Is It Time To Admit Character Doesn’t Matter? There is a kind of willful obliviousness to character that is unseemly no matter which side of the political spectrum embraces it. It’s prominent in both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s campaigns.
How many times have we heard that it is righteous and fair to dig into the minutia of a candidate’s personal past, no matter how small or seemingly trivial the issue or how mean-spirited and tendentious the investigation, because, after all, it “goes to character” and, as we all know, when it comes to a presidential candidate, character is everything.
Maybe we vote largely on policy or, as they say, an assessment as to which candidate is best for our wallet, but character is a deal-breaker. Bad character equals no vote, it is thought. Hence: Unleash the dogs of investigative journalism and lay bare as many foibles, peccadilloes, and bad grade-school report cards you can unearth. It goes to character.
How much more do we need to see to know this notion is entirely preposterous? The only character issues most voters care about are the ones associated with the candidates they have no intention of voting for: Yes, those character flaws they care about. A lot.
With candidates they support, not so much. With their own favorite, there is no limit to the amount of obvious bad behavior and despicable character traits they will engorge without even beginning to choke. Maybe it’s a matter of turning a blind eye, or rationalizing, re-framing, or putting one’s fingers in one’s ears and humming “Embraceable You,” but the goal is the same: Move on. (Hey, didn’t a website with that name spring forth for the explicit purpose of papering over one particular president’s slimy and probably felonious conduct?)
The idea is to achieve stratospheric levels of high dudgeon about bad behavior in the guy you don’t support, while ignoring equally bad behavior, or worse, in the one you do, and by “guy” I mean Hillary. Or Donald. You get the idea.
We’ve Ignored Bad Character for Decades
Admittedly, and most certainly, it didn’t start with Hillary and Donald: Yes, William Jefferson Clinton may be many things, some of which are considered admirable, even presidential; but his behavior towards women, chronicled over and over for decades, shows he was (and probably still is), by even the most charitable analysis, a pig, everything mainline feminism has found repellent and execrable for 40 years, touching all the bases. Yet they voted for him, overwhelmingly.
All three were given a pass by the majority of the electorate.
Nixon may have profoundly improved the geopolitical landscape (a matter of continuing debate, but still), yet he was a twisted, petty man, overtaken by the irresistible tide of his own ugly vindictiveness. Not a nice man, you might say. He won in a landslide.
Kennedy, we now know, was, among other things, essentially a prep-school advantaged pimp. To this day, he is revered. (Okay, not by everybody, but pretty much.)
Three presidents, all men of very questionable “character,” as that term is customarily (and rather incessantly) applied in the context of presidential political gymnastics. No, that’s not all they were, but it is certainly part of what they were.
All three were given a pass by the majority of the electorate, and they were given that pass for the same reason and in the same way Hillary and Donald are currently being given a “character” pass.
That Brings Us to Hillary and Donald
Does anyone—other than Hillary supporters—have the ability to un-see the completely obvious corruption, insider finagling, roaring personal ambition, arrogance, phony-baloney pandering, and habitual prevarication (okay, call it “Clintonian Parsing”) that has draped her entire career, a level of broad-based malfeasance that would not only disqualify anyone else for any public office, but most likely land him in the pokey?
He is a guy willing to cut off the health insurance of a deathly ill infant nephew if it suits his purposes.
Does anyone—other than Trump supporters—not understand that he has made his fortune by cynically buying off politicians to get them to put their thumbs on the scale, his scale; that, over and over he has shown a willingness to say or do anything to further his own personal interests, happy to roll over anyone or anything that stands in his way; that at his own father’s funeral all he could talk about was himself, that he is a guy willing to cut off the health insurance of a deathly ill infant nephew if it suits his purposes; that he is a nasty, mean-spirited bully obsessed with self-aggrandizement so rampaging that it is possible to imagine him doing just about anything, changing any position at any time, in order to get his next magazine cover; and that his level of debate discourse rises only insignificantly above “Your mother wears combat boots”?
They don’t care. Or, more accurately, character only counts if it’s the other guy we’re talking about, and, even then, it only counts with people already inclined against the candidate, serving to deepen their antipathy, not create it.
