Columnist.
Does anyone remember what it was that turned America hostile toward the tropical paradise of Cuba? Our president tells us "we're caught in a time warp, going back to the 1950s and gunboat diplomacy, and 'Yanquis' and the Cold War." Yes, really, "gunboat diplomacy." That is how University of Chicago adjunct law professors talk about American foreign policy. And he adds, "Sometimes those controversies date back to before I was born." So, what got America so riled up over the Castro brothers and Cuban communists even before Barack Obama was born? As I recall, it was a bipartisan hostility. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican if memory serves, began it. His successor, John F. Kennedy, a Democrat, continued it, and he and his brother Bob actually dragged the nation through the Cuban missile crisis. Then Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, and Richard Nixon, a Republican, and literally every president thereafter continued to harass and afflict the Castros until President Obama had the brilliant idea of simply using his executive powers to relax various commercial and travel restrictions against Cuba. Yet why did America's hostility toward Cuba start in in the first place?
Some of my most cherished lines from President Bill Clinton's presidency had nothing to do with women with whom he did or did not have sexual relations. Rather, they were inspired by the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which he signed on the South Lawn of the White House on Nov. 16, 1993. At the time, there was not much controversy about what he then said, but they were admirable lines nonetheless. Today they might be deemed heroic lines. Back in 1993, President Clinton said that our Founding Fathers "knew that religion helps to give our people a character without which a democracy cannot survive." Then he elaborated on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, saying: "What this law basically says is that the government should be held to a very high level of proof before it interferes with someone's free exercise of religion. This judgment is shared by the people of the United States, as well as by the Congress. We believe strongly that we can never be too vigilant in this work." In the coming years, some 30 states adopted variations of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and all was quiet, until whammo.
What is going on in American politics of late? There has not emerged a truly goofball politician since Anthony Weiner, the congressman and later New York mayoral candidate who could not resist sending pictures of his private part so frequently and to so many women that it really was no longer a private part but rather a public spectacle. Go ahead; Google it. In fact, Yahoo it. My guess is there are dozens of pictures of Weiner's public private part all over the Internet. The best example of a contemporary pol's being slightly goofball is Aaron Schock, the Republican from Illinois' 18th Congressional District. Yet he has had the good sense to resign from Congress. My guess is he suspected there was something shameful about his deportment. One cannot really be a goofball pol and accept the notion of shame. Yet what caused him to leave Congress? Was it the hubristic pride he took in his torso? Countless times, he was photographed displaying the exquisite torso of a male underwear model to the world. That was a hoot, and even more of a hoot was his appearance on the cover of Men's Health magazine with his shirt out and daringly unbuttoned to display his well-toned abs. By the way, what sport demands well-toned abs?
What do you know, the world's leading reformer of Islam is turning out to be a general. He is not a learned mullah. He is not a suicide bomber. He does not even have a weaponized bicycle. He is Egypt's Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi who, somewhat reminiscent of our own General George Washington, turned in his uniform for civilian garb and was elected president of Egypt with a huge majority. President el-Sissi's new role as reformer should not be terribly surprising. After all, the last great reformer in the Arab world was the Egyptian statesman Anwar Sadat. Sadat restricted his reforms to politics, initiating a demarche with Israel. Those reforms ended abruptly when assassins shot him as he appeared at a public ceremony in Cairo in 1981. To be sure President el-Sissi's reforms are political, but they are also religious. He has called upon religious clerics assembled at the premier Cairo university of Al-Azhar to commit Islam to a "revolution."
A couple of months back in our nation's capital Senator Rand Paul spoke at The American Spectator's annual Robert L. Bartley dinner and wowed the crowd. However, at the end of his rousing speech, he assumed a more somber tone as he spoke about the plight of America's poor, particularly the poor who commit petty crime. He expanded his remarks to include those who commit petty crime in general and find themselves committed to the unwelcoming doors of the American prison system from which they emerge often only infrequently. Our American prison system turns out to be a place with little to offer, save for an advanced degree in criminality. If one were intent on entering a life of crime, one might begin in an American prison. Senator Paul's point was that something should be done about criminalizing petty crime and handing down onerous sentences when other forms of punishment are available. Stealing a loaf of bread or selling a small quantity of marijuana or some other controlled substance ought not to land a young person in jail, putting him on the road to more serious and more violent crimes. It ought not to condemn the young person to a life spent in and out of the criminal justice system when other options are available.
