Columnist.
Speaking to graduates at West Point (New York), President Barack Obama tooted on his toy horn, "al-Qaida's leadership on the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan has been decimated." Even that slender boast -- just on the border regions? -- is now vitiated. The five Taliban terrorists released from Guantanamo Bay in exchange for Sgt. (sic) Bowe Bergdahl will step nimbly into any vacant posts. Khairullah Khairkhwa, one of the founders of the Taliban, served as governor of Herat province when the Taliban controlled Afghanistan. He is known for ethnic massacres, narcotics trafficking, close ties to Osama bin Laden, and supervising terrorist training camps within Herat.
Here's a not-so-bold prediction: After the press loses interest in the Veterans Affairs scandal, after the investigations have been completed and one or two officials have resigned, nothing will change. Is this cynicism? Not really. It comes down to one's view of how much government can achieve by bureaucratic, top-down management. The progressive project has limitless faith in the capacity of wise managers to run complex systems for the benefit of all. Untainted by the profit motive, bureaucrats can deliver services equitably and efficiently. Every liberal/progressive program has the effect of taking decision-making away from individuals, communities and local governments, and centralizing it in Washington.
The latest mass-casualty shooting spree -- this one in Santa Barbara, California -- has touched off the usual debate about how to put a stop to these hideous spasms of murder. These random massacres have become, as I wrote in a previous column, an American psychosis. Some, including the anguished father of one of the victims, point to guns and the National Rifle Association as the villains. Defenders of guns respond with the usual arguments -- which I find persuasive. That much having been said, I wish people who defend the Second Amendment wouldn't talk about their guns with such lascivious pleasure. Guns are necessary to self-defense. The right to own them is enshrined in the Constitution. Enough said. Let's not worship them. Gun worship -- by the Hollywood left which uses it to sell tickets, and by the conservative right, which fetishizes guns -- are both part of our national problem.
This story has a very troubling start, but a pretty satisfying conclusion -- if it really is the conclusion. Among the contemptible episodes of student/faculty heckler's vetoes at commencement ceremonies this year (Condoleezza Rice, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Christine Lagarde and others have been disinvited from leading universities following ignorant and aggressively intolerant protests), one of the most disturbing concerned the treatment of Robert Birgeneau by Haverford College. Birgeneau is the recently retired chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. You don't get to be chancellor of Berkeley if you've got the political opinions of, say, Mitch McConnell, and Birgeneau is indeed a liberal in good standing. But revolutions tend to devour their own, and Birgeneau has become the Jean-Paul Marat of liberal academia.
Is the election of a pro-business, pro-American, growth-oriented prime minister in the world's largest democracy good news or bad news for the world's oldest democracy? We in that oldest democracy are currently governed by the Democrats, a party that has more in common with the defeated Congress party in India than with the victorious Bharatiya Janata Party. You could tell that the White House was less than overjoyed at the election of Narendra Modi when the spokesman recited boilerplate praise of a "free and fair election." Are there sensitivities regarding this particular small-government guy? Sure. India is not Indiana. The man who has just been elected prime minister was until recently included on a list of people prohibited from entering this country by the State Department.
There's a debate among economists about why a college degree is worth so much. That the credential is valuable is not in doubt. According to the Pew Research Center, college graduates earn about $17,500 more annually than high school grads. Why? The "human capital" school believes that students learn valuable skills in college that employers are willing to pay for. The "signaling" school doubts that the content of a college education is really that marketable. They argue that employers are interested in the traits -- diligence, intelligence, self-control -- that a degree reflects. For decades, politicians have bought votes with promises to make college "more affordable." They passed legislation with names like the "College Cost Reduction and Access Act" and the "Ensuring Continued Access to Student Loans Act." There are Pell Grants and Stafford Loans, and much more besides.
It's a cliche to say that Washington, D.C., is "out of touch" with voters, but there's something to it. Arguably, in 2012, the Republican Party seemed focused on a subject -- debt -- that wasn't a high priority for average Americans. Sincere Republicans (including this columnist) believe it should be. Nations that cannot pay their bills eventually fall into decline, hardship and worse when governments resort to inflation to pay off their debts. It's easier to make small adjustments now than to endure wrenching hardships later. But the voters remain to be convinced.