Try This Litmus Test
Here’s a litmus test. Go see the movie “13 Hours,” Michael Bay’s gripping account of the events at Benghazi, as told by the people who were there and lived it. If you are not a Hillary supporter, here’s what you are going to be thinking.
It was necessary to pretend the problem didn’t exist, to make sure nothing indicated otherwise, all to get Obama re-elected.
You will experience a building fury at and loathing for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as you watch a magnificent American ambassador murdered and a group of stunningly heroic young Americans fight it out with no support. Your detestation will not only be fueled by the incompetence of the people these guys had every reason to believe would be there for them—but were not—it will be based upon your belief about why it happened, that it occurred two months before the end of a re-election campaign grounded in large part on the claim that Cool Hand Barack had smoothed the waters in the Middle East.
That’s why the planes weren’t scrambled: To do so would etch in concrete actions whose authorization could only be accounted for if our adversaries were not “on the run,” not by a long-shot. That’s why there was no official response of any recordable type. It was necessary to pretend the problem didn’t exist, to make sure nothing indicated otherwise, all to get Obama re-elected.
If you are not a Hillary supporter, you have not one scintilla of doubt that for the same reason, for purely partisan and self-serving electoral purposes, she promulgated the “video tape” hooey, calculatingly and cynically foisted a bald-face fable on the American public, and lied to the families of the men who died. That notion, as you watch the movie, is nauseating, literally.
Yes, that’s what you’re thinking if you’re not a Hillary supporter. If you are a Hillary supporter, here’s what you’re thinking. That Michael Bay is a conservative hack with a long history of producing hyper-patriotic drivel. You can’t take it seriously; it’s propaganda. It’s a typical pre-election hit-job on Hillary, engineered by the vast right-wing conspiracy. Poor Hillary: What she doesn’t have to put up with…
Donald Trump: The Man Who Makes Money From Nothing
Trump, for his part, has made long strides and accomplished astonishing things by relentlessly and almost obsessively finding ways to convince people that he is a much bigger deal than he actually is. Read “The Art of the Deal” and you’ll see that even he, himself, makes no bones about that: It’s the core of the game.
What Trump actually does is less important that what he can make people believe he has done.
Along the way, Trump figured out something that has become not only his hallmark, but makes Trump Trump, and it is that what you actually do is less important that what you can make people believe you have done. That belief can be turned into increasing credibility, opportunity, and money, step by step, until you reach the ultimate, the Elysian fields of hot-air-based success: The ability to be paid for doing nothing.
That is exactly where Trump is right now. Everything he set out to do—disengaging revenues from accomplishment—has been achieved. Most of his income now derives from nothing more than licensing his name, which is to say, taking a cut of what other people charge folks who mistakenly believe Trump has anything to do with anything.
He is making a huge fortune by allowing others to prey on the false belief that this project or that is a “Trump” project, with all that implies, and it implies the kind of overblown illusion of Trumpian greatness that he has spent a lifetime constructing (literally and figuratively). This, despite the fact that he now has little or nothing to do with these projects that are being sold under his name. He no longer needs to do anything or risk anything.
This is a pretty good gig, and you have to hand it to him. You don’t, however, have to elect him president, and you don’t have to make it into something it is not. It is opportunism and self-dealing writ on a scale so large that it can be a little hard to see for what it is, and while it tells you a great deal about what he is prepared to do for himself, it tells you nothing about what he can actually be relied on to do for you, if what you want him to do conflicts in the slightest way with what he wants to do for himself.
Try Swapping Names with Characters
None of this matters to their respective supporters. Character doesn’t count; maybe we don’t vote our wallets, or even our hearts. Maybe even ideology doesn’t hold the day. There’s plenty of evidence that Trump is the furthest thing from a true conservative and may be, in fact, an utterly shameless and thoroughly pragmatic panderer willing to change any stripe at any time if it suits his purpose. But plenty of conservatives are in his corner, foursquare, you betcha.
What if it was Hillary and not Trump who had spent a lifetime greasing politicians of every persuasion?
Here’s the irony, and perhaps the saddest part of all: If you play the substitution game and swap character flaws between candidates, the hypocrisy becomes glaring.
Sure, the Clintons have gone from selling the Lincoln Bedroom during Bill’s tenure to selling the State Department during Hillary’s, engineering what is undoubtedly the largest influence-peddling scheme in the history of the planet, and her supporters have little or nothing to say about it.
