Columnist.
The headlines were misleading: "Moms are Breadwinners in Record 4 of 10 Households." Immediate thought: Wow, 40 percent of wives are primary breadwinners. Nope. If you read down to the fifth or sixth paragraph in most stories about the new Pew study, you'd discover that the number of women out-earning their husbands was actually just 22.5 percent of married couples with children under the age of 18. The 40 percent figure includes single-parent households, in which the mom is not the primary, but the sole, earner. They're always lauded, those single moms. Politicians of both parties always append the word "heroic" to them. But the profile of single mothers has changed dramatically since 1960, when only 4 percent were "never married." In previous decades, women became single mothers through divorce, desertion or death. In 2011, 44 percent of single moms were never married.
If you Google "George W. Bush shredding the constitution," you will get many millions of hits. The New York Times railed, "Ever since 9/11, we have watched Republican lawmakers help Mr. Bush shred the Constitution in the name of fighting terrorism." President Bush attempted to listen in on the international calls of suspected terrorists, he used waterboarding on exactly three terrorists, and he put detainees in Guantanamo. Mr. Obama -- greeted rapturously in 2008 as the "constitutional law professor" who would restore respect for our founding document -- has demonstrated a contempt for law unseen since Nixon.
Count me as irritable on the subject, but President Obama's imperious habit of suggesting that American diplomats work for him is offensive to democratic sensibilities. In the second presidential debate last fall, when the Benghazi matter came up, the president responded: "Well, let me ... talk about our diplomats, because they serve all around the world and do an incredible job in a very dangerous situation [sic]. And these aren't just representatives of the United States; they're my representatives. I send them there, oftentimes into harm's way. I know these folks, and I know their families. So nobody's more concerned about their safety and security than I am." (I wish Candy Crowley had asked what the names of the four dead Americans were. But, as we discovered, she had other plans that night.)
Speaking at Ohio State just a few days before abuse of power and dishonesty scandals swept over his administration, President Obama sang one of his trademark odes to the benevolence of government: Unfortunately you've grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's at the root of all of our problems. ... They'll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our ... experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can't be trusted. It was vintage Obama -- caricaturing his opponents' views (who believes government is at the root of "all" our problems?), and implying that concern about government overreach is equivalent to rejecting self-rule.
Two years ago, this column, along with others, raised an alarm about the Obama administration's decision radically to diminish the due process rights of those accused of sexual harassment on American campuses. There's a new outrage today, but first, a recap: In a 2011 letter to colleges, the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights (OCR) mandated that in cases of suspected sexual harassment or sexual assault, universities were to reduce the standard of proof to a more likely than not standard. The new standard requires that fact finders believe only that there is a 50.01 chance that the charges are true.
Stephen Hawking, the world-renowned physicist and celebrity, has cancelled a planned trip to Israel to participate in a conference sponsored by Israeli President Shimon Peres. His explanation: "I have received a number of emails from Palestinian academics. They are unanimous that I should respect the boycott. In view of this, I must withdraw from the conference." It's an odd world isn't it? By what inverted moral calculus does someone of Hawking's stature find it morally problematic to set foot on the soil of the region's only democracy? One wonders how many other nations has Hawking declined to visit in order to express his disapproval of their policies?
My iPhone buzzes on a regular basis with "news alerts" from Politico, The Hill and other sources. Politico provides breathless, this-cannot-wait-till-you-get-to-your desk "breaking news" sirens on every hiccup emanating from the White House. On April 22, for example, the news flash permitted me to learn without delay that "President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama will on Thursday attend a memorial service for the victims of last week's explosion in West, Texas." When three career employees of the State Department announced their intention to testify before Congress -- contradicting the Obama administration's carefully constructed storyline about events in Benghazi, Libya -- my phone was silent. News is very much in the eye of the beholder.
The Obama administration is quite worried about stereotyping Muslims as violence-prone terrorists. They fear that any acknowledgment that some Muslims commit acts of terror because they are religiously motivated (however twisted the terrorists' interpretation of Islam may be) is to encourage a backlash of intolerance (at best) and violence (at worst) against Muslim Americans. It's not crazy to worry about anti-Muslim violence. There have been vicious attacks on innocent Muslims. Last November, a Queens, N.Y., man was stabbed six times as he stood outside his mosque by an attacker who shouted "F------ Muslim, I'll kill you." In the wake of the Boston bombing, a drunk Northern Virginia man reportedly attacked and broke the jaw of a cab driver (an Army reservist who served in Iraq and at Guantanamo) after snarling "If you're a Muslim, you're a (expletive) jihadist. You are just as bad as the rest of them."
