Columnist.
The defamation of Paul Ryan as a racist for noting the multigenerational persistence of joblessness in troubled neighborhoods is more than just another episode of hysterical name-calling by the left. The episode represents, in microcosm, the left's intellectual bankruptcy. Ryan's comments were not just true and well-intentioned; they were obviously so. Even if Ryan were not already known for his lifelong commitment to anti-poverty efforts for all races, even if he had not regularly accompanied John L. Lewis on his annual pilgrimage to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., and even if he had not agitated to do more 2012 campaign events in minority neighborhoods, the words he used on Bill Bennett's program tell the story.
The most febrile of George W. Bush haters liked to claim during his tenure that the former president "scared" them. There is far more reason to be frightened by President Barack Obama, because fecklessness and inconstancy trigger wars. The outstanding example of weakness inviting aggression was the conduct of the democracies toward Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. Though it has been retroactively tainted as shameful cowardice, the policy of appeasement grew out of a "war weariness" that was far more understandable than our own. Britain and France suffered millions of dead and wounded in World War I and were desperate to avoid a repeat. The Munich Agreement, which ceded part of Czechoslovakia to Germany (without its consent), was signed by Britain and France in hopes that Hitler's ambitions were limited, but in any case because they believed appeasement was the best way to avoid war.
Most Americans who are dissatisfied with President Barack Obama's leadership are thinking about the poor economy and the misbegotten health care law. That disillusionment is justified -- if not tardy. But the foreign policy failures of this administration are likely to be far more consequential, lasting and possibly catastrophic. What we are seeing is the collapse of American influence in the world. Permitting people like Obama, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Hagel and John Kerry to deal with the brutal realities of world politics is like putting Richard Simmons into the ring with Muhammad Ali.
Amy Chua, the "Tiger Mother" who launched a thousand panic attacks among ambitious but lenient parents, is back with an almost-great book about why some groups achieve spectacular success in America while others languish. Written with her husband Jed Rubenfeld (both are law professors at Yale), "The Triple Package" examines a number of groups who've succeeded in this country and advances a thesis about why groups (and nations) prosper or decline. The success of Asian-American immigrants (this principally includes people from China, Japan, Korea and India) is legendary. Less familiar is the bounding achievement of Nigerian immigrants. Though they account for only 0.7 percent of the black American population, they comprised 25 percent of the blacks at Harvard Business School last year. Nigerian immigrants are estimated to be 10 percent of America's black physicians. The average family income of Nigerian immigrants is not only above the black average, but above the national average as well.
Just try to envision the scene: A newly elected Republican mayor of a large American city takes steps to close down some of the best schools serving an almost exclusively minority population. You know how it would go. We'd be hearing that Republicans "hate" the poor. The words "cruel," "vicious" and "racist" would circle the new mayor like sharks. News organizations would examine where the mayor sent his own children, and his hypocrisy would be fiercely denounced. It is, of course, the new Democratic mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, who is shutting down a number of highly successful public charter schools. (His son attends a magnet school.) Charters are public schools run by parents or others and are not constrained by the usual public school rules, hours or curricula. Charters currently educate about 20 percent of the students in Harlem and the Bronx, boroughs known for a) poverty, b) unemployment and c) abysmal public schools.
When seven Democratic senators voted with all of the Republicans to reject Debo Adegbile's nomination to serve as head of the Justice Department's civil rights division, Harry Reid cried racism. It's as if Reid was on autopilot, and the aide who usually touches his elbow to correct him wasn't available. If the aide had been there, he would have whispered, "Um, Senator, you're accusing your own side of racism." Adegbile had been rejected, the majority leader explained, because "he stood for civil rights," and "Republicans have done everything they can, for a number of years now, to stop people from voting ... "
Among the academic set from which President Barack Obama springs, everyone agrees that wars are the result of "arrogance" and bullying by the United States. So concerned was then-Sen. Obama about the potential for U.S. aggression that he declined to vote for 2007 legislation that would have designated Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization. The IRGC had been involved in training and arming terrorists worldwide, particularly in Lebanon (Hezbollah) but also in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Palestinian territories. But Obama worried that such a vote would be "saber rattling."