"Two, four, six, eight. Stop the violence. Stop the rape," so chanted a group of Ohio University students calling themselves "f---rapeculture" at a protest a couple of years ago. Rape culture activists have become a fixture on campuses throughout the country, and now, 55 colleges -- including Harvard, Princeton and Berkeley -- are under federal investigation for mishandling sexual assault complaints. Some of my conservative/libertarian sisters have pointed out that the statistics on sexual assault are wildly inflated. Christina Hoff Sommers notes that the "one in five women are victims of rape" statistic that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention popularized (and that has been cited as justification for drastically diminishing the due process rights of those accused) is wildly at odds with Department of Justice crime victimization surveys, and is based on poorly worded questions and unrepresentative samples.
The headline looks like a hoax-- saturated fat does not cause heart disease -- but it's real. This news is more than just another example of changing health guidelines; it's a cautionary tale about trusting the scientific consensus. For more than 50 years, the best scientific minds in America assured us that saturated fat was the enemy. Animal fat, we were instructed, was the chief culprit in causing obesity, Type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Throughout my adult life, I have conscientiously followed the guidelines dispensed by the health arbiters of our age. Trusting utterly in the scientific research of the American Heart Association, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, I accepted the nearly universal wisdom of the medical and nutritional experts.
The Ben Rhodes memo revealing the duplicity of this administration on the subject of Benghazi reminds us about the character of those involved. That President Barack Obama could lie so evenly and so passionately (remember the second presidential debate?) is not perhaps surprising at this stage. But let's not forget what it took for Hillary Clinton to lie to the grieving father of an American hero. First, a refresher on the facts (as they were certainly known to the principals): A convoy of well-armed terrorists rolled into the complex housing the American consulate in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012. The attackers sealed off streets leading to the consulate with trucks and then commenced the attack on the building using rocket-propelled grenades, AK-47s, mortars and artillery mounted on trucks. Ambassador Chris Stevens called Deputy Chief of Mission Gregory Hicks for help, saying, "Greg, we're under attack." Hicks, who was in Tripoli, conveyed this up the line, but no help arrived.
Remember poverty? It was once a chief preoccupation of the Democratic Party. Lyndon Johnson made war on it. An entire ecosystem of federal, state and local programs has been created over the course of the past half-century to combat it, costing taxpayers more than $1 trillion annually. Yet the Democratic Party seems to have forgotten the poor. The proposal to increase the minimum wage by a few dollars is trifling compared with the vaunting ambitions of the War on Poverty. Sargent Shriver, Johnson's poverty czar, predicted that welfare state programs would eliminate poverty by 1976. Throughout the post-Great Society era, Democrats proclaimed that the persistence of poverty was a moral stain on the nation.
Sonia Sotomayor is a wonderful role model. Truly. Through hard work, brains and rare self-discipline at an early age, she was able to overcome poverty and family dysfunction to become what she is today. She was diagnosed at the age of 7 with Type 1 diabetes, and because her father was an alcoholic and her mother a full-time nurse, it fell to her to manage the daily insulin injections and testing that are part of the required treatment. The image, in her memoir, of a small girl dragging a chair to the stove so she could sterilize her syringes before school is poignant indeed. Any person attempting to overcome hardship can look to Sotomayor for inspiration. But as she demonstrated in her long, impassioned dissent in the case of Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, the experience of benefiting from race preferences has left her prickly and defensive on the subject. As others, including her Supreme Court colleague Justice Clarence Thomas, have argued, that kind of gnawing insecurity is one of the consequences of preferences. Others are never sure if you've achieved your position entirely on merit, and neither are you.
Just because your opponent is hurling baseless or even ridiculous charges does not mean that you are free to disregard them. You may think it's absurd to argue that you are engaged in a "war on women." But contempt for the accusation is not enough. Some strategists suggest (they have for years) the key for Republican candidates is to downplay social issues in favor of economic arguments. Pocketbook appeals are great, but the premise -- that social issues damage Republican candidates -- is shaky at best. When Pew asked women voters to rank a list of issues in order of importance in September 2012, abortion was named less often than health care, education, jobs, Medicare, the economy, terrorism, taxes, foreign policy and the budget deficit. The only issues that ranked lower for women voters were immigration and energy. A post-election Kaiser poll found only 7 percent of those who voted for President Barack Obama cited women's issues as most important to their vote.
The Republican Party is roiling with internal conflicts, say the analysts. The tea party is confronting the establishment. The noninterventionists are at war (forgive the expression) with the interventionists. The libertarians would like the party to endorse same-sex marriage. Fair enough. These conflicts will play out during the primaries in 2016, and we'll discover whether they are serious fault lines or merely squabbles. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party, supposedly the firm fortress of the middle class, minorities and women, is actually showing some internal stresses as well. Little fissures are snaking through the crust, perhaps reflecting tectonic movement beneath.