What if it was Trump who did that? What if it was Trump and not Hillary who did this to Kathleen Willey? What would they have to say, then? The world would see the most sustained explosion of righteous indignation ever recorded.
What if it was Hillary and not Trump who had spent a lifetime greasing politicians of every persuasion to get them to provide the abatements and favors that made her whole empire possible, who adopted any policy or political position one day if it suited and the opposite the next, and who, when running into trouble, declared bankruptcy after bankruptcy, and who never passed on an opportunity to go for the jugular with sleazy personal attacks? What would Trump’s supporters have to say about that behavior if it was in Hillary’s resume instead of The Donald’s?
Resentment Is No Way to Build a Life
We all know what the answer is: There is a kind of dishonesty, a willful obliviousness, that is unseemly no matter which side of the political spectrum embraces it. That’s why we might have to simply accept the fact that in our day, until further notice, character doesn’t matter, nor does policy or even one’s wallet. Maybe we’ve reached the point where the only thing that matters, the only thing driving the votes of the great, heaving majority of voters is bile.
In our day, until further notice, character doesn’t matter, nor does policy or even one’s wallet.
Hillary spends all day every day validating the perceived victimhood of her constituency, promising to stick it to the bastards who have engineered their misery—you know, the fat cats who have caused them to be completely incapable of affecting their own circumstances in any positive way: It’s not your fault, and I’m going to make the people who did it to you pay.
Trump taps into the seething resentment of people who go about their lives treating people fairly, working hard and trying to be decent citizens, and for their trouble are painted as racist, greedy, uncaring. unenlightened Yahoos. They are sick unto death of it and willing to overlook everything, or anything, if their guy is going to stand up and punch the bullies in the nose.
It’s of a piece; it’s not good, and to move beyond it we’re going to have to get smarter, fairer, more respectful of our opposites—and very, very lucky.
Henry Scanlon is a writer from Ponte Vedra, Florida.
So which Left-wing publication is going to pull together a bunch of liberal intellectuals for an “Against Sanders” issue?
There’s been a ton of concern trolling from Democrats about the chaos and extremism ripping the Republican Party in half. It’s bad for the country, you know? We need two strong and functioning political parties. John Kasich is the only plausible choice to save the GOP and so on. Well, what happens if the GOP ends up nominating some run-of-the-mill Romney-esque Republican or an ambitious conservative from Texas, and the Democrats end up with a socialist? Surely liberals would be deeply troubled by their own party’s hard left turn?
As unlikely as that might seem, a year ago, Bernie Sanders was down 57-5 in Iowa polls to Hillary Clinton. As of this writing, the race is too close to call — which by any measure means that Sanders, who was outspent, can declare victory. It was pretty clear that the party’s energy and passion are centered on a Sander’s candidacy — even if he’s unable to pull it out against the establishment choice.
What are these people so mad about!? Has anyone asked?
Put it this way: Last night, 25 percent of the GOP voted for celebrity populist who gained unparalleled coverage from the media for a half a year. Half of Democrats voted for a once-obscure elderly socialist senator from Vermont who bases his campaign on conspiracy theories and juvenile zero-sum economic theories that were all the rage in the early 1900s. (And the other half went to a candidate that sounds increasingly like him.)
Like him or not, Cruz’s positions, as conservative as they are, are within the philosophical frontiers of the Reagan Right. Maybe you think them antiquated, but they are hardly “radical” — as in representing some extreme section of a political party or movement. Cruz’s ideas would be recognizable to any Republican in 1984 or 1994. But would any Clinton-era Democrat in 1996 embrace the economic positions of Sanders (or Hillary, for that matter)? How about 2008?
Sanders does not believe a free market should determine how goods and services are distributed.
It’s amusing to watch people maintain that Sanders isn’t a genuine socialist because he hasn’t laid out a Five Year Plan or called for the means of production to be transferred to the state. (Last night, for example, CNN’s Van Jones continually referred to Sanders as a “progressive” — which tells us something about socialism and progressivism.) Socialists are always “democratic” when they have no choice. The fun part comes later. So Sanders might inject a measure of nationalism into his brand of socialism. He may fuse his old-fashioned redistributionism and class-warfare with some contemporary political flourishes. He may believe in incrementalism — just as Marx did. But Sanders does not believe a free market should determine how goods and services are distributed.
