Columnist.
The latest police shooting to roil Chicago was all too familiar — and not because it fits the poisonous narrative of rampant police racism alleged by Black Lives Matter. Quintonio LeGrier's father called police after locking himself in a bedroom when his son menaced him with a baseball bat. When the police arrived, LaGrier, a 19-year-old with emotional problems, allegedly charged them with the bat. An officer shot him dead, and accidentally killed a neighbor as well.
We should be glad that 2015 is passing into memory, because it was a year when we could barely hold it together. It was a year when we freaked out over symbols and scared ourselves with fake statistics. It was a year when the facts weren't allowed to get in the way of a good, overwrought slogan. It was a year when we convinced ourselves that Earth was nearly beyond saving. It was a year of the safe space and micro-aggression.
No one will ever mistake Donald Trump for a student of James Madison. The real-estate mogul has demonstrated about as much familiarity with the U.S. Constitution as with the Bible, which is to say, none. Trump has captivated a share of the tea party with a style of politics utterly alien to the Constitution. In the year of Trump, the right is experiencing a post-constitutional moment.
Back before there was cable TV, Washington Irving won the war on Christmas. The great early American writer had an outsized role in giving us Christmas as we know it. A little background, according to "Christmas in America: a History," by Penne Restad. Back in merry old England, Christmastime in the 17th century was merry indeed, a raucous affair that incurred the displeasure of the Puritans.
If there's any lesson from Tuesday's debate, it's that six months after his entry into the Republican presidential race, no one has any better idea of how to handle Donald Trump than when he first got in. Las Vegas highlighted how Trump has established alpha-dog dominance in the Republican field. He's not only the front-runner according to national polls, he's a front-runner other candidates are literally afraid to criticize in his presence.
Saving the planet has never been so easy. The Paris climate talks concluded in a rousing round of self-congratulation over an agreement that, we are told, is the first step toward keeping Earth habitable. If generating headlines and press releases about making history were the metric for anything, Paris might be as consequential — if misbegotten — as advertised.
To believe his critics, Donald Trump has ripped up the U.S. Constitution and sprinkled its shreds on the smoldering embers of what was once the Statute of Liberty. He did this, of course, by proposing a temporary ban on Muslim immigration into the United States, which might be the most roundly and fiercely denounced idea in America since the British Parliament passed the Intolerable Acts (in 1774). There is no doubt about it: Donald Trump's proposal is invidious; not all Muslims are a security risk. It is unworkable; among other things, airlines would have to screen travelers from Europe for their religion. It is imprudent; we don't want to send a message of generalized hostility to Muslims.
"The same people who are most exercised about guns in America ... know little about them."
Self-righteousness is liberating. The same people who are most exercised about guns in America, and want to ban and even confiscate entire categories of firearms, know little about them and evidently feel no compunction to learn. The worst terror attack in the United States since Sept. 11 has become the occasion for another frenzied, poorly informed push for new gun restrictions. President Barack Obama gave a prime-time address on the terror threat, in which he resolutely reaffirmed the status quo in the campaign against ISIS. Except that he hopes that gun control, one of the signal political and policy failures of our time, will now be deployed to help foil the apocalyptic terror group.
A funny thing is happening on the way to the GOP meltdown. According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, the two most popular and broadly acceptable candidates in the field are perhaps the most talented and most reliably conservative. Oh, and by the way, they are Hispanics in their 40s. Donald Trump is still leading the polls and has demonstrated a staying power that has confounded his critics, but Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz are now beginning to stand out in the rest of the field, clustering with Ben Carson in effectively a three-way tie for second place nationally.
The murderous rampage at a Colorado Springs, Colorado, Planned Parenthood clinic had barely ended before the left began using it to try to shut down the abortion debate. The shooting was an act of terrorism directed against women's "health-care services," and incited by the inflammatory rhetoric around video exposes of Planned Parenthood. The triple murder had been nearly inevitable given, in the words of Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards, the "toxic" environment created by "hateful rhetoric."
The Paris attacks have occasioned a wide-ranging debate about what they mean and how to respond, involving Islam and its role, military strategy and, oddly enough, how Muslims in New Jersey reacted to Sept. 11 (thanks, Donald Trump). It's all very interesting and, for the most part, quite important. At bottom, though, the import of the Paris attacks is not complicated: ISIS terrorists are enemies of our civilization.
After the Paris attack, conventional wisdom held that Republican voters would finally turn away from political outsiders and reward candidates representing sobriety and experience. No one stopped to consider that, actually, voters might be drawn to the guy who memorably said of ISIS that he would "bomb the [expletive] out of them."
President Barack Obama has seen the enemy, and it is the refusal to accept more Syrian refugees. From the tone of his post-Paris remarks, you'd think that a sophisticated terrorist assault on a major Western city is a setback; sentiment in the U.S. against taking more Syrian refugees is an atrocity.
The instant online symbol of global support for Paris after last week's attacks was a roughly rendered peace symbol with an Eiffel Tower in the middle of it. The French designer Jean Jullien sketched it as soon as he heard the news of the atrocity. He called it "Peace for Paris," and it immediately became a sensation on social media. Its success is a sign of the times. We have become experts at treacly online mourning. We take grotesque atrocities and launder them into trite symbols and slogans that are usually self-congratulatory and, of course, wholly ineffectual. The 19th-century author William Dean Howells once said, "Yes, what the American public wants is a tragedy with a happy ending." On social media, the happy ending is the widely shared and tweeted image or hashtag.
Ted Cruz gets no respect. At least no respect in keeping with the impressiveness of the campaign he's built and his increasing odds of winning the Republican nomination. The press and the political class are beginning to catch on to Cruz's strength, and there has been more talk of a prospective Cruz-Marco Rubio race during the past two weeks, but his coverage and his buzz have been lagging indicators — and they are still lagging.
It was doubtful that the University of Missouri would stand up to a left-wing pressure campaign targeting its president, but when the football team joined the campaign, it was all over. Missouri is an SEC school, where even a mediocre football program — Mizzou is 1-5 against the rest of the conference — has formidable financial and cultural power.
Marco Rubio has a dubious distinction among the top-tier Republican presidential candidates: He's the only one who crafted and passed through the Senate a so-called comprehensive immigration reform that is anathema to the right. As Rubio has demonstrated considerable political strength, the spotlight has turned to him. Inevitably, his role as frontman for the "Gang of Eight" bill will get extensively relitigated — and it should.
For the press, the debate about Obamacare is over. There may be a few proverbial Japanese soldiers wandering on isolated islands yammering on about the failure of Obamacare, but word will eventually filter down to them, too. This assumption is so deeply embedded that it is impervious to new evidence that Obamacare is an unwieldy contraption that is sputtering badly. Yes, Obamacare has covered more people and has especially benefited those with pre-existing conditions (to be credible, Republican replacement plans have to do these things, as well), but the program is so poorly designed that, surely, even a new Democratic president will want to revisit it to try to make it more workable.
Bernie Sanders is the most prominent conspiracy theorist in America. He runs around the country saying that the economy is "rigged" by what he calls "the billionaire class." Sanders doesn't mean this metaphorically. He's dead serious. As he put it in his speech at Liberty University a couple of months ago, our economy is "designed by the wealthiest people in this country to benefit the wealthiest people in this country at the expense of everybody else."