"Personal charm may be Obama's last best hope" headlined the Washington Post on Monday. That charm was on ample display at the annual vanity fest called the White House Correspondents Association dinner over the weekend. The dinner always features two comedians -- one professional, and the other, the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Skilled joke writers contribute the one-liners, but delivery counts, too, and President Obama has clearly improved over the course of four years. In 2009, some of his jokes were in bad taste. He said Dick Cheney was writing his memoirs, to be titled "How to Shoot Friends and Interrogate People." While a few lines were amusing -- addressing the press he said, "most of you covered me and *all* of you voted for me" -- the speech wasn't top-drawer entertainment.
It was cool and rainy Sunday morning when the bomb ripped through the building. At 10:22, a group of children was just heading into the basement to hear a sermon at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. According to a Washington Post account at the time: Dozens of survivors, their faces dripping blood from the glass that flew out of the church's stained glass windows, staggered around the building in a cloud of white dust raised by the explosion. Four girls were killed. The head of one little girl was found far from her body. Twenty-two others were injured. Wandering through his devastated church, the Rev. John H. Cross found a megaphone and asked the enraged and stunned crowd to disperse. "The Lord is our shepherd," he sobbed, "we shall not want."
If there was one thing the left was certain about in 2008 it was this: George W. Bush had catastrophically undermined America's world reputation with his unprovoked aggression and use of torture. The advent of Obama would reverse the damage. As Andrew Sullivan wrote in 2007, among best assets Obama brought to the "rebranding" of America was "his face." The election of Obama and his friendly approach to the Muslim world would make the United States safer as well as more just. No one believed this tale more fervently than Obama himself. His first official act was to direct the closing of Guantanamo Bay within one year and the elimination of harsh interrogation techniques. The "message we are sending around the world," he intoned, "is that the United States intends to prosecute the ongoing struggle ... in a manner that is consistent with our values and our ideals." In Cairo a few months later, he declared, "a new beginning" of relations between America and the Muslim world.
Obama doesn't care about dead children. He's indifferent to the suffering of their parents. There isn't a single coherent argument on his side of the case. He lies about the issue. It's pure politics. That's the way the dispute would be presented if Obama's opponents deployed the kind of demagogic language he slips on like comfortable loafers. Sounds harsh, doesn't it, possibly even racist? Funny how touchy everyone is about the way Obama is criticized but how indifferent most are to his low accusations. His opponents are always guilty of bad faith, whereas he is concerned about preventing children from being mowed down by crazed gunmen. Except he isn't. The gun control measures the president worked so hard to pass and which the Senate voted down would have done nothing to prevent Newtown and would do nothing to prevent the next Newtown.
To understand the magnitude of what Egyptian columnist Khalid Muntasir has done, it helps to get a taste of what most Egyptian and Arab media are like. In Egypt, expressions of vicious anti-Semitism are not just acceptable, they are commonplace. Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader and now president of Egypt, was famously captured on tape describing Jews as the "descendants of apes and pigs," as recently as 2010. This aroused not a flicker of controversy inside Egypt. In 2002, Egyptian state television, along with channels throughout the Arab world, ran a program giving credence to the infamous Czarist forgery, "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," a "document" that supposedly traces the Jewish conspiracy to rule the world and a durable standard of anti-Semitic ravings for a century. The most vile anti-Jewish (not just anti-Israeli) calumnies are circulated widely in the Arab press. Mein Kampf is a bestseller in the Palestinian territories, and Islamist supremacism blends with ethnic hatred throughout the Arab world to concoct a brew of overpowering anti-Semitic (and often anti-Christian) virulence.
We tell ourselves, we parents of college-bound kids (not to mention ordinary citizens), that American campuses really aren't as bad as all that, that students can avoid the most tendentious indoctrinators and that the press tends to exaggerate. And then we read headlines like "Kathy Boudin Teaching at Columbia" and sharp reality once again punctures the comfortable cushion of denial. I'm not speaking personally because I'm among the hyper-vigilant and politically obsessed. I read the newsletters of the National Association of Scholars, a group of academics who bravely battle campus attempts to suppress free speech and free inquiry. I scan the press for news of academia. But most Americans, I'd guess, while knowing that college faculties are dominated by liberals, don't realize quite how extreme or how deeply corrupt our campuses have become.
