Columnist.
On Tuesday, the day after it was announced that Officer Darren Wilson would not be charged in the slaying of Michael Brown, the president for a second time called for calm. His statement was measured, careful and responsible. He condemned violence and looting while acknowledging the legitimate concerns animating the protestors. He wasn't all that moving or eloquent, but this might have been one of those times when swinging for the rhetorical fences wasn't what the moment needed. One theme he hit repeatedly, and correctly, was that the passions of many protestors are rooted in something very real. The "frustrations that we've seen are not just about a particular incident," Obama said. "They have deep roots in many communities of color who have a sense that our laws are not always being enforced uniformly or fairly."
Maybe President Obama is just trolling? For those who don't know, in Internet parlance, trolling is an effort to elicit outrage from a specific group or the public generally. As the always useful -- but not always G-rated, or spell-checked -- Urban Dictionary explains, "Trolling requires deceiving [sic]; any trolling that doesn't involve decieving [sic] someone isn't trolling at all; it's just stupid." (Pro tip: When spelling "deceiving," remember it's "i before e except after c.") The definition continues: "As such, your victim must not know that you are trolling; if he does, you are an unsuccesful [sic] troll."
I understand we've turned the page to the next controversy -- Obama's unconstitutional immigration pander -- but I'd like to dwell a little longer on the previous travesty. Obama administration health-care consultant Jonathan Gruber was discovered to have boasted that Obamacare was designed to exploit the "stupidity" of American voters and elude honest accounting by hiding both its cost and the taxes necessary to pay for it. When asked about this in Brisbane, Australia, the president rolled his eyes at the controversy.
The European Space Agency's Rosetta project accomplished one of the most impressive scientific feats in our lifetime. They essentially moved a clunky machine from one speeding bullet onto another, by remote control, from 310 million miles away. It's hoped this achievement will help usher in a new era of space exploration by teaching us how to exploit the raw materials swirling around the solar system. Also, it was really cool. But it wasn't cool enough for some feminists who found the shirt worn by Matt Taylor, Rosetta project scientist, to be a bigger deal. Taylor's shirt, designed by a female friend, depicts a bunch of attractive, scantily clad women drawn from comic books holding guns. (Slate's Amanda Marcotte oddly described their stances as "pornographic poses.")
In the old Soviet Union, Kremlinologists would read the state party newspaper Pravda not so much for the news it contained, but to glean what the commissars wanted readers to believe the commissars were thinking. The closest we have to that in America is the New York Times. Obviously, it's not a state organ and there are many fine journalists there, but it does play a similar role for the Democratic Party, often reporting less on what Democrats actually think and more on what Democrats want readers to believe is the current state of Democratic thinking. Two days after the midterm Democratic Gotterdammerung, Team Clinton let it be known that it thinks the election was good news for it. "Midterms, for Clinton Team, Aren't All Gloom," proclaimed the understated headline in the Times.
We know Barack Obama is good at least one thing -- getting Barack Obama elected president of the United States. How good he is at being president of the United States is a subject of considerable debate. A less debatable proposition: He is just plain awful at running a political party. People often forget that among the many formal roles the president has -- commander in chief, first diplomat, etc. -- he is also the leader of his own party. And in that role, he stinks.
"To everyone who voted," President Obama said in his press conference on Wednesday, "I hear you. To the two-thirds of voters who chose not to participate yesterday, I hear you, too." Let me begin with a bit of a rant. In a sense, this is the last piece of the puzzle to click into place for the president's Nixonian transformation. Spy on reporters? Check. Bomb a country (or two) without authorization from Congress? Check. Issue dubious claims of executive privilege to conceal embarrassments or prevent scandals? Check. Withdraw from -- and lose -- an unpopular war he didn't start? Check. Corrupt IRS? Check. Imperial presidency? Check.