Moreover, his applause lines are no less scaremonger-y than Trump’s nativist crowd-pleasers. Sanders is no less of a protectionist, appealing to the same fears and anxieties of working class Americans. All the troubles in the world are laid at the feet of greedy billionaires and corporation who function in an imaginary zero-sum economic dystopia, where fairness can only be reinstituted using state force — the guiding light of all decency.
Sanders calls for government control of the energy (to stop global warming) and health-care sectors. And schooling and health care will be “free,” paid for by the fictitious capital of the disreputable speculator. “Where speculation ends — in real life — there real, positive science begins …” wrote Marx.
There is no real battle or uproar among Democrats over the radicalization of the Left.
And I feel entirely comfortable red-baiting Sanders, because he’s a socialist.
Democrats are no longer talking about erecting safety nets to help the poor survive or break free of poverty; they’re talking about confiscatory taxation and redistributing to make life “fair” for the middle class. That might be popular — it is a radical break from traditional policy. “You guys ready for a radical idea?” Bernie asked in his victory speech. “Well, so is America.”
The key difference between the two party’s situations is that intellectual Right is in a fight to save conservatism from what they see as a distortion undermining its historical purpose. (And they may yet lose that battle.) There is no real battle or uproar among Democrats over the radicalization of the Left, probably because Sanders’ positions are an organic result of the rhetoric, obsession over inequality, and its redistributive economic policy. Right now, Democrats are fighting over electability, or how fast they want to move on certain issues.
If Sanders had the charisma or talent of Barack Obama, Hillary wouldn’t stand a chance. Yet, everyone will probably keep obsessing over Trump. “How did journalists miss GOP radicalization?” professional handwringer Norman Ornstein tweeted last week. “No. 1 reason: stubborn insistence on false equivalence.” As Iowa proved, the equivalence is very real. Will any editorial boards ask: “How did journalists miss this Democratic radicalization?” Doubtful. Probably because socialism isn’t a particularly troublesome or radical thought to Democrats or most of the media. Iowa also proved that.
I admit I don't understand the Trump phenomenon. I hope a Trump supporter will explain it to me. I'm open to being convinced, but I just don't see a lot to like about that guy or his approach to the Presidency.
I get that there's a lot of frustration right now with the direction of the country. From economic to foreign policy, the current administration leaves a lot to be desired. Unfortunately, I don't think Donald Trump is the right person for the job.
I have never heard Donald Trump talk about the Constitution, limits on executive power, or what his guiding principles as a leader would be. I suspect he doesn't have any firm principles; his convictions are decided issue-by-issue, and he does what he thinks is best.
News flash - so does President Obama. And that's my real problem with Trump - it's 'new boss same as the old boss'; another egotistical person sitting in the White House who thinks he/she has all the answers. I don't want a Monarch to 'do what he thinks is best'. I want a leader who will respect the limits of the office, uphold the laws that have been passed, and work with Congress to improve those laws that need improving (not 'go it alone' with his pen and a phone).
Beyond governing philosophy, I think it's embarrassing how Trump responds to any criticism with personal attacks (Oh yeah, well, you're stupid, you have bad hair, you're weak, you're falling in the polls, your magazine is dying, etc. - all actual responses from Trump in response to criticism).
So, to recap - the Republican headliner is an unlikable guy who attacks anyone who disagrees with him like a middle schooler, describes no guiding principles and has an approach to the Presidency that can be summed up as "I'll do it better".
What kind of fantasy land do politicians live in that they think their efforts to impose costs on businesses will not result in a reaction from those businesses? No one should be surprised - when you raise the cost of something, demand goes down. That's basic economics, and should be easily understood by everyone.
Killing the golden goose of capitalism
Jan. 21, 2016
By ADAM B. SUMMERS / Staff columnist
The financial world, and quite a few employees, were taken aback recently when Wal-Mart announced that it will be closing 269 of its 11,600 stores, including 154 in the U.S., although it still plans to open 300 stores worldwide in the coming year.
Oakland officials “expressed shock” at Wal-Mart’s decision, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, and Washington, D.C., leaders were “furious,” according to a Washington Post headline.
