Columnist.
Gov. Scott Walker has leapt to the top of polls in Iowa. As day follows night, he has moved to the center of the liberal press's crosshairs. This is the world we inhabit: When a Democrat is perceived as popular, the press discovers layers of humor and elan we never suspected. When a Republican is gaining strength, the press sharpens its bayonets. Based on his response to trap-door questions in the past few days, we've been instructed that Walker a) is a crypto young Earther (or, just as bad, a panderer to same); b) that he ought to have answered the question regarding President Obama's faith with a resounding affirmation of Obama's fitness for sainthood; and c) that he is some sort of coward for not grabbing Rudy Giuliani by the scruff of the neck and escorting him off stage when the former mayor questioned the president's love of country.
President Obama's scolding of Western civilization at the National Prayer Breakfast ("Lest we get on our high horse...") may go down in history as the emblematic moment of his presidency. It was atrociously ill timed and characteristically sophomoric. My colleague Jay Nordlinger observed that Obama sounded just like the students in the 1980s who, when presented with evidence of the Soviet gulag, would respond with the tu quoque rejoinder: "Well, what about racism?" During the Cold War, we called this the "moral equivalence" fallacy, because however grave our flaws were (and some were serious), they didn't exist on the same plane as those of the Soviet Union or China or Cambodia or North Korea or the other communist nations that amassed a body count of more than 90 million souls in their seven decades of tyranny. There were other reasons the moral equivalence argument was fallacious (We had independent courts, a free press and other mechanisms for fighting injustice; they had none of those.), but that didn't prevent it from issuing from the mouths of nominally educated people until the Berlin Wall was hacked to pieces. And even after.
"Cui bono?" Who benefits? It was the question ancient Romans asked when hoping to cut through a fog of possible causes for a problem. As of this morning, U.S. Marines were evacuating Sanaa, the capital of Yemen. We've seen this movie before: the bonfires of documents, the hammer blows to equipment, the disabling of weapons, the rush to the helicopters. Think Saigon 1973 or Tehran 1979. Only five months ago, President Obama touted his policy toward Yemen as a success: "This strategy of taking out terrorists who threaten us, while supporting partners on the front lines, is one that we have successfully pursued in Yemen..." Well.
Let me see if I understand this: Chris Kyle was not a hero, but Brian Williams was? What do we make of Williams' attempt to snatch some vicarious honor? The response to "American Sniper" should not surprise us. Bill Maher called Chris Kyle a "psychopath patriot." It's more than likely that Maher thinks all patriots are a bit unhinged. Lindy West, writing in The Guardian, called Kyle a "hate-filled killer," and The Atlantic's Megan Garber wondered whether "heroism is still heroism when you're motivated by hatred." Spawned in the Vietnam era, the modern left cut its teeth defaming America. That included a campaign of vilification and slander against Americans who served in Vietnam. The chief spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War was none other than Secretary of State John F. Kerry. In testimony before Congress, young Kerry claimed that American forces in Vietnam had committed atrocities "in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan." He claimed that they "randomly shot at civilians ... raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power..." and so forth.
Cuban President Raul Castro has issued new demands for normalizing relations with the U.S. He wants us to lift the trade embargo, remove Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terror and give Cuba the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay. Truly. You can look it up. One can imagine President Obama being awfully tempted to give Guantanamo to them. He's planning to close the prison there piecemeal anyway. And who needs naval bases these days when, as Obama schooled Mitt Romney, "We have these things called aircraft carriers now..."?
Barack Obama's sixth State of the Union address was an homage to France. The president might not have intended it as such -- he mentioned the nation only glancingly when denouncing terror attacks in Pakistan and Paris. Yet France was at the heart of the president's address. France has everything that Obama finds wanting in his own country. His entire presidency is a prolonged effort to tear the United States away from free market economics and decentralized political power (what the French deride as the "Anglo Saxon model") toward the kind of socialist, government-dominated society France has achieved.
