Columnist.
In so-called "March in March" protests, thousands of students in California universities recently demonstrated in outrage over spiraling tuition costs. At both the California State University and University of California multi-campus systems, tuition hikes in recent years have far exceeded the national average. Meanwhile, universities slash classes, cut key research, and rely even more on exploited and poorly paid part-time lecturers and graduate-student teaching assistants.
Americans -- left, right, Democrats and Republicans -- are all sick of thankless nation-building in the Middle East. Yet democratization was not our first choice, but rather a last resort after prior failures. The United States had long ago supplied Afghan insurgents, who expelled the Soviets after a decade of fighting. Then we left. The country descended into even worse medievalism under the Taliban. So after removing the Taliban, who had hosted the perpetrators of 9/11, we promised in 2001 to stay on.
The European Union and the United Nations, as well as globalization and advanced technology, were all supposed to trump age-old cultural, geographical and national differences and bring people together. But for all the high-tech veneer of the 21st century, the world still looks a lot like it did during the last hundred years and well before that.
Jeremy Lin is the New York Knicks basketball sensation whose so far brief but amazing performance on the court has set the world on fire in a mere month. Most NBA superstars are not 23-year-old Harvard-graduates. And they are rarely devout Christian, second-generation Taiwanese-Americans. The fact that Lin is an anomaly has guaranteed both sensationalism and controversy, at least some of it politically incorrect. Take professional boxer Floyd Mayweather's recent remark that "Jeremy Lin is a good player but all the hype is because he's Asian. Black players do what he does every night and don't get the same praise."
President Barack Obama recently assured El Salvador that the United States would not deport more 200,000 Salvadorans residing illegally in the United States. As the election nears, and the president looks to court Hispanic voters, he also created a new position of "public advocate" for illegal immigrants. His duties would appear to be to advocate that millions circumvent, rather than follow, current federal law. The administration has also said it will focus enforcement only on those who have committed crimes -- with the implicit understanding that it is no longer a crime to illegally enter and reside in the United States. In contrast, Obama has caricatured those supporting completion of a fence on the border as wanting to place alligators in the Rio Grande.
On the campaign trail, presidential candidate Barack Obama once called for a "reset" policy with Iran. Supposedly, the unpopularity of the Texan provocateur George W. Bush and his administration's inability to finesse "soft power" had needlessly alienated the Iranian theocracy. After all, the widely quoted but highly politicized 2007 National Intelligence Estimate claimed that Iran had ceased work on a bomb in 2003 and would not have a weapon for the foreseeable future. That flawed analysis fueled another popular talking point: that the Bush-Cheney warmongers were looking for more phantom weapons of mass destruction in Iran of the sort that had led them into Iraq.
Barack Obama's favorability in the polls falls when he is himself -- overexposed, hard left in his press conferences, and boastful about legislative achievements like Obamacare and a stimulus of more than $1 trillion. Then a strange thing happened. Obama largely went quiet. Often he was out of sight, vacationing in Hawaii or golfing. It was almost as if he learned that the less he was seen or heard, the more Americans liked the idea of Obama as president rather the reality of his constant "Make no mistake about it" and "Let me be perfectly clear" sermonizing.
The news media seem obsessed with the serial affairs of a younger Newt Gingrich back in the last century. The anger of his second of three wives mysteriously became national news on ABC's "Nightline" on the eve of the South Carolina primary. Millions watched Mrs. Gingrich II complain that Newt and the present Mrs. Gingrich III had done to her (while ill) just about the same thing that she and Newt had earlier done to Mrs. Gingrich I (while ill). Do these marital dramas involving our leaders matter that much? At some point, does long-ago adultery earn a statute of limitations? Do we forgive a few, but not serial, transgressions? Do we really care to learn the back-and-forth, he said/she said details? And do leaders have to be exceptionally talented to atone for extremely poor marital behavior?
In Greek mythology, the prophetess Cassandra was doomed both to tell the truth and to be ignored. Our modern version is a bankrupt Greece that we seem to discount. News accounts abound now of impoverished Athens residents scrounging pharmacies for scarce aspirin -- as Greece is squeezed to make interest payments to the supposedly euro-pinching German banks. Such accounts may be exaggerations, but they should warn us that yearly progress is never assured. Instead, history offers plenty of examples of life becoming far worse than it had been centuries earlier. The biographer Plutarch, writing 500 years after the glories of classical Greece, lamented that in his time weeds grew amid the empty colonnades of the once-impressive Greek city-states. In America, most would prefer to live in the Detroit of 1941 than the Detroit of 2011. The quality of today's air travel has regressed to the climate of yesterday's bus service.
President Obama just ordered massive cutbacks in defense spending, eventually to total some $500 billion. There is plenty of fat in a Pentagon budget that grew after 9/11, but such slashing goes way too far. Fairly or not, the cuts will only cement a now familiar stereotype of Obama's desire to retrench on the world scene. They follow symbolic apologies for purported past American sins, bowing to foreign royals, and outreach to the likes of Iran and Syria. Abroad, such perceptions can matter as much as reality, as our rivals begin hoping that Obama is as dubious about America's historically exceptional world role as are they.
