Columnist.
Heavens, no! Insists Michael McCrum, the "special prosecutor" who procured the indictment of Texas Gov. Rick Perry for alleged misuse of his constitutional power to veto legislation. Why, it wasn't about politics at all! The legal case against Perry, which discombobulates such plans as the governor might have for another presidential bid, is grounded, McCrum says, in "the facts and the law, and nothing else." The prosecutor, if I may be permitted, is full of a commodity long recommended for agricultural enrichment. We may imagine if we like that a grand jury in one of America's most liberal counties concluded, without bias or rancor, that one of America's best-known conservative politicians illegally vetoed funding for that same county's "public integrity" unit presided over by a DA convicted of drunk driving. It was illegal for the governor to use his legal power? That seems essentially the narrative the jury bought from McCrum.
Is anybody overjoyed, rapturous, bowled over with delight at seeing the United States again involved in Iraq? No? We can move on then. The United States *is* involved in Iraq. Concerning which involvement we have two choices: 1) Mess it up, getting lots more people killed than have been killed already; or 2) help the locals to engineer something like a standoff between Iraqis able to pass for reasonable people and those who, on present evidence, might have earned censure from Genghis Khan for excessive devotion to human slaughter. It may be a while before President Obama figures out what he has gotten himself into -- first on account of prematurely pulling all American troops out of Iraq, second by sending back the Air Force to protect the Iraqi minority known as the Yazidis, along with such Americans as can still be found among our endangered friends, the Kurds.
Word to Christians from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria: Convert, leave or die. Forget accommodation. Forget religious tolerance and related catch phrases from the always tolerant, perpetually forbearing West. Convert, leave or die. Against the backdrop of attempts to exterminate -- not just subdue, not just conquer; *exterminate* -- Christianity in the Middle East, Secretary of State John Kerry's frantic appeals for an Israeli stand-down in the war with Hamas look more absurd by the second. The firers of rockets from Gaza into Israel are of the same kidney as the ISIS terrorists. If you're not one of them, they want you gone or dead.
So, then, what are we supposed to think when the governor of Texas dispatches National Guardsmen to the state border with Mexico in order to deflect the onrush of illegal border-crossers? What are we supposed to do?
Sarah Palin's call for the impeachment of President Obama makes no sense. What does the lady want -- a national street fight? But a fetching question arises from her enterprise: Could we live for two years under a President Joe Biden? Would it be worse than now? Maybe not. It has come to this, in the second year of the second term of Barack Obama. Our present chief executive makes Joe Biden look good -- a prospect that once seemed as unlikely as a free Clinton speech. Joe Biden, without a fresh political perspective to his name -- but with a head of nicely transplanted hair and a mouthful of nicely capped teeth -- might lead the country more intelligently than ...
What this country almost certainly doesn't need right now is more laws and regulations; but it doesn't necessarily need fewer laws and regulations, either. What we appear to need above all else is a deeper -- and that's not saying much -- understanding of the purposes for which a civilized society passes laws and enacts regulations. We need, in essence, moral instruction. Eeek! "Moral instruction"? "Right" and "wrong"? By whose lights, whose standards? The contraception debate -- to the extent you call it a debate instead of a shouting match -- brings to mind these fundamental, yet generally skirted, issues. In 21st-century America, right and wrong are matters we hand over to the big guns in politics and -- alas -- the chattering profession, my own profession: the media. He who makes the loudest noises and wins the most elections gets to cram his views down the public's throat.
The U.S. Supreme Court had a banner day, a crackerjack day, with horns and ice cream, as it trumped the federal government's brazen claim of power and authority to define which religious convictions, if any, have a proper place in the health care arena. Hooray for the Hahn and Green families for carrying to the high court their plea to be released from the duty of providing employees with contraceptive coverage under Obamacare. Never mind (as the government saw it before the court's 5-4 ruling) the two families' religiously grounded conviction that the mandate violated their religious beliefs and moral principles, potentially implicating them in the destruction of unborn life.
