Columnist.
On the day after his 82nd birthday, on Independence Day to be precise, a giant passed away, Richard Scaife. The man had style. He departed decorously as the nation was happily celebrating its 238th birthday. His sense of style has not been often mentioned in the obituaries, nor have his wit and engaging warmth. His philanthropy has been mentioned, though it is often his political philanthropy, not his cultural philanthropy. Dick came from a long line of philanthropists, dating back to his grand uncle, President Calvin Coolidge's secretary of the treasury Andrew Mellon. Dick generously supported medical research, various educational institutions, the National Gallery, a slew of Pittsburgh-based museums, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Toward the end of his life, he donated to the Clinton Foundation and had a friendly meeting with Bill Clinton. He admired the president's charitable work with the Clinton Foundation, and I have always believed he wanted to encourage Bill's good side.
BOSA, SARDINIA -- That is right, you read "Bosa, Sardinia." Well, you might ask, how did I get into this place high atop vertiginous hills along the Temo River in western Sardinia with not another Yank for miles and only the Internet to keep me abreast of the Obama terror? My Italian adventure began last summer in Rome. There my wife and I were sitting, having dinner with an Italian friend of 40 years, Antonio Martino, and his wife Carol. In his distinguished career he began teaching his Italian countrymen free market economics, which had he learned at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman. Eventually, Italy came alive, and he served in the Berlusconi government as Minister of Foreign Affairs and Minister of Defense. Through the evening we had much to talk about, and when we shut down he invited us back to his summerhouse this summer.
A couple of weeks ago, I was lured from my customary solitary breakfast to dine with Dr. Ben Carson, the celebrated neurosurgeon and inchoate politician. He probably squirms at the appellation "politician," but I am afraid that is what he is going to be. In fact, a politician is what he will have to be if he acts upon his diagnosis of America. He believes America is losing touch with its founding principles. Usually at breakfast time I am holed up with four newspapers, eggs and coffee to gain my bearings on the day ahead. Yet, the prospect of listening to Dr. Carson overwhelmed my newspaper time. Besides, I am a confirmed hypochondriac, and Dr. Carson is a truly accomplished physician. Possibly I might gain a new insight to various afflictions.
Aha, Mr. Obama, how do you now like "leading from behind"? When you first enunciated this hocus-pocus in 2011, Charles Krauthammer called it neither a theory nor a doctrine. He called it "dithering," a style devoid of ideas. Instead of the implementation of a doctrine, we have seen indecision, hesitancy, delay. In the aftermath of that delay, it is too late to prevent the carnage, a carnage that did not have to take place. Iraq was stable and relatively peaceful before we led from behind. Now the country is quite possibly lost. Cartographers will be presenting the world with a new map of the area once it has been carved up.
There is lurking in the land a very treacherous threat to American freedoms, and only a handful of citizens seem to care. Perhaps I should say that only a handful of citizens are willing to make bold their concern. For the threat is camouflaged in the garb of "high-tech gadgetry" and the promise of instant response to the customer. Who could oppose that? Amazon, the country's largest bookseller, controlling 40 percent of book sales in the country, wants to cap the price of e-books at $9.99. Publishers say they cannot cover their costs at $9.99 and want to charge more. If Amazon wins, then it comes a step closer to controlling publishing in America, both the production and the distribution of books. Think of that. One source controlling an area as vital to free thought as books.
Some 45 years ago, one of the era's great wits and finest writers, the Englishman, Malcolm Muggeridge, wrote about the Great Liberal Death Wish. He saw the Death Wish at work everywhere. In the liberals' appeasement of the Soviets, he saw it. In liberals' extravagant extension of the welfare state, he saw it. For a certitude, he was right. The liberals of the day died off and were replaced by Margaret Thatcher in Britain and by Ronald Reagan in America. Not much was heard of them for years until Tony Blair and Bill Clinton came along, and both men's liberalism was greatly truncated. The Liberal Death Wish was Muggeridge's true insight. By the 1980s, the Death Wish had only killed off the liberals. The rest of us escaped. The West managed to overcome the liberals' instrumentalities of death. In the Cold War, President Ronald Reagan's military buildup, contrary to those who said it was reckless and dangerous, managed to practically bankrupt the Soviet Union.
Apropos of a 22-year-old deranged student's slaughter of his male roommates, two coeds, and another male student, as well as leaving 13 injured and in the hospital, I have been doing my research. In the courses of which, I came across this quote on the front page of Tuesday's New York Times. A second-year student in global studies at the university where the crimes were committed said in the news story's second paragraph that, "If we don't talk misogyny now, when are we going to talk about it?" She went on in the next paragraph with similar profundities. It put me in mind of another quote from the Times on Sunday in the op-ed section by columnist Charles M. Blow. He was commenting on the owner of the Dallas Mavericks' allegedly "bigoted" remark (though it seemed perfectly sensible to me) a few days before. Blow said the remark typified "the endlessly ached-for, perpetually stalled 'national conversation on race' that many believe is needed but neglected. ..."
