Columnist.
When New York City's strikingly successful police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, arrived to address students at Brown University, he was harassed, booed and heckled for 30 long minutes. "Racism is not for debate," they shouted. A university official pleaded with the goons, er, students to permit Kelly to speak, reminding them that they would be free to express disagreement during the Q-and-A session afterwards. "Shout him down!" responded a man in the audience, and the crowd did.
The spectacularly dreadful debut of Obamacare represents the greatest political opportunity for conservatism and the Republican Party in two generations. Big government stands rebuked. It has overreached, overpromised, and, embarrassingly, failed to deliver. Even if the website's gremlins are banished, and even if Obamacare purrs along like a BMW from now on, voters will be disillusioned.
Slate magazine deserves credit for publishing a series of articles about polyamory. The first, "Why I'm Still In The Polyamory Closet," by the pseudonymous "Michael Carey," elicited angry letters because Carey compared polyamorists with homosexuals. Polyamory (the desire -- need? -- for multiple sexual partners) is a choice, the letter writers protested, whereas homosexuality is innate, like skin color.
The constipated debut of Obamacare has reduced the president of the United States to the status of TV pitchman. "Act now" to get this great product, he exhorted listeners on Monday, offering testimonials from one of the rare successful purchasers, promising limitless benefits and low prices, and even an 800 number. His operators are standing by, he urged, and they speak 150 languages! (You could sign up in Min Bei and Kazakh, if you could sign up at all.) If Obama had thrown in a free tote bag for the first 100 callers, it wouldn't have seemed out of place.
The drama of the past three weeks has revealed a vein of despair and rage among conservatives. I share their feelings about what is happening to the country, even as I believe their tactics have made things worse (only temporarily, one hopes). Is America gradually becoming a slow-growth, high-unemployment, sclerotic, bureaucratically top-heavy nation like France, Italy and Great Britain? Yes. Was the nation already stumbling under the weight of unsustainable promises made in the form of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and government pensions *before* Obama added another entitlement? Yes. Is the U.S. receding as a world power in favor of Russia and China? Yes. Is the federal government encouraging dependency through prolonged unemployment, welfare and food stamp benefits? Yes, yes, yes.
It's clear to all but the most blinkered that the "Defund Now!" strategy for blocking the implementation of Obamacare has been worse than a failure. Obamacare will be funded, but the fight has exacerbated the already low standing of the Republican Party. Obama's approval rating has ticked up during the shutdown, while Republicans are now competing with the Taliban in approval. Architects of the shutdown plan assured us that when Republicans took a stand on principle, the voters would be impressed. The Wall Street Journal/NBC poll showed that 51 percent of respondents believe the president is putting his own political agenda ahead of what's best for the country. Pretty good? Not really. Seventy percent say that about congressional Republicans.
Republicans and conservatives are clearly in the mood for a fight. That martial spirit is part of what has brought us to the standoff in Washington. It's odd then, that the battle for the governor's mansion in Virginia, which pits a solid conservative attorney general against a Democratic moneyman and back-scratching liberal Clinton pal, should be so neglected. Ken Cuccinelli is currently being buried in campaign spending by Terry McAuliffe. McAuliffe, who may not know much about Virginia, or about how to govern a state, but who certainly knows how to raise money, is outspending Cuccinelli two to one.
Denouncing the dysfunction in Washington has become a cliche. For a change of pace, let's decry the putrefaction in American popular culture. (There are bright spots, but those will have to await another column.) Miley Cyrus is America's id. She is all desire -- for fame, for attention, for money - without any mediating influences like conscience, character, prudence or taste. America celebrates her. She gets some criticism, but she can laugh it off, because she knows she's cool. Do you doubt her importance? She hosted Saturday Night Live this week -- the apotheosis of hip.
Almost exactly 159 years ago, a British light cavalry brigade rode directly into Russian guns at the battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War. Tennyson was available to immortalize the valor of the soldiers who rode bravely to their deaths ("theirs was not to reason why"). How stirring, for the survivors. The Light Brigade was actually meant to harry a retreating Russian artillery battery. But "someone had blundered" and the order was given that the six hundred ride directly into a valley surrounded by Russian guns.
Want a glimpse of what the Obamacare battle will look like in 2015? Just glance at liberal websites. You'll find a trove of insurance company bashing. Are insurance premiums rising instead of falling by the $2,500 per family that Obama repeatedly promised in 2009? They are. If you consult ThinkProgess, Daily Kos and Physicians for a National Health Program, you'll learn that it's the "greedy insurance companies" that are causing prices to rise, not the risibly titled, "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act."
The Republican Party has experienced a calamity -- the reelection of Barack Obama -- and some parts of the party are behaving like an animal in a trap, chewing off a foot in an effort to cope with it. Sens. Mike Lee and Ted Cruz, Heritage Action and a handful of talk-radio hosts are lashing out at anyone who questions the "defund" tactic on Obamacare as "the surrender caucus." The only reason Republicans haven't prevailed, they argue, is because Republicans politicians -- especially Republican leaders -- are squishes. What's needed are stalwart fighters who do not care about being invited to Georgetown cocktail parties.