And there before us, b'golly, was ... the car! THE car. You know? The one positioned, in blood and early 20th-century elegance, at the center of modern history; the open car carrying the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, when a teenage terrorist in Sarajevo shot them dead on St. Vitus Day -- June 28 -- 1914, setting off nearly uninterrupted shockwaves of horror. Or so we generally hear. I will come back to that point. I saw the car nearly half a century ago at the Austrian Museum of Military History in Vienna: large, dark, eerie. The sight was akin in my mind to the notion of inspecting the cutlery employed by Brutus and Cassius on mighty Caesar's carcass.
The Eric Cantor debacle in Virginia last week demanded a storyline, which was no heavy lifting. In the GOP primary a political newbie had wiped the floor with the majority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives. Bring on the analysts to find the narrative in the rebuke administered, a rather remote if hard-working political power broker linked more frequently -- here comes the dichotomy -- with Wall Street than Main Street. Cantor, on these terms, updated Cardinal Wolsey's Shakespearean lament from "Henry VIII": "Had I but served my district with half the zeal/I served the Chamber of Commerce he would not in mine age/Have left me naked to mine enemies."
Sir Isaac Newton instructs us, in the Third Law of Motion, that for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction. It may be another way of saying that without Barack Obama there might not now be a Ted Cruz. The political writers swarmed all around the Texas Republican Party's recent convention with the tale of how much enthusiasm Cruz aroused there as the party's prospective answer to Barack Obama and Harry Reid. "I tell you this," Cruz said at one Republican event, "as good as 2014 is gonna be, 2016 is gonna be even better." "Something incredible is happening," he told delegates. "Something is sweeping the state of Texas; it's sweeping every state." He likened the "something" to "the Reagan revolution we saw in the face of stagnation, in the face of feckless, naive foreign policy, in the face of America getting weaker and weaker ... "
Not to be overlooked amid the gale of reaction to the Environmental Protection Agency's carbon emission proposal is the EPA's gall, its effrontery, its smug tone of We're-the-government-and-don't-you-forget-it. Putin could take lessons from this gang. The signal point, to be sure, is the thumbprint of Barack Obama on the EPA's plan to reduce -- in theory -- the economy's carbon footprint. EPA wants by 2030 a 30 percent cut in emissions compared with 2005. A plan to tackle the perceived problem failed in 2010 in a Senate heavily controlled by Democrats. OK, says Obama, his term as president winding down, I'll do it myself, through executive authority. Listen up -- I'm talking! The EPA, which he controls, sure did listen.
The way to have the foreign policy you want is first to figure out what kind of foreign policy you want. It is a task at which American leaders grow less and less adept, possibly on account of Americans' general inability to figure out what they want: involvement, isolation or variations of the two? What, exactly? Barack Obama, who plans a major foreign policy speech this week at West Point, merits a modicum of sympathy. A modicum, I said -- let's not get over-generous -- for his disposition to figure out things on the fly, such as Syrian chemical weapons, Putin, the Ukraine, Egypt, the Middle East and other dangers.
The news about all the disinvited commencement speakers -- at Brandeis, at Smith College, at Haverford -- grabbed America in an unexpected and gratifying way. Yes, something *was* amiss! Students were telling their elders to shut up, and -- this was the gratifying part -- the public feedback was strictly negative: enough so that the replacement speaker, at Haverford, for the beaten-down Robert J. Birgeneau, ex-chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, called the protesters and their faculty backers "immature" and "arrogant." Which they are and were, of course; the question being, where did the protestors get their sense of entitlement to push around supposedly smarter people than themselves? It's in the cultural water, one is afraid. We've been on this track for around half a century -- the track of immature, arrogant claims to moral superiority, based on nothing but given credence by people with more professional authority than moral courage or common sense.
The hollowness at the core of 21st century liberal politics stands out against the backdrop of the big climate change ... would "debate" be the word? Not likely. The air fills with assumptions, generated by the media sources that channel most political assumptions. Among these: The people will believe every word from on high, duly knuckling our foreheads. As President Obama himself put it, referring to a recent National Climate Assessment report: "Earlier this week I issued ... " With characteristic modesty the president corrected himself: "Or we issued a report (showing) that climate change is not some far-off problem in the future. It's happening now ... more severe floods, more violent wildfires." "More and more Americans" know it, including "Republicans outside of Washington." Alas, "inside of Washington we've still got some climate deniers who shout loud, but they're wasting everybody's time on a settled debate. Climate change is a fact."
