Columnist.
Iran just announced a radical expansion of its uranium-enrichment facilities. The news followed the recent disclosure of the country's previously secret nuclear facility near the city of Qom -- and came just two days after the International Atomic Energy Agency's censure of Iran for its failure to halt enrichment. In other words, instead of complying with international requests to stand down, Iran has decided to step up efforts to enrich uranium, which, despite the government's denial, is all but certainly intended for a bomb.
Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan is accused of murdering last week 13 people (12 of whom were soldiers) and wounding another 30 at Fort Hood, Texas. It was not the first, nor will it be the last, domestic terrorist incident since Sept. 11, 2001. We now see that authorities had, or should have had, reason to be suspicious of Hasan -- including his contact with a radical cleric and a bizarre "medical" presentation he once gave to Army doctors that focused on Islam and the military. Now, we're also learning that someone going by the name Nidal Hasan posted extremist views on the Internet, and that at least one former classmate questioned his loyalty to America. Yet no one acted.
Norway stunned the world by awarding the coveted Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama, who was nominated for the honor after being in office less than two weeks. But the award is in keeping with Europeans' behavior over these first nine months of Obama's presidency. They've gone gaga over the guy. In return, however, their crush is not quite being reciprocated. Obama did his best to avoid British Prime Minister Gordon Brown at the recent G-20 summit. The tabloids in Britain still whine about the tawdry gifts the cool Obama gave Brown when he came to Washington earlier this year.
President Obama last week flew to Copenhagen to persuade the International Olympic Committee to award the 2016 games to Chicago, his hometown. He and first lady Michelle Obama delivered their now well-known inspirational stories about their Chicago neighborhood experiences. They even had Oprah in tow, along with a number of other Chicago big shots. Danish crowds thronged to see the celebrity president. The paparazzi had a field day. After little more than an hour-long presidential pep talk, Obama's Chicago whirlwind entourage jetted back home on Air Force One. A few hours later, the IOC rejected Chicago's we-are-the-world bid in the first round.
Last week, three dictators -- from Iran, Libya and Venezuela -- delivered lunatic hate speeches at the General Assembly of the United Nations. Why do these anti-Semitic dictators feel so free to damn America from downtown New York? Why do their abettors spurn our requests for help? And why do creepy regimes plot to get nukes, and fund terrorists? Easy. They do not fear, much less listen, to an indebted and energy-hungry America that either needs their cash or oil -- or both. Libya's Moammar Gadhafi raved for 90 minutes. He railed about everything from the Kennedy assassination to his own jet lag. He trashed the United States and the Jews. Even Gadhafi's translator collapsed from exhaustion trying to keep up with the stream-of-consciousness insanity.
California is in an uproar over water. Nearly a quarter-million acres worth of contracted federal irrigation deliveries have been cut from the big farms of the west side of the San Joaquin Valley in central California. The water in large part is being diverted to the salty San Francisco Bay and the delta to improve marine ecology. The result of the cutbacks is that many crops in the San Joaquin Valley have gone unplanted. Farm income is down. Thousands of farm laborers are unemployed. Growers and workers are now livid at environmentalists, federal bureaucrats and judges for worrying more about fish than about people and food growing. Environmentalists counter that the real cause of the cutoff is an ongoing drought. They argue there are too many claims on too little fresh water with no margin of safety in dry years like this one. The problem is not just saving tiny delta smelt or salmon, but a larger one of living within our means and not polluting our fragile ecosystem. Emotion colors the arguments of both sides. The west side is not yet a "dust bowl," as claimed on Fox News, and San Francisco Bay and the delta will not turn stagnant, as some environmentalists fret. The majority of west-side land is still farmed, and the bay is far cleaner than it was decades ago.
It was certainly uncouth of Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., to scream out "You lie" at his commander-in-chief in the middle of Barack Obama's recent health-care speech before a joint session of Congress. And others who keep insisting that the president doesn't have an authentic U.S. birth certificate clearly come off as unhinged -- much like just-resigned White House green-jobs czar Van Jones does for having signed his name to a petition stating that the Bush administration may have allowed the 9/11 murders of 3,000 people to happen. During his speech the other night, the president calmly called for a new civility --although he had just accused his opponents of dissimulation in their attack on his health-care plan, while himself presenting many dubious suppositions as fact. Over the last three decades, we saw vicious attacks on Ronald Reagan and on Bill Clinton, and their tough replies in turn. But recently the vicious rhetoric has escalated far beyond anything in the past. The smears seem reminiscent more of the brawling on the eve of the Civil War, or the nastiness during the 1960s that took decades to heal.
Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, is becoming a metaphor for almost all the sins of our age. Let us count the ways. How about corruption? Currently, Rangel is under investigation by two House subcommittees for illegally holding four rent-stabilized apartments in New York and not disclosing more than $75,000 in income from a rental villa he owns. He also took free Caribbean trips paid for by corporate cronies and used his congressional letterhead to press for money for the City College of New York's new educational center, which bears his name.
Seventy years ago this week, on Sept. 1, 1939, the Second World War broke out with the German invasion of Poland. Thousands of books have been written about the war. And by now revisionist historians of revisionist historians engage in an endless cycle of disagreement over why the war started, how it ended and what it all meant. Here are a few more controversial thoughts on the horrific conflict that killed 60 million people, wrecked Europe and set the stage for an ensuing half-century Cold War. Many blame Germany's aggressions on the supposedly harsh terms of the Versailles Treaty following the First World War, which stripped a defeated Germany of territory, required reparations and dismantled its military.
The anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan headed to Martha's Vineyard this week, where President Obama is vacationing. Once again she is protesting our two wars abroad. But Sheehan is a media has-been. ABC's Charlie Gibson used to cover her anti-Bush rallies in Crawford, Texas. Now he says, with a sigh, of her recent anti-Obama efforts, "Enough already." The war in Iraq is scarcely in the news any longer, despite the fact that 141,000 American soldiers are still protecting the fragile Iraqi democracy, and 114, as of this writing, have been lost this year in that effort.
In Greek mythology, even Olympian gods and heroes were subject to a higher divine power known loosely as "fate" -- an allotted moira , or destiny, that could not be changed even by thunderbolt-throwing Zeus. In modern America, debt -- whether national, state or trade -- now plays the same overarching role as the ancient Greek notion of fate. And the president, Congress and the states for all their various agendas are impotent since they must first pay back trillions that have long ago been borrowed and spent.
In George Orwell's allegorical novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four," the picture of "Big Brother" appears constantly in the adoring media. Perceived enemies are everywhere -- supposedly plotting to undo the benevolent egalitarianism of Big Brother. Citizens assemble each morning to scream hatred for two minutes at pictures of the supposed public traitor Emmanuel Goldstein. The "Ministry of Truth" swears that the former official Goldstein is responsible for everything that goes wrong in Oceania.
