Columnist.
WASHINGTON -- And so the government of the United States has put its foreign policy in the steady hands of President Vladimir Putin, and the KGB Americans from coast to coast are breathing a sigh of relief. In Congress, the left and the right and those in between are relieved. In recent months, it has become abundantly clear that the president of the United States is not up to the task. He would rather lecture us on domestic issues, such as how to run up trillions of dollars of debt. Then he would like to work on his golf game -- do you recall how our elites laughed and laughed when the former Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, then the Supreme Commander of NATO, and finally the two-term president of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower, played golf?
WASHINGTON -- Avert your gaze! Show some respect for the deeply troubled. Richard Trumka, the portly president of the AFL-CIO, has come forward with a pathetic acknowledgment of organized labor's weakened condition, and I suggest compassion. In fact, his proposal suggests the moribund condition of the American left, and I urge a dignified silence.
WASHINGTON -- It has now been just over a year since a group of terrorists overwhelmed our diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, and killed four Americans, one of whom was our ambassador, two of whom were former SEALs. Today, we know little more than we did then, despite the bluster of the then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and of President Barack Obama, who has gone on to other problems. Incidentally, former Secretary of State Clinton is now in retirement and ceaselessly roaming the country lecturing for enormous honoraria. She is, according to the press, the "inevitable" Democratic nominee, and, according to the likes of Time magazine's Joe Klein, the most talented and credentialed candidate for the presidency in "many a moon."
WASHINGTON -- It was one of the most comic, presidential moments in recent American history: President Barack Obama's solitary walk across the South Lawn of the White House. Supposedly it made history. I would put it right up there with President Bill Clinton's solitary walk down Normandy beach in 1994. The sun is setting. The great man stands alone (in his baggy suit). The bluffs made historic by our soldiery in World War II are on one side of this famous draft dodger and the sea dotted with warships is on his other side. Bill becomes reflective. Then, ever so perceptibly, he *panics*. Three network cameras are whirring, dozens of photographer's cameras are click-clicking, and Bill has completely drawn a blank as to what he is to do next. He glances down in the sand and catches himself. He espies the stones that have been carefully laid in his path by his clever advance personnel and, *ah-ha*, he falls to his knees! He arranges them in a cross! He composes himself as in prayer! Perhaps he is thinking of a callipygian rump he glimpsed half an hour ago. Surely his advance men had the sense to get her name. At any rate, the columnist Maureen Dowd captured the scene for the New York Times before she too went over to the dark side.
WASHINGTON -- Maybe Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq should not have been in such a hurry to bid American troops adieu as he was back in 2007. What is more, maybe President Barack Obama should have come up with a few more compelling proposals for American troops to stay in Iraq for a few more years. After all, we did expend all that blood and treasure in getting the Sunni and the Shiite to live together peacefully -- no car bombs, no suicide bombers. I think Prime Minister Maliki would agree with me. Iraq was a relatively peaceful place to live when there were American troops stationed nearby.
WASHINGTON -- It is called the Taranto Principle, having been named after he who coined the principle, the inimitable James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal. According to the Taranto Principle, the left-wing media, in their fawning treatment of left-wing politicians, only encourage the pols' worst instincts: encouraging Jean-Francois Kerry's sophomoric wind-surfing during his presidential race or Howard Dean's blood-curdling scream upon losing the Iowa caucuses. And then there is President Barack Obama. At his press conference the other day, he finally commented on the traitor Edward Snowden. Obama said, "You know, if I had a son, he'd look like Edward." OK, OK -- I made that up, but who doubts that he is capable of such excesses? Barack Obama might say anything, and the left-wing press will generously indulge him, thus encouraging him to ever-greater pratfalls.
WASHINGTON -- As Ariel Castro, the convicted kidnapper, rapist and baby killer, shuffled off in chains to the hoosegow, I thought why was there so little reportage or commentary about his idiotic statement made in an Ohio courtroom. Is it because the man himself is so repugnant? Is it because his transgressions against society are so repulsive? I think it is both and one thing more. Americans have heard all this claptrap before. We are familiar with the rumblings of a sociopath. A sociopath, in plain language unadorned by the psychiatrists' hocus-pocus, is a person who does not know right from wrong, at least as regards his own behavior.
WASHINGTON -- The reaction to President Barack Obama's highly personal speech last Friday, ostensibly on race but actually on himself, has been surprisingly subdued. Some would have thought he was going to tone down the rhetoric. Instead his rhetoric was inflammatory. I think he caught the country off guard. The vast majority of Americans were going about their business, and then -- whammo -- the president was in the White House pressroom emoting. Still, over the weekend things were relatively quiet. Most Americans wanted it that way.
WASHINGTON -- The other day another pundit came to my side. I have been watching this steady trickle of sages joining the cause ever since the spring of 2012 when I pronounced, at book-length complete with footnotes, "The Death of Liberalism." Now the veteran columnist Daniel Henninger of the nigh unto infallible Wall Street Journal has pronounced the glum news. On July 10, Dan wrote, "July 3 was the quiet afternoon that a deputy assistant Treasury secretary for tax policy announced in a blog that the Affordable Care Act's employer mandate would be delayed one year." And Dan stated with marmoreal solemnity: "Mark July 3, 2013, as the day Big Government finally imploded." Others, too, have made similar discoveries, none more memorably than Victor Davis Hanson who celebrated July 4, 2011 by stating that the Founding Fathers' vision of government had been vindicated. Obamacare had been rushed into law and with its trillion-dollar overruns atop all the other federal overruns would prove to be "unsustainable." He called the liberals Frankensteins. I called them zombies. Nonetheless, whatever living corpse you choose, with Obamacare came the last gasp of liberal overreach.
