Columnist.
All you need to do is look at the headlines out of Central America to see why tens of thousands of children are ending up at our border. "In Columbia (sic), Rising Violence Breeds New Doubts" (N.Y. Times); "Guatemala Seen Slipping Into a Haven For Drugs" (LA Times); "Democracy Jeopardized as New Wave of Violence Sweeps Guatemala" (AP); "The Volcano That is Guatemala" (St. Louis Post-Dispatch); "A New Dark Age for Latin America?" (Miami Herald); "Murder Soars in El Salvador" (Washington Post); "Social Breakdown Turns Deadly in Guatemala" (Washington Post); "Roadside Rampage: Salvadoran Murders in Guatemala Raise Stake of Central American Drug-Addled Violence" (States News Service); "Drug Cartels Take Toll on Guatemala's Politics" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution).
In the film "Obvious Child," Jenny Slate plays Donna Stern, a stand-up comedian who specializes in making jokes about her private parts, with the occasional foray into fart humor. She is about to go onstage. Her friend offers her some encouragement: "You are going to kill it out there!" Donna replies: "I actually have an appointment to do that tomorrow." Donna's talking about her abortion appointment. Get it? It's funny because it's true. Or if you're like me, you think it's not funny because it's true.
You wouldn't think, five years into the Obama presidency, that so many liberal Americans wouldn't like America. A new Pew survey found that 44 percent of Americans don't often feel pride in being an American, and only 28 percent said that America is the greatest country in the world. Respondents who "often feel proud to be American" were overwhelmingly conservative (from 72 percent to 81 percent depending on the kind of conservative). A majority (60 percent) of "solid liberals" said they don't often feel proud to be an American. The polling data only proves what has been obvious for a while.
Abortion-rights protesters gathered outside the Supreme Court building on Monday holding signs that read "Birth Control: Not My Boss's Business." Much to their chagrin, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito agreed in his ruling in the Hobby Lobby case. Of course, that's not how supporters of the government's contraception mandate see it. They actually believe that birth control is their boss' business, and they want the federal government to force employers to agree. More on that later, but it's first worth noting how we got here.
Paging Elizabeth Warren: This is your moment. In 2007, Democrats were delirious with rage about the Iraq war. Hillary Clinton, the "inevitable" presidential front-runner, had voted for the war and refused to apologize for it. Other leading candidates, including Joe Biden, John Edwards and Chris Dodd, voted for it too. This left a huge opening for a credible antiwar candidate. Barack Obama, inexperienced and underqualified, nonetheless jumped into the vacuum. The rest, as they say, is history. Today, the issue that obsesses the base of the Democratic Party is income inequality. I think that's foolish. The underlying causes of inequality -- miserable economic growth, stagnating wages, poverty, etc. -- are vastly more worthy challenges. Though, in fairness, many people actually have those problems in mind when they talk about inequality.
It's a fact of human nature that it's easier to talk about who's to blame for a problem than it is to figure out what to do about the problem. Case in point: There's a near-riot in liberal circles over the very idea that supporters of the Iraq War should even be allowed to criticize the president's handling of the current Middle East crisis, never mind offer advice on how to proceed. The Atlantic's James Fallows says Dick Cheney and company "have earned the right not to be listened to." Slate magazine's Jamelle Bouie says that prominent public intellectuals and journalists who supported the Iraq war should "be barred from public comment." Charles Pierce at Esquire is less subtle: "Shut up, all of you. Go away."
For understandable reasons, the IRS scandal has largely focused on the political question of whether the White House deliberately targeted opponents. To date there's no evidence that it did. That's good for the president, but it may not be good for the country, because if the administration didn't target opponents, that would mean the IRS has become corrupt all on its own. In 1939, Bruno Rizzi, a largely forgotten communist intellectual, wrote a hugely controversial book, "The Bureaucratization of the World." Rizzi argued that the Soviet Union wasn't communist. Rather, it represented a new kind of system, what Rizzi called "bureaucratic collectivism." What the Soviets had done was get rid of the capitalist and aristocratic ruling classes and replace them with a new, equally self-interested ruling class: bureaucrats.
