Columnist.
What a joy to find the New York Times editorial page staff on duty whenever a tough moral question arises, such as, "Can the U.S. government require business owners claiming religious liberty privileges to fund contraceptive care for employees?" Sure, natch, you bet, returns the Times, doubtless to the relief of the U.S. Supreme Court, which takes up the question formally this week in yet another suit stemming from Obamacare. Owners who "personally disapprove of certain contraceptives ... are wrong," asserts the Times, "and the Supreme Court's task is to issue a decisive ruling saying so. The real threat to religious liberty comes from the owners trying to impose their religious beliefs on thousands of employees." Get those employers and their stale convictions outta here!
"The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun." -- Ecclesiastes 1:9 This is true even in politics. Maybe especially in politics, where the recycling of bad and good decisions reflects the recycling, according to democratic practice, of bad and good leaders. As the Russians push their imperial agenda in the Ukraine, and Western leaders wring their hands, the '70s come painfully to mind. I bring up the '70s -- of god-awful memory -- as much to nourish hope as to enlarge perspective on current events in the world and the nation along with it.
"Stand with Rand" -- a nice, snappy exhortation for sure; comparable, in rhythm and energy, to "I Like Ike." Not that Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul stands, shall we say, in much danger of becoming president, despite his straw-poll victory (31 percent) at the Conservative Political Action Conference. (For comparative purposes, Ted Cruz got 11 percent, Marco Rubio 6 percent, and Rep. Paul Ryan 3 percent, a figure wholly non-commensurate with the ex-Veep nominee's qualities). When you're young and on fire, as were nearly half the straw poll participants at CPAC, you're subject to hurling obstacles out the window. For instance, does the American electorate as a whole chew its fingernails as earnestly as Paul does over federal storage of telephone call information for potential use in fighting terrorism? "The Fourth Amendment" -- illegal search and seizure -- "is just as important as the Second Amendment," the senator contends.
Well, we saw it coming. But wait, that's getting it backwards. We ought to have seen it coming. And we didn't -- "we" as a collective: we, the American people acting in our sovereign capacity as voters. Why was it not plain to us in 2008, and yes, again in 2012, that Barack Obama was an unlikely choice for Leader of the Free World, not to mention head policy director of the World's Most Dynamic Economy? It was not plain to us because we failed to look. That is, I think, the right answer. It is certainly the answer to the conundrum concerning how we got into our current foreign policy mess with the Russians -- whom we bested only 25 years ago -- and what happens next. I did not say "how we get out of" said conundrum. I think we don't. The Russians, of all washed-up imperial powers, have us by the nose and mean to inconvenience us.
Big Labor took a roundhouse punch on the chin a week or so ago, and the ringside clatter made it sound as though nothing much had changed in America since the days of John L. Lewis. Raise your hand if, along with me, you have the slightest recollection of John L. Lewis, the formidable, bushy-eyebrowed head of the United Mine Workers of America, who once personified the combative force of the post-World War II labor movement. In those olden times, shaped by battles over pay and working conditions, American unions attained unprecedented levels of influence. Only to decline from there -- descending lately to the agony of an election the United Auto Workers seemed sure to win.
Gee. Gosh. And my, oh, my, as my grandmother might have exclaimed in wonder and awe. All we need to know about global warming is what John Kerry tells us? In Jakarta over the weekend, our secretary of state exposed the irrelevance and blindness of any who questions what he calls "the science" on climate change. These folk represent "loud interest groups" -- i.e., "big companies" that "don't want to change and spend money" to prevent the melting of the ice caps and the withering of the planet. They are "a tiny minority of shoddy scientists" and "extreme ideologues." "The science is unequivocal!" Unequivocal; do you hear that?! "(T)hose who refuse to believe it are simply burying their heads in the sand. We don't have time for a meeting anywhere of the Flat Earth Society."
This isn't exactly a new topic, I regret to say. For weeks there's been national conversation -- and the requisite component of shouting -- over the Obama White House's determination to stream the legislative music of its choice. Other people's choices? Those of the states, say, or even of Congress? Sorry, the president can't hear a word you're saying. He's rocking to his own beat. Over just the last couple of days came two more instances of lofty Obaman disdain for others' views. Atty. Gen. Eric Holder led the way, pushing the federal government toward authoritative affirmation of a question the White House evidently believes to be settled -- to wit, whether gay marriage should be the law of the whole land.
A drug is by definition a remedy, a treatment, a hoped-for cure. Something's the matter, or anyway not as good as it ought to be. Here, a bit of this will fix you up ... A lot of what goes on in 21st century America seems a lot less good than it ought to be. Witness in this context the legal-marijuana boom -- the strong public affirmation in places such as Colorado for the right to use pot for purposes left to the user's discretion. Said purposes include the alleviation of physical pain. They include likewise the alleviation of, well, one just can't say -- possibly the alleviation of unfulfilled desire.
The thing about Mike Huckabee is that the uproar he occasioned over federal provision of contraception reveals the depth and extent of modern America's moral/cultural dysfunction. Will we get around to talking about it once the uproar dies down? Not likely. The matter is too hot -- meaning too fundamental. It speaks to personal identity questions never heretofore raised in American life and unresolved for that very reason. Let us recount. In a weekend speech, the TV host and former Arkansas Republican governor assailed the idea that women depended on the government for access to "a prescription each month for birth control," being unable otherwise to "control their libido or their reproductive system."
