Columnist.
Vanilla is the most popular ice cream flavor in America, not because it is the best (that would be coffee) but because it is the least objectionable. Put another way, vanilla is the most acceptable to the most people; it's not many people's favorite, but nobody hates it. And that's why Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is the vanilla candidate. A new Des Moines Register poll has Walker in first place -- narrowly -- among likely Republican caucus-goers. With Mitt Romney included in the poll, Walker was the respondents' first choice with 15 percentage points. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul was second with 14 percentage points and Romney third with 13. With Romney out, Walker rose to 16 percentage points and Paul to 15. First place in a tightly packed field is better than any of the alternatives, but it's not that big a deal this far out.
Have you heard about the secret conspiracy between the Saudis and the White House? I haven't either, probably because there isn't one. But events are playing out exactly as one would expect if such a conspiracy existed. With no help from Barack Obama, the U.S. has launched an energy revolution, becoming the world's leading oil and natural gas producer. This has dismayed environmentalists and donors in and out of the Obama administration. After all, Obama bet big -- really big -- on green energy. The oil and gas boom is not the energy revolution Obama was looking for. Saudi Arabia and other petro-monarchies aren't happy about it either (which is one reason the United Arab Emirates and other OPEC states bankroll anti-fracking propaganda in the West). Until recently, Saudi Arabia was the world's biggest oil producer, and it is still arguably the most important one in global markets because its oil is so easy to get out of the ground. The cheaper it is to extract, the easier it is to maintain profits when prices go down. That means the Saudis have an outsized ability to affect the global price of oil.
A week after his State of the Union address, political observers are still trying to figure out what President Obama's game is. That's because rhetorically and substantively, he seems to be in another world. In his State of the Union address, Obama refused to even take note of the GOP's historic midterm gains and the fact the House and Senate are now both under Republican control. On foreign policy, Obama talked as if everything was going swimmingly abroad, prompting even the Washington Post's Dana Milbank to marvel at Obama's "disconnect" from what is happening in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Russia.
It's hard to believe that was only President Obama's sixth State of the Union address. It feels like he's given so many more. Maybe that's because the man seems to be constantly talking. And talking. The talking is the background noise of much of the last decade, auditory wallpaper that seems to line the corridors of everyday life. And when he talks, he's often talking about himself -- particularly about things he's said on other occasions when he was talking. Like many liberals today, Obama has a particular weakness for the logical fallacy known as the argument from authority, and you know he is about to invoke his favorite authority when he begins a sentence, "As I said before." As if there are large swaths of people who say, "Oh, he said it before, so it must be true."
In the wake of the terrorist attack on a kosher market in Paris, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked French Jews to come home. I don't particularly like that advice. I think it would be a tragedy if centuries of Jewish French culture had to die out because Jews were chased out by Islamist thugs. The French government agrees -- for now at least -- and has posted armed soldiers everywhere Jews live and gather. Still, what Netanyahu understands is that there is strength in numbers. The more Jews there are in Israel, the stronger Israel will be. The flip side is that the fewer Jews there are in France -- or Europe or America -- the weaker Jews as a whole will be.
Could this argument be any dumber? The Obama administration has forced America and much of the world into a debate no one wanted or needed. Namely, does Islamic terrorism have anything to do with Islam? This debate is different than the much-coveted "national conversation on race" that politicians so often call for (usually as a way to duck having it), because that is a conversation at least some people want. The White House doesn't want a conversation about Islam and terrorism. White House spokesman Josh Earnest says, "We have chosen not to use that label [of radical Islam] because it doesn't seem to accurately describe what happened."
In 2007, when President Obama announced that he was running for president, he did it in Springfield, Ill., to highlight his supposed connection to Abraham Lincoln. He brought in his biggest fans to cheer him on. When George W. Bush announced in 1999, he did it in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The Bush campaign, likewise, brought in a big crowd of supporters. John Kerry announced in Patriot's Point, S.C., in 2003, amid a sea of American flags, war veterans and an aircraft carrier in the background. And where was Mitt Romney when he announced on Friday that he was thinking of another run in 2016? He, too, was talking to his base: about 30 deep-pocketed donors in New York City. "Tell your friends," he said.
