Columnist.
As the fight continues over whether to raise taxes to ratify the additional $3.6 trillion President Obama and the Democrats have spent in just 27 months, you hear the same refrain from Democrats: We must raise taxes to the levels of the Clinton administration. This is always followed by flights of exaggeration portraying the Clinton era economic record as "The Greatest Peacetime Expansion in American History," or in world history, or in galactic history. They seem to think it was the tax hikes that produced the prosperity.
Free medicine! That's what Obamacare has brought you -- or should bring you, at least according to CNN. The story's opening sentence set the tone: "Contraceptives, sterilization and reproductive education should be covered by health insurance plans with no cost to patients under the health reform law, a new report recommends."
To be a Democrat means to live in denial. Consider all of the things you must ignore or explain away. The PIGS. Not the chauvinist pigs whose transgressions preoccupied 1970s feminists, but PIGS as in Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain -- nations facing sovereign debt crises because they pursued exactly the sort of policies Democrats favor for this country. The PIGS share bloated government sectors (In Greece, the government employs 33 percent of workers.), generous unemployment packages, high minimum wages, dire pension obligations and a shrinking tax base. Each week brings fresh news of turmoil in the streets.
Count on it: In the coming days and weeks, Republicans will be accused -- not just by Democrats, but by the chattering class that includes some self-styled conservatives -- of wild irresponsibility regarding the nation's fiscal health. It isn't that Republicans are models of rectitude on the subject -- see the Bush deficits. And it's true that some Republicans, like Americans for Tax Reform's Grover Norquist, have fetishized their opposition to taxes to the point where they defend pot-valiantly even tax subsidies such as those for ethanol. It's enough to make you think they're drinking the stuff. Still, when it comes to chaperoning America toward bankruptcy, the Democrats have no peers.
It is becoming a verbal tic -- the tendency on the part of the president to tell wealthy Americans ("people like me" he's always careful to add) that they have made more than enough money and will have to cough up more of it for the government. Speaking for himself on July 11, the president offered that he had "hundreds of thousands of dollars that I don't need." The president is of course welcome to donate as much of his extra money as he likes to the federal treasury. He knows Timothy Geithner personally and can probably get a guarantee that his check will be cashed without delay. And since the president is so ready to impute unpleasant motives (like greed) to those who oppose tax increases, perhaps we should impute some sort of moral failing to him for not having thus far contributed his spare change to the government.
It's impossible to read Ying Ma's fascinating memoir, "Chinese Girl in the Ghetto," without wincing. She was born in Guangzhou, China's third largest city. Throughout her mostly carefree early childhood years, she kept her family's secret: that her parents repeatedly sought permission to emigrate to the United States. Her family was not poor, at least not by Chinese standards of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Yet her daily life would be considered squalid by first world standards. Her family lived in a two-bedroom apartment. She, her brother and her parents shared one bedroom (and two plank beds). Her paternal grandparents and an uncle shared the other. At times, another uncle slept in the living room. They shared the kitchen and bathroom (such as it was) with the family next door. There was no running hot water, and the toilet was a hole in the floor. The elderly had a particularly hard time crouching.
How many times have we heard awestruck references to Barack Obama's history as a law professor? Many came from the man himself, as when he told a crowd at a 2007 fundraiser, "I was a constitutional law professor, which means unlike the current president, I actually respect the Constitution." Does he? At his press conference on June 29, the president was asked whether he thought the War Powers Act -- which he has flamboyantly flouted in the case of our armed conflict with Libya -- was constitutional. His reply, during which he managed to inject yet another reference to his credential as a law "professor" (he was actually not a professor but a senior lecturer, but never mind), expressed the most flippant disregard for law that we've heard from an American president since Richard Nixon jousted with David Frost.
If only lower income heterosexuals were as keen to marry as some homosexuals, the United States would be a much stronger country. Supporters of gay marriage (most prominently The New York Times, which reported New York's legalization of such unions last week with about as much hoopla as it did the Japanese surrender in 1945) are ecstatic.
History will be kind to me for I intend to write it. -- Winston Churchill There is history -- a chronicle of human events -- and then there is perceived history. So often, the two are wildly at odds. In 1963, a popular Democratic president was assassinated by a Marxist named Oswald, who had actually defected to the Soviet Union and returned to the U.S. with a Soviet wife, was an active member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and had attempted to assassinate a right-wing general named Edwin Walker earlier in the year.
It isn't quite panic yet, but the sounds emanating from Obamaland are certainly nervous. If you are David Axelrod, chief strategist for President Obama's re-election campaign, you are well aware of your idol's fall and doubtless less than thrilled to get this question from CNN's Candy Crowley: "Something that the president said this week struck me ... he said it's not as cool to be an Obama supporter as it was in 2008... I think he's right. I think it's not as cool to be an Obama supporter now. How do you get cool back into this?"
The Republicans candidates for president did a respectable job presenting themselves at the New Hampshire debate on Monday. But there was one person on stage most viewers must have wished they could vote out -- the moderator. John King was bumptious, bullying, and, with his "this or that" game-show gimmick, stupefyingly trivial. Isn't it members of the press who usually complain that candidates dodge the really important issues? Yet here was a CNN honcho wasting valuable airtime with questions like "BlackBerry or iPhone?" while the candidates itched to return to the deficit, taxes, health care, and foreign policy.
