Columnist.
The past is the great obsession of modern times.
Read moreThose Republicans! Here's the lowdown on 'em — and on their lousy, lowdown approach to governing. They don't want the wrong people voting. They're "scared of letting citizens have their say." They're engaged in "a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people, and young people from one end of our country to the other." Don't you just want to kick 'em? Don't you just want to vote for Hillary Clinton? Which after all is the point of Clinton's demagogic tirade last week — getting you to vote for her so she can launch new and better demagogic tirades. Moving up the road from this latest Clinton tour de force shouldn't be hard. The Clinton view of the right to vote is that it exists to put Clintons in office, rather than to affirm faith in the power of free, unimpeded voter choice.
Evidence of the country's much-vetted shift to the political left is the strengthening and spread of the movement to abolish capital punishment, that relic of barbarous times when we struck off people's heads for, you know, social revenge. Sort of like what ISIS does. As we don't want to be like ISIS, or the remaining repositories of organized revenge, such as Iran, we need to cool it on capital punishment. So, in part, goes the argument that Nebraska legislators adopted in overriding their governor's veto of a bill to abolish the death penalty. Nebraska got a lot of publicity at the time because there wasn't much else going on besides the Texas floods and also, because of Nebraska's being a "red" state, its action might be seen as auguring great change in the near future: a movement from revenge to mercy.
Columnist and Fox News contributor Kirsten Powers' new book, "The Silencing: How the Left Is Killing Free Speech," links her snugly to the cause of unfettered thought and expression — important for conservatives, certainly but also for non-conservatives. As it should be for any American, come to think of it, as the "progressive" left pounds and pulverizes anyone of differing mind and purpose. The politicization of almost everything has put at some risk, in the most talkative of ages, the broadly assumed right of First Amendment-cherishing Americans to speak their pieces. "The illiberal left," says Powers, "... believes that people who express ideological, philosophical, or political views that don't line up with their preferences should be completely silenced." In other words, delegitimized as people worth hearing on the showing of "self-appointed overlords — activists, university administrators, journalists, and politicians — who have determined what views are acceptable to express. So, shut up — or else."
You might have another notion entirely. I prefer to see the fruits of Raul Castro's semi-conversion to Catholicism before reaching conclusions as to his sincerity. "I read all the speeches of the pope, his commentaries," said Raul on Sunday, following a meeting at the Vatican with the hugely popular Pope Francis, "and if the pope continues this way, I will go back to praying and go back to the church. I'm not joking." Magnifico! And then how quickly do the Cuban peoples' shackles fall off? Freedom of speech returns ... when? Not to mention, in the present context, freedom of religion? Liberal admirers of Pope Francis are likely to seize on Raul's Vatican epiphany as heightened evidence of the pope's unanticipated impact on the secular world: his high ratings in the polls; his friendliness to social outcasts; the rapture he excites when the media catch him downplaying the "culture wars."
Here's how it stands with Western civilization — what's left of it, I mean — insofar as various Westerners are concerned. You keep your lip buttoned whenever foes, internal as well as external, jump up and down on you, kick you around, make known their fondest wish is to do you in, ideals and all. You hope for the best while doing nothing. You follow, that is to say, the counsel of "Jacques," who posted Monday on the New York Times' website, disburdening himself as follows concerning the Sunday shootings at the Mohammed poster contest in Garland, Texas: "The Far Right is using 'freedom' as a stick to beat and provoke Muslims. Cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed do not advance the cause of freedom one iota. It is provocation pure and simple."
Well. I really can't believe I am saying this. The U.S. Supreme Court is poised to tell us what marriage means. Not speculate; not explain. Tell: as in, "Wipe that smile off your face and listen to what I'm telling you." We are at a remarkable moment in human affairs: one we would hardly have predicted 50 years ago at the start of our cultural upheavals. Historic understandings that drew, for the most part, support and sympathy no longer have footing, which is fine with the kind of folk — they are in leadership roles all around us, including judgeships and presidential candidacies — who think we're in the business of inventing a whole new way of life, atoning in the process for ancient sins. And what would be considered an ancient sin? Preferring one ideal or mode of conduct over another one. Talking a lot about Truth. Those would be some of the more salient sins.
