Columnist.
It is happening again. The media tell us there is a huge groundswell of support for Hillary to run for the presidency in 2016. Already an enormous political action committee has been formed. She is again -- as she was in 2008 -- the Inevitable Candidate and, by the way, the Inevitable President. Moreover, the mainstream media are, of course, with her. These are what I have been calling for over 20 years the media's Episodic Apologists. Their professional lives have followed a well-worn arc since at least 1992 when the Clintons first emerged nationally -- though the arc was there in Arkansas back in the 1980s.
Does everyone agree that the recent news on abortion is actually quite promising? Abortions are in decline. Abortion is at its lowest level since Roe v. Wade in 1973 legalized it. There were 1.05 million abortions in 2011, down 13 percent from the 1.21 million abortions committed in 2008. We are heading back in the direction of the 1.03 million abortions committed in 1975. All this information comes from the Guttmacher Institute's report "Abortion Incidence and Service Availability in the United States, 2011," and the Guttmacher Institute favors abortion along with the more humane forms of birth control. So when even the Guttmacher Institute agrees abortion is down, it has got to be down.
Events of this past week have lent credence to one of my most dearly held beliefs. A double standard in political life is better than no standard at all. The Democrats have -- as to their behavior in politics -- almost no standards at all. The stuffy Republicans have -- as to their behavior in politics -- a pretty hard and fast set of standards and they stick by them. When the Hon. Trey Radel, a freshman congressman from southwest Florida, was arrested last October for trying to purchase cocaine from an undercover police officer at Washington's DuPont Circle, I figured his goose was cooked. Surely the Democrats would be against him. After all, he is a Republican. A more serious problem was his fellow Republicans. They would not stand by him. They almost never do stand by a Republican caught in flagrante delicto. Remember if you will the late Richard Milhous Nixon. Contrast his dark fate with the Democrats' national treasure, Bill Clinton, who committed perjury and obstructed justice. House Republicans found him guilty as charged, but in the Senate both Democrats and Republicans let him off easy, and he has been having a jolly time of it for years while Nixon's reputation has only darkened.
There are many different indicators of an unhappy society. Sociologists point to crime rates, suicide rates, the incidence of divorce, even the frequency of customers leaving the lights on in public restrooms. Economists point to economic growth rates, unemployment rates and the University of Michigan's monthly economic outlook for the United States. One of my own personal favorites is the sudden transformation of the republic's healthy, happy, rosy-cheeked bicycle riders into a mob of angry cranks. It happens every few decades and is a sure sign of an unhappy society.
You will perhaps forgive me if I have found all this bellyaching about retired Secretary of Defense Bob Gates' so-called indiscretion, indignation and candor a bit hard to take. I first got to know Bob in the early 1980s, thanks to Bill Casey. Through all these years, Bob has not changed fundamentally. What has changed is Washington. It is more politicized, with especially shallow and parochial politics, and it is in need of candor, indignation and even moments of indiscretion. Bob did not let the country down when he wrote his memoir, "Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense."
I am afraid that fewer than one million out of the 4.3 million registered voters of New York City have settled upon the Big Apple a bad apple for mayor, the Hon. Bill de Blasio. What some three million registered New Yorkers were doing when 752,604 of their fellow citizens elected this Bad Apple to the mayor's mansion, I do not know. New York City embraces a very sophisticated citizenry, possibly the most sophisticated of any city in America. So perhaps they were all at a museum on Election Day or writing poetry or learning ancient Greek. But while they were indulging themselves, the moron vote brought from obscurity to Gracie Mansion a clod.
"What you're seeing is how a civilization commits suicide," observes Camille Paglia, the learned iconoclast and professor of humanities at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She made that observation in a lengthy interview with The Wall Street Journal, the highbrow newspaper that proves daily that intelligent journalism in America is neither dead nor near bankruptcy as long as it holds to the right values. Paglia was talking about our civilization, and I have nothing to add save one caveat. I recall the late 1970s, when America was pretty much in a heap. Suddenly, along came the oldest president in American history -- a president whom his friend William F. Buckley adjudged too old to govern -- and that president, Ronald Reagan, won the Cold War, revived the economy and still managed long naps in the afternoon.
In a recent and very good book, John L. Allen comes to the judgment that "Christians today indisputably are the most persecuted religious body on the planet," and he concludes that "the transcendent human rights concern of our time is this rarely noted persecution." In the affluent and comfortable West, we take for granted a tolerance that is not shown Christians in Egypt, Iraq, Nigeria or Eritrea, much less North Korea. Yet the war against Christians exists here at home, too. It is not as ugly, but it exists and with it Americans have witnessed an amazing reversal in our history. After all, this country was originally a Christian country. It was a refuge for all Christians, and, as the years passed, all Western faiths -- eventually all humane faiths. America became a land of religious tolerance. Given the intolerance toward Christianity that we see in America today, possibly it is time for Christians to rethink this tolerance. Possibly, tolerance can go too far.
It has been a grim Christmas around the White House. Frankly, I think President Barack Obama must be wondering why. Has anyone on the White House staff seen him tee off lately? He is really walloping the old ball, and his putting game has improved too. Moreover, he has been taking many not-to-be-forgotten trips on Air Force One, most recently his trip to South Africa to solemnize the expiry of Nelson Mandela, which was only marred by the sign-language interpretations of Thamsanqa Jantjie. Jantjie stood to Obama's immediate left gesticulating sheer gibberish to the world's hard-of-hearing, and, oh, yes, there was that blot on his police record. It turns out that Jantjie was arrested for a particularly grisly murder in 2003, but he never served time so it could not have been that bad. He spent something like a year under psychiatric evaluation before embarking on his new career of incomprehensible hand gestures.