The Little Sisters of the Poor, a 175-year-old Catholic order of nuns that cares for the elderly poor, believes itself to enjoy a constitutional right to exemption from a federal mandate hazardous to the order's self-understanding. The mandate, under Obamacare, is either to cover contraceptives and abortifacients for employees or to hand off coverage to the Little Sister's insurance carrier. The nuns oppose all artificial means of birth control.
Retired Defense Secretary Robert Gates breezed back onto the national scene last week by speaking his mind. Oh, and did he speak it -- loudly enough, robustly enough to remind all within earshot what it means to hear an honest man seek to serve the truth. I said "seek" to serve. Did he actually serve, and how would we know for sure? With any of Gates' memorable judgments, ladled out in a memoir called "Duty," we are entitled constitutionally to differ. Is President Obama, as Gates avers, skeptical of his own Afghanistan policy? Are the majority of representatives in Congress "uncivil, incompetent at fulfilling their basic constitutional responsibilities (such as timely appropriations), micromanagerial, parochial, hypocritical, egotistical, thin-skinned and prone to put self (and re-election) before country?" Has Vice President Joe Biden "been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades"? Do foreign policy calculations spring as often as not these days from domestic political reasonings?
With the 50th anniversary of the war on poverty at hand, the New York Times undertook a guided tour of the vast and murky battlefield, offering a surprising -- for the Times -- admission. To wit, poverty isn't just about what the government does, or doesn't do, for poor people. It's about, in part, how poor people live, voluntarily or otherwise. The Times didn't make a big deal about what it called "sociological trends (that) help explain why so many children and adults remain poor, even putting the effects of the recession aside." That the story so much as acknowledged the impoverishing effects of family breakdown is the really big deal, given the broad commitment of American liberals to the notion of job-training, better education, minimum-wage hikes and so on as the keys to overthrowing "inequality."
And so with ukuleles and autoharps, and cheers and groans, Americans usher Obamacare onto the public stage, knowing -- with hope, with disgust, with fear, with acceptance -- that the thing is here to stay, in the way all government programs, once enacted, hang around like a deadbeat brother-in-law: chain-smoking, impossible to get rid of. Foes and friends of Obamacare understand this truth: You never get rid of a government program. Did Ronald Reagan, despite vows and expectations, ever get rid of the promiscuous and worthless Department of Education? Or the Department of Energy? Hardly. In like-manner, Obamacare will endure. The government already claims 1.1 million sign-ups. It is below original expectations; each one nevertheless represents an aspiration not even a President Cruz would find possible to repudiate. And more sign-ups are to come.
What a great tool for promoting your religion -- a mid-winter feast where everybody eats copious amounts of food, receives interesting gifts and hears or hums constantly your theological message. "Veiled in flesh the Godhead see; Hail the Incarnate Deity," is hardly street lingo, but repetition over the years lends familiarity and, conceivably, respect; besides which it was written by a great genius in terms of preaching through sing-able poetry -- Charles Wesley. Then think of the angels! A secret, sometimes public, affection for angels wells in every human breast.
The minimum wage fracas emerging in politics highlights the mother of all political fracases: the one titled, Who Gets What? Anybody surprised to see the question emerge in early 21st-century America must have been doodling on the history book cover when -- just for example -- the French Revolution heaved into sight. Who started and carried on the revolution? The self-defined many, as over against the execrated few. "Being nearly an hundred to one," Lord Acton would write, "they deemed they were virtually the substance of the nation, and they claimed to govern themselves with a power proportioned to their numbers." As for those then possessed of power and money, off with their heads!
The late, great Milton Friedman used to say, there's no such thing as a free lunch. The ancient Romans had another pointed saying: "Quod erat demonstrandum," meaning, roughly, remember now what I told you, doofus? To put it another way, is there room for surprise in the report that high deductibles may contribute to making Obamacare something less than the divine blessing its authors meant it to be? For all the comforting promises out of D.C., relayed to the general public with profound sweetness, there's no such thing as a free lunch. Someone always pays. To believe otherwise is a) to believe money grows on trees, or b) not to care, so long as someone else picks up the check.
You'd have thought the president of the NRA had called for the tarring and feathering of mourning dove hunters! All it took for Pope Francis to bring down on himself the Wrath of Rush Limbaugh last week was to disrespect -- or appear to be disrespecting -- capitalistic economics, in the context of calling for a new Christian evangelism. "The worship of the ancient golden calf," said the pope, "has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose." Further: "The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase." There was, to make matters worse, some severe language regarding "trickle-down economics" and that good old Darwinian notion called "survival of the fittest."
In the dim reaches of long ago, Americans observed a quaint custom. They called it Thanksgiving, or something of the sort. The custom arose on account of their supposing, often against hard evidence -- weather, war, famine, pestilence, etc. -- there were things for which to be thankful and that, accordingly, thanks were to be rendered. Which meant, by common consent, that the designated recipient of the thanks in question was God.
Would John F. Kennedy have sought to shove national health care down the national gullet? The question takes on poignancy in a week full of Kennedy look-backs and looks all around at the works, the style and the obsessions of Barack Obama. We could put the question another way: Is Obama the spiritual heir to the president slain in Dallas 50 years ago this week?
As Vince Lombardi, among others, has delicately phrased it, winning isn't everything; it's the only thing. That's what happens with absolute declarations: They get absolute real fast, to the point that, in political terms, it becomes challenging to discuss the prospect of Christopher James Christie as likely candidate for the Republican nomination for president. Christie duly walloped his Democratic opponent in last week's gubernatorial race, drawing majority support from women and minorities. Does that validate his possible candidacy for president? Would conservatives be happier if nobody liked him but those despicable Republicans-in-name-only?