The traditional family is dead, so we've been informed. It's been replaced by blended families, cohabitation, single-parent families, and, if the latest scientific controversy regarding mitochondrial DNA pans out, multiple biological parents for a single child. It's not wrong to declare that the face of the American family is changing (even if most of the changes have been for the worse), but it may be overwrought. The only way to sing a dirge for the "traditional" family is to define it exceedingly narrowly -- and even then, it's not dead, just diminished. If you define "traditional" as a father working and mother not working outside the home, and 2.4 children (OK, kidding about the .4), then yes, only about 23 percent of families fit that model today. But if you broaden the definition a bit to include households in which one spouse, usually the husband, works full time and the other, usually the wife, works only part time in order to care for children, then you get a majority of married couples. Among parents of children younger than 6, married mothers are less likely to be working at all, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, making those families look very traditional indeed.
Though you wouldn't necessarily know it based on news coverage, the United States in the reign of President Barack Obama is enduring the most prolonged period of slow growth and high unemployment since World War II. The president asserts that he saved us from another Great Depression, which, like his claim that the stimulus would "create or save" millions of jobs, is about as provable as the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. The Obama administration has done little to spur job creation, but a great deal to inhibit it. The president mocks the idea of deregulation ("cut two regulations and call me in the morning"), but the new layers of rules and directives his administration has layered over the already-existing sedimentary encrustations cannot have helped.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, may be the brightest light to adorn the Republican Party in many years. He knows how to make the case for conservative ideas, pointing, for example, to the contrasting fates of Detroit and Houston to illustrate the superiority of conservative policies. So it's particularly galling to see that rather than train his fire at President Barack Obama and the liberal machine that cocoons him, Cruz has become a one-man wrecking ball against Republicans. His most recent foray into sabotaging his colleagues concerned the debt limit increase. Because Speaker John Boehner sent over a "clean" debt limit bill, Republican senators had decided to let it pass with only Democratic votes. Republicans would not be endorsing the Democrats' spending priorities, but neither would they be opening themselves to the accusation of flirting with national default. With Obama's political fortunes sinking and several "red state" Democratic senators in jeopardy, Republicans have a good chance to retake the Senate in November -- unless they fall into civil war.
There are many reasons President Barack Obama's presidency has proven so ineffectual even by its own standards -- boosting economic growth, improving health care, preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction, enhancing America's world reputation. One reason is that Obama is the most ideologically rigid president in American history. He believes in all the wrong ideas, and holds to them with mulish tenacity. But there's a second reason that was on vivid display the past few days -- overweening arrogance. This president has no patience with attempting to solve the actual problems that afflict the people he was elected to serve. That's small beer. A great, world historical figure like himself cannot be tending to trivial matters, like whether Healthcare.gov will actually work, or whether there might be something the federal government can do to alleviate the effects of drought in California.
Few have ever heard the name Debo Adegbile. He's President Barack Obama's nominee to head the civil rights division of the Justice Department. A few months ago, his nomination would have been a non-starter -- there is more than a whiff of radicalism in his past. But we are in a new world. Sen. Harry Reid is now absolute monarch of the Senate. Republicans are largely irrelevant. They cannot offer amendments to legislation. They cannot filibuster. I suppose they can write letters to the editor, and march outside the chamber wearing sandwich boards. Before the Reid invocation of the "nuclear option" eliminating the filibuster, Adegbile would have been considered too controversial. But now, the administration can have its head on nominations.
Remember the IRS scandal? It's gone. Poof. So flaccid has press interest in the story become that President Barack Obama made bold in an interview with Fox News to say there was not a "smidgen of corruption" in the IRS's conduct. It requires terrific confidence in the passivity of the press to float the discredited "Cincinnati did it all" dodge since we know that IRS employees in that office were taking direction from Washington. We further know that IRS offices in California, Oklahoma, Washington, D.C. and other places have been identified as singling out groups with "Tea Party" or "Patriot" in their names.
