Columnist.
Throughout the last third of George W. Bush's presidency, opinion leaders were obsessed with the question of mistakes. Among most members of the press and among Democratic officeholders (even, or perhaps especially, those who voted to approve the Iraq War), the appetite was strong to hold President Bush in a half nelson until he admitted that the war had been a terrible mistake. When Jeb Bush entered the presidential race, he was quickly charged with fraternal guilt in the matter.
There was a much-beloved quote circulated among leftists, often attributed to Sinclair Lewis, that "when fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." In light of recent episodes of mob action on American campuses, the quote needs updating: When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in "diversity" and demanding "safe spaces."
"My mother was a smoker," Chris Christie told a New Hampshire audience in a video that has gone viral. Though she tried everything — gum, patches, hypnosis — nothing worked. When she was diagnosed with cancer, he continued, "No one came to me and said, 'Don't treat her, (because) she got what she deserved.' No one ... said, 'Hey listen, you know your mother was dumb. She started smoking when she was 16. Then after we told her it was bad for her, she kept doing it, so we're not going to give her chemotherapy, we're not going to give her radiation, we're not going to give her any of that stuff — you know why? (Because) she's getting what she deserves.' No one said that."
Jeb Bush's campaign may be mortally wounded. Limping in the polls despite his massive war chest, he stooped (almost literally if you check the body language) to attacking Marco Rubio in an attempt to revive his fortunes. Rubio's response, suggesting that Bush had been "told" to attack him, seemed like a bull's-eye. Jeb Bush is an honorable man, a man raised to behave like a gentleman; but he was feeling desperate at Wednesday's debate, and tried to play against type.
"It's about what these women will let guys get away with." You may not expect to hear commentary like that at your garden-variety think tank panel discussion, but it got pretty lively at the American Enterprise Institute discussion on the topic "Do Healthy Families Affect the Wealth of States?"
Think of today's Democratic Party as the little village of Hamelin. A piper called Bernie Sanders toots his socialist tune, and all the little Democrats skip along behind him to ... where exactly? According to the medieval legend, the Pied Piper of Hamelin led the children away and drowned them. "Socialist" was once an epithet in American politics, but the Obama years may have effected a change.
The Justice Department has announced that it will begin releasing 6,000 "nonviolent" inmates from federal prisons starting at the end of this month. Welcome to the era of de-incarceration. At a conference named for former New York Mayor David Dinkins (who presided over the city at a time of runaway crime), Hillary Clinton decried the number of Americans behind bars and declared, "It's time to change our approach. It's time to end the era of mass incarceration."
The bride, Edda, was 20, glamorous and well connected. The groom came from a prominent family. Their wedding was Italy's social event of the year in 1930. If the occasion was marred in any way, it was through the inability of the bride's father to part gracefully with his first-born daughter. He was so distraught that when the couple drove off for their honeymoon on Capri, Dad followed them for miles in his own car until Edda finally stopped, marched back to his car, and told him he had to turn around and go home. That is our introduction to Edda Mussolini and her father, Benito, in Jay Nordlinger's gripping new book, "Children of Monsters: An Inquiry Into the Sons and Daughters of Dictators." "I have managed to bend Italy," Mussolini once said of his daughter, "but I doubt I will ever be able to bend Edda's will."
Dear Republican Members of Congress: Consider this an intervention. You guys do not understand how to hold a decent hearing. Hillary Clinton danced away from your Benghazi questions like Muhammad Ali. Your threats to hold more hearings on Planned Parenthood and Benghazi are about as frightening as President Obama's warnings to Vladimir Putin that "doubling down on Assad would be a mistake." Within hours of Obama's feeble bleat, Russian planes were dropping bombs on the Syrian resistance (not, it should be noted, on ISIS). Putin's Russia, once described by John McCain as a "gas station pretending to be a country," is now running circles around Obama — rushing to fill the power void left by American abdication in the Middle East.
"A pope that mentions Dorothy Day is a pope that rocks," tweeted Neera Tanden of the left-leaning Center for American Progress. Tanden might have wished to reel back that praise if she had known that Day, though a prominent pacifist and socialist, was also a fervent opponent of abortion, birth control, Social Security and the sexual revolution. It's fitting that Pope Francis should have invoked Dorothy Day among his pantheon of great Americans — she's a symbol of where leftists always go wrong. This pope is going wrong in the same way. The left's delusions of "social justice" seem indomitable — impervious to evidence.
The question dogs any woman who writes about politics: "Don't you want to see the first woman elected president of the United States?" The unstated premise, always obvious, is that you are some sort of traitor to your sex if your hand isn't itching to pull the lever for someone with the correct chromosomes. My answer has always been, "That depends upon what she believes." Hillary Clinton banked on the First Woman President effect from the start — an understandable gambit for someone with no substantive accomplishments and many flaws.