It used to be that the first Tuesday in November was Election Day, but now it is the last day of Election Month. Election Month is bad, but it's a symptom of a deeper problem that makes the underlying problem worse. As George Orwell said, "A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, but then fail all the more completely because he drinks." The deeper problem is that we simultaneously expect too much and too little of casting a ballot. See, for instance, actress Lena Dunham's "5 Reasons Why I Vote (and You Should Too)" on Planned Parenthood's website. Reason No. 1: "When you vote, you feel so, so good."
"You're the butcher, or you're the cattle." That appears to be the theme of the fifth season of AMC's "The Walking Dead, the most successful TV series about zombies since C-SPAN covered the Reform Party convention in 2000. It's a grim yet compelling drama that at times prides itself less in creative writing than in inventive ways to dispatch the ambulatory deceased. But so far, this is probably the best season since the first. It is also the darkest by far, and for the same reason: It has now dawned on the show's heroes (and writers) that while zombies are a constant danger, humans are the real enemy.
What day is it?" "It's today," squeaked Piglet. "My favorite day," said Pooh. As a proud member of the "don't just do something, sit there" school of politics, I don't fret much about partisanship and gridlock. Partisanship and gridlock aren't bugs of our constitutional system, they're features. And while everyone likes to see their preferred policies sail through Congress, on the whole I think we've been well served by those features for two centuries.
There is an enormous amount of whining these days about our ideological debates. This gets the problem wrong. Ideological debates are fought over ideas, but politics is more often about competing stories, or, as the eggheads call them, "narratives." Much has been written about the power of ideas. "The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood," John Maynard Keynes famously wrote. "Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist."
Never let it be said that Mother Nature doesn't appreciate irony. A new study led by researchers at Occidental College and the University of California at Santa Barbara has found that the oil platforms dotting the California coast are fantastic for sea life. In a 15-year study, researchers found that the ecosystems that build up around artificial rigs host 1,000 percent more fish and other sea life than natural habitats such as reefs and estuaries. The California rigs outstripped even famously rich ecosystems such as the coral reefs of French Polynesia. Now, as a big fan of artificial reefs, I think this is exciting news. There are many who oppose the idea of improving on God's -- or, if you prefer, Gaia's -- design. This strikes me as crazy, given the fact that virtually all of the food we eat and the clothes we wear are the products of human innovation. When humans ran out of gazelles or bison to hunt, they had the great idea of catching a few and raising a renewable supply. When picking wild seeds and berries no longer fed the tribe, it dawned on humans to plant their own.
Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes is running for U.S. Senate in the great state of Kentucky. She is a woman of conviction, of substance, of principle. "I'm not an empty dress," she insists, "I'm not a rubber stamp, and I am not a cheerleader! I am a Clinton Democrat." I'm old enough to remember when "Clinton Democrat" had a fairly specific meaning. Back when Bill Clinton first ran for president, he did so as "new kind of Democrat." He decried the "brain-dead policies of both parties." He was so determined to dispel the image of the Democrats as being soft on crime, he took time off from the campaign trail to approve the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a man so mentally disabled that when he ate his last meal, he left some of his pecan pie on his plate and told guards he was saving it "for later."
While disposing of a body in a mass grave, one man in a hazmat suit turns to another and asks, "When did we run out of body bags?" "Two days ago." Fortunately, the scene is only from the movie "Contagion," though it's probably close enough to what is going on in parts of West Africa right now. The 2011 hit about a runaway virus that kills millions has probably come to mind to more than a few people of late as we watch governments struggle to contain Ebola and reassure the public.
In news that must have left my friends at the New York Post -- never mind the gang at "The Daily Show" -- with a renewed confidence that ours is a just and beneficent God, the White House has been caught covering up a scandal involving a Cartagena hooker. The phrase "Cartagena hooker" alone is a mellifluous gift to ink-stained wretches everywhere, but the revelation that the White House reassigned the alleged client of the aforementioned Andean call girl to the State Department's office of "Global Women's Issues" is the sort of flourish Tom Wolfe or Chris Buckley wouldn't dare attempt as satire.