They only have themselves to blame.
While Wal-Mart President and CEO Doug McMillon was quick to dispel the notion that Wal-Mart’s voluntary “investment in wages” had anything to do with the store closures, some have noted a pattern among the more poorly performing stores getting the axe: they tend to be located in cities with high government-imposed minimum wages and other costly anti-business policies.
A San Francisco Chronicle report noted that Wal-Mart stores were closing in San Jose and Oakland, which each adopted minimum wages higher than the state rate – currently $10.30 and hour and $12.55 an hour, respectively – while the two stores in San Leandro, a city that did not increase the minimum wage, will remain open.
“I think it really is a little discouraging,” Oakland Councilman Larry Reid told the Chronicle. “The minimum wage in the city of Oakland played a factor, was one of the factors, they considered in closing the stores.”
Among the seven stores closing in Southern California are two in the city of Los Angeles (Chinatown and the Crenshaw District), L.A. County (Altadena) and Long Beach (on East Fifth Street). Both the city and county of L.A. adopted ordinances last summer that will hike the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020. Long Beach just approved a measure Wednesday that will raise the minimum wage to $13 an hour by 2019, and possibly to $15 by 2021.
City officials were also upset in the District of Columbia, where Wal-Mart is keeping its three existing stores but announced that it could no longer move ahead with plans for two additional stores in poor areas east of the Anacostia River, where the jobs they would bring were eagerly anticipated (as was the sales tax revenue they would generate for the district). The retailer had only been allowed to operate in the city by virtue of a “handshake deal” in 2013 whereby it agreed to open stores in poorer neighborhoods.
“It’s an outrage,” former mayor Vincent C. Gray told the Washington Post. “A deal’s a deal,” snapped Councilman Jack Evans.
Such a deal is ridiculous on its face, however, since business owners in a free society are not blackmailed or otherwise coerced to operate or not operate in certain areas. They open their stores where they deem fit and profitable, and consumers make the ultimate decision about the wisdom of their location decisions.
As Councilman Evans related to the Post, Wal-Mart’s decision was influenced by the city’s $11.50 hourly minimum wage – which could rise to $15 an hour if voters approve a ballot measure in November – and proposals to require a minimum number of hours for hourly workers and force employers to pay into a fund for employees’ family and medical leave.
It is unfortunate that those in poor neighborhoods who are most in need of the jobs, and wide selection of goods and produce at cheap prices that Wal-Mart offers will be deprived of these things due to the greedy and shortsighted policies of their governments, which make it too costly to operate at all. Wal-Mart is a business, not a charity. It is an employer, not a make-work jobs program.
For too long, big government elected officials and advocates have treated businesses as cash cows for their pet programs, many of which are used to buy votes at election time. It is time that they learned that they cannot keep biting the hand that feeds them without deleterious consequences.
'American Sniper' widow: Gun control won't protect us
By Taya Kyle
Restricting our freedoms to protect against the very few who want to do evil would be a mistake
I am sharing my thoughts with you because I feel I can relate to people on both sides of the issue of gun control. I have been afraid of guns, I have sworn I would never use a gun on another person and so did not need one, and I have wanted to deny the existence of evil.
I have also become a gun owner, am prepared to defend myself with a firearm, and understand the fear of my freedoms being taken away.
I have been touched by extreme violence and I have been robbed of the life I always wanted by someone who chose to do evil. Because I have felt, and lived, all of these things, I have spent much time thinking about evil, freedom and not only the world we live in, but the country too.
There are many facts and statistics people will use to argue both sides of the gun control issue. We can use other countries as examples and we can use crime rates of cities, states and countries. And no matter how thoroughly researched the statistics are, people have an emotional reaction to this issue that almost always overrides the statistics presented, other than this one: The violent crime rate in the United States has gone down substantially in the last 20 years.
Our fears, though, have gone up, because of the high-profile incidents of mass killings of people caught unaware. Killers have taken lives in churches, schools, hospitals, government buildings, the site of a marathon, the Twin Towers and even a part of a military base where soldiers were known to be unarmed. Our vulnerability
These killings highlight the fact that any of us, and any of our loved ones, are vulnerable when caught with our guard down against another person who desires to do harm.