The vigils in Paris are moving. The hashtag plumes of #JeSuisCharlie ("I am Charlie") are endearing. The expressions of condemnation from Muslim leaders are commendable, as are the assurances of solidarity and support from Western governments. But, as a practical matter, they don't change a thing: The jihadists won this week. Even if the atrocity in Paris served to imbue the civilized world -- Muslim and non-Muslim alike -- with a newfound resolve to battle radical Islam (it almost certainly won't), this still stands as a victory for the bad guys.
Jeb Bush is starting the new year with a smile. Former Arkansas governor and, until last weekend, Fox News host Mike Huckabee announced he would "explore" running for president. By the way, these "exploration" announcements are yet another example of the government encouraging politicians to lie. Exploratory committees disguise the fact that a candidate is running about as well as glasses conceal Superman's real identity. They require a willful suspension of disbelief on the part of everyone watching. Politicians like this loophole because it drags out the time in which they are allowed to conceal their donors and provides another round of headlines when they "formally" (and inevitably) announce their candidacies.
There's an old joke in the newspaper business, now immortal on the Internet: "The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country. The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country. The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don't really understand the New York Times. They do, however, like their statistics shown in pie chart format. ... The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country, and they did a far superior job of it, thank you very much. ..."
Many conservatives finished the year angry about the same thing they were angry about at the beginning of the year: liberal double standards. As I write this, GOP House Whip Steve Scalise is in hot water over reports that he spoke to a group of racist poltroons in Louisiana 12 years ago. Whether it was an honest mistake, as Scalise plausibly claims, or a sign of something more nefarious, as his detractors hope, remains to be seen. But one common response on social media is instructive. Countless conservatives want to know: Why the double standard? Barack Obama was friends with a domestic terrorist, Bill Ayers. His spiritual mentor was a vitriolic racist, Jeremiah Wright. One of his administration's closest advisers and allies is Al Sharpton, a man who has inspired enough racial violence to make a grand dragon's white sheets turn green with envy.
Hey, Jeb, Ted, Rand, Marco, Bobby, Chris and the dozen or more others I'm forgetting, here's something to write on your bathroom mirror in 2015 and beyond: The "P" in POTUS stands for "President," not "Pundit." I understand that the Seinfeldian faux-holiday Festivus is behind us, but I want to get at least this one grievance in for next year a bit early. Republicans have a tendency to tell, not show. They feel the need to explain why they are saying something, rather than work at simply saying what they need to say convincingly. I call it "reading your stage direction." The first president Bush was probably the worst sufferer of this political malady. The most famous example was when he was running against Bill Clinton in 1992. Clinton was probably the best faker of sincerity in modern American politics. Sticking with the Seinfeld theme, he followed George Costanza's dictum, "It's not a lie if you believe it." Clinton could convince himself that whatever he was saying was the truth, and that helped him sell himself as the Great Empathizer.
Going by objective standards of reason and fairness, Al Sharpton is not to blame for the assassination of two New York City cops over the weekend. Nor are New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, President Obama or any of the protesters and activists they supported, encouraged and allied themselves with. Going by what we know, the only person to blame is the man police identified as the killer, Ismaaiyl Brinsley. This is the standard I've upheld in this space for years, when one madman after another has killed and maimed in the name of one cause or another. It's also been necessary to uphold this standard when madmen have killed for no political cause whatsoever, but politicians and journalists have been determined to claim otherwise.
