Columnist.
PITTSBURGH -- According to the experts, this ought to be "Obama Country." In the 2008 presidential election, the Obama "Hope and Change" machine scored big in western Pennsylvania, carrying the region with nearly 58 percent of the vote. But this week, there's little evidence of that support here in the Steel City, where more than 70,000 freedom-loving Americans have gathered for the National Rifle Association's 140th annual meeting. On Wednesday, while NRA officials were making final preparations for the "Three Rivers Celebration of American Values," President Barack Obama made an unanticipated visit to the White House pressroom for a "special announcement." Several police officers -- veterans of the campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan or both -- were in the security operations center here when a duty officer announced that the television networks were interrupting regular programming for live coverage of urgent presidential remarks.
WASHINGTON -- Easter morning sunrise services are part of a long tradition in Christianity. For millenniums, believers around the globe have gathered in the open at dawn on Easter Sunday to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ and profess their faith. This year, there will be far fewer such assemblies in the Middle East and southwest Asia. For this we can thank what President Barack Obama calls the "Arab spring." One of the rarely reported consequences of the "democracy movement" sweeping across the southern Mediterranean coast to the tip of the Arabian Peninsula and up the Persian Gulf has been an increasing threat to indigenous Christian communities -- some of which date back nearly 2,000 years. This Holy Week, the Obama administration was quick to profess "outrage" at the Gadhafi regime for killing and wounding journalists in Misrata, Libya. Yet neither the White House nor our NATO allies have condemned a spike in violence against Christians throughout the region.
WASHINGTON -- We finally know how President Barack Obama wants us to handle our nation's crippling national debt. If we can believe his words, the president intends to ignore the monster under the bed -- Social Security entitlements -- while he raises taxes and cuts deeply into our nation's defense. Haven't we heard this song before? On April 13, more than a week after Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., provided a detailed "Choice of Two Futures" blueprint for how the GOP would reduce our disastrous deficit, Obama showed up late at George Washington University to describe how he now wants to fix the problem he failed to address in his fiscal year 2012 federal budget proposal. The geniuses at the White House decided to call the president's address "The Country We Believe In." Set aside the grammatical anomaly of ending the title with a preposition.
WASHINGTON -- According to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, everything is hunky-dory on America's southern border. In her public appearances and speeches, Napolitano consistently claims that things along our side of the U.S.-Mexico border are "safer than ever" and that "spillover violence" is simply "a widespread misperception." In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed column she co-authored with Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, Napolitano claimed, "The Southwest Border Is Open for Business." Unfortunately, too much of the business is in drugs, murder and mayhem -- and business is good.
It was an auxiliary -- not a U.S. military or government source -- who encouraged me to report that allied air-ground control teams and commandos were already on the ground in Libya providing target data when the first French and British airstrikes took place near Benghazi on March 19. Afterward, I was disparaged for disclosing classified information. The critique is misplaced. My reports described why these ground control teams were essential to allied aircraft attacks on Gadhafi's armored mechanized units that were about to overrun rebel forces. I noted that these close air support missions preceded U.S. and British missile strikes and airstrikes against Gadhafi's air defense sites and that they had nothing to do with establishing a no-fly zone as we were being told by the Obama administration. The information I relayed was not classified -- but it could not be independently confirmed. Now it is.
WASHINGTON -- Nobel laureate Barack Obama, fresh from his Latin American spring break, is in serious trouble. Globalists and Utopians who once lauded his constant contrition now want POTUS to return his Peace Prize. Here in Washington, libertarians, progressives and conservatives are outraged that U.S. military forces were committed to combat in Libya without a congressional resolution. The commander in chief's approval ratings are dropping faster than a JDAM. And no matter what happens to Moammar Gadhafi, the turmoil in the Middle East is likely to get a whole lot worse before it gets better. For all of this, President Obama has nobody to blame but himself.
WASHINGTON -- Try this for a timeline of recent events that affect Americans, and see whether you can determine whether the leader of the Free World suffers from presidential attention-deficit disorder: Wednesday, March 9: The 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit at Camp Lejeune, N.C., is alerted to deploy with all possible haste for the Mediterranean Sea and be prepared for military and humanitarian contingency operations off the coast of Libya. That night, President Barack Obama hosted a "TV party" at the White House to watch a basketball game: the Chicago Bulls vs. the Charlotte Bobcats. The Bulls won.