You can tell who the keepers of American culture are by, among other things, the anniversaries they mark. We're currently being invited to revel in memories of the "iconic" tennis match between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King, the so-called "Battle of the Sexes". Robin Roberts of ABC News recalled King's "stunning triumph". ESPN explained to younger viewers that King "won for all women". The New York Times' Gail Collins gushed that King's victory 40 years ago was a message "for any woman who had ever worried about being laughed at if she stepped out of line."
After every mass shooting, I write a variant of the same column. Perhaps I'll republish this one when the next attack happens. The increase in mass shootings over the course of the past several decades is not imaginary. In 2000, The New York Times analyzed 100 mass shootings between 1949 and 1999 and found that 73 of them had happened since 1990. Since 2000, according to Mother Jones magazine, there have been 33 more, including the recent massacre at the Navy Yard. The majority of the killers have untreated mental illness.
Mitt Romney's iPod playlist featured Johnny Cash, Frankie Valli, the Beach Boys and the Soggy Bottom Boys. Barack Obama's iPod had, the president assured his fans, something for everyone -- "Stevie Wonder, James Brown. I've got Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan," Obama said. "And then I've got everything from Jay-Z to Eminem to the Fugees, to -- you name it." This pop cultural posturing isn't new, as historian Tevi Troy chronicles in a highly entertaining survey of how American presidents have consumed and affected pop culture: "What Jefferson Read, Ike Watched, and Obama Tweeted".
In March 2012, President Obama whispered to placeholder Russian president Dmitri Medvedev that he needed "space" on matters like missile defense until 2013. "After my election, I'll have more flexibility," the president blurted into an unsuspected open microphone. "I will convey this information to Vladimir," Medvedev promised, managing not to smirk outwardly. Medvedev did not need to deliver the message. Obama has telegraphed his weakness in a thousand ways, starting with the "reset" that was premised on the idea that relations between Russia and the U.S. were frayed because we had been without the transformative leadership of Barack Hussein Obama. It didn't seem to occur to Obama that Russian behavior might have had something to do with it.
Barack Obama accelerated his political ascent in 2002 by positioning himself firmly as the voice of anti-war Democrats. Unlike Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Edwards and John Kerry, then-Illinois state Sen. Obama announced that he opposed the effort to topple Saddam Hussein, not because he opposed all wars, but because he resisted what he called "dumb wars." What was "dumb" about the Iraq War? Sen. Obama didn't say precisely, but he inveighed against "the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats ..."
Some defenders of Miley Cyrus' VMA performance don't understand what all the outrage is about. Justin Timberlake tweeted, "She's young. Take it easy on her." Lena Dunham worried about "slut shaming." Russell Simmons wrote "Just saw @MileyCyrus. What did I miss. She was having fun. #twerkmileytwerk." And Adam Lambert tweeted " ... Listen if it wasn't ur cup of tea -- all good but why is everyone spazzing? Hey -- she's doin something right. We all talkin." Cyrus seemed to endorse Lambert's any-attention-is-good-attention rationale. She boasted on Twitter that "Smilers! My VMA performance had 306.000 tweets per minute. That's more than the blackout or Superbowl! #fact."
Ater 9/11, the prevailing view was that "nothing would ever be the same." The sight of bodies plunging 100 stories from the flaming towers of the World Trade Center seared into our psyches the reality that America has cruel and wanton enemies. The USA Patriot Act, which sought to repair some of the intelligence lapses that permitted the 9/11 attacks to go undiscovered, passed the House by a vote of 357 to 66 and the Senate by 98 to one.
Gathering on the 50th anniversary of the speech that made Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. an icon, a crowd of Democratic partisans, including the president of the United States, attempted to hijack King's legacy for cynically narrow ends. The march, or what The Washington Post dubbed a "Washington Entertainment-Political-Celebrity event" was organized by a coalition of mostly leftist groups -- Al Sharpton's National Action Center, the Urban League, the Rainbow Push Coalition, the NAACP and the Children's Defense Fund, among others. The speakers roster featured the usual suspects: Benjamin Jealous, Sidney Poitier, Julian Bond, Randi Weingarten, Caroline Kennedy, Al Sharpton, Oprah Winfrey, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and President Obama.
It's ironic that President Obama so often carps about politics -- blaming "politics as usual" or "hyperpartisanship" for everything from the lack of economic growth to joblessness to climate change -- when he is the most relentlessly partisan president in recent memory. Obama is a staunch left/liberal who finds it very difficult to rise above politics and attempt to unite the country. Arguably, his very best speech, the one delivered in Tucson after the Gabby Giffords shooting, did transcend partisanship. It was an outlier.