The Obama administration's response to the Congressional Budget Office's prediction that Obamacare will cause 2.5 million fewer Americans to work in the coming years is an opportunity for Republicans to seize the moral high ground on the issue of work. Rather than dispute the CBO's analysis -- which would have been awkward, as the White House has touted CBO's predictions in the past -- the administration is spinning the jobs loss as a kind of liberation. No longer tied down to the pesky need to earn a salary, some Americans will be able to follow their bliss. The is part of a pattern from this administration (it would be crude to call it a "war on work"), of incentives, disincentives, taxes, regulations and other decisions that make jobs more difficult to find and unemployment more entrenched.
From one point of view, President Barack Obama's invocation of the hoary "77 cents" myth regarding the relative earnings of women and men was a shallow and cheap political pander. Democrats, eager to maintain their advantage with women voters, stoke grievance. It's the same playbook they've used to solidify their standing with black voters -- suggest whenever and wherever possible that Republicans are racists. It's crude, offensive and libelous -- but effective. Yet Obama fancies himself an intellectual. Campaigning against Ken Cuccinelli in Virginia, the president chastised the Republican for challenging climate change, saying, "It has to do with what's true. It has to do with facts. You don't argue with facts." Many in the press and in progressive circles regard this president as a bit of a thought leader.
An administration as image-conscious as this one should have been more careful in its choice of antagonists. The Little Sisters of the Poor is a Catholic charity providing care to the poorest elderly in a hospice-like setting. They serve 13,000 people in 31 countries, and operate 30 homes in the United States. Their faith calls them to treat every person, no matter how old, disabled or poor as if he or she were "Jesus himself." There is no religious test for admission, only that you be poor and in need of care at the end of life. Think thousands of Mother Teresas. Today, they are facing harassment from the Obama administration.
Only 28 percent of respondents to a recent Harris Poll say they plan to watch the State of the Union address. Some of those are lying. It's clear the Obama charm has worn extremely thin. The rapturous excitement President Barack Obama once elicited was based, at least in part, on the idea that he had something new to offer, that he transcended the "old politics." It's not enough to say that those expectations were misplaced -- that was obvious from the beginning. But he has proved to be one of the most polarizing leaders of the modern era, encouraging a corrosive sense of grievance between Americans and undermining people's faith in the essential justness of their country.
"I came from a place of struggle," insisted Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis after The Dallas Morning News revealed that key details of the life story she had successfully shopped to the mainstream media were false. She wasn't a 19-year-old mom when she was first divorced, but 21. She lived with her second husband in the very comfortable Mistletoe Heights neighborhood of Fort Worth, Texas, not in a trailer park made famous by a thousand admiring profiles. She lived in the trailer park for just a few months. One of Davis' struggles, apparently, is with the truth.
Everyone knows by now that the governor (and possible presidential contender) can be a hothead. Some have called him a bully. Even if you think that's too strong, it's undeniable that a trace of bellicosity has been important to what the professionals like to call his "brand." Still, he shouldn't have said what he did in that radio interview. However strongly he may feel about those who disagree, and certainly he has his reasons for feeling aggrieved, he shouldn't have said that his opponents "have no place" in his state. It's understandable, considering the intemperance and intolerance he demonstrated, why the press is going wild with this story.
The Departments of Education and Justice have teamed up to make the lives of students in tough neighborhoods even tougher. Framed as a measure to combat discrimination against black and Hispanic children, the guidelines issued by the Obama administration about school discipline will actually encourage racial discrimination, undermine the learning environments of classrooms and contribute to an unjust race-consciousness in meting out discipline. Claiming that African-American and Hispanic students are more harshly disciplined than whites for the same infractions, the Obama administration now advises that any disciplinary rule that results in a "disparate impact" on these groups will be challenged by the government.