WASHINGTON -- Fuel and food prices are up. So is unemployment. Officials in the Obama administration and their allies on Capitol Hill are stunned. They shouldn't be. It's O-Team policy -- or lack of it -- that got us here. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits for the first time jumped this week to 397,000 -- meaning there are more people looking for work than the private sector has jobs available. You don't have to be a government economist to see the direct connection between rising costs for essentials -- such as gasoline, home heating fuel, electricity and eating -- and layoffs.
WASHINGTON -- In 1794, during George Washington's second term as president, Congress finally got around to appropriating funds to build six wooden-hulled frigates that were "sufficiently armed" to protect American shipping from pirates and fast enough to evade British and French "ships of the line." It wasn't enough. America needed an expeditionary force in readiness. It still does. Just a decade after our first fleet was built, President Thomas Jefferson had to beg Congress for funds to deploy ships, sailors and Marines in adequate numbers to force pirates from Tripoli -- the present-day capital of Libya -- to stop them from seizing American merchant vessels and enslaving their crews. Now President Barack Obama faces a similar quandary -- too few ships and troops to protect American citizens and interests -- off the same coastline.
WASHINGTON -- According to Hillary Clinton, "the safety and well-being of Americans has to be our highest priority." Oh, really? That comment, proffered by our secretary of state Tuesday, is overshadowed by the serious jeopardy U.S. citizens now encounter thanks to the ideological blindness and national security incompetence of the Obama administration. Since 2011 began, more than 20 Americans have been injured, killed or gone missing in the midst of violence in Lebanon, Tunisia, Iran, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Mexico and the Indian Ocean. American citizens are being held by government authorities in Iran, Yemen and Pakistan -- and by pirates in Somalia. Our State Department says it is "concerned."
WASHINGTON -- For days after protests started in Cairo, the Obama administration struggled to find its voice about the "revolution" in Egypt. When the O-Team eventually decided Hosni Mubarak had to go, the White House and the State Department began chattering about a "democratic outcome." In the end, they settled for a military coup while proclaiming a "victory for the people." Now, with violent anti-government protests in the streets of Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and Iran, President Barack Obama's moral ambiguity is increasingly evident -- and dangerous. The current predicament of what to do and say about the increasingly volatile situation in the Middle East is the direct consequence of totally inadequate intelligence and Obama's own vague Utopian goals for the region. It has been that way since the beginning of his tenure.
WASHINGTON -- On Thursday morning, the heads of America's intelligence services went to Capitol Hill to testify before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on worldwide threats to the United States. We won't know what was said in the committee's closed sessions until it's leaked by one of the participants. But to paraphrase former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, based on their public testimony, what we now know about what our intelligence services don't know ought to alarm us. The director of national intelligence, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, stunned the committee by describing Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood -- the organization that has co-opted pro-democracy protests in Cairo's Tahrir Square -- as "a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried al-Qaida as a perversion of Islam. ... They have pursued social ends, a betterment of the political order in Egypt."
When Barack Obama went to Cairo in June 2009, he was lauded for seeking "a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world." His speech was spiked with apologies for what he believes are past American errors and omissions and peppered with Utopian calls for "peace in the Middle East," a "world in which no nations hold nuclear weapons" and upholding "the richness of religious diversity." The president also boldly proclaimed himself to be "a student of history." But two years on, it appears he has not learned some of history's lessons very well.
WASHINGTON -- This year's State of the Union address has been parsed, analyzed, applauded (80 times), celebrated and derided. The rhetoric has been described as "visionary" and "myopic." The president's promises and pledges have been depicted as "important" and "hollow." None of that really matters in the near term. What's most important right now is how the Obama administration handles the increasingly intense cries for greater freedom sweeping from Tunisia to Yemen -- threatening every authoritarian Muslim regime in that region save one: Iran's. The theocrats in Tehran didn't foment the "Jasmine Revolution" -- the youth-driven popular uprising that forced Tunisia's Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to flee the presidential palace he occupied for 23 years. The unrest that drove Ben Ali into comfortable exile in a Saudi palace began as a protest against government corruption, high unemployment and a spike in the price of basic foodstuffs. But the ayatollahs are capitalizing on the expanding chaos.
