Columnist.
In 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama on two occasions went out of his way to warn the Iranians that the development of a nuclear weapon "would be a game-changing situation, not just in the Middle East, but around the world." Obama later added, "It is unacceptable for Iran to possess a nuclear weapon; it would be a game changer." Strong language. And Obama twice this year again used "game changer" in reference to Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, warning him not to dare use chemical weapons. In March, Obama announced to Assad that "the use of chemical weapons is a game changer." A month later, Obama again warned Assad not to resort to WMD use: "That is going to be a game changer."
The American middle class, like the American economy in general, is ailing. Labor-force participation has hit a 35-year low. Median household income is lower than it was five years ago. Only the top 5 percent of households have seen their incomes rise under President Obama. Commuters are paying more than twice as much for gas as they were in 2008. Federal payouts for food stamps, unemployment insurance and disability insurance have reached unprecedented levels.
For the last 70 years, American higher education was assumed to be the pathway to upper-mobility and a rich shared-learning experience. Young Americans for four years took a common core of classes, learned to look at the world dispassionately, and gained the concrete knowledge to make informed arguments logically. The result was a more skilled workforce and a competent democratic citizenry. That ideal may still be true at our flagship universities, with their enormous endowments and stellar world rankings.
President Obama's on-and-off-again planned American attack on Syria is nothing new. Besides its five declared wars, America has a habit of intervening all over the world. Even apart from clandestine CIA operations, and even after the unhappy end of the Vietnam War, we have attacked lots of countries and non-state militias. The roll call of recent American military interventions is quite astounding: Cambodia, Iran, Libya, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Liberia, Iraq, Haiti, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, Zaire and Afghanistan.
Israel could be forgiven for having a siege mentality -- given that at any moment, old frontline enemies Syria and Egypt might spill their violence over common borders. The Arab Spring has turned Israel's once-predictable adversaries into the chaotic state of a Sudan or Somalia. The old understandings between Jerusalem and the Assad and Mubarak kleptocracies seem in limbo. Yet these tragic Arab revolutions swirling around Israel are paradoxically aiding it, both strategically and politically -- well beyond the erosion of conventional Arab military strength.
Two quite different 21st-century Americas are emerging. The nation is not so much divided by "wars" between the rich and poor, men and women, or white and non-white. Instead, there is the world of reality versus that of triviality. In the vast plains of the Dakotas and the American West, thousands of men and women of all classes and colors are fracking oil and gas to create new energy for millions of homeowners and commuters -- while giving America a second chance at strategic energy independence. Yet the beneficiaries mostly ignore these elemental efforts. They instead prefer to fixate on the alleged sexual creepiness of big-city political mediocrities like Bob Filner and Anthony Weiner.
In Sam Cooke's classic 1959 hit "Wonderful World," the lyrics downplayed formal learning with lines like, "Don't know much about history ... Don't know much about geography." Over a half-century after Cooke wrote that lighthearted song, such ignorance is now all too real. Even our best and brightest -- or rather our elites especially -- are not too familiar with history or geography.
We all run across the pill bug in our gardens. At the first sign of danger, the tiny paranoid crustacean suddenly turns into a ball -- in hopes danger will have passed when he unrolls. That roly-poly bug can serve as a fair symbol of present-day U.S. foreign policy, especially in our understandable weariness over Iraq, Afghanistan and the current scandals that are overwhelming the Obama administration.
We may be in the era of Facebook and fracking. But 2013 is still beginning to look a lot like the cataclysmic century we just left behind. More people probably died from the wars of the 20th century than from the battles of the prior 2,500 years combined. The bloodiest century saw the rise of fascism, Nazism, communism and jihadism. Capitalism almost collapsed during the Great Depression. What followed was a Big Government antidote not unlike our own experience after the panic of 2008.
There are many strange elements in the current debate over illegal immigration, but none stranger than the mostly ignored role of Mexico. Are millions of Mexican citizens still trying to cross the U.S. border illegally because there is dismal economic growth and a shortage of jobs in Mexico? Not anymore. In terms of the economy, Mexico has rarely done better, and the United State rarely worse.