As I reflect on the "inevitable" presidential candidacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton, I try to put it in historic context. She lacks the shifty eyes, darting hither and yon at her audience and the assembled press corps. Her brow betrays no beads of sweat. Nor is there any noticeable perspiration on her upper lip. She has never exactly said, "I'm not a crook." Though she has certainly slipped up with plenty of other maladroit pronunciamentos, from her famous 1992 boast, "I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies," to her more recent rant before a Congressional committee investigating Benghazi: "What difference at this point does it make?" Let me hasten to answer that it does indeed make a difference how violence originates in a faraway land where four Americans were about to be murdered.
The arrival last week of the enormous -- 829 pages! -- and laborious U.S. National Climate Assessment, a report put together by 300 American worrywarts, reminds me of a little noted fact. The American left has no practical solution for many of the problems that agitate it, and that its neurotics hope will agitate us. Put another way, the left is given to setting the American people off on noble quests for which there is no solution. A case in point is global warming or climate change. The global warmists -- mostly drawn from the left -- may or may not be right about global warming. As they say in their recent Climate Assessment, "Climate change, once considered an issue for the distant future, has moved firmly into the present." Well, maybe so, but there is still little we can do to alleviate global warming. America is, mostly for economic reasons, meeting the goals of the Kyoto Protocol without actually having signed the treaty.
What do you think of the September vote in Great Britain to decide whether Scotland shall be free of London's rule? Scotland has been part of the United Kingdom since 1707. Yet, in September, Britain will go to the polls to vote "yes" or "no" as to the question "Should Scotland be an independent country?" If a majority vote "yes," Great Britain will be great no more. The Act of Union in 1707 was a long time ago. It ushered in over 300 years of uniting -- dare I say it -- two great people, the Scots and the English. The Scots may have been portrayed as a junior partner, but they held their own. Edinburgh in the 1770s came to be called "the Athens of the North," the home for a brilliant enlightenment with great thinkers such as David Hume and Adam Smith. Over the past 300 years, the Scots have made splendid contributions to philosophy, science, the arts, commerce, warfare and -- forget not -- drink. To this day, its leading export is whisky, and it is very good whisky, on par with Tennessee bourbon, maybe even better.
There is something decidedly odd about the use of racially loaded terms in America today. Black personalities use these terms on occasion, and no controversy whatsoever is attached to the event. Even when the terms are enunciated in public for all to see and to hear. When whites -- often old and over the hill -- use these terms and ideas -- often behind closed doors -- all hell breaks loose. The latest occasion of this occurred when Donald Sterling, the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, a basketball team, was taped uttering racially divisive words and ignorant ideas to his obviously disgruntled lover. She handed over a tape of the conversation, apparently surreptitiously made, to online scandal sheet TMZ and kaboom. Suddenly, Sterling became one of the most notorious men in America and, of course, a modern American bigot. Of a sudden, the columnists and talking heads commenced a new round of chatter about how racism is still with us. After all, an 80-year-old billionaire is spouting racist swill in the comfort of his own home.
My telephone is not ringing off the hook. No intriguing or inquiring emails have arrived on my computer. Yet, on Friday, a document drop from the Clinton Library revealed that years ago, in the 1990s, I was at the very heart of the "vast right-wing conspiracy." Now here we are almost a week later, and still no journalist, much less a historian, has called to ask me if I really was actively conspiring with the British press, select American newspapers, obscure right-wing political operators and, who knows, possibly foreign powers to create the gossamer of scandal over the Clinton White House. All this was reported in the documents. It has always struck me as curious how news stories are, or are not, reported in America. What standards must be met to land a story on the front page or even to decide that it is a story worth reporting at all?
Last week a national treasure spoke. That would be Charles Krauthammer, syndicated columnist, television commentator and all around public sage. He also is a chess player. Krauthammer noted that two months ago a petition bearing the signatures of some 110,000 tyrants was sent to the Washington Post -- from where did it come, I would like to know -- demanding that the Post discontinue publishing articles that deny global warming or -- who knows -- take even a skeptical view of global warming. Yet Krauthammer assures us that precisely a day later his column containing the exact heresy ran in the Post. So, apparently, the Washington Post, unlike the Los Angeles Times, will remain unintimidated by the global warmist tyrants, at least for now.