WASHINGTON -- When the world tunes in for the State of the Union address next week, viewers will be treated to a dramatic improvement in the background scenery. Thanks to American voters, House Speaker John Boehner's well-tanned smile will be behind the president instead of Nancy Pelosi's surgically enhanced grimace. But if President Barack Obama -- who campaigned for office by promising "hope" and "change" -- is paying attention to current events, he must also alter his message. James Carville's famous words, "It's the economy, stupid," are still true. Therefore, most of what Obama says Tuesday night will focus on ways he can be credited with "creating and preserving" American jobs and stemming the tidal wave of home foreclosures. Predictably, he will find ways to blame his predecessor for our current economic travail. His remarks will include carefully crafted applause lines on new calls for "civility" in political discourse in the aftermath of the atrocity in Tucson, Ariz., along with pledges to cut deficit spending and debt in the years ahead. We also should expect promises to "work with Republicans" on "improving, not ending," his health insurance law and platitudes about "protecting American security" while eliminating "waste, fraud and abuse" by "reforming" our nation's defense budget.
WASHINGTON -- Shortly after 10 a.m. MST on Saturday, Jan. 8, an apparently unstable young man goes on a murderous rampage at a grocery in Tucson, Ariz. A federal judge and five others are murdered in cold blood. Thirteen others -- including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords -- are seriously injured. Those are the cold, hard facts. It's a serious story. It begs the inevitable question: "How could this happen?" But instead of starting a dispassionate examination of the details, members of the mainstream media, politicians and pundits -- within minutes of the event -- began twisting the atrocity in Tucson. In the days since, exploitation of this tragedy has become a national pastime.
WASHINGTON -- Congratulations, Speaker Boehner, to you and the members of your new majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. The gracious humility of your acceptance remarks was a vivid contrast to your predecessor's ill-mannered comments as she handed over the speaker's gavel. She clearly does not intend to be held accountable for the disastrous performance of her party in last November's elections.
WASHINGTON -- "Happy new year," I said to the long-haul trucker as we arrived simultaneously at the door of a service station just off Interstate 70 near Frederick, Md. The temperature was in the teens; the wind was gusting at more than 30 miles per hour; and his 18-wheel rig was covered with residue of the blizzard he had driven through on his way west. "What's to be happy about?" was his frosty response to my cheery salutation. He continued in a tone more frigid than the weather: "Have you seen the price of diesel fuel? It's going to cost you 50 bucks to fill up your SUV. It's going to run me almost a grand. I'm an independent trucker. My wife lost her job last year when the company where she worked for 15 years shut down. I'm hauling Chinese-made auto parts from Baltimore to Indianapolis and then a load of scrap steel to California for shipment to China. My wife and our three kids are counting on me. And the clowns in Washington are trying to put me out of business."
WASHINGTON -- This magnificent musical work penned by Handel in 1741 is heard all around the world in this season. His powerful lyrics are drawn directly from the Bible and remind us all to be thankful for the birth, sacrifice and resurrection of the Lamb of God. In our family Christmas tradition, Handel's oratorio is performed at our Christmas Eve church service. The following morning, we play it in the background as our children -- and now a dozen grandchildren -- rip into their presents around a carefully decorated Scotch pine. Each time I hear it, the music prompts me to be grateful for the Prince of Peace -- and thankful for those whose selfless service makes it possible for us to enjoy this celebration in tranquility.
WASHINGTON -- There's a lot of phony hype about how tough things have gotten for the Obama administration. Last month, the president's party took "a shellacking" from Republicans at the polls. Those aren't my words; they're President Barack Obama's. Since then, he's been depicted as "politically wounded," "forced to accept a new reality" and "pushed into a corner" by tea party Republicans. Don't believe the propaganda. Despite GOP victories in the House of Representatives, governors' mansions and state legislatures Nov. 2, the O-Team persists in pressing its radical domestic agenda and Utopian national security policies. Obama's proclivity for waging class warfare and antipathy toward free enterprise are evident in everything that has happened since the midterm elections.