There's an MRCTV video circulating on the Internet that features a man with a microphone asking college students in Washington, D.C., to name just one member of the United States Senate. At least half a dozen are stumped. When he asks how many senators each state has, the same crew is equally flummoxed. One hundred percent of the students could name the hit song from the movie "Frozen," though. These surveys about how ignorant Americans are have become hardy perennials. Survey data confirm that large numbers of Americans lack even rudimentary knowledge of what used to be called "eighth-grade civics." A survey by Common Core found that 25 percent of American high school students thought Christopher Columbus sailed after the year 1750, and about a third of them did not know the Bill of Rights guarantees freedom of speech and religion.
The screeching polarization of American political and cultural life in recent years is exacting a toll. Debate has been debased. Contempt and hatred for those with opposing views is now the norm. While some on the right have criticized their own side -- think of Rick Perry and Jeb Bush challenging immigration opponents, or conservative columnists taking on some talk radio hosts -- liberals have been shamefully silent about the excesses committed by Democrats. That's why it gives me particular pleasure to report that two liberal columnists have recently defied this trend. One is my old friend and sparring partner Ruth Marcus (we've known each other since the fourth grade) of the Washington Post, and the other is Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times.
In the aftermath of the mass shootings in Aurora, Colo.; Newtown, Conn.; Tucson, Ariz.; Virginia Tech; the Washington Navy Yard; and sadly, other locales, conventional wisdom held that the epidemic of mass shootings was a problem of gun control. I wrote columns attempting to draw attention to the mental health system in America that so wrongheadedly fails to treat the dangerous mentally ill. Now, at last, the mental health angle on mass shootings has become conventional wisdom -- just in time, perhaps, to be wrong again. "Fort Hood shooter had mental problems" headlined USA Today. "Fort Hood shooter was Iraq vet being treated for mental health issues," announced CNN. A number of stories mentioned post-traumatic stress disorder as the possible culprit for Spc. Ivan Lopez's awful crime, and most discussions of the attack have sought answers in psychiatry.
"The conservative minds of the Heritage Foundation have found a way for Republicans to shrink the gender gap: They need to persuade more women to get their MRS degrees." So wrote the Washington Post's Dana Milbank about a panel that featured Mollie Hemingway, Karin Agness and yours truly. It was so nice of Milbank to attend -- a shame that his mind was so clenched shut that he could hear only what his prejudices led him to expect, rather than what we actually said. Hate to interrupt a good sneer, but the panel wasn't about the gender gap; it was about feminism. Milbank focused narrowly on the political implications of our talk and couldn't resist descending to the most tired leftist cliche, namely that "the consensus was that we ought to go back in history." The left cannot shake is starry-eyed confidence that history has a vector -- that forward is always toward the sunny uplands of equality, prosperity and happiness -- and backward is always a descent. Tell that to Germans in 1933 or Cambodians in 1975. Ask a newly captured slave onboard a ship in the middle passage if he wanted to "go back in history."
The mother of the 16-year-old pro-life demonstrator who suffered a rough confrontation with a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has shown a rare civility -- the spirit liberals are forever bemoaning the lack of but rarely demonstrating themselves. The event: A small group of pro-life activists visited UCSB to demonstrate against abortion. They bore posters and leaflets and set up their display on the campus's "free speech zone." Professor Mireille Miller-Young was offended, no "triggered," by the photo of an aborted baby on Thrin Short's poster. Together with two or three students, the professor grabbed a large sign and then pushed and scratched the girl who attempted to take it back. This was captured on video by the pro-lifers. "I was stronger, so I took the sign," Miller-Young explained later.
In the Netherlands this week, President Barack Obama confessed a fear: "I continue to be much more concerned, when it comes to our security, with the prospect of a nuclear weapon going off in Manhattan." It would be reassuring to think that the president worries about this (when he's not busy filling out his NCAA brackets), except that he is failing to do the most important thing to prevent such a catastrophe. The president was speaking at a meeting of the Nuclear Security Summit, a conclave of nations that agree to certain worthy actions, such as converting their reactors from the use of highly enriched uranium to newer versions using low-enriched uranium, beefing up security at nuclear facilities, improving radiation detection at airports and seaports, and so forth. Fifty-seven nations and entities (the EU and U.N. included) participate in this process. But the Islamic Republic of Iran is not on the list.