By savagely attacking and murdering writers and cartoonists as well as Jewish shoppers, French Islamists clarified something that many in the West have deceived themselves about: that the war we are engaged in is a war of ideas. Islamists have once again reminded us that freedom itself is their target. This discomfits the left. They prefer to pretend that Islamist violence (when they acknowledge it at all) springs from unemployment, poverty or, most frequently, colonial oppression. Most leftists, and some on the libertarian right, believe that American responses to Islamists' attacks -- ranging from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to NSA wiretapping -- are the causes of the murderous rage that has claimed thousands of victims on every continent (10,000 in 2013 alone) and has in the past three months plunged Australia, Canada, Israel, Pakistan and now France into agonies as civilians (including children) have been coldly massacred in the name of Allah.
Nine months from now, Republican candidates for president will meet on the stage of the Reagan Presidential Library (with the old Air Force One providing great visuals) for the first debate of the 2016 race. It seems likely that among those in attendance will be at least four -- Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal, Mike Huckabee and Jeb Bush -- who support (or once supported) the Common Core. Republicans are about to find out what's been percolating among the grassroots. Properly undertaken, a debate about Common Core could be healthy for the party and the country. Or it could be an unholy squabble over rumors and bogeymen. We'll see. The old joke has it that America will never adopt national education standards because Republicans hate anything with the word "national" in it, and Democrats hate anything with the word "standards" in it. Common Core's advocates accordingly worked through the National Governors Association and other state groups. Backed with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Common Core has now been adopted by 41 states. The Obama administration boosted participation by dangling waivers from some requirements of the No Child Left Behind law, as well as stimulus funds, to states that adopted Common Core. That alone was enough to alienate many Republicans.
Jonathan Gruber, sage of MIT and proud champion of the Affordable Care Act, may well have had the worst year in American public life. His repeated demonstrations of arrogance, contempt for the American people and smug self-satisfaction brought mortification to his party and president. His glib references to the redistributionist aspects of the Affordable Care Act gave the lie to the Democratic Party's dubious claim that the mandate was not a tax, along with the excruciating (to Democrats) acknowledgment that -- presidential oaths to the contrary notwithstanding -- Democrats regard "nontransparency" as their friend.
Democrats have done very well politically by convincing voters that they are, in a very broad sense, on the side of the little guy. "Republicans," they say, "take care of the rich, but we Democrats are the party that brought you Social Security, Medicare, Head Start, the Civil Rights Act, free school lunches, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and Obamacare. We are the party that will tax rich Republicans to fund government programs that help poor and middle-class Democrats." Like mothers, Democrats are nurturing and supportive. There are a few little problems with this narrative. Most of those programs, for good or ill, had bipartisan support. Further, Head Start has been a colossal failure; the school lunch program is overly broad and encourages waste (with 64 percent of children getting free or reduced-price lunches); civil rights laws (in direct contravention of the promises of their original backers) have been interpreted to permit quotas and "reverse discrimination"; AFDC wound up encouraging unwed childbearing and arguably contributing to poverty; and Obamacare is causing the middle class to pay higher premiums for more limited medical care while still covering only a fraction of the uninsured.
Has there ever been a president more eager to make concessions to vicious regimes than Barack Obama? The opening of diplomatic relations with Cuba is the latest and, one fears, not the last in a string of preemptive concessions. Obama, with his blend of hard-left prejudices and vaulting solipsism, has sought throughout his presidency to atone for what he and his party view as America's past sins. That was the essence of the "reset" with Russia, which included betraying two of America's European allies, Poland and the Czech Republic, who had been scheduled to receive ground-based antiballistic missile systems. Though Obama is fond of saying "the Cold War is over," and even mocked Mitt Romney's concern about Russian behavior by sniffing, "The Eighties called, and they want their foreign policy back," it is Obama himself who seems fixated on reenacting the Cold War -- except this time, the U.S. loses.
President Barack Obama has launched a new initiative to get American schools to teach computer science. Appearing at a Newark, New Jersey, middle school, the president suggested that students, especially girls and minorities, should learn "not just how to use a smartphone but to create the apps for a smartphone." If we lived in a country where most students were graduating from high school with good English and math skills and with a firm grasp of American history and government, we might be in a position to make time for advanced computer skills. But we don't. Only about 68 percent of Newark's students even graduate from high school.
