Columnist.
WASHINGTON -- I see that the stalwarts of Reform Politics throughout the city of New York have been given reason for hope and change. It is reported that former congressman Anthony D. Weiner (pronounced as you might expect) is testing the waters for a return to public life. He is mulling over a run for the mayor's mansion or perhaps a campaign for "public advocate." I am not really sure what a public advocate does, but Weiner has done things in public that are very daring, so I have no doubt he could handle the duties of a public advocate. You will remember that he left the House of Representatives when he was caught handling his private parts in photographs that he sent to women he did not know and repeatedly lying about it to his colleagues and the press. Well, now he is pondering a return to public office. He has been out of, I guess we would call it, the public eye for a little over a year, and as he told WNYC recently, "I paid a very high price...." He has become a stay-at-home dad to his six-month-old son, and when he does go out in public, he wears jeans, T-shirts and a baseball hat turned backwards. So he is contemplating another office of public trust. Whatever office he chooses to run for, you can count on his running as a Reformer. He has always been very progressive and was, in fact, a dreadful scold to the reactionary Republicans on Capitol Hill until those dratted pictures turned up. CNN would not even give him a show on the network, not even a late-night show. CNN gave former governor Eliot Spitzer a show after his imbroglio with a sex ring, but not Weiner.
WHITEFISH POINT, Mich. -- I have just cleared the "Soo" locks of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, passing from the lower Great Lakes to Lake Superior. In fact, I am now anchored just off a beautiful lighthouse on Lake Superior. Yes, you have guessed correctly. I am in a boat, a cruise ship, in fact, known as the "Yorktown," possibly in honor of the famed battle that ended our War for Independence, though possibly for some other achievement. I shall not hazard the question to our extremely busy captain. He has enough on his mind, and I am told these waters are treacherous. My life jacket is never far away. This is the first American Spectator cruise undertaken with National Review. The editors and writers at the National Review are old hands at conducting cruises, and so I am watching them closely for instruction and wise counsel. How is a landlubber like me to conduct myself on a cruise? When do I put on my life jacket? Do I wear it at meals? When do we abandon ship? When do I speak? John Miller, the national correspondent for NR, and Jay Nordlinger, a senior editor for NR, are sage mentors and very knowledgeable speakers. Along with them are AmSpec writers Grover Norquist, John Wohlstetter, and John Fund, whom AmSpec shares with NR. Giving even more heft to our discussions of politics is George Gilder, an expert on practically everything.
WASHINGTON -- I have a headache. I imagine you do too, if you have been trying to interpret the legalese employed by those legal sages who have pronounced on Thursday's Supreme Court decision on Obamacare. I would rather read the lyrics of a thousand rap composers than the anfractuous language of one legal sage. Thanks, however, to Professor E. Donald Elliott of the Yale Law School, I had a translator at my side, and I shall now hand down my judgment of the Court's decision on Obamacare, which all sensible Americans have abstained from reading in its entirety, including B. H. Obama and the vast majority of denizens of Capitol Hill, including N. Pelosi. Some of these worthies even admitted as much. It fell to nine heroic souls garbed in black to actually read the law and to Chief Justice Roberts to write the decision for the exhausted majority.
Washington -- The summer Olympics are upon us, and already they are spoiling things for those of us who like our summers restful and given over to reasonable pageantry, particularly pageantry in London. For those of you who have not been made aware of it, the Olympics are in London this summer, which is about as appropriate as holding the world gun fight championships in Rome just across the palazzo from the Vatican, if there are world gunfight championships. The gunfight championships should be held in an appropriate setting like Kabul or some Middle Eastern metropolis along with the world car bombing championships. London should be off limits for tasteless vulgarity. In summer, London is one of the loveliest cities on earth, and certainly among the most sophisticated. But how will we enjoy Shakespeare in the park or great concerts, or the British "Spectator's" annual summer party, when thousands of athletes are being offloaded from airplanes and preparing for their multitudinous over-hyped contests? There will be media and of course idiotic sports writers. There will be purveyors of sports equipment and even more egregious commercial interests. The Giant Corporations will be on hand to sell automobiles, perhaps even agricultural equipment and maybe gigantic land movers. Can you see Mark Phelps wearing a high tech swimsuit driving up in a John Deere e-series Wheeled Harvester and saying, "I go everywhere in my John Deere"? There will be ads for junk foods, nutritional foods, beer, and countless other products -- all proud sponsors of the Olympics and the "Olympic Spirit."
