Columnist.
When the Obama administration finalized its regulation requiring health care plans to provide cost-free coverage for sterilizations, contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs, House Speaker John Boehner -- as this column noted last year -- was one of those who correctly argued that the regulation was an attack on religious freedom and that Congress must not let it stand. On Wednesday, in craven contradiction to that position, Boehner plans to lead the Republican-controlled House in enacting a continuing resolution that will fund the government for the rest of fiscal 2013 and that will provide the administration with the money to carry out its attack on religious liberty while leaving Barack Obama's claimed authority to do so unchallenged.
When George W. Bush was stumping as a "compassionate conservative" in the closing days of the 2000 presidential campaign, he went to Florida and repeated a campaign promise to double the funding for the National Institutes of Health. "I will lead a medical moon shot to reach far beyond what seems possible today and discover new cures for age-old afflictions," Bush said. After he won Florida by a famously narrow margin -- and thus was elected president despite losing the nationwide popular vote -- Bush basically made good on his funding promise.
The ultimate purpose of the U.S. military is simple: Defend the God-given liberty of Americans. Yet today we have a president who is using his power as commander in chief to wage war against the moral truth that makes liberty possible. Last week, outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta executed a directive from President Obama that requires the military to treat cohabitating homosexuals as if they were married couples. Panetta did so in a memorandum he sent to the secretaries of the military departments and to the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness.
When NATO published a "media backgrounder" on Afghan security forces in October 2010, the U.S.-led alliance was adamant that as the Afghan National Army (ANA) grew to the point where it would be able to defend its own country, it would also need to increase the women in its ranks. "This growth must result in an inclusive army," said the NATO document. "This requires future effort in building a cadre of female soldiers, as well as ensuring an ethnically balanced army. Currently there are 301 women in the ANA, of which 166 are officers." A year later, The New York Times ran a story about a female cadet training to be an officer in the ANA.
Karl Rove -- "The Architect," as President George W. Bush called him -- crafted Bush's two presidential campaigns and served as a key player in Bush's White House. Now, with an assist from The New York Times, Rove is presenting himself as a conservative leader. On Sunday, the Times reported that American Crossroads, the super PAC Rove started, was beginning a new program called "The Conservative Victory Project." This project, as the Times put it, will "recruit seasoned candidates and protect Senate incumbents from challenges by far-right conservatives and tea party enthusiasts." But Rove is no conservative.
When I was a boy in the 1960s, my father had nine season tickets to the San Francisco 49ers, and on Sundays in the fall would often bring as many as seven of his 11 children to see the team play at Kezar Stadium. Kezar was at the southeast corner of Golden Gate Park, adjacent to the Haight-Ashbury District. In 1967, there was probably no greater side-by-side contrast of the diverging trends in American culture than between the people inside that stadium, watching a game played on grass, and the people outside the stadium, smoking grass. At the age of 9, I followed pro football -- that is, the fate of the 49ers -- with passionate intensity. I did not care about the extraordinarily odd and presumably transient people on the other side of the stadium wall. I assumed the only way they could have a long-term impact on my world was if, say, one of them, driving stoned, ran me over in his Volkswagen bus.
When he stood before the world to deliver his first inaugural address four years ago, President Barack Obama proudly declared, "We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers." Early in his presidency, he repeated various permutations of this phrase, always reserving the resonant final spot for the "non-believers." During his first term, Obama also occasionally edited the Creator from the Declaration of Independence. "We hold these truths to be self-evident," he said, for example, in a Sept. 15, 2010, speech, "that all men are created equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights: life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Next week, four months after terrorists killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will finally testify in congressional committees about what happened that day. Since Sept. 11, the Defense Department has released a timeline of that day, the Senate Homeland Security Committee has released a report, and a State Department "Accountability Review Board" set up by Clinton herself has published its own analysis. But the composite story derived from these sources raises more questions about Clinton's role on 9/11/12 than it answers. In fact, these sources cite no action at all personally taken by Clinton.
On the night of Sept. 11, 2012 -- before former Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty were killed by a terrorist mortar strike -- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton released a public statement linking the attack against the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, with an anti-Muslim video, which she referred to as "inflammatory material posted on the Internet." Clinton's statement, still posted on State's website, is dated Sept. 11, 2012, and headlined: "Statement on the Attack in Benghazi." The statement first notes that a State Department officer had been killed in Benghazi -- an apparent reference to Information Management Officer Sean Smith, whose body had been recovered at the U.S. mission in Benghazi by U.S. security officers by about 5:30 p.m. Washington, D.C., time on Sept. 11 -- or 11:30 p.m. Benghazi time.
Looking back over the last four years, it is now obvious that the greatest symbolic moment of President Barack Obama' first term was the very first moment. That is when Obama placed his left hand on Abraham Lincoln's Bible, raised his right hand, and followed the lead of Chief Justice John Roberts in attempting to recite the oath that all American presidents must take, swearing to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Obama and Roberts mangled the oath, a poignant precursor of their subsequent exertions to mangle the Constitution itself.
