Columnist.
It was a massive flatbed truck, flanked by smaller vehicles brandishing "oversized load" banners, carrying a huge white thing. I think the first one I saw was in Ohio. But I know that by the time I passed Grand Island, Neb., I'd lost count. What was it? At first, it looked like it could be a replacement for the Swords of Qadisiyah -- that giant crossed blades sculpture in central Baghdad.
Before President Obama headed off to his rented 28-acre retreat in Martha's Vineyard, he spent a few days campaigning around the Midwest in his new million-dollar, Canadian-made campaign bus, paid for at government expense. He even unveiled what many believe will be his new re-election theme: "Country first." According to his new stump speech, if you oppose his agenda, then you don't care about America as much as he does.
On Saturday, Texas Gov. Rick Perry got into the race for the GOP presidential nomination, and within 24 hours, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty got out. Perry didn't exactly chase Pawlenty out of the race; the Iowa straw poll (in which T-Paw finished a distant third) did that. But the two developments are closely related. They're linked by the fact that Barack Obama is very beatable.
Riots are fascinating things. How lawless greed, cruelty and violence suddenly set fire to the minds of men is one of the most mysterious, almost magical (though not in the positive sense) manifestations of human behavior. And because they are a manifestation of human behavior, riots are as old as human nature. They were a common affair in cities before ancient Rome was new. This should invite humility in anyone purporting to know why riots happen.
"Is this a wakeup call to Washington?" NBC's David Gregory asked Sen. John Kerry on "Meet the Press," referring to the S&P downgrade. "Well, it's a partial wakeup call. I believe this is, without question, the tea party downgrade." Shortly after pointing fingers and assigning blame, Kerry went on to lament how Republicans insist on pointing fingers and assigning blame in this national crisis.
Uncle Sam now owes more on his credit cards than he makes in a year. The national debt passed the total U.S. GDP this week. Mull that over for a bit. Now mull this over: Until the budget deal this week, the federal government borrowed 40 cents for every dollar it spent. And the budget deal didn't do very much to change that. It "cut" $2 trillion over 10 years, which means Uncle Sam will overspend slightly less. If we hold to the deal -- and who among us doubts that Congress won't keep its word? -- spending will "only" increase by $1.8 trillion over 10 years. That's because in the topsy-turvy, laugh-clown-laugh world of so-called baseline budgeting, we've been talking about trimming the rate of increase. Think of Uncle Sam walking in a wind tunnel leading to insolvency. The cuts increased the headwind he has to walk into, but they don't do anything like force him to turn around.
After Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency changed. As he put it in 1943, "Dr. New Deal" had to be replaced by "Dr. Win the War." It was a colossal policy switch, but it wasn't an extreme makeover politically. He was still the same FDR, and the public understood the need for change. And it saved his presidency. As President Obama's former economic advisor, Larry Summers, said recently, "Never forget ... that if Hitler had not come along, Franklin Roosevelt would have left office in 1941 with an unemployment rate in excess of 15 percent and an economic recovery strategy that had basically failed."
The worst thing about the 2008 primaries -- other than, you know, the result -- was the huge amount of time wasted on what amounted to a Republican "Spartacus" re-enactment. Instead of each nominee yelling, "I'm Spartacus," and, "No, I'm Spartacus," we got, "I'm Ronald Reagan!" "No, I'm the real Ronald Reagan here." The obsession with finding another Reagan was really a veiled slap at the Republican who actually occupied the White House at the time. Nobody was running to be another George W. Bush, nobody promised to give "four more years" of what they got for the last eight.
Every political movement has its rhetorical strengths and weaknesses. The right can wax poetic about liberty and freedom, the left about the nobility of the poor and downtrodden. Nowhere do these differences come across more starkly than on the subject of taxation. (Note: This is not a column about the debt-ceiling negotiations. I would have put this warning up top, but I feared that immediately seeing the phrase "debt-ceiling negotiations" would cause many readers to face-plant into their breakfast tables or computer screens.)
I know everyone is sick of hearing about the debt-limit negotiations. Lord knows I am. When I turn on the news these days, I feel like one of the passengers seated next to Robert Hays in the movie "Airplane!" By the time we get to the phrase "in the out years," I'm ready to pour a can of gasoline over my head. Still, regardless of how things turn out with the negotiations, what we are witnessing is the rollout of the Obama re-election campaign's theme: Obama is the pragmatic voice of reason holding the ideologues at bay.
A lot of conservatives are having fun at President Obama's expense after his latest gaffe. In the midst of testy debt-limit negotiations, Obama told House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, "Don't call my bluff." The first rule in bluffing is to keep it a secret that you're bluffing. So, technically speaking, that's like a con man saying, "Don't give any weight to the fact that I'm lying." And while I do think Obama is not telling the truth about a great number of things, conservatives should look closer to home if they want to criticize impolitic truth-telling.