A superb report in the Wall Street Journal by that inimitable journalist, James Taranto, moves me to reflect on the modern university and things sexual. Taranto has come across another of those poor saps, a male student as fate would have it, who fell into the clutches of a predatory female student.
It is now apparent that our president has lied to us. He lied when he crooned soothingly about improving the healthcare of millions of Americans through vast changes in health policy that would actually *lower* their costs. Those costs are now going up, and they are going up for almost everyone. They will not come down. He lied when he said we could keep our present health care policy. Those policies are rapidly disappearing. He lied again when he said we could keep our doctors. He lied when he said his plan would not involve rationing. I could go on, but in sum he is lying about most aspects of the most massive social policy in American history. It is also the greatest disaster in social policy in the history of social policy. President Barack Obama is a rank amateur.
It appears that President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan is acting up again. As if President Barack Obama does not have enough on his hands with HealthCare.gov and hotspots spreading around the globe, he now has Karzai, the Importunate. The Afghan prima donna is threatening our president's role as a wartime president, a role he has not been particularly comfortable in, but at least it is popular with some Americans. Now the playing of "Hail to the Chief" may become somewhat subdued all because of Karzai's demands. He is refusing to sign a status of forces agreement allowing us to leave U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan after the war, troops that would be used to protect Afghans!
The hapless Richard Cohen has done it again. He was acting like a good scout in slandering Americans "with conventional views," and in the course of his noble endeavor he brought down on himself the full force of the virtue patrol. Well, he has only himself to blame. In the course of writing a column assessing Governor Chris Christie's 2016 presidential chances, he went off on a playful scherzo, to wit: "People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York -- a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children [What did Cohen expect, tri-racial children? -- RET]. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio's wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts -- but not all -- of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn't look like their country at all."
They are at it again. They are again telling Republicans and conservatives how dreadful their political condition really is. I am speaking, of course, of the voices of the Kultursmog, and to hear them tell it we are in a hell of a heap. We lost the governorship of Virginia. Even worse, we won the governorship of New Jersey. What dreadful news. Of course, in Virginia the Republicans lost to a congenital liar, backed by the most famous congenital liars in American politics, the Clintons. It is only a matter of time before he is in deep do-do. Governor-elect Terry McAuliffe's campaign was an amalgam of lies as flagrant as his lie in his memoirs.
How does one explain the victory of Bill de Blasio over Joseph J. Lhota by some 500,000 votes? I have viewed all the learned studies offered up by the psephologists. I have studied the pundits' blah. If there were chicken entrails to be read, I would have read them. Frankly, I am at a loss to explain the election save for the timeless power of boredom.
The historic blunders of President Barack Obama's embarrassing health care rollout demonstrate spectacularly the utter failure of what? Let me tell you. They are the blunders of what was once called the "Brightest Generation" in American history, the 1960s generation. It did not start with Obama. His blunders were just a continuance of their blunders. By the 1960s generation, I mean the pot-smoking, war-protesting, guitar-strumming kids of the left -- not the majority from the 1960s generation, not the silent majority, but the minority. They were the miracle workers in politics: Jean-Francois Kerry, the Clintons, Al Gore, Joe Biden and all the rest. Their sages such as Saul Alinsky formalized their balderdash in learned tomes for their successors, for instance, our president. The media kept whooping it up for them. Their every pratfall was portrayed as a great success. Well, make a success of the health care rollout.
The utter disaster of the Obamacare rollout is now a matter of fact. Even President Barack Obama's Monday morning attempt at damage control in the Rose Garden was a disaster. Behind him stood a score or more of supporters all drawn from points around the country, all apparently in need of Obamacare. Some were in need of a doctor's immediate attention. One was Karmel Allison. Yes, her name was Karmel! She was a young lady standing to the right of our president. Suddenly she appeared glassy-eyed. She seemed about to faint. She must have made a gentle gasp because the president suddenly turned around and momentarily forgot about Obamacare. He said weakly, "I got you. You're OK?" At that point she was helped, do we say off stage? At any rate, she was taken away to seek proper medical care. Presumably, it is still available at the White House.
So far the telephone has not rung. Last week, I suggested a way for the left and the right to get together constructively. I suggested that the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton might give me a call and we might unite in demanding an investigation of the death of Miriam Carey. You may have forgotten who Carey is. After all, it has been two weeks since her death. Two weeks of thunderous silence, after she rammed a White House barricade with her car and then drove off down Pennsylvania Avenue with a posse of police speeding after her. She was shot dead in a hail of gunfire at the end of the avenue two blocks from the United States Capitol. The House of Representatives gave the police a standing ovation.
I am just wondering if Miriam Carey, the mentally ill mother who drove her black Infiniti down Pennsylvania Avenue after she rammed a White House barricade, was read her Miranda rights before she was shot dead in a fusillade of gunfire by a gang of well-armed police who surrounded her car at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. The information has not been released, though as I write almost a week has passed since the lethal event. Why could not those crack shots have aimed at her car's tires. Then they could have waited for her next move. It looks to me like they were shooting at the side of the car about half way up the door. They apparently wanted to take no chances.
WASHINGTON -- It is the most thunderous proof of the Taranto Principle to date. I am speaking of the Senate's rejection of the House of Representative's proposal to delay the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act for a year, along with the federal subsidy for Congressional lawmakers and their staffs if and when these selfless public servants enter health care exchanges. You cannot have such subsidies and neither can I, but Congress and its aides can. The Senate will not even negotiate over it.