The first issue of Captain America came out on December 20, 1940. It shows Cap slugging Adolph Hitler in the mouth. Good stuff, but note the date. America wouldn't enter World War II for about another year. At the time, many Americans wanted to stay out of another European war. And here was an American superhero punching the leader of a sovereign nation in the kisser. Subsequent issues kept pitting Captain America against Hitler and his goons. The angriest reaction came from the German American Bund, Hitler's stooges in the U.S. They harassed Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, the creators of Captain America, with hate mail and telephoned death threats.
Jonathan Gruber should have been Time's Person of the Year. The magazine gave it to the "Ebola Fighters" instead. Good for them; they're doing God's work. Still, Gruber would have been better. Time's Person of the Year designation has lost a lot of its stature over recent years. Part of its decline can probably be attributed to the fact that it's come to be seen as an honorific. It was originally conceived to recognize the person who, "for better or for worse ... has done the most to influence the events of the year." So Adolf Hitler (1938) and Josef Stalin (1939 and again in 1942) qualified. In 2001, however, the editors couldn't bring themselves to bestow the title on Osama bin Laden, even though he certainly deserved it. (New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani got it instead for his heroic response to the evil deeds of the person who influenced the events of the year most decidedly for the worse.)
For a long time I resisted the word "torture" when discussing the "enhanced interrogation techniques" used against high-value captives in the war on terror. I don't think I can do that anymore. The report put out by Diane Feinstein and her fellow Democrats may be partisan, one-sided, tendentious and "full of crap," as Dick Cheney put it the other night on "Special Report with Bret Baier." But even the selective use and misuse of facts doesn't change their status as facts. What some of these detainees went through pretty obviously amounted to torture. You can call it "psychological torture" or something to that effect, but such qualifiers don't get you all that far.
Nine males were accused of being part of a heinous rape. The alleged injustice fomented a mob mentality. An enraged community wanted to skip any talk of a serious investigation, never mind a trial, and go straight to the punishment. I'm not talking about the now-discredited allegations against fraternity members at the University of Virginia, but of the legendary case of the Scottsboro Boys, nine African-American teenagers falsely accused of rape in Alabama in 1931. Despite testimony from one of the women that she had made up the whole thing, the Scottsboro Boys were convicted in trial after trial. All served time either in jail or prison.
At a time when Ferguson, Missouri, has been under siege, the president unilaterally brought millions of illegal immigrants "out of the shadows," the so-called Islamic State beheaded another American, an architect of Obamacare admitted the law was conceived and birthed in deception, and the secretary of defense was unceremoniously dumped, it's no wonder that a speech by Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. -- the Tuesday before Thanksgiving -- didn't get the coverage it deserved. But for political junkies, Schumer's speech at the National Press Club is a marvel to behold. It is at once one of the most impressive acts of political truth-telling from a major politician in our lifetimes and a sophomoric explication of political philosophy. Let's start there. "Democrats must embrace government. It's what we believe in; it's what unites our party," Schumer explained. "If we run away from government, downplay it, or act as if we are embarrassed by its role, people won't vote for our pale version of the Republican view."
Reasonable people can disagree on whether racism was involved in the tragic death of Eric Garner. My own suspicion is that this misfortune could have transpired just as easily with a white man resisting arrest and/or a black cop choking him. And even though lots of people don't want to hear it, reasonable people can disagree on whether illegally excessive force was to blame. Personally, watching the ubiquitous video of Garner's arrest, it looks like excessive force to me. But the simple fact is that a Staten Island grand jury saw evidence that led it to conclude otherwise. People should at least entertain the possibility that it might have gotten the ruling right.
Rolling Stone has published an incredible story about a rape at the University of Virginia, sending shock waves around the country. But when I say the story is incredible, I mean that in the literal, largely abandoned sense of the word. It is not credible -- I don't believe it. I'm not saying that the author of the story, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, deliberately fabricated facts. Nor do I believe that all of her reporting was flawed. There may be an outrageously callous attitude toward sexual assaults at UVA. Rape, particularly date rape, may be a major problem there. I've talked to enough people with connections to the campus to think that part is credible enough.