The U.S. Supreme Court's latest public prayer decision reminds us what an increasingly terrible time our liberals have with God. To wit, they don't really want him around: well, certainly no more than necessary, and when he does show up, the less said about it, the better. Except that considerable numbers of Americans appear very much to want him around. How to make these obsessives take their obsessions discreetly out of sight? Such is the liberals' perplexity. In Greece, New York, a suburb of Rochester, the town board has, since 1999, invited local religious leaders to open meetings with prayer. The preponderance of these leaders has been Christian (there have been no calls in Greece, apparently, for the blessings of Zeus). Two disconcerted locals sued; they wished the town to demote the Christian/Jewish God to a more generic status. A federal district court said Greece was doing just fine; an appeals court asserted the reverse; this week the Supreme Court agreed with Greece, finding, 5 to 4, in favor of what Justice Anthony Kennedy called "a practice that was accepted by the Framers and has withstood the scrutiny of time and political change."
The nice thing about modern America is that, if you don't like a certain form of reality, you can always make up your own version. It helps to have a few federal judges in your corner -- such as the ones currently busy with re-imagining marriage as an institution open, on an equality basis, to same-sex as well as different-sex pairings. Then there's Justice Sonia Sotomayor, declaring that a call for no racial discrimination is tantamount to a call for racial discrimination of a very racial, and detestable, sort.
A prime reason for subscribing to the New York Times -- a cultural misdeed for which I regularly beat my breast -- is that of tapping into the Times' tips concerning what real, bona fide Forward Thinkers are thinking at a given moment. Like now, when opinion leaders are lining up to assure us the return of Robin Hood economics is way overdue. To a talkative redistributionist -- the young French economist Thomas Piketty -- the Times turned over a whole page of its Sunday Business section, allowing the subject to make the case for what the reporter called "a progressive global tax on real wealth (minus debt), with the proceeds ... redistributed to those with less capital."
So "Racism" once more stalks among us! The Obama administration and its congressional minions are in full-court press style on the topic. The country's president and chief magistrate asserted the other day at a political rally put on by, of all racial demagogues, Al Sharpton that poor people and black people find it harder than ever to vote. Along came Atty. Gen. Eric Holder with his own tale of racial woe. A Republican-dominated House committee had roughed him up, he thought. "What attorney general," he asked the same political gathering, "has ever had to deal with that kind of treatment? What president has ever had to deal with that kind of treatment?"
"Lib-er-al *adj.* 1. a. Not limited to or by ... authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas ... b. tolerant of the ideas and behaviors of others; broadminded ... " May I amend that definition from "The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language"? " ... c. except where necessary to show non-liberals their proper place. See 'Mozilla.' See also: 'Eich, Brenda, ex-Mozilla CEO." A certain amount of satisfaction -- I'd hate to say pleasure -- accrues to non-liberals watching liberals fall all over themselves trying to explain why certain beliefs and convictions just can't be expressed in Today's Society. The reason (in Liberalspeak) that Mozilla forced out Brendan Eich, the inventor of JavaScript, last week is that no good liberal is going to put up with non-liberal thinking! Non-liberal thinking isn't thinking! It's bigotry!
Brains? Sure, we value brains in our Important People: a law degree, maybe; a much-followed Twitter account. A capacity for 12-hour days and shared household duties; the ability to "lean in" without getting leaned on. And does all of this together seal the deal on "talent" and "success"? Not without character, it doesn't. Not without courage; not without what we used to praise, and still occasionally do, as "moral fiber." Before the habit of thinking on these traits dies away entirely, let us talk of Jerry Denton, and how he honored his country not by seeking fame or money for his services but rather by putting duty above mere well-being. I say "mere," because, as Admiral Jeremiah Denton Jr. proved during his seven-year captivity in Hanoi, personal well-being is low on the list of the highest human goods.