I have a slightly different take on California's recent decision to regulate college sex. Don't get me wrong: I think it's beyond idiotic, unworkable, even borderline Orwellian. We'll get to all that. But I also think it's incredibly useful. You see, for years I've been railing and ranting about the ridiculous myth that liberalism is socially libertarian; that liberals are "live and let live" types simply defending themselves against judgmental conservatives, the real aggressors in the culture war. That thinking runs counter to most everything liberals justifiably take pride in as liberals. You can't be "agents for change," "forces for progress," or whatever the current phrase, and simultaneously deny that you're not the aggressors in the culture war. For instance, just in the last decade, liberals have redefined a millenniums-old understanding of marriage while talking as if it were conservatives who wanted to "impose" their values on the nation.
Barack Obama had a choice between liberalism and the Democratic Party. He chose the latter and it cost him dearly. Liberalism, as an ideology, insists that government can do good and great things for the people and the world, if the people running the government are smart liberals. The Democratic Party says the exact same thing. But liberalism is an ideal, while the Democratic Party is that ideal's representative here in the real world, and in the real world political parties disappoint. Just to be clear -- and to avoid a lot of "Oh, yeah? What about Republicans?!" responses -- this is true of the GOP, too. Conservative ideology holds that government should only do those things that only government can and should do, and that list is very short. For instance, government shouldn't be in the business of playing favorites in the economy. It shouldn't "pick winners and losers." Rather, it should be a fair umpire and let competition work its magic. Alas, Republican politicians routinely fall short of this ideal, preferring to be pro-business rather than pro-market. That, in so many words, is why the Export-Import Bank is immortal.
It's funny how President Obama is always talking about "I" and "me" whenever it makes him look good, but suddenly it's "they" and "we" when mistakes are made. For instance, for years Obama boasted about how he ended the Iraq war and how he withdrew American troops. "You know I say what I mean and I mean what I say," he boasted on the campaign trail in 2012. "I said I'd end the war in Iraq. I ended it." Then, over the summer, as one Iraqi city after another fell to Islamic State militants, and as critics insisted that Obama's decision to pull all of our troops out of Iraq was partly to blame, he suddenly changed his tune, mocking the critics. "What I just find interesting is the degree to which this issue keeps on coming up, as if this was my decision [to withdraw U.S. troops]."
Fox News host Bill O'Reilly wants a mercenary army to supply the ground forces in the latest installment of the war on terror. And it seems the smart set can't stop laughing. The Washington Post's media blogger, Erik Wemple, called it an "insane" idea and suggested that allowing O'Reilly to peddle the idea on "CBS This Morning" was an "insane departure from that show's standard." The whole spectacle, Wemple opined, proved that O'Reilly will "never be much of a thought leader in policy circles." It's true that on the left and the right, O'Reilly's idea is being scorned fairly mercilessly. That's understandable on the left. Arguably the most hated host at the most hated news network (in large part because both are so successful), O'Reilly could come out in support of the law of gravity and the usual suspects would run the headline, "Fox Host Supports Law Requiring Babies and Puppies to Fall from Great Height When Dropped."
Last Friday, the White House announced its "It's On Us" initiative aimed at combating sexual assaults on college campuses. I'm all in favor of combating sexual assault, but the first priority in combating a problem is understanding it. That's not the White House's first priority. Roughly six weeks before Election Day, its chief concern is to translate an exciting social media campaign into a get-out-the-vote operation. Accurate statistics are of limited use in that regard because rape and sexual assault have been declining for decades. So the Obama administration and its allied activist groups trot out the claim that there is a rape epidemic victimizing 1 in 5 women on college campuses. This conveniently horrifying number is a classic example of being too terrible to check. If it were true, it would mean that rape would be more prevalent on elite campuses than in many of the most impoverished and crime-ridden communities.