"Congressional investigators are fuming over revelations that the Internal Revenue Service has lost a trove of emails to and from a central figure in the agency's tea party controversy." That's the opening sentence of the Associated Press story on the IRS's claim that it lost an unknown number of emails over two years relating to the agency's alleged targeting of political groups hostile to the president. But note how the AP casts the story: The investigators -- Republican lawmakers -- are outraged.
The Arab Spring is over. Welcome to the Jihadi Spring. Across a huge swath of what, up until recently, had been known as Iraq and Syria, a transnational movement of Sunni Islamic extremists has taken control. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has conquered -- without much effort -- Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, along with most of the province of Nineveh. It's also taken Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown. Along the way it has ransacked banks (to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars), pillaged weapon stockpiles (including the stuff we left behind for the Iraqi army), and recruited ever more fighters from Iraq, Syria and abroad. ISIS started out as an al-Qaeda franchise, but in 2011 it broke off to become an independent dealer of Islamist mayhem. If anything, it is more extreme than al-Qaeda -- though that fine distinction probably means little to the Shiites and Christians it slaughters.
Hillary Clinton's State Department memoir, "Hard Choices," has just come out, and who among us can contain their excitement? Not Mike Allen, author of the incestuously insider Politico column "Playbook." In Monday's installment, he began, "Welcome to Hillary Week!" But the exclamation point was ironic, for Allen immediately dropped what he calls a "truth bomb": "'Hard Choices' is a newsless snore, written so carefully not to offend that it will fuel the notion that politics infuses every part of her life. In this book, like in 'The Lego Movie' theme song, everyone is awesome!"
There he goes again. At a press conference in Brussels Thursday, President Obama was asked if he was surprised by the controversy over his decision to trade Bowe Bergdahl for five high-ranking Taliban leaders. His response was vintage Obama: "I'm never surprised by controversies that are whipped up in Washington." Thus establishing from the start that he considers the controversy to be a kind of partisan farce, he proceeded to rebut criticisms virtually no one has made. This is Obama's favorite rhetorical trick; he builds and then tears apart a straw man while insisting that the American people are on his side.
Good for Rick Perry. After a fairly disastrous first go at the White House, he's gearing up for a second try. Over the weekend, he told NBC News' Kasie Hunt: "I was not prepared properly." In 2012, he told CNN that the "idea you can just stroll in there and be in the mix and be successful, I think is a bit of a stretch. But, anyway, you live and learn." That's a bit of an understatement. The last time around, Perry parachuted into the Republican primary right after the Iowa straw poll, effectively landing on the winner: Rep. Michele Bachmann. She may have been the shortest-lived front-runner ever.
Can we please stop holding the country hostage to crazy people? Every year a tiny number of mentally ill people go on horrific killing sprees. It just happened in California. I won't name the person because I think the media attention lavished on these horror shows encourages some of these young men -- and they are almost all young men -- to seek fame or validation through bloodshed. In an entirely human response, we get spun up into a frenzy of finger-pointing. In the aftermath of the Gabby Giffords shooting, many of the country's leading journalists and politicians suggested the former congresswoman was shot because of the "violent" political rhetoric of Sarah Palin, Rep. Michele Bachmann and other Tea Party-affiliated politicians. It was beyond stupid and slanderous. It was also utterly devoid of evidence. (The culprit was a severe paranoid schizophrenic who abused drugs.)
Vladimir Putin, with the aid of his vast propaganda machinery, has convinced many Russians that the interim government in Ukraine is expressly Nazi and fascist. And while there were some neo-Nazi goons among the protesters who brought down the corrupt government of Victor Yanukovich, and there are definitely ultranationalists among the coalition resisting Moscow, it's simply a transparent lie that the current government is fascist. That hasn't stopped some left-wing writers and crackpots in the West from buying the Russian claim that the United States is in cahoots with a "fascist junta" in Ukraine.