President Obama's statement honoring Margaret Thatcher was an example of the chameleon-like nature of liberalism. Rewriting history is a liberal specialty. Just as the anti-Cold War liberals were miraculously transformed into cold warriors after the war had been won, yesterday's anti-Thatcherites are today morphing into something else. The president's statement praises Thatcher as one the "great champions of freedom and liberty" and goes on to observe "she stands as an example to our daughters that there is no glass ceiling that can't be shattered." So today we all celebrate Margaret Thatcher as a feminist icon? This is revisionism of a high order.
I plunged into Thomas Sowell's latest book "Intellectuals and Race" immediately upon its arrival but soon realized that I needed to slow down. Many writers express a few ideas with a great cataract of words. Sowell is the opposite. Every sentence contains at least one insight or fascinating statistic, frequently more than one. His newest offering is only 139 pages (excluding notes), but tackles a huge question -- the damage that bad ideas on matters of race peddled by self-satisfied intellectuals have had and continue to have on the world. Race is almost a national psychosis for Americans, distorting our perceptions and inhibiting rational debate. Sowell places our obsession in context both historically and internationally.
It's a deeply felt conviction among liberals that they are the caring party. It's not too much to say that liberals are quite confident that they are nicer, more moral people than conservatives. It must require truly titanic powers of denial for the "moral" and "compassionate" party to maintain its position on abortion -- a position that leads them into some macabre rationalizations. Consciences among the morally superior party are agreeably quiescent. But recent headlines have not been similarly cooperative. In Florida, the legislature is considering a variant of the "Born Alive Infants Protection Act," which would require that abortionists provide medical assistance to infants who are "accidentally" born alive and kicking during an abortion. (Then State Senator Barack Obama vociferously opposed similar legislation in Illinois.)
Same-sex marriage is probably inevitable in America whatever the Supreme Court decides. That's because the public is clearly leaning that way. That the court is even being asked to impose a sweeping social change on the nation is illustrative of another lost battle -- the idea that the Supreme Court is not a super-legislature and that nine robed lawyers ought to refrain from imposing their policy preferences on the whole nation. Even two liberal justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, have from time to time expressed caution about the Court imposing its will on matters better left up to the people and their elected representatives. It will be interesting to see whether those prudential considerations come into play in their decisions in these cases or whether the desire for a particular outcome overwhelms concerns about the Court's proper role. Too few Americans recognize this for what it is -- a loss of sovereignty.
This week, together with about 13 million Jews worldwide (yes, that's all there are), our family will celebrate the Feast of Passover -- perhaps the oldest continuously celebrated religious holiday in the world. Passover is primarily a holiday of the home, not the synagogue. The preparations take days. We sit down to a table adorned with familiar objects: a silver cup for the Prophet Elijah, candle sticks, a lamp shank representing the sacrifice in Temple days, bitter herbs, matzah, parsley, eggs and salt water. We do the traditional "seder" -- its choreographed rituals burnished by centuries of practice. Everything is repeated on the second night, except in Israel, where only one night is observed. The traditional explanation for this repetition (other Jewish holidays are also repeated) is that after the dispersion of the Jews following the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 of the Common Era, Jews in the diaspora could not be certain exactly when the holiday dawned in Israel. So they performed the rituals twice, just to be safe.
In my last column, I argued that for all the undeniable woes of the Republican Party, the unfurling of Obamacare represents a huge vulnerability for Democrats. The Democratic health reform bill is economically nonsensical and politically unpopular. A recent Rasmussen poll found that 54 percent believe the law will damage the U.S. health care system. Even among Democrats, support for the law is ebbing. In February, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that only 57 percent of Democrats (compared with 72 percent in November of 2012) support the law. The battle over health care reform is not over. Yes, the 2012 election ensured that the law would not be repealed and replaced in 2013. But when the American people are unhappy with a policy, they find a way to alter it. Republicans can tie themselves in knots and consider abandoning their principles on abortion, taxes, immigration or marriage (and perhaps some of those positions require rethinking), but the health care issue is pitched right over home plate.