Andrew Jackson was sort of a rough-and-tumble president, undoubtedly, but the United States, in the 1820s and '30s, was sort of a rough-and-tumble country. Notice how refined and civilized we've gotten since then, to the point that a coalition of lady activists is ready to pull President Jackson's mug off the $20 bill, substituting — well, that's yet to be decided. New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen's notion is that whoever we come up with for a replacement needs to be female, there being no other females on our paper currency. An online poll suggests Eleanor Roosevelt, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, and — get ready — Wilma Mankiller, a former chieftains of the Cherokees. Mankiller's promotion to greenback celebrity — viewed apart from her titillating name — would be seen, most likely, as an act of overdue retribution. According to one kick-out-Jackson activist, our country's seventh president "engineered a genocide" by conspiring with Congress to drive the Cherokees, at bayonet's point, out of the Southeast and into Oklahoma.
I'm. Just. So. Excited. That. Hillary. Clinton. Is. Ready. To. Be. My. Champion. I mean, she says she's ready, what with "the deck ... still stacked in favor of those at the top." Oh, ma'am, we "everyday Americans," I can tell you, have had it up to here with the "top" people running everything. We're ready for a president with a family net worth of only $13 million: somewhere in the Clinton range, we're informed. Something else we're ready for is a president whose speech-giving fees, pre-campaign, were a modest $200,000: $10,000 a minute or thereabouts; no more than your Aunt Bessie would spend on a new Lamborghini Gallardo.
We learn, from a squint-eyed investigation by major functionaries at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, that Rolling Stone magazine's bulging-eyed, 9000-word article, "A Rape on Campus," doesn't wash. A "journalistic failure that was avoidable," the investigators called the article, which purported to tell of a 2012 gang-rape at the University of Virginia, involving fraternity members and a female student. Except, apparently, it didn't happen: or anyway not nearly the way the complainant told the magazine, which with minimal investigation bought her story hook, line and sinker, and commenced to spread it abroad. Guilty as charged, was Rolling Stone's message.
In the political game -- humanity's reward for forbidden fruit chomping in the Garden of Eden -- all disagreements concern power: Who's No. 1 around here; who gets the final say-so. The ludicrous, and disheartening, dust-up over Indiana's new law on religious freedom shows where growing numbers of Americans think power has shifted with respect to society's fundamental and most important institution, marriage. Critics of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, signed into law only last week by Gov. Mike Pence, accuse Indiana of providing citizens legal cover to discriminate against gays -- to deny them jobs or services on "religious" grounds.
Cinematically, as well as politically, we are sort of in a John Wayne moment: which is where Ted Cruz comes in. Things in this town of ours ain't a-going real good right now. Everything, in fact, seems to be falling apart, save in the eyes of folk who wish America would either drop into the sea or fall in line with President Obama's preachments and prescriptions. Wait! A sudden thunder of hooves in the distance! A shout! A shot! It's... It's ... Ted Cruz, declaring his candidacy for the U.S. presidency. I do not want to be understood as mocking a serious candidate at an undoubtedly serious moment in national affairs. The point is: Would he be volunteering to save us if the feeling weren't so widespread that we need saving, and fast?
Maybe the question is, who'd want a degree from a university whose administration, on learning of a frat-boy incident on a bus, behaves as though God had personally dispatched the whole academic bureaucracy to wreak revenge. "P-o-o-o-o-or Okies," as we Texas Longhorns used to chant from the Cotton Bowl stands. I mean, what else do they do at Oklahoma University besides act as though the future of civilization depended on humiliating a couple of undergrad pranksters on account of a racist song they sang; closing down SAE's local chapter, even unto removing the Greek letters from the house and driving non-participants into the highways and byways? Does OU actually educate anyone? Or is extermination for incorrect viewpoint the school's idea of modern education?
One vast, towering reason for Barack Obama's victory over John McCain in 2008 was the widespread expectation that an articulate and half-black chief executive would help the country overcome at long last its racial anxieties. He'd speak about race with far-seeing eye and reasonable demeanor. He'd see all sides of the matter. He'd guide with confidence -- as he sought to do in Selma the other day, reminding Americans that "the march is not yet over; we know the race is not yet won. We know reaching that blessed destination where we are judged by the content of our character requires admitting as much." Etc. -- words and more words, glistening for a minute or two in the sunlight, then just lying there. So it goes.