WASHINGTON -- Warren Kozak, the author of "LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay," wrote a memorable piece in "The Wall Street Journal" on June 6, 2012 that cries out for comment. On the 68th anniversary of the Allies' invasion of Europe over the bloody beaches of Normandy, he reminds us of an unthinkable act by President Franklin Roosevelt on that day. At least it is an unthinkable act today. The president did not call a press conference to notify Americans huddled before their radios of what our military was doing. They already knew from news reports, though they might have learned even more from their president. Nor did President Roosevelt boast of how he had marshaled our troops and given the order to action, as the present occupier of his office is prone to do. Instead, Roosevelt offered a prayer, a prayer of unthinkable dimensions nowadays. I suspect if I were of voting age in 1944, I would have been a Republican. Yet, as President Roosevelt spoke, he would have spoken for me. Transported back to the battle of Normandy, I would have taken heart in his words. Would a Barack Obama, similarly transported back across the decades, have taken heart? Or would he and millions of other miraculously transported Americans from the present have squirmed? Would they have filed lawsuits through the American Civil Liberties Union? Is this not another of those church and state conundrums that we conjure up today?
WASHINGTON -- One of my favorite controversialists is back, Bob Woodward, with his sidekick Carl Bernstein. Sunday in "The Washington Post," they wrote that Richard Nixon was more hideous than we have heretofore known. The 37th president conducted five wars while in office, according to the boys, and those do not even include his minor fracases, the Cold War against the Soviet Union and the Vietnam War. I say Woodward is a controversialist. You might recall his controversial "interview" with CIA Director Bill Casey conducted on Bill's deathbed when no one was watching. It made it into Woodward's book "Veil," saving its author from the embarrassment of admitting that Bill had kept Woodward utterly in the dark about Iran-Contra and so much else during their more conventional interviews earlier. This time, Woodward somehow circumvented Bill's CIA guards, his doctors and nurses, his wife and daughter -- one of whom was in the hospital room at all times -- to get his incomparable interview. Moreover, Bill had completely lost the power of speech, his face being a mask of terrible deformity, as his friend Bert Jolis reported within days of the so-called interview. Woodward overcame every hurdle to extract from the dying man a confession of involvement in Iran-Contra about which Woodward knew nothing while writing the book. Possibly, he had disguised himself in Bill's hospital room as a cockroach.
WASHINGTON -- Frankly, I wish the Pew Research Center would occasionally keep its thoughts to itself. Sometimes those thoughts are merely insipid and beneath the attention of serious minds. Sometimes they are alarming and capable of stirring up an already excitable populace. There is talk of cannibalism being practiced by the criminal element. There is Lady Gaga. These are worrisome times. Yet the Pew Research Center has gone and done it again. The Center released a study Monday that employed exhaustive polling and ingenious charts to render my fellow Americans restive, or so it seems. The Pew Research Center's overall finding is that political polarity in America is tremendously more intense than it has been in decades -- possibly since the Civil War, and 618,000 soldiers died in the Civil War! Of course, intense partisanship is the kind of thing that profoundly troubles Bien Pensants everywhere. It leads to legislative gridlock and stalemate.
WASHINGTON -- Here I am on the campaign trail, frenetically promoting my book, "The Death of Liberalism." I appear on scores of radio interviews, in and out of the studio. I appear on Fox News and C-SPAN. I hardly have time for dinner, but it could be more demanding still. I could be invited to appear on mainstream media, as it is still quaintly called. Yet I am not. ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC do not call. I, the editor of a major magazine from the right that has been around for 45 years, have written a book arguing that a major political ideology, Liberalism, is dead, and no one in the mainstream media seems to think it merits even a spitball. Things have changed even more than the mainstream media knows.
WASHINGTON -- I first heard it two, perhaps two and a half years ago. A sage sitting in his New York City office pronounced it. Said the sage to me: "This is going to be the dirtiest presidential campaign in history." I would pass on my prescient friend's name, but he is a gentleman of high profile. It would be best if he were to continue his life unmolested by the Living Saint in the White House, whom a benighted majority of Americanos deposited there in 2009.
WASHINGTON -- Conrad Black is back in Canada. He controlled the third-largest string of English-language newspapers in the world before he became entoiled with the Unites States Department of Justice. For his friends, it was a terrible loss. We missed him, and we have missed his newspapers. He made the Telegraph papers in London a beacon of civilized discourse and a sound source of news. They provided better information on the high-jinks of Bill Clinton than any news source here, save the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, and, ahem, The American Spectator. The Telegraph papers were great newspapers and his other publications, for instance, Spectator of London, were eminently civilized too. They still are, though they miss Conrad's journalistic touch.