Rush Limbaugh is a savvy guy who thinks Republican leaders are wrong to shun the idea of another government shutdown. Appearing on "Fox News Sunday," he argued that the only important poll is the one held on Election Day. "(The GOP) won a landslide election 10 months after that so-called shutdown. ... The essence of a poll is an election, and I've got two of them. And we would have won in 2012 if four million Republicans hadn't stayed home." The belief that Romney would have won in 2012 if millions of Republicans hadn't sat out the election is widely shared on the right, but it's probably not true. Sean Trende, one of the country's most careful election analysts, examined turnout data for RealClearPolitics.
Rolling Stone magazine and its reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely are facing a great deal of skepticism about a story called "A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA." The article tells the story of "Jackie," a University of Virginia student who says she was gang raped at a fraternity party early in her freshman year. There are solid journalistic reasons to question Erdely's reporting. She failed, as Slate and others have objected, to get any statements from the accused, while offering feeble and conflicting accounts about why -- first saying the young men were hard to find, and then explaining that the victim was uncomfortable about having them contacted.
In the immediate aftermath of Michael Brown's shooting, before we learned that he had not been shot in the back, that he had not had his hands up, that he had, in fact, attempted to grab Officer Wilson's gun, I wrote in favor of requiring more police to wear body cameras. Assuming nothing about Wilson's guilt or innocence, I wrote, "Cameras cannot repeal aggression, bias, rage or stupidity -- but they can certainly diminish them. And with cameras, justice for the guilty -- cop or civilian -- is more attainable." In the wake of the grand jury's decision not to indict Wilson, Brown's parents have called for police to wear body cameras. I remain in favor, but the outright denial displayed by so many opinion leaders in this case makes me doubtful that even video evidence would be enough to calm the next storm if the victim of violence is black and the perpetrator white.
During the 2012 campaign, President Obama often resorted to his favorite substitute for thinking: ridicule. Before enthusiastic audiences (who were assured his reelection would spell a thriving economy and a revived middle class), the president would mock Republicans by suggesting that "they have the same prescription they've had for the past 30 years. ... Take two tax cuts, roll back some regulations, and call us in the morning." Obama's prescription, which we are now in a position to evaluate for effectiveness, was the most massive increase in regulation of modern times. There is no industry or economic sector that the Democratic Party does not believe would benefit from badgering interference from Washington. Adding insult, every new regulation is trussed up and presented as "being on the side of the middle class."
"I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." President Obama twice pronounced those words. On the first occasion, Chief Justice Roberts erred slightly in the wording. So mindful was Obama of the importance of complying with the letter of the law that he arranged for Roberts to administer the oath again the following day. The second time, both spoke the words verbatim.
The Islamic State beheaded another American this week. The Obama administration's response revealed its stubborn determination to deny reality. Peter Kassig was a former Army Ranger and emergency medical technician who was moved by the suffering of Syria's civilians and returned to the region after his discharge to provide aid. He helped some of the one million Syrian refugees who have fled into Lebanon, using his own funds to buy supplies like diapers and other necessities and driving an ambulance into Syria. He was kidnapped in October of 2013.
Americans of most political persuasions tend to view the United Nations as corrupt and morally inverted. An organization supposedly dedicated to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights regularly overlooks abuses by the world's worst actors (Cuba, North Korea, China, just to name three) while expending vast quantities of outrage at the efforts of one tiny democracy, Israel, to defend itself. When the United States stands with Israel against the UN lynch mob, it restores ballast to the moral universe. What should be up is up, and what should be down is down. I kept a photograph of Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan, U.S. ambassador to the UN in the 1970s, on my wall for many years. Scowling with disgust at the corruption of the idea of human rights in the UN, he held his hand high to veto the infamous "Zionism is Racism" resolution. Steady American diplomacy under later presidents got the foul thing revoked in 1991.
A prayer has been answered -- not for a massive Republican victory at the polls, though that, too. No, I'm thinking of the perennial prayer of losers: "Oh Lord, let my enemies go too far." The results of the 2014 midterms will be chewed over for weeks and months. One datum that hasn't received much attention so far is the exit poll result showing that 71 percent of voters are somewhat or very worried about another major terrorist attack in the United States. Such is the Republican reputation for hardheadedness on national security that the party benefits from this concern without breaking a sweat.