In a week when the Wall Street Journal's editorial page lectures the Republican Congress for tactical stupidity; and Israel's prime minister lectures the Obama administration, whose insiders lecture him back; and no one can believe Obama has believable plans for anything; and he can't believe anybody would believe such a thing -- with all this going on, who cares what goes on at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill? I really wouldn't care myself but for the appearance of a book about the university's apparent subservience to athletics and the dough that athletics brings in. I gather from Gregg Easterbrook's review in the aforesaid Wall Street Journal that Jay M. Smith and Mary Willingham, in "Cheated," tell a tale of significant dimensions, concerning the indifference of a putatively great university to the chicanery involved in sponsoring fake classes for athletes who can barely read. But who -- here's the point, don't you know? -- play football and basketball so superbly they earned UNC an average $30 million profit for the two sports last year.
Neil Patrick Harris mocked the, shall we say, non-diversity of the Oscars lineup, but more clamorously received in the political theater of the moment was Patricia Arquette's summons to get with the equal-pay-for-women cause. Which you might have assumed had slipped from causiness after 52 years of effort in Washington, D.C., to eradicate the imputed pay gap. Not so. Because, look, "inequality" continues to vex and disgrace the progressive ideal of an America where variations among citizens, as to income, looks, tastes, intelligence and the like, are the result of nefarious Old Guard plots. The Equal Pay Act of 1963, by Ms. Arquette's reckoning, seems not to have worked out; nor anything meant since then to "equalize" men and women -- the civil rights laws, the Lilly Leadbetter Fair Pay Act, the National Equal Pay Task Force, etc. One federal action after another -- and still the pay gap persists! The usual reproach along this line is that full-time women workers take home only 77 percent of the bacon carried off by their male counterparts.
A number of maxims surround the practice of war. The main maxim runs to this effect: When you get attacked, fight back. Unless, to be sure, you don't care whether you win or lose -- an option, to be sure, not given to American presidents and other national leaders, assuming, to be sure, they take with maximum seriousness their obligation to the security of their people and their people's freedom. Days after the mass beheadings of Coptic Christians in Libya, profoundly serious questions linger in the air. Does Barack Obama know what's going on all around him? Does he have the slightest inkling?
It's been kind of fun, I tell you: a Florida Democratic congressman, one Alcee Hastings, calls Texas a "crazy state." Texans -- e.g., Rick Perry -- joyfully, jubilantly acknowledged the craziness that has made our state (yes, I am one of the assorted bedlamites) foremost in the country for economic growth. How come Texas leads in job creation and in general economic wellbeing -- the oil price free-fall notwithstanding? Because we're all nuts down here? It's a nice kind of nuttiness, if so. Not that Texas -- very much a part of our fallen, post-Edenic world -- is without its modern challenges, including deficiencies in the public schools and the persistence of poverty amid plenty: the same challenges, come to think of it, facing Congressman Hastings' Florida. To say nothing -- in variant degree -- of progressive paradises such as California, New York, Illinois and Massachusetts, where enlightened opinion would shut down quickly enough any crazy, Texas-like adventures in the spread of freedom.
Back in the '90s I bantered once or twice with Karl Rove. It had to do with the Bush boys, George and Jeb. I said something like, "Come on, Karl" -- we enjoyed a slight and, to my mind, professionally cordial connection through Texas journalism -- "Jeb's the conservative. He's the Bush we ought to want to see in the White House." This was assuming, of course, that the stars were in alignment for a victory in 2000 by either Bush boy, upon the constitutionally mandated retirement of Bill Clinton. Jeb was governor of Florida then. He talked and played a good conservative game on policy, but Karl was having none of it. George W. was the likelier, and more impressive, conservative -- just the conclusion you would expect from one who was already an official adviser to George W.
"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." Barry Morris Goldwater, may God rest his freedom-loving soul, spoke the celebrated words in accepting the Republican nomination for president in 1964. But the author of the phrase was a brilliant political scientist named Harry V. Jaffa, whose death a couple of weeks ago, at 96, put the obituarists instantly in mind of a rhetorical flight from which Goldwater supposedly never recovered. The two -- Barry and Harry -- knew with some exactitude what they were doing. As William J. Middendorf, a ring leader of the Draft Goldwater movement, would later note: Goldwater was taking on "the major theme of the (GOP) opposition debate: that he and his supporters were 'extremists' and the Rockefellers and Scrantons of the party were the voices of 'moderation.'"