When do insensitive words destroy reputations? It all depends. Celebrity chef Paula Deen was dropped by her TV network, her publisher and many of her corporate partners after she testified in a legal deposition that she used the N-word some 30 years ago. The deposition was filed in a lawsuit against Deen and her brother over allegations of sexual and racial harassment.
In the old Dr. Faustus story, a young scholar bargains away his soul to the devil for promises of obtaining almost anything he wants. The American media has done much the same thing with the Obama administration. In return for empowering a fellow liberal, the press gave up its traditional adversarial relationship with the president. But after five years of basking in a shared progressive agenda, the tab for such ecstasy has come due, and now the media is lamenting that it has lost its soul.
By A.D. 200, the Roman Republic was a distant memory. Few citizens of the global Roman Empire even knew of their illustrious ancestors like Scipio or Cicero. Millions no longer spoke Latin. Italian emperors were a rarity. There were no national elections. Yet Rome endured as a global power for three more centuries. What held it together? A stubborn common popular culture and the prosperity of Mediterranean-wide standardization kept things going. The Egyptian, the Numidian, the Iberian and the Greek assumed that everything from Roman clay lamps and glass to good roads and plentiful grain were available to millions throughout the Mediterranean.
Truth is the lifeblood of democracy. Without honesty, the foundations of consensual government crumble. If the Internal Revenue Service acts unlawfully, our voluntary system of citizens computing their own taxes implodes. Yet Lois Lerner, one of the IRS's top officials, would not answer simple questions about her agency's conduct during congressional testimony, instead pleading the Fifth Amendment. Any taxpayer who tried that with an IRS auditor would end up fined and in court.
The Obama administration is facing scandals everywhere -- using the IRS to punish political enemies, seizing the phone records of Associated Press and Fox News reporters, monitoring phone and email accounts of millions, and making up stories about what happened in Benghazi. In other words, the sort of government overreach that hardly raises eyebrows in Russia, China and most of Africa and Latin America is felonious here in the freest society in the world. Because of America's unique Constitution, and especially the Bill of Rights, for over two centuries Americans have taken as their birthright privacy and free expression, so that even the slightest infringement becomes cause for outrage -- and correction.
GIBRALTAR -- From the heights of Gibraltar you can see Africa about nine miles away to the south -- and gaze eastward on the seemingly endless Mediterranean that stretches 1,500 miles to Asia beyond. Mare Nostrum, "our sea," the Romans called the deep blue waters that allowed Rome to unite Asia, Africa and Europe for half a millennium under a single prosperous, globalized civilization. Yet the Mediterranean has not always proved history's incubator of great civilizations -- Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Florentine and Venetian. Sometimes the ancient "Pillars of Hercules" at the narrow mouth of the Mediterranean here at Gibraltar marked not so much a gateway to progress and prosperity as a cultural and commercial cul-de-sac.
Ideas of the 1960s have now grown reactionary in our world that is vastly different from a half-century ago. Take well-meaning subsidies for those over age 62. Why are there still senior discounts, vast expansions in Social Security and Medicare, and generous public pensions? Five decades ago all that made sense. There was no such thing as double-dipping. Seniors often were physically worn out from blue-collar jobs. They were usually poorer and frequently sicker than society in general. The aged usually died not long after they retired.
Government is now so huge, powerful and callous that citizens risk becoming proverbial serfs without the freedoms guaranteed by the Founders. Is that perennial fear an exaggeration? Survey the current news. We have just learned that the Internal Revenue Service before the 2012 election predicated its tax-exempt policies on politics. It inordinately denied tax exemption to groups considered either conservative or possibly antagonistic to the president's agenda.
In Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, he ran to the left of Hillary Clinton as a moral reformer. Obama promised to transcend the old politics and bring a new era of hope-and-change transparency to Washington. Five years later, those vows are in shambles. True, the murder of four Americans in Benghazi has become a mess of partisan bickering. But the disturbing facts now transcend politics. The Obama administration -- the president himself, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney -- all at various times blamed an obscure video maker for the "spontaneous violence" that killed Americans last September.