Regarding last week's string of stories about Hillary Clinton conducting her State Department business between 2009 and 2013 exclusively on a private email account, the heat -- as we say here in Washington -- is on in the kitchen. Her account was completely controlled by her. Even the server was controlled by her. She apparently had no State Department account when she was secretary of state, and no one thought to ask about it until late in 2014 when a Congressional committee inquiring into the bloody assault on our complexes in Benghazi sought her emails. Yet now the heat is on in the kitchen and the Episodic Apologists are turning it up. Yesterday's press conference was an attempt to calm them with the blessed emollient of Clintonian confusion. We shall see how it works.
Readers of this column are familiar with my argument that a conservative tide is sweeping the country, contrary to the mainstream media. In the off-year elections of 2010 and 2014, the gains made by conservatives have been substantial in governors' mansions and in state legislatures. To be sure, they have been substantial in Washington, too, at the House and Senate level, but I would argue that they have been more consequential at the state level. There, old conventions that have been in place since the left-wing 1960s are being heaved out, and a clamor of protest is being heard from the evicted. It can only get worse. Since the late 1960s, state universities have established departments and "learning" centers that have nothing to do with education and everything to do with advocacy for a certain narrow points of view -- say minority studies, feminist studies, advocacy for the poor, the people with eating disorders, the chronic bedwetters -- that sort of thing. State governments, too, have allowed taxpayers' dollars to be skimmed off into similar projects. Now state governments, recently taken over by conservative Republicans -- possibly even by tea partiers -- are closing down such boondoggles and provoking howls of indignation from the so-called aggrieved.
When former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said he did not think that "the president loves America," was he right? Of course he was. The record is strewn with President Barack Obama's statements of contempt for America. In a quieter setting, I think Professor Obama would agree. He would then go on to brag about his love for higher things: for humankind, for the world community, for the planet, the green planet. Recall in 2009 when Obama told a European audience, "There have been times when America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive toward" Europe. I cannot remember exactly when "America" or even an American president expressed these sentiments, but I guess Obama and his speechwriters can. He has also expressed his contempt for the American system of commerce. In a speech abundant with contempt for capitalism he said -- and I shall only pick out one passage -- "if you've got a business, you didn't build that."
The irrepressible New York Times is at it again! First it destroys the credibility of the most trusted newsreader in America, Brian Williams, and leaves him in a heap exposed as a flagrant liar. Now it is destroying the credibility of the most trusted comic in America, Jon Stewart, and intent on leaving him, too, in a heap exposed as a flagrant liar. All poor Stewart ever did was to sally forth into the realm of irony, saying on Twitter and Facebook that "Finally, someone is being held to account for misleading America about the Iraq War." He was, as fate would have it, joking about his erstwhile collaborator in comedy, Williams. Then, whammo, the Times publishes its heavily documented piece divulging how the CIA and the American army, after vanquishing Saddam Hussein's forces, undertook a very effective program, Operation Avarice, for "acquiring and destroying at least 400 Borak rockets, one of the internationally condemned chemical weapons that Saddam Hussein's Baathist government manufactured in the 1980s ..."
On the vexed matter of Brian Williams my friend and colleague Wes Pruden raises a fundamental question. "Brian Williams, the tall tale teller for NBC News, has had a rough few days, but he's likely to survive," writes Wes. "He'll probably be back," Wes speculates, even overcoming the derisible endorsement of Dan Rather. Dan, your endorsement could be the kiss of death to poor Brian. Is there no reality-check on these egomaniacs? My view is at variance with Wes's. He will never return to NBC Nightly News. Within a week of publicly apologizing for claiming to be on a helicopter that endured enemy fire in Iraq in 2003, Williams saw his ranking among America's most trusted public persons drop from 23 to 835, according to a leading research firm that gathers such preposterous findings for advertisers and marketing executives, the New York Times tells us. In six months his ranking will be in oblivion. The Times also tells us that Williams is "distraught," and "according to people close to him, [he is] telling friends that if he could go door to door and apologize to each of his viewers he would do so." I suggest that he start doing so, and after he has apologized to his last viewer he might return to NBC and ask for his job back. The job will be gone, as will some management at NBC News.
