packed, multiracial congregation of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., on Sunday. It was the first service since the horrific slaughter of nine innocent souls by a racist fanatic. Not being a Christian, I can only marvel at the dignity and courage of the victims' relatives who forgave the shooter. If I could ever manage such a thing, it would probably take me decades. It took them little more than a day. Less shocking, but almost as uplifting, was the conduct of the broader Charleston community, which has been unified and dignified, despite the expectations of some in the media — and the accused gunman, who had singled out Charleston because of its success at racial integration.
"God," Friedrich Nietzsche famously declared, "is dead." God, it has been noted, made a similar yet more lasting pronouncement about Nietzsche. But before the German philosopher departed this mortal coil, he had some interesting things to say. Nietzsche argued that one of the most powerful forces in society was "ressentiment." Similar to the everyday word "resentment," ressentiment lay at the heart of new kinds of morality. In ancient times, nobility was associated with power. The downtrodden, the poor, the weak, the enslaved were ignoble. The masses of have-nots, to use a more modern language, resented their plight for understandable reasons. But they were too weak to launch a real, armed revolution. Instead, the powerless resorted to a moral revolution, assaulting the concepts of nobility, goodness and morality and rendering them evil in the popular imagination.
What if a team of Chinese agents had broken into the Pentagon or — less box office but just as bad — the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and carted out classified documents? The next day, the newspapers and morning TV shows would show pictures of the broken locks and rummaged filing cabinets. And if we caught the Chinese spies in the act, perp-walking them for the world to see? Boy howdy. My hunch is that the airwaves would be full of people talking about how "this was an act of war." And I have no doubt that if the situation were reversed and we had sent our team to Beijing, the Chinese would definitely see it as an act of war.
"Basically, people in the market for Jihad think the Islamic State offers the best product on the market."
First, the good news: It turns out President Obama was right. Al-Qaida is being destroyed. One could even say he deserves some credit for this happy turn of events. Which brings us to the bad news: Al-Qaida is dying out because it's being replaced by something far worse. According to a fascinating report in the Guardian newspaper, two of Al-Qaida's leading clerics say that the Islamic State has all but destroyed its parent organization. Basically, people in the market for Jihad think the Islamic State offers the best product on the market. It's ironic. For a decade, terror analysts marveled about how creative al-Qaida was. Lawrence Wright in his gripping account of the rise of al-Qaida, "The Looming Tower," writes that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri deliberately set out to bring the best practices of the business world to religiously fueled terror and carnage. Al-Qaida's Jihadis got paid vacations, round-trip tickets home to visit family, healthcare, etc. They saved huge money on retirement gifts, since Allah promised to provide 72 virgins at the end of a productive career in lieu of a gold watch.
