Columnist.
They say all is fair in love and war (I'm skeptical), but that doesn't mean war and love have much in common. When it comes to love, both parties need to be in on it. In war, all it takes is one to tango. Sure, if the non-belligerent party doesn't want to fight, it can try to talk, or cut a deal, or even surrender. But it's up to the guys willing to kill to decide how things will proceed. This is particularly relevant when two parties are at war and one side wants to stop. As legendary Marine Gen. James Mattis has said, "No war is over until the enemy says it's over. We may think it over, we may declare it over, but in fact, the enemy gets a vote."
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." That's the full text of the First Amendment. But (with apologies to the old Far Side comic), this is what many in the press, academia and government would hear if you read it aloud: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, blah blah blah, or abridging the freedom of the press, blah blah blah blah." Don't get me wrong: The revelation that the Obama Justice Department has gone to unprecedented lengths to hamper or punish journalists is real news. DOJ trawlers dropped a gill net over the Associated Press in the hope of landing a single fish.
Although there's still a great deal to be learned about the scandals and controversies swirling around the White House like so many ominous dorsal fins in the surf, the nature of President Obama's bind is becoming clear. The best defenses of his administration require undermining the rationale for his presidency. "We're portrayed by Republicans as either being lying or idiots. It's actually closer to us being idiots." So far, this is the administration's best defense. It was offered to CBS News' Sharyl Attkisson by an anonymous aide involved in the White House's disastrous response to the attacks in Benghazi, Libya.
Of course the president deserves some of the blame. Yes, it's extremely unlikely he ordered the IRS to discriminate against tea party, pro-life or Jewish groups opposed to his agenda (though why anyone should take his word for it is beyond me). And his outrage now -- however convenient -- is appreciated. But when people he views as his "enemies" complained about a politicized IRS, what did he do? Nothing. Imagine for a moment if black civil rights organizations, gay groups or teachers unions loudly complained to members of Congress and the press that the IRS was discriminating against them. How long would it take for the White House to investigate? Answer honestly: Minutes? Hours? OK, maybe days if there was an attack on one of our embassies that the administration was busy ignoring.
President Obama was asked about the metastasizing Benghazi scandal in a joint news conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron on Monday. Referring to the Americans who died in Benghazi, the president said, "We dishonor them when we turn things like this into a political circus." He added that "the whole issue of talking points, throughout this process, frankly, has been a sideshow. ... There's no 'there' there." He's half right. The talking points drafted by the State Department, the CIA and the White House and given to congressional Republicans and, most famously, to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice are not the center of this story.
"Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night and decided they'd go kill some Americans? What difference -- at this point, what difference does it make?" That was how then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton famously brushed off the question of when she knew that the attacks on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11 that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were, in fact, a terrorist assault and not a "protest" of an anti-Islam video that got out of hand. Clinton's fans, in and out of the press, loved her defiant response, and they should be ashamed of themselves for it.
At an investment conference last week, Harvard historian Niall Ferguson created a huge mess for himself. He glibly speculated that maybe because economist John Maynard Keynes was a childless, "effete" homosexual, he embraced a doctrine that favored immediate economic gratification. Keynes' bon mot "in the long run, we are all dead" takes on new meaning when you realize he didn't have kids to worry about. Following the usual script, but at a much faster clip, an uproar ensued on Twitter and in various blogs. Ferguson quickly offered an apology that rivaled John Cleese's in "A Fish Called Wanda" in its abjectness. It was all over before the mob could get their pots of oil to full boil.
Is the American body politic suffering from an autoimmune disease? The "hygiene hypothesis" is the scientific theory that the rise in asthma and other autoimmune maladies stems from the fact that babies are born into environments that are too clean. Our immune systems need to be properly educated by being exposed early to germs, dirt, whatever. When you consider that for most of human evolutionary history, we were born under shady trees or, if we were lucky, in caves or huts, you can understand how unnatural Lysol-soaked hospitals and microbially baby-proofed homes are. The point is that growing up in a sanitary environment might cause our immune systems to freak out about things that under normal circumstances we'd just shrug off.
In the new sci-fi movie "Oblivion," Earth's most precious resource is Tom Cruise. But running a close second (spoiler alert) is water. Aliens want it. All of it. This is old hat, science fiction-wise. In "The War of the Worlds," H.G. Wells had Martians coming to Earth to quench their thirst. The extraterrestrial lizards (cleverly disguised as human catalog models) in the 1980s TV series "V" came here to steal our water too -- though they wanted it in part to wash down the meal they intended to make of us. In the more recent "Battle: Los Angeles," pillaging Earth's oceans was the only motivation we're given for why aliens were laying waste to humanity.
"If history were to repeat itself," warned President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his 1944 State of the Union address, "and we were to return to the so-called normalcy of the 1920s, then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of fascism here at home." The "normalcy" of the 1920s that Roosevelt referred to was a time of peace and prosperity. The decade began with Republican President Warren Harding commuting the sentences of political prisoners jailed by the Wilson administration, including the socialist leader Eugene Debs. "Normalcy" meant the end to the Palmer raids aimed at rooting out dissidents, the end of economic rationing, the cessation of domestic surveillance and the state propaganda of the World War I years.
"You know, I actually believe my own bull----." That's what President Obama once told a reporter. If the man ever uttered a statement that spoke more to his approach to politics, I haven't heard it. Whether it stems from a grandiose overconfidence in his own powers of persuasion, or the lessons he took from his years as a community organizer, or his own messianic conviction that he is on the right side of everything, including history itself, the president has operated under the theory that he can move the American people to his causes. And he can't. He just can't.
If abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell is found guilty of homicide, he will be unique among murderers-for-hire: He set his fees based on weight. "The bigger the baby, the more he charged," a grand jury explained. It recommended he be charged with eight counts of murder -- one patient, seven babies. Despite what amounted to a blackout at many media outlets until last week, you've probably now heard at least some of the details. According to the grand jury report, Gosnell's Philadelphia "clinic" was a filthy abattoir. It stunk of urine. Flea-ridden cats defecated freely, including in procedure rooms. Fetuses -- or, rather, parts of fetuses -- were all over the place, in jars, on shelves. The remains of 45 babies were found by authorities. Gosnell collected baby feet in jars.
Are Brad Paisley and Rand Paul the bravest men in America? Er, no. At least not by my lights. But maybe the country singer and the first-term senator are contenders for that title according to the attorney general of the United States, Eric Holder. In 2009, Holder famously declared in a speech that America is a "nation of cowards" because it refuses to talk about race "enough." What constitutes enough race talk in our private time seems like a hard thing to quantify, and I'm not sure Holder has any idea how to do it either. Holder was hardly the first, nor will he be the last, liberal to call for a national conversation on race. It is one of the mossiest locutions in modern America. I sincerely doubt an hour goes by where the phrase or something similar -- "frank dialogue," "much-needed discourse," etc. -- isn't uttered or written by some editorialist, college professor or television host.
In 1975, when asked to explain why Margaret Thatcher was poised to take over the Tory Party, the irascible British satirist Malcolm Muggeridge replied that it was all due to television -- and the fact that the telegenic Thatcher had a "certain imbecile charm." That was one of the nicer things said about an "imbecile" who earned a degree in chemistry from Oxford and became a lawyer while studying at home. (She sent her bar application to the maternity ward while recovering from delivering twins.) One lesson here is that being underestimated is a great gift in politics. Ronald Reagan was dubbed an "amiable dunce" before he was known as the "Teflon president," and Thatcher had imbecile charm before she was dubbed -- by the Soviets -- the "Iron Lady."
In what may be the greatest victory to date for the sophisticatedly asinine organization "No Labels," the Associated Press has embraced a new policy against "labeling people." For instance, its widely used and influential style guide is being purged of such terms as "schizophrenic" in favor of "diagnosed with schizophrenia." Most of the chatter about the AP's move has been over its decision to drop the term "illegal immigrant." AP Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll explained that the change on "illegal immigrant" was based on the no-labeling policy. "We concluded that to be consistent, we needed to change our guidance," Carroll said. This was the AP's first mistake. Consistency is an impossible standard to apply to the English language. I myself wish people would write about a "feckful foreign policy," or an "ept remark," or "ert" gasses.
The government in Britain recently did something interesting. It asked everyone receiving an "incapacity benefit" -- a disability program slowly being phased out under new reforms -- to submit to a medical test to confirm they were too disabled to work. A third of recipients (878,000 people) didn't even bother and dropped out of the program rather than be examined. Of those tested, more than half (55 percent) were found fit for work, and a quarter were found fit for some work. But that's Britain, where there's a long tradition of gaming the dole. Americans would never think of taking advantage of the taxpayers or misleading the government. Well, except for the couple dozen people who have pleaded guilty to scamming the Long Island Rail Road's federal disability system in a $1 billion fraud scheme. A billion bucks would pay for a lot of White House tours.
Is the Iraq war to blame for the mess we are in? Now, I should qualify that question by explaining "mess" and "we." By "mess," I mean the dawn of Barack Obama's second term, the predictably catastrophic rollout of Obamacare, the exploding debt and deficit, the stimulus boondoggles, etc. By "we," I mean conservatives (particularly those, like me, who supported the war), but also anyone else who doesn't think Obama has done a bang-up job. There seems to be a growing consensus that the answer to that question is "yes." In a recent column, the Washington Examiner's Philip Klein writes, "It's hard to see how Obamacare would have become law if Bush had never invaded Iraq." New York Times columnist Ross Douthat says the war is "responsible for liberalism's current political and cultural ascendance." In The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan laments that the war "muddied up the meaning of conservatism and bloodied up its reputation." She even goes so far as to assert that the war "ended the Republican political ascendance that had begun in 1980."
Almost exactly 20 years ago, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead wrote a controversial essay for The Atlantic titled "Dan Quayle Was Right." In case you forgot (or never knew), let me fill you in on what Quayle was right about. There once was a popular sitcom called "Murphy Brown." The title character, played by Candice Bergen, was a news anchor. The show had its moments, but it was also insufferably pleased with itself and its liberalism. At least until the arrival of the Aaron Sorkin oeuvre ("The West Wing," "The Newsroom"), it set the standard for such things.
Just because things can be put on the same list doesn't mean they are necessarily similar. My attic contains within it thousands of comic books, an inflatable bed, some jigsaw puzzles, some family pictures and a "Frampton Comes Alive!" album. These things are, roughly speaking, in the same location, but they're hardly of equal value, importance or function. I bring this up for the simple reason that we're hearing a lot about how the GOP must deal with "abortion and gay marriage" as if they are almost the same issue. Well, in my house, I hear about my dog and my mortgage a lot. They're both important -- and complicated in their own ways -- but they aren't all that similar.
"At CPAC, the Future Looks Libertarian," read a dispatch on Time magazine's website. "CPAC: Rand Paul's Big Moment," proclaimed The Week magazine. Meanwhile, the New York Times headlined its story about the annual conservative political action conference "GOP divisions fester at conservative retreat." George Will, a man who actually knows a thing or two about conservatism, responded to the NYT's use of the word "fester" on ABC News' "This Week." "Festering: an infected wound, it's awful. I guarantee you, if there were a liberal conclave comparable to this, and there were vigorous debates going on there, the New York Times' headline would be 'Healthy diversity flourishes at the liberal conclave.'"