Washington -- When you have a young woman screaming in a hallway about some sort of grievance she has with you, you have a problem. Even a Secret Service agent, surrounded by his buddies, has a problem. I know about this sort of thing from my work in the archives pursuant to my researches as a presidential historian. One thinks back to the late 1940s of Elizabeth Bentley, an American spying for the Soviet Union. She raised an intolerable ruckus outside a hotel room with one, possibly two, Soviet intelligence operatives -- both male. Her involvement with one had been romantic, but the cad let her down. Possibly, he did not pay for her turkey sandwich. Possibly, he left other bills cooling on the table. At any rate, there was hell to pay. She had a set of lungs on her like a bull moose and a face to boot. When she let out a yell, it was deafening. Of course, the Russians were terrified. Shortly thereafter, she renounced Communism, and they were glad to get back to Stalin's Russia.
WASHINGTON -- All is bleak. All is woe! I speak of the tea party movement, the movement of 2009 and 2010 that was the hot news story of those years and led to the Republican rout of the Democrats in 2010. Now the tea party movement is, according to reports in the media, in decline.
WASHINGTON -- There are some campaign advisers who would counsel former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney to jog on the campaign trail tirelessly, probably in short pants and with a catchy T-shirt emblazoned with some memorable phrase, say, "Fred Fna Ate Here," a la Al Gore and Bill Clinton. Jimmy Carter started the presidential candidates' jogging craze, and since him there have been a horde of presidential joggers, all wearing little boys' outfits, the notable exception being Ronald Reagan -- possibly because, as he campaigned from 1976 on, he was considered too old to be president. On the other hand, the old cowboy had a sense of dignity that all other would-be presidents in recent years have lacked. Perhaps Romney should be photographed windsurfing as John Kerry was in 2004 and downing shots of firewater as Hillary Clinton did in 2008. Or he could filch a page from President-elect Vladimir Putin and campaign shirtless. Adopt the he-man look, Mitt!
WASHINGTON -- As America rings up another $3 trillion-plus budget -- almost a historic peacetime 25 percent of gross national product -- and borrows another $1.3 trillion to pay for it, one should not be surprised that the usual mob of special pleaders is fuming at anyone who has the temerity to suggest a sane alternative. These are the new Democrats and they do not mind putting us on the road to Greece.
WASHINGTON -- We in America today live in a country circumscribed by entitlement policies devised by an America that steadily has been disappearing. Those policies established more than a generation ago cannot possibly, in mathematical or demographic terms, support the America of the present, much less the America of the future. That is the stark reality. We need to reform those policies, or we shall go bankrupt, and raising taxes on the so-called rich will not fix things. Even raising taxes on the middle class will not fix things. Nor will spending a trillion dollars more than we have on hand fix things. Eventually, those trillion-dollar deficits have to be paid off. Facts are facts; the day of reckoning that our hayseed politicians have said was up the road apiece is here. We have to do something now, and we can begin by growing the economy.
WASHINGTON -- For a couple of years now, I have been talking about the Kultursmog, the utterly polluted state of our political culture. Those who pollute it are the liberals. Kultursmog is the only form of pollution that they approve of, but they do approve of it mightily, and of course, they are the chief contributors to its noxious fumes. Now they are using it to kill off an American value prized by millions of Americans down through the centuries, free speech. As I say in another context, we are watching the death of liberalism.
WASHINGTON -- I like to think of Miss Sandra Fluke's contretemps with the madly admired Mr. Rush Limbaugh as, well, a fluke. She objected to his joke about her being "a slut" and "a prostitute," and hesto presto the part-time Georgetown University law student struck pay dirt. You object to my characterization of her as "part-time"? How could she be a full-time law student and still be appearing before Congress explicating the plight of coeds with $3,000 contraceptive bills or others suffering the heartbreak of being rejected publicly at the pharmacy for insurance coverage of a birth control bill? Then there was all the other media attention that came from Rush's little joke. Yes, I see it as a fluke, defined by the Dictionary of American Slang as "a fortuitous accident." Was not Miss Fluke felicitously named years ago before anyone ever thought of talk radio?
WASHINGTON -- The other day, the estimable Wall Street Journal editorial board took issue with the equally estimable T. Boone Pickens, the legendary oilman, over the Nat Gas Act. The Journal argued with its customary lucidity that Pickens' idea of subsidizing natural gas, even for a short period, was ill-advised. To my mind, the Journal left one argument out, to wit: national security.
WASHINGTON -- There is another horripilation on the campaign trail. Someone has told a joke that has roused the virtue police. I am speaking of the virtue police who are working for the grim forces of political correctitude. They do not find the joke very funny. The jokester is a supporter of Rick Santorum, and now he too is on the hot seat for it. Late last week, his supporter, the amiable Foster Friess, perpetrated the joke. It went like this: "You know, back in my days, they'd use Bayer aspirin for contraceptives," the easygoing multi-millionaire philanthropist told MSNBC. "The gals put it between their knees, and it wasn't that costly." Kaboom -- all hell broke loose. According to the Washington Post, "the remark outraged women's groups and many others."