Spring is in the air, and one senses that it is again time for the college students of the land to engage in protest. It all began in the late 1960s, and one of the legacies of that period is that the campuses are evacuated as soon as possible. By May, the student body will be vamoosing. Administrators have discovered that that soft, gentle, spring-like weather breeds discontent among the students, drunken carousal, violence and criminality. It is best to return the inmates to their parents. An early sign of this seasonal discontent came a week ago at Dartmouth where a troop of students took over the president's office and delivered up a 72-point manifesto, which obviously took a lot of work. As Jillian Mayer, a senior, said, "None of those points are just thrown in there because we thought they should be there. People spent a lot of time building this Freedom Budget.
In August of 2008 at the Beijing Summer Olympics President George W. Bush had a talk with President Vladimir Putin. Georgia's anti-Moscow president, Mikheil Saakashvili, had been uttering provocative sonorities about Russia, so Russian troops marched into Georgia much as they are doing today in Crimea. Bush reminded Putin, "I've been warning you Saakashvili is hot-blooded." To which Putin suavely responded, "I'm hot-blooded, too." Bush's rejoinder was "No, Vladimir. You're cold-blooded." Well, whether the president of Russia is hot-blooded or cold-blooded or bloodless, his troops are in Crimea now, and Russia still has the same problem it had at the end of the Cold War. Its economy is not quite modern. In fact it is sickly. Its growth rate last year was 1.3 percent, hardly capable of sustaining a modern military.
The Republicans *would* nominate as their candidate for the recently contested House seat in Florida a candidate with the celebratory surname of Jolly. David Jolly to be exact. Needless to say David Jolly won. Perhaps his victory will establish a trend. According to the trend, the Republicans will be running candidates with surnames like Happy, or Joyous or even Gay. Imagine a wave election -- as political commentators are predicting 2014 to be -- in which the Republicans run candidates with the aforementioned names: Happy, Joyous, Gay! Imagine a future House of Representatives where the dialogue might run: "Speaker Jolly, I should like to propose an amendment to your bill on noxious particulates in the atmosphere," says the Hon. Happy. Responds the Hon. Jolly, "By all means do so, Mr. Happy." It would be a new dawn for the Republic.
From time to time, I put down my duties of writing about politics and other human follies and pick up a book, often a book of poetry, often by W. B. Yeats. The other night I read Yeats' poem "The Fiddler of Dooney." It is a little masterpiece, but then Yeats wrote so many masterpieces. It begins: "When I play on my fiddle in Dooney, Folk dance like a wave of the sea; My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet, My brother in Mocharabuiee." And on it dances for a few more stanzas, delighting the eye and the ear and the mind. Yeats obviously chose each word with the utmost care and gave his words a structure that was finely disciplined -- good show W. B.!
Regarding our community activist's present imbroglio with President Vladimir Putin of Russia, I stand with Donald Trump who said recently: "The thing I have the most concern about is that he's being so lambasted for not being respected, and for being a joke, that he'll do something really stupid to show that he's a man." We are now about where we were with Jimmy Carter after he lectured his fellow citizens about their so-called "inordinate fear of communism" even as the Soviet Union was spreading its tentacles over the Third World. His sudden turnaround -- caused by Soviet aggression in Afghanistan -- from a position of sweet reason to the pose of a hawk alarmed me and doubtless alarmed the Russians. Jimmy began the military build-up that a more gifted statesman, President Ronald Reagan, consummated in pursuit of a peaceful ending of the Cold War. Yet while Jimmy resided in the White House, I was uneasy with the sudden anti-communism of this moralistic twerp. Most probably Donald was, too. Now we have to worry about the intolerable greenhorn Barack Obama. What will he do next?
National Security Advisor Susan Rice appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday and said that when she had appeared on several news outlets back in September 2012 to state that the attack on an American diplomatic installation in Benghazi was a "spontaneous reaction" to an American-made film that appeared on YouTube she had used "the best information we [the White House] had at the time." Senator John McCain responded to her statement Sunday that it left him "almost speechless."
First Mitt Romney loses a presidential election that he was predicted to win in a walk. Then he appears some 15 months later on Sunday's "Meet the Press" to lecture the nation on how Republicans might lose the presidential election once again. "I don't think Bill Clinton is as relevant as Hillary Clinton if Hillary Clinton decides to run for president in 2016," Romney opined. Perhaps he forgot that Bill was elected president 21 years ago promising that a vote for him would mean acquiring two presidents "for the price of one." Romney, Hillary is actually pretty tightly entangled with Bill, now and forever. May I suggest that you read up on their peculiar relationship? They are even closer than Bonnie and Clyde.