Hillary Clinton is in a pickle. She's a shoe-in for her party's presidential nomination because of Barack Obama's failures. But those failures might keep her from getting the job. Her husband's "law of politics" is that elections are always about the future, but she's stuck in the past. In 2008, Obama pandered to liberal hopes while Clinton appealed to their good sense. Obama promised miracles and magic. Clinton promised more homework. "Cynicism" was Obama's real opponent, he explained. And he used Clinton as a stand-in for it. She played her part, pointing out that the Civil Rights Act got through Congress because of LBJ's hard work, not Martin Luther King's speeches. She insisted that politics was toil, not performance art.
Trigger warning: I am going to make fun of "trigger warnings." Of course, if you're the sort of person who takes trigger warnings very seriously, you probably don't read this column too often. So maybe my mockery will miss its target, sort of like making fun of the Amish on the Internet -- it's not like they'll find out. In fairness, the Amish are actually very impressive people. Even though some Amish communities are more tolerant of technology than the stereotypes suggest, their Anabaptist puritanical streak leaves me cold. On the whole, I like modernity. I may not love every new fad of the last few centuries, but mark me down as a fan of refrigeration, Netflix, modern dentistry, universal suffrage, the internal combustion engine and all that stuff.
Here's a question. If -- and this is a big if -- the United States could dispatch a swarm of heretofore secret super-drones to find and kill every member of the Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram, would you be in favor of doing it? I'll even modify it for those of you who are squeamish about killing terrorists who slaughter men, women and children with abandon. What if the drones could simply paralyze the terrorists long enough for the U.S., or the Nigerians or some duly authorized force of U.N.-sanctioned "good guys," to apprehend them? Would you favor it then? I phrase the hypothetical question this way because it avoids some of the usual objections to the U.S. "imposing" its values militarily. Chiefly, it avoids the concern about risking American lives for causes that many believe aren't in our vital national interest. It also avoids concern about civilian casualties.
What is happening to the Nigerian girls kidnapped by Boko Haram is tragic. The sinking of the Titanic, the fall of Saigon, the British defeat at Gallipoli, the Dred Scott decision -- tragedies all. You can go on all day and all night listing terrible calamities and even lesser injustices, misfortunes and other evidence that life isn't fair. But you will probably collapse from exhaustion before you reach Jeb Bush's difficulty becoming the third President Bush. The New Yorker cartoons write themselves. Bush, in all his blue-blazered glory, sitting next to, well, just about anyone at a bar (or standing in front of the Pearly Gates, or lying on a psychiatrist's couch, or visiting the complaints department) lamenting that he never got his turn. Or maybe he'd wear a shirt saying, "My Dad and My Brother Lived at the White House and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt."
The notion that something can simultaneously be wrong and constitutional really seems to bother a lot of people. Consider the Supreme Court's recent decision on public prayer. In Greece v. Galloway the court ruled, 5-4, that the little town of Greece, New York, could have predominantly Christian clergy deliver prayers at the beginning of city council meetings. As a constitutional matter, the majority's decision seems like a no-brainer to me. The authors of the Constitution permitted -- and required! -- prayer at similar civic gatherings when they were writing the document and for years afterward, when many served as congressmen, senators, judges and presidents.
In 1920, a bond salesman walked into Joseph Yenowsky's Waterbury, Conn., clothing store. Yenowsky was a tough sell. During their lengthy conversation, Yenowsky told the salesman he thought Vladimir Lenin, the Russian Bolshevik leader, was "the brainiest man" in the world. The bond salesmen turned Yenowsky in to the police for sedition. Yenowsky got six months in jail under a Connecticut statute. This was hardly an isolated incident during the so-called "Red Scare" of the World War I era. In Syracuse, three activists were arrested for circulating fliers protesting the conditions of America's political prisoners. The subversive flier quoted the First Amendment. They got 18 months in prison. In Washington, D.C., a man refused to stand for the The Star-Spangled Banner. A furious sailor shot the "disloyal" man three times in the back. When the man fell, the Washington Post reported, "the crowd burst into cheering and handclapping." An Indiana jury deliberated for two minutes before it acquitted a man of murdering an immigrant who'd said "To hell with the United States."