America is now in a time that in some ways resembles the 1850s, when freedom-loving people, attentive to political and cultural trends, saw a great crisis coming. After the Mexican-American War, as Southern slaveholders and their political allies sought to extend the realm of slavery into the West and tip the nation's political and cultural balance to the advantage of slaveholders, many believed liberty was at risk. In the wake of the Dred Scott decision -- in which the Supreme Court argued that the federal government could not prohibit slavery in the territories because enslaved human beings were a form of property protected by the Fifth Amendment -- Abraham Lincoln, then a Senate candidate, explained his own understanding of the coming crisis.
I was driving near the Washington Beltway recently behind an evangelistic atheist. It was not the Obama-Biden bumper sticker that gave this driver away, but the one just below it: "You don't need God -- to hope, to care, to love, to live." That seemed an oddly defensive bit of secular scripture, and since the bumper sticker also promoted a website (livingwithoutreligion.org), I decided to see what the Godless were preaching. "We who are nonreligious lead meaningful lives without reliance on the supernatural," said the website.
President Barack Obama travelled to Michigan this week and made his case for class war in defense of the welfare state. We need to take more money from the rich, he said, or schools will not be able to afford books, students will not be able to afford college, and disabled children will not get health care. "Our economic success has never come from the top down," said Obama. "It comes from the middle out.It comes from the bottom up." Obama spoke these words a few miles from Detroit -- the reductio ad absurdum of his argument.
Ronald Reagan, who was then a movie actor, delivered one of the greatest and most prophetic speeches of the 20th century, when he appeared before the Orange County Press Club on July 28, 1961. Vital Speeches of the Day later published the full text under the headline, "Encroaching Control: Keep Government Poor and Remain Free." Reagan made an alarming argument: Americans were slowly surrendering to socialism just as some socialists had predicted they would. "Not too long ago," Reagan said, "Norman Thomas, six times a candidate for president on the Socialist Party ticket, commented that 'the American people would never knowingly vote for socialism but that under the name of liberalism, they would adopt every fragment of the socialist program.'"
Will House Speaker John Boehner give President Barack Obama the money he needs to implement a regulation that Boehner himself described as an unconstitutional attack on religious freedom that forces Catholics to cooperate in immoral acts? The Constitution gives the House of Representatives, which now has a Republican majority, the power to deny funding for any act by the executive branch. But does Boehner have the courage to stand up against the president and use this lawful authority to protect religious liberty? On Feb. 8, 2012, Boehner went to the well of the House and laid down a marker.
"Catholicism teaches that it is a sin to use, provide, or otherwise support contraception." These words are not from the Catholic Catechism or a sermon by a Catholic bishop. They are excerpted from the preliminary injunction U.S. District Judge Robert H. Cleland issued last month temporarily stopping the Obama administration from forcing a family-owned outdoor-power-equipment company to comply with an Obamacare regulation that requires virtually all health care plans to provide women (but not men) with co-pay-free coverage for sterilizations, contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs. The judge stated the Catholic teaching on contraception as an undisputed fact of the case. He could have made similar statements about sterilization and abortion.
How long does it take to tell the president that his CIA director is under investigation? Here is the answer Americans are now supposed to believe: longer than it took for the White House to discover a YouTube video did not inspire the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi. In June 2010, President Obama fired Gen. Stanley McChrystal as the U.S. commander in Afghanistan because McChrystal had criticized civilian administration officials in the presence of a writer from Rolling Stone. Obama immediately named Gen. David Petraeus -- hero of the Iraq surge -- the new field commander in Afghanistan.
Almost every night I take a 2-year-old golden retriever on a long walk through a safe and sylvan suburban neighborhood. This is Champ's dominion, and he prances through it with the happy confidence of a not-so-long-ago puppy who now assumes he is undisputed sovereign of all he surveys. Champ is particularly tolerant of the lesser creatures in his realm. Chipmunks skittering by in the dust, geese honking through the skies overhead, squirrels scrambling for the nearest tree -- these things rarely disturb his princely mien. Even the arrogant red fox -- who has made a habit of casually strolling across the road 50 feet in front of Champ's otherwise attentive nose -- elicits no response at all from this most benevolent of neighborhood monarchs.
President Barack Obama's schedule for Sept. 11, 2012 -- the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks -- was designed to present a man with deep empathy for terror victims. At 8:46 a.m., in front of reporters, he and Michelle Obama observed a moment of silence outside the White House to mark the minute and hour when American Airlines Flight 11 flew into the World Trade Center. Then, in front of reporters, the Obamas moved to the Pentagon. They arrived before 9:37 a.m. so Obama could lay a wreath to mark the minute and hour when American Airlines Flight 77 flew into that building. On the way back to the White House, in front of reporters, they stopped at Arlington Cemetery to visit the graves of servicemen killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
When a generation of young men at Princeton, Harvard and Yale invented American football in the decades after the Civil War, they must have envisioned that someday there would be a game like the one Princeton played Saturday against Harvard. This was football as it was meant to be. It was not the crystal blue October sky that made this game so nearly perfect, or the red leaves falling from the maples, or the yellow leaves clinging to the elms. Nor was it the gothic towers rising through the autumn colors beyond the stadium wall. It was what happened on the field that made this a day for the ages. Both Harvard and Princeton entered the game unbeaten in the Ivy League. But not long after the opening kickoff, evidence mounted that this may not be a contest of equals. Harvard dominated -- on offense, defense and special teams.