Joblessness haunts the Obama administration. The stimulus was the most spectacular flop of recent history. Yet the president, as he demonstrated in North Carolina Monday, knows no other way. Democrats are often scornful of Republicans for being "agenda driven" or "ideological." If they are in a particularly scornful mood, they'll throw in something about conservatives being "anti-science" or failing to pursue "fact-based" policies.
Rep. Anthony Weiner has achieved something by behaving so spectacularly shamefully. Unless I miss my guess, he has revived the concept of sexual morality. Even for a jaded nation, this is one sex scandal too far. We've had it. Our capacity to remain non-judgmental on sexual matters -- as we've been tirelessly instructed to do for 40 years -- seems to have reached its end point. The national reaction to Weiner's conduct, in contrast to previous sex scandals (and there have been too many to count in the past two decades), has been not amusement (though jokes made the rounds) but disgust. When even the ultra-liberal New York Times reaches for terms like "profoundly squalid," it's safe to say we've arrived at a new cultural moment: "Judgmentalism" is back.
The Washington Post has issued a post-mortem on the career of John Edwards ("American Dream is Irrevocably Undone") and finds tragedy and pathos. "The man born Johnny Reid Edwards had it. Great gobs of potential." He might have been, the Post laments, "a great husband, could have been an enduring statesman ... president." But fate intervened. With his indictment on misuse of campaign funds last week, "America witnessed the latest distasteful episode in ... (the) fall from grace of a political comet."
I will not get sentimental, or so I keep telling myself. Well, maybe a little sentimental, but never maudlin at the approaching departure of my 17-year-old son for college in the fall. Fall? Did I say fall? No, he leaves in August -- cruel calendar! If I sometimes find myself leafing through photos of him at 2 and 5 and 11 -- here nodding off in the stroller, there in his Harry Potter costume -- and if there's a smile at the memory of how enthralled the preschool David was with the Triassic, Cretaceous, Jurassic and its fearsome denizens, well, that's the way of mothers. One video I happened to pick off the shelf featured an 8-year-old David narrating a tour of the backyard with, as he put it, grinning, "my dimwitted assistant, Ben." That would be his little brother, who knew well how to give it back.
"The police are afraid," an Egyptian reported after witnessing 80 prisoners, some armed with machetes and guns, break out of a jail in Cairo. It was one of many such jailbreaks in the past three months. Crime, an unwelcome weed in the garden of the Arab Spring, has proliferated in the months since the Mubarak regime was driven from power. Egypt today is plagued by sectarian violence, kidnapping, and hooliganism. The police, who kept order through brutality and intimidation during the Mubarak era, are now too cowed to act. At a soccer match between the Egyptian and Tunisian teams, reports The New York Times, a referee's call on behalf of the Tunisians led to a riot. Spectators rushed the field, attacking the referee and the visiting team. Two players were sent to the hospital.
Though I warned two weeks ago about the possibility of a Republican loss in NY 26, I'm not sorry that Democrat Kathy Hochul's deceptive, demagogic resort to Mediscare succeeded. After May 24, no Republican can fail to anticipate the contours of the 2012 election. They'd best pay attention. The New York loss may yield even more dividends. It may induce a certain complacency among Democrats. Rep. Steve Israel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, crowed, "Today, the Republican plan to end Medicare cost Republicans $3.4 million and a seat in Congress. And this is only the first seat ... We served notice to the Republicans that we will fight them anywhere in America when it comes to defending and strengthening Medicare."
President Obama has claimed many times to be a steadfast friend of the state of Israel. He certainly found bold words to convey that impression when he addressed the AIPAC conference in 2008. "(W)e know that we cannot relent, we cannot yield, and, as president, I will never compromise when it comes to Israel's security ... not when there are still voices that deny the Holocaust, not when there are terrorist groups and political leaders committed to Israel's destruction, not when there are maps across the Middle East that don't even acknowledge Israel's existence, and government-funded textbooks filled with hatred towards Jews, not when there are rockets raining down on Sderot, and Israeli children have to take a deep breath and summon uncommon courage every time they board a bus or walk to school."
Call it testosterone poisoning: A group of fraternity pledges at Yale, blindfolded and led in a line, each with his hands on the shoulders of the boy in front of him (the Yalie bunny hop?), were paraded in front of the Women's Center. There they shouted vile and puerile slogans including "No means yes, yes means anal" and "My name is Jack, I'm a necrophiliac, I f--- dead women." "It makes you want to slap those kids," laments Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Idiotic behavior like that of Delta Kappa Epsilon makes his job -- defending free speech and common sense in the Orwellian universe of the American academy -- that much more difficult.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's plea that Congress would have to pass the 906-page Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in order to "find out what's in it" has become an instant classic in the annals of dysfunctional government. But in the months since the bill's passage, as the Department of Health and Human Services has parceled out waivers, something else has become clear: We may never know what's in it.