WASHINGTON -- Dante Alighieri was the 13th-century Florentine author whose "Inferno" apportioned his sinners' suffering in hell to their vices committed on earth with delightful affect. For instance flatterers are mired in human excrement. Traitors are frozen in a lake of ice. Now Margaret Thatcher's distinguished British biographer, Charles Moore, updates Dante by heaving the wretched Edward Snowden into hell.
WASHINGTON -- I am immersed in research on the life of he who was called the Lion of the Senate, Edward M. Kennedy, known by one and all as Teddy. Readers of this column will be surprised to hear that I do not think his life was totally devoted to mischief. Oh, yes, there was the Chappaquiddick mishap. And one cannot ignore the slandering of Judge Robert Bork, which was at once ignorant and unconscionable. Judge Bork at the time of Teddy's outburst against him was probably indifferent to abortion and at any rate would not have made the elimination of abortion his obsession if he were raised to the Supreme Court. Obviously it was one of Teddy's obsessions, despite the teachings of his church.
WASHINGTON -- For four decades the American people have been perplexed by "affirmative action," "quotas" and all the circumlocutions that have accumulated around them. Reading about them is painful. Living with them is worse. What has the Supreme Court trying been trying to tell us with these bewildering decisions? What are educators trying to tell us with these policies?
WASHINGTON -- Who is Gary Muthert? Well, he is the Internal Revenue Service officer in Cincinnati who gathered applications in 2010 -- presumably from the Tea Party and other conservative organizations seeking tax-exempt status. He did it, he says, at the behest of a local Cincinnati IRS manager who incidentally remains unidentified. According to transcripts of Muthert's testimony to the House investigative committee, the unidentified manager informed Muthert that "Washington, D.C. wanted some cases." That is to say, Tea Party cases. Who is Elizabeth Hofacre? She too is an employee of the IRS in Cincinnati. She somehow received Muthert's cases, and whether on her own or at the direction of someone else she sought help with these cases from the Washington, D.C. office whose purview it is to oversee tax-exempt organizations. This gets complicated. Why were Muthert's cases not sent directly to Washington as the unidentified manager requested? How did Hofacre get involved?
WASHINGTON -- I depart America for two blissful weeks in Italy and return to find that my country has been transformed, rather rudely, into a totalitarian state on the order of Iran, possibly even North Korea. My telephone is directly plugged into something called PRISM. Big Brother hounds my email, even when I am only viewing the weather. Soon I shall be wearing a Mao jacket -- or perhaps not. Possibly my fears are overheated. Yet President Barack Obama got us into this mess, and it is unlikely that he will get us out. He seems smugly unconcerned about the fears of almost 50 percent of the American people who, I adjudge, are almost as worried as I am.
POSITANO, Italy -- I am in Positano, Italy, on the Tyrrhenian Sea, soaking up the sun and pondering the immensities. Pompeii is just down the road, or over the mountain, or somewhere nearby, and it seems to me that Pompeii is the future for America if things continue under Barack the Pitiable, not Rome as the left-wingers and the right-wingers seem to have agreed upon. Pompeii went out in a cataclysm. Rome gently declined with a few massacres and plunderings as sad punctuation marks.
WASHINGTON -- Recently in Washington the Newseum was saved from what could have been a very embarrassing event. Or maybe the people who run the Newseum would not have been embarrassed, but the institution was saved anyway. The Newseum is an interactive museum dedicated to the study of news and journalism. It was going to honor two terrorists as journalists before genuine journalists intervened.
WASHINGTON -- Where are we now in this morass of Obama administration scandals? We have the Associated Press imbroglio. We have the Benghazi imbroglio. We have the I.R.S. imbroglio. Well, a synonym for imbroglio is confusion, and in all the above cases replace the word "imbroglio" with the word "confusion" and you will get a hint of where I am going. We have one massive cloud of confusion, and that is exactly what this embattled administration wants. They think that if an event can be brought to confusion, at some point the journalists and the general public will throw up their hands and agree that it is just too difficult to penetrate. Perhaps the Nixon Administration was hoping for such an outcome back in 1972.
WASHINGTON -- How odd! There I was, Saturday evening in the Windy City at a fundraising event for the Chicago Rowing Foundation, and who do I encounter but the mayor of Chicago, His Honor Rahm Emanuel? You might recall that back in 2010 I was encouraged by conservative Chicagoans and doubtless by the good government lobby to run against Rahm for mayor, claiming, quite properly, that I had a more legitimate claim to residency in Chicago than did he. What is more, I had a friend on the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners and, it being more important in Chicago whom you know than the merits of your case, I am pretty sure the Republican nomination was mine. In the end, I took a pass on the race, but now I am not so sure I will pass it up in 2015. Rahm's problems mount, and I would relish debating him on the issues. He seemed like a likable fellow when he stopped me for a picture and presumably my autograph. Alas, ushers hastened us to our seats.
WASHINGTON -- Though it pains me to say it, I have made my final judgment about the left. They do not like conservatives very much. In fact, they come to an immediate boil when we enter their admittedly quite limited range of perception. It all began back in the 1960s when radical thought gained a footing with American liberals. Back in those days liberals relished America, the mixed economy (as they called capitalism), our system of government, and they were free of the bees in their bonnets that eventually drove them to collective suicide: feminism, socialism, identity politics, and all the little stuff: consumerism, the sky is falling, something about organic foods. Taken one thing with another, it finally consumed liberalism, moving me last year to administer the last rites to the whole gaudy set of bugaboos and to pronounce liberalism dead in a sad little book, "The Death of Liberalism."