In 1994, the Republicans took back the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. The significance of that victory is hard for some younger people to appreciate, because we now seem to go through political leaders the way Lady Gaga goes through wardrobe changes. In the old days, it was a given that the House was the Democratic Party's fiefdom, which is why the Gingrich Revolution was such a tectonic shock. By the spring of 1995, Americans were talking as if we had suddenly adopted a parliamentary system with House Speaker Newt Gingrich as the prime minister. Really. President Clinton was asked at a news conference if he were even relevant anymore. He responded: "The Constitution gives me relevance." Critics guffawed at first, because it set such a low bar, like raving about potted meat because it complies with the minimal government standards for human consumption. Didn't the president bring anything else to the table, other than the job description?
5.1, 9.3, 8.1, 8.5, 8, 7.1 and 3.9. While that might sound like a controversial series of Olympic curling scores, these numbers in fact add up to a grave problem for Barack Obama. They are the quarterly percentage gains in gross domestic product starting in 1983 through to Election Day 1984. And they aren't the only significant numbers. In 1984, real income for individuals grew by more than 6 percent and inflation plummeted. The unemployment rate in November 1984 was still 7.2 percent -- relatively high -- but it had dropped from 10.8 percent in December 1982, and it was clear the momentum was for even lower unemployment. "Staying the course" with Ronald Reagan made sense to most people, which is why he won re-election in a 49-state landslide.
"That's racist." It's a comedic catchphrase these days, popularized by an online clip from a 2005 TV show "Wonder Showzen" on MTV2. It's not as iconic as Gary Coleman's "What 'chu talkin' 'bout, Willis?" or Fonzie's "Ayyyyyy" or even Bart Simpson's "Don't have a cow, man." But what it lacks in pedigree, it makes up for in ubiquity and social relevance. Across the country, it's a staple of schoolyards, Internet discussion groups, Twitter and sitcoms.
President Obama's core message in his Wednesday press conference, his first since March, could be found in his advice to Republicans. "You go talk to your constituents and ask them, 'Are you willing to compromise your kids' safety so some corporate-jet owner can get a tax break?'" This was just one of six shots the president took at corporate-jet owners. A novice might be forgiven for thinking that the president really doesn't like corporate jets or that the Republicans cared so much about the darn things that they had proposed crossing out "arms" in the Second Amendment and replacing it with "corporate jets." Where's Charlton Heston to proclaim, "From my cold dead hands you can have my Learjet 85..."?
The backdrop for my favorite science-fiction novels, Frank Herbert's "Dune" series, is something called the Butlerian Jihad. Some 10,000 years before the main events of the story take place, humanity rebelled against "thinking machines" -- intelligent computers -- controlling people's lives. The revolution was sparked because a computer decided to kill, without the consent of any human authority, the baby of a woman named Jehanne Butler. I bring this up because I'm wondering why we can't have a Reppertian Jihad.
Former Republican New York Gov. George Pataki personifies almost everything I dislike in politicians. He's not corrupt -- as far as I know -- in the criminal sense, but he's entirely corrupt politically and intellectually. He goes along to get along, with his colleagues and donors, with liberal pieties and the editorial boards that spew them. He was a lazy governor who often worked no more than 15 hours a week, and over his 12 years in office he held at most three cabinet meetings. He "broke virtually every political promise he ever made," according the New York Post's legendary state editor Fred Dicker, and was so shameless in his lack of principles, integrity and loyalty that former Sen. Al D'Amato -- the sort of man best pictured swimming a moat at night with a knife in his teeth -- said of his protégé: "What he did broke my heart."
Suddenly and sadly, the Libyan war may be one of the most consequential adventures in recent American history. Libya's not important because it is vital to our national security. Nor is it a particularly significant country. It's important solely because the Washington establishment, led by President Obama, made it important. If you set out to take Vienna, Napoleon advised, take Vienna. Similarly, if you invest America's and NATO's prestige in an obstreperous North African backwater, you'd better recoup a worthwhile return on that investment.
"Shovel-ready was not as ... uh ... shovel-ready as we expected," Barack Obama joked the other day at a meeting of his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. Republicans jumped on Obama's comment as insensitive. "He joked about the wildly mistaken predictions he and others at the White House made a couple of years back about the job-creating potential of the stimulus," said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. "Well, I don't think the 14 million Americans who are looking for jobs right now find any of this very funny." I'm sure they don't, but the fact that the president laid an egg when he tried to be self-deprecating isn't the scandal here.
I'd barely followed "A Gay Girl In Damascus" until last week, when Daily Beast columnist Peter Beinart posted something to Twitter: "This is really important -- this woman is a hero," with a link to a story about Amina Abdallah Arraf, a Syrian-American woman and the author of the blog "A Gay Girl In Damascus." According to the story, Amina had been seized by Syrian security forces for her dissident writing. Quickly, Amina's arrest became a new Internet cause. Even the U.S. State Department joined the effort.