It proved as hard to break up the bankrupt European Union as it was to create it. For all the hundreds of stories predicting the imminent end of the union, insolvent Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain still hung in. Apparently if these debtors keep promising to end their spendthrift ways, quit calling the historically sensitive Germans bad names, and welch only on serial billion-euro loans -- rather than default all at once on massive trillion-euro obligations -- the Germans will keep doling out enough money for the EU to whimper on a bit longer. Meanwhile, the world's failed states, such as Iran, North Korea and Pakistan, just keep on failing. Getting the bomb and acting crazy are about all these pariah nations can do. Otherwise, who would care that the adolescent-looking Kim Jong Un just took over North Korea? How else can we explain giving away billions each year to anti-American Pakistan? Without monotonous threats of acquiring nuclear weapons and closing the Strait of Hormuz, would anyone pay attention to the nutty theocracy in Iran?
Nearly 10 years ago, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld provoked outrage by referring to "Old Europe." How dare he, snapped the French and Germans, call us "old" when the utopian European Union was all the rage, the new euro was soaring in value, and the United States was increasingly isolated under the Bush administration! Yet the more things change in Europe, the more they stay the same. The island of Britain usually is, and is not, a part of Europe -- carefully pulling out when things heat up, terrified that it will be pulled back in when things boil over. British Prime Minister David Cameron knows the old script well, as he adamantly and publicly insists that Great Britain is still a part of the crumbling European Union while privately assuming that it is not.
Two terrible September days sum up the first decade of the new American millennium. The first, of course, was Sept. 11, 2001. Osama bin Laden's suicide terrorists that morning hit the Pentagon, knocked down the World Trade Center, killed 3,000 Americans, and left 16 acres of ash in Manhattan and $1 trillion in economic losses in their wake. Two invasions into Afghanistan and Iraq followed -- along with a more nebulous third "war on terror" against Islamic radicalism.
The rise of a German Europe began in 1914, failed twice, and has now ended in the victory of German power almost a century later. The Europe that Kaiser Wilhelm lost in 1918, and that Adolf Hitler destroyed in 1945, has at last been won by German Chancellor Angela Merkel without firing a shot. Or so it seems from European newspapers, which now refer bitterly to a "Fourth Reich" and arrogant new Nazi "Gauleiters" who dictate terms to their European subordinates. Popular cartoons depict Germans with stiff-arm salutes and swastikas, establishing new rules of behavior for supposedly inferior peoples.
There is a revolution going on America. But it is not part of the Tea Party or the loud Occupy Wall Street protests. Instead, massive new reserves of gas, oil and coal are being discovered almost everywhere in the United States, due to revolutionary methods of exploration and exploitation such as fracking and horizontal drilling. Current prices of over $100 a barrel make even complex efforts at recovery enormously profitable.
From 2007 to 2009, a surge of 20,000 troops under the generalship of David Petraeus saved a mostly lost war in Iraq. Petraeus' counterinsurgency doctrine helped win over the population, as the surge in troops gave greater security to Iraq's government and military. Despite occasional violence, fewer Americans have been killed in Iraq in 2011 (53 in the most recent count) than in any year since the invasion -- a quiet that could end with the departure of all American troops soon. By 2009, Afghanistan was spiraling out of control and seemed in need of a similar troop surge. President Obama reluctantly agreed to send 20,000 reinforcements. Two prominent veterans of the Iraq turnaround, Petraeus and Marine Gen. James Mattis, eventually took over command of the war and the surrounding theater to seek a repeat of what they had helped accomplish in Iraq.
Nominating Mitt Romney is sort of like taking grandma's castor oil. Republicans are dreading the thought of downing their unpleasant-tasting medicine but worry that sooner or later they will have to. By any logical political calculus, the former Massachusetts governor is an ideal presidential candidate. Ramrod straight, fit and well-educated, he knows all sorts of facts and figures and comes across like a cinematic chief executive.
Recently, an open mic caught French President Nicolas Sarkozy and American President Barack Obama jointly trashing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Sarkozy scoffed, "I cannot stand him. He's a liar." Obama trumped that with, "You're fed up with him, but I have to deal with him every day." In one of the most bizarre op-eds published by the New York Times in recent memory, Paul Kane suggested that the United States could literally sell out its support for democratic Taiwan for about a $1 trillion. He argued that the Chinese might be so thankful to us for letting them get their hands on the island that they might forgive much of what we owe them.
Richard Nixon went to Red China with political impunity. Had a Democrat tried that, he would have been branded a commie appeaser. To this day, liberals cannot conceive that during the two world wars, progressives like Woodrow Wilson, Earl Warren and Franklin Delano Roosevelt trampled on civil liberties in a way unimagined by Dick Cheney. Ronald Reagan signed the most liberal illegal immigration amnesty bill in history, and ran larger yearly deficits than had Jimmy Carter. "Read my lips" George H.W. Bush agreed to huge tax increases. And George W. Bush ran up the largest debt of any eight-year president, outspending Bill Clinton by more than fivefold. The latter, remember, bombed Belgrade without either congressional or United Nations approval -- and without antiwar protests. Without an opposition, almost anything goes.
First lady Michelle Obama the other day railed at "the few at the top," who do all sorts of bad things. A few months ago, we began hearing of the "1 percent" who are responsible for the current economic mess. "They" apparently make all their money at the expense of the other 99 percent. Are they the same as last year's villains, who had not paid "their fair share" in making over $200,000 in annual income? Do they include the greedy doctors, who, the president once asserted, recklessly lop off limbs and yank tonsils for profits? Is my urologist a dreaded one-percenter? He found out what was causing my kidney stones but probably makes good money. Was a nearby farmer one, too? I bet he makes over $200,000 but, like many other growers in this area, has found a way to produce beef and cotton more cheaply and efficiently than farmers in almost any other part of the world, thereby enriching his county, state and nation.