Two potential Republican presidential candidates caused mild palpitations amongst the press corps this week in expressing their misgivings about state-mandated children's vaccinations. The press's concern could be a precursor of what Republican candidates might experience in the coming primaries. Ostensibly a mild outbreak in measles is the cause of the journalists' alarm. Governor Chris Christie, speaking in the United Kingdom, and Senator Rand Paul, speaking on radio and TV talk shows, expressed their reservations about this public health policy. Christie called for "some balance of choice" between health officials and parents. Paul said most vaccines should be voluntary.
There is a problem with the Internet. Its commentary is too often dominated by pinheads. H.L. Mencken used to complain that only idiots write letters to the editor. That might have been true of his day -- the 1920s and 1930s -- but in our time writers of letters to the editor of newspapers and even of websites are occasionally quite well-informed and even lucid. But others, I am afraid, are indeed pinheads, sitting in their underwear back home, foaming at the mouth, believing that the whole world is profoundly interested in their every word, until the authorities arrive at their homes to take them away. Friends have informed me that this is the case with those crybabies who protest that conservative columnists are insufficiently conservative, weak-kneed and fatuous. In the correspondence pages of newspapers and websites, they bawl for some extravagant idea about immigration, the Common Core, or some other hare-brained notion that they, in their delusion of grandeur, believe is the true conservative position on this or that. A friend suggests that I should remind these fantasticoes of "how far conservatives have come from the early 1950s when the leading exponents of conservatism could all fit quite comfortably into the corner telephone booth of a major city."
A few weeks back, many Americans were understandably perplexed by Duke University's decision to allow Muslim students to sound the call for Friday prayer (the adan) from the belfry of its famed Chapel tower. After all, the Chapel has its roots in Methodism, Duke having been historically linked to the United Methodist Church. Moreover, you would think that the left-wing professoriate that dominates the Duke campus would raise concerns about an old bugaboo, the separation of church and state. Imagine if Catholic students called on Duke to allow Gregorian Chant to be sung from the belfry or Baptist students called upon Duke to allow a weekly sermon of fire and brimstone. The Rev. Franklin Graham, the evangelist and son of the Rev. Billy Graham -- for many Americans a kind of Protestant Pope -- reacted with a sense of astonishment that typified the reaction of many Americans. He said, "As Christianity is being excluded from the public square and followers of Islam are raping, butchering, and beheading Christians, Jews, and anyone who doesn't submit to their Sharia Islamic law, Duke is promoting this in the name of religious pluralism." Thus as Duke students frolicked through their days flinging Frisbees and cutting classes and as their earnest profs rode skateboards to nearly empty classrooms, Fridays would be marked by the Islamic adhan ringing from the Chapel belfry for the Muslim few -- the majority of Duke's 700 Muslims are apparently not that religious. This was the state of things until Jan. 15.
This column over the years has been interested in liberalism in a special way, as a coroner is interested in a corpse in a special way. Specifically, I have been interested in the pathologies that laid the patient low. What precisely has been the cause of death? The coroner asks what made a robust fellow a corpse. Was it a remorseless cancer or a tragic accident? Was it Huntington's disease or something else, possibly, simple alcoholism? In the case of the liberal, the cause of death was almost certainly a massive overindulgence. Simply stated, the liberals attempted too much. They even attempted to solve problems that were not conventionally understood as problems. After all, there were no plausible solutions, for instance, for the elimination poverty, which in America amounts to relative deprivation, not destitution. How can we solve a citizen's relative deprivation?