Does it matter what weapon they used? If it was a rifle, a pipe bomb, a truck of fertilizer, a pressure cooker or a plane -- the end result is the same. Yet millions of other people have the freedom to have those very same things and will never use them to kill.
These horrific mass killings were committed by a very small number of people who wish to harm and kill others. When they do it, we flock to the scene and ask "Why?" Who are these people who choose to do harm? What is their story? What went wrong? What are they trying to tell us?
Ultimately, in our horror, we give them a voice they would never have had otherwise. Is our insatiable need to know and find out how their lives might have gone wrong part of the result they are looking for? Is that part of the reason there is an incentive to do such harm to innocent people? We know it isn't the availability of the weapon, because they used different methods, different weapons.
We can't legislate human nature. If we add up the number of these mass killers over the last decade, how many people are we talking about? Fewer than 40 over the last decade? Do we want to make laws for millions based on the choices of fewer than 40 evildoers?
Can we fix these people? Can we legislate out of them the desire to kill? Those in the business of fighting crime and analyzing mental illness can look into the lives of each of these killers and tell you the red flags that popped up before the massacre.
Why don't we deal with that instead of banning the tools very few use? By the very nature of these crimes, we know that evildoers don't care about the laws. After all, murder is against the law, and they are choosing to ignore the law from the moment they plan to harm people.
Beyond that, who among us has the right to tell me I will murder someone because I have a gun? And who can tell me that I can only defend and protect myself in a way they feel comfortable with?
Just having access to a deadly weapon doesn't turn someone into a killer. Have you ever felt road rage? Many of us who have cars have felt some form of extreme anger at other drivers because we feel they have put us in harm's way. We might even envision ramming their cars or cutting them off in return, but do we actually do it? No, because the overwhelming majority of us never want to take another human life.
Even special ops guys, military and police who are trained to kill for legitimate purposes, who are familiar with multiple weapons and have access to the weapons and ammunition -- even these people, who are experienced, will tell you they never know if they can pull the trigger until placed in a position to use deadly force to protect another person.
My government has proven that it's not able to protect me against people who want to kill. And I don't blame the government, because there is only one person to blame here: The man or woman who decided to kill. Killers will use any means
If you put an assault rifle in my hands or yours, I am not going to murder anyone, and I am guessing you won't either. But what makes gun control advocates think that someone who decides to kill will not use any means necessary to do so?
The person who killed my husband, Chris, worked in an armory with daily access to every caliber of high powered weapon for years. He chose to kill when he got out of an environment of accountability and drug testing.
Simply having a weapon did not make him a murderer. His life choices did. What red flags did he display? Well, the prominence he got after he took the lives of Chris and Chad Littlefield resulted in many people hearing his claim of post-traumatic stress disorder. And yet, psychiatrists on both the prosecution and defense testified he did not have PTSD. He was however a known drug user. Based on testimony at his trial, people around him not only tolerated but sometimes participated in the drug use and enabled him by seeing him as the "victim." He repeatedly got out of trouble by claiming PTSD.
The officers would take him at his word, deliver him to a mental health facility where the facility would write a diagnosis which is known in that community as a label for likely drug use, and they would release him. Because of the HIPAA law and our desire to protect everyone's privacy, we allow bad behavior to slip through the cracks.
Imagine how different things would be if a mental health facility could tell police, "This is a drug user," and the police could go track him for drugs and put him in jail for breaking those laws instead of waiting for worse crimes in the future.
In the state of Texas, there is a fairly new certification process for our police where officers are trained to notice and recognize mental health issues and have knowledge of the drugs people take and the effects of them. So how they intervene is different based on whether they believe there is a mental health issue vs. a drug issue. Wouldn't it be a better use of our time to work through this issue? It gives police a different crisis intervention method.
Some advocates want to restrict certain kinds of guns -- perhaps allowing a pistol but not an assault rifle.
To those who don't know guns well, the term "assault rifle" brings to mind either a sniper's gun or a fully automatic weapon we have seen in the movies, meant to mow down large numbers of people. In actuality, fully automatic weapons are already highly restricted and require an additional license most gun owners will never have.