The Democratic Party has been weak-minded on defense for decades, but with the Iran capitulation, they've achieved a new threshold of cowardice and treachery. While it's true that an honorable handful of Democrats have resisted the president's pressure, the overwhelming majority have chosen to go over the cliff with Barack Obama, a president who never met an enemy he didn't wish to conciliate or an ally he didn't seek to betray. Democrats have long tended toward appeasement of aggressors. Throughout the Cold War, they scared themselves (and everyone else) silly conjuring specters of nuclear holocaust. Then-Sen. John Kerry was one of many prominent Democrats who endorsed the "nuclear freeze." It wasn't America's enemies that we should fear, the Democrats argued, but the weapons themselves.
Nine years ago, aboard a National Review cruise, I debated immigration policy with my colleagues and the cruisers. It was a good discussion that touched all the familiar bases. Are there really jobs Americans won't do? Are big business and big agriculture enmeshed in a corrupt bargain with liberal Democrats whereby business gets cheap labor and Democrats get new voters? I argued then, as I do today, that there are many serious immigration reforms we ought to be undertaking. We have a valuable commodity — the right to live and work in the U.S.A. (and in some cases to become a citizen) — and we should not be handing it out to just anyone. We should swiftly deport criminals even as we should be more welcoming to those who earn PhDs or bring other skills. But I also argue that illegal immigration, particularly from Mexico, is steeply declining and likely to continue to; that even most Republicans, to say nothing of the larger electorate, are moderate on immigration; and that immigrants tend to work hard.
"The passengers on that French train are surely grateful that some manliness remains indomitable."
Among a very long list of harms inflicted upon the United States by Barack Obama and his party, perhaps the worst was Caesarism. Obama relished the worship of millions in 2008. From his star turn at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, he was treated not as a political candidate, but as a savior. Progressives fell into a swoon, typified by Newsweek editor Evan Thomas' 2008 comment, "I mean in a way Obama's standing above the country, above — above the world; he's sort of God." Now, a similar kind of unreasoning adulation is greeting (improbably enough) Donald Trump. Fred Barnes reports that a focus group of Trump supporters is swept up in a kind of worship, too: "He's not just their favorite candidate. Their tie to him is almost mystical. He's a kind of political savior, someone who says what they think."
When a heavily armed man emerged from the bathroom of a European train and began what was clearly intended as a massacre of innocent, unsuspecting civilians, six men ranging in age from 22 to 62 sprang into action. A banker and a middle-aged academic, both French, were first on the scene. The sound of gunfire awakened three young American tourists: Alek Skarlatos, Spencer Stone and Anthony Sadler. In a moment evocative of the Flight 93 passengers' shining courage on 9/11, Skarlatos saw Ayoub El-Khazzani struggling with one of his guns and leapt up, saying simply "Let's go" to his friends. The three Americans, two Frenchmen and one Briton who took on the terrorist were unarmed — though, thank God, in the case of two (the third was fit, too), their military training prepared them for violence. That's right. For the world to be safe for most people, good people must learn the arts of war to prevent bad people from ruling through terror. It's true of individuals, and it's true of nations.
Let's assume, for fun, that Donald Trump's supporters are thinking with their brains, not their viscera. If so, they will want to know that the issue he has lassoed for self-aggrandizement has been utterly demagogued. Trump is playing them for chumps. A young woman was murdered by an illegal alien in a so-called "sanctuary city." Awful, of course. San Francisco's officials bear some of the blame for Kate Steinle's death by declining to enforce the law. But Trump has abused the trust of his audiences by suggesting that an illegal immigrant crime spree is the great threat to our nation. Trump admirers yearn to "take our country back." From whom? From Barack Obama, Valerie Jarrett, Al Sharpton, The New York Times, Jon Stewart and Hillary Clinton? Or from Mexican illegals?
For decades, I believed that displaying grisly photographs of aborted babies was the wrong way to make the pro-life case. Disturbing images, I thought, would only repel viewers, not persuade them. I now think I was wrong. There are many ways to make an argument. The Center for Medical Progress has demonstrated that a 2 x 4 has its uses. These videos, precisely because they are graphic, shatter the complacency and denial that are essential for a regime of mass violence to proceed. They undermine the reassuring fiction that birth is a bright moral line. Five seconds before the baby emerges, it has no moral worth. Five seconds after — all moral worth. That is untenable logically and pitiless psychologically.
"Seven Jewish Lawmakers Could Tilt the Scales on Iran Deal," headlines The Times of Israel. The members — Sen. Charles Schumer, Rep. Steven Israel, Rep. Eliot Engel, Rep. Adam Schiff, Rep. Nita Lowey, Sen. Ben Cardin and Rep. Ted Deutch — are all Democrats. They must choose between loyalty to their party's president and concern about what the deal portends for Israeli and American security. There are long and short answers to the question: "Why are Jews liberal?" The long answer traces back to the Enlightenment in Europe, when parties of the right were monarchist and anti-Semitic, while parties of the left favored pluralism and religious freedom. I don't buy the long argument. Tsar Alexander III, who instigated pogroms against the Jews, is long dead. So is Napoleon, who liberated them. In the meantime, Jews have suffered under communists, who proved just as cruel as the monarchists.
The Trump bump tells us something about the state of American politics.