As the Republicans settle into the House of Representatives and the Senate, with in the House's case their largest margin in 86 years and in the Senate's case about as healthy a margin as they could have gained in 2014, the talk in major media is of the Republicans' many problems. As the Washington Post put it in a front-page headline, "Rancor in GOP flares ..." The Democrats should suffer from such "rancor." I wonder how the local press is handling the Republicans' takeover across the nation. The Republicans have gained control of 24 state governments, from the governors' mansions to the state legislatures. The Democrats have only managed to hang on to similar dominance in seven states down, down from 13 in 2014. Any way you look at it, these are palmy times for the Republicans, unless you are looking through the bloodshot eyes of a Democrat or a camouflaged Democrat, say, a member of the press corps.
It is the end of the year 2014 and the beginning of 2015. Perhaps it is an appropriate time to think about what we are to be confronted with in the presidential year 2016. Ever since the autumn electoral rout of the Democrats, we have been confronted by news stories of the looming presidential prospects of Hillary Rodham Clinton and hints about the rise of the presidential prospects of Elizabeth Warren. Only rarely is there a news story about the presidential prospects of the Republicans, though I count more than 25 possible Republican candidates. On the Democrats side we only hear of two, Clinton and Warren.
Two news stories, both from New York City, suggest that 2015 may be a grim year, but the grimness might be tinged with whimsy -- at least in the second case. First the grimness, and I write as an American with two proud police officers prominent in my family tree, my great-grandfather and my great-great-grandfather. The first was Frank Tyrrell, for many years the sole survivor of Chicago's Haymarket Riot. As a youngster, wearing short pants and a neatly pressed suit coat, I went along with the burly members of the Chicago Police Department to place a wreath on the Haymarket memorial. Incidentally, the Chicago police had to move the memorial indoors after the radical SDS in the early 1970s bombed it a second time. Did our president's accomplice, Bill Ayers, have a hand in the bombing? We shall wait for the full Obama memoir.
Will Rogers, the late American humorist and corn-pone philosopher, once said, "All I know is what I read in the papers." That statement earned him a place in Bartletts's Familiar Quotations. Were he alive today it would most likely be inviting widespread derision. Today's newspapers abound with bogus stories. Most of us only know of the stories that are soon exposed. Doubtless there are many more. For instance, news stories of GDP growth or inflation rates usually have to be revised but they are taken at face value when they first appear. Are there any newspaper readers in America who do not know about the humbug of Rolling Stone's story about alleged rape at the University of Virginia? The story was based solely on the word of the alleged victim without any further sourcing. Now University officials and local police have yet to find a trace of the seven alleged rapists. The fraternity at which the alleged rape took place has no record of a party having taken place there -- two years ago, as it happens! And one more thing, it appears three of the victim's original supporters now think they were given a bogus email address. They are beginning to doubt her elaborate story, which features no witnesses other than her.
I should like to pose a question to the overnight press baron Chris Hughes, who owns the New Republic that he has rendered moribund with astounding speed and no class at all. My question is an old-fashioned one that might have circulated within the humanities faculty at universities two generations ago. "What," I would ask, "makes a book more authoritative and satisfying than a news report?" Most of the profs in their tweed jackets, and some pulling on their briar pipes, would answer that the author of a book has more time to write it than the author of a news story, and the author of a book has more sources to consult and more interviews to conduct. He or she works from more evidence and writes with greater care -- at least one would hope. To which today's slightly crazed neoteric shouts some gibberish about "a vertically integrated digital media company" and leaves the room, preferably with the slam of a door.
Alas it is over. I am speaking of the Thanksgiving Day celebration -- one of my favorite holidays. It is a serious celebration as we give thanks for our many blessings. Yet it is also a jolly day, full of good food, drink and sport -- perhaps touch football, more likely a televised game. The whole family comes together and, often in the company of friends, has a festive time. Moreover, there is a venerable sense of tradition to the feast that renders the whole holiday somehow reassuring. However, now comes a time troubled by a deep sense of apprehension, especially for people of faith. I am speaking of the Christmas season. The apprehension begins with how we greet people? Last week it was customary to say, "Have a Happy Thanksgiving" or just "Happy Thanksgiving." I must have intoned that line a hundred times, never with a premonition of giving offense or of introducing an evangelizing spirit into a brief social encounter. "Happy Thanksgiving" might be prefatory to devastating a plump bird, but only the very morbid are offended and they can always munch on a nutrition bar.