The lack of understanding makes it easy to develop rhetoric and legislation that will calm the fears of people who don't understand a given subject, but that doesn't really change any end result because we cannot legislate the evil side of humanity. Freedom and responsibility
Cars are tools that is involved in about as many deaths as guns. If you are a driver prone to drinking and driving, should we only allow you to drive an ultracompact car? Not an SUV which could kill more people? No, we take away the drunk driver's access to legally drive any car. This is about freedom to do as you like until you prove incapable of showing good moral judgment.
In this country, we give freedom and take it away once you prove to be unworthy of the freedom we have given you. Nobody suggests taking away cars or going through a battery of tests to determine whether or not you might be a drunk driver one day.
Does every man commit rape? There is a human element here that is real and we cannot legislate. Would we take away the freedom of all men by castration because some cannot handle what they have? No, we allow freedom until an individual chooses to take something that others use for good and use it to do harm to another.
Are our current laws being enforced? Are felons and known drug users really put in jail when arrested for a lesser crime and known to have a gun? In most situations, no, because police have more pressing issues than to incarcerate a felon for having a gun that he or she hasn't used in a crime. We have plenty of laws on the books that we cannot or do not enforce. Let's start enforcing what we have before creating new laws.
Understandably, we want a solution to ensure that we and our loved ones will never be in the situation of being caught unaware by someone who chose to do evil. Mass killers have targeted churches, businesses, movie theaters, schools and hospitals, but they could as easily take their violence to a place where people are armed. Yet they do not.
Even at Fort Hood, the killer chose a place on the base where he knew soldiers would be unarmed. What does that tell us? That evil targets those who are unprepared for the evil to strike.
When Chris and I were looking into our personal security after the book "American Sniper" came out, we took measures and thought of different scenarios, and Chris told me that still, based on his experience, "Babe, if someone wants to kill me, they will."
Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan were arguably some of the best-protected men in our country. Did it stop someone from shooting them?
As Reagan once said, "You won't get gun control by disarming law-abiding citizens. There is only one way to get real gun control: Disarm the thugs and criminals, lock them up and if you don't actually throw away the key, lose it for a long time." The evil few; the responsible majority
And what we need to do is find the courage to accept that from the dawn of time until the day man no longer walks the earth, evil will find a way. Murder is nothing new, it is not going away and it is not dependent on one method of killing or another.
We can forge ahead knowing that while evil is among us, it involves the few. The good, responsible people are the vast majority. We can trust each other with basic freedoms until one of us proves to be untrustworthy by maliciously, intentionally harming another of us.
If you have never owned a weapon, or have never known the masses of peaceful gun owners who love their families and are in nurturing professions such as counseling, nursing, social work and pastoral jobs, may I suggest you talk to them about why they cherish their freedom to have these weapons?
We have slipped into a land of government that has promised the moon, seldom delivered and driven us into a world of more laws, more government, and less freedom -- and none of that has stopped murder, pain and suffering.
No government can provide the utopia many seek. My hope for this country is that we remain a people who value freedom, who have the courage to face the realities with faithful hearts instead of anxious ones. I hope our people hold tight to the notion that we do not have to be a fear-ridden country focused on restrictions, but rather that we remain the land of the free and home of the brave.
God bless you and thank you for giving me some of your time.
I have my doubts that historians will criticize Obama's "overreach", but the author makes excellent points here about how divorced public expectations (The president should do something!) are from the design of our constitutional system (It is Congress who does things, and the President who enforces the laws passed by Congress). The President going around the elected officials to enforce his views should be not celebrated by the public.
Mr. Harsayni's example of the outcry that would result if a Republican President passed restrictions on abortion in a similar fashion is an excellent parallel - you can guarantee that would not be celebrated.
Laws should be left to the legislature - the President is free to propose new legislation and persuade others to share his viewpoint, but he should not be "making laws". Note the headline on the TV screen below from today. I bet the President wishes he could just "announce new laws", but that's now how it works in the US.
Over the winter break I finally got around to binge-watching “Parks and Recreation.” In case you missed the show’s seven-year run, it’s about a fascistic, small-town councilwoman who believes it’s a politician’s job to impose her notions of morality, safety, and decency on everyone, no matter what voters want or what the system dictates. She is justifiably recalled by the people of her town after attempting to regulate portion sizes at fast food restaurants, but ends up running a federal office where she can do big things without the consent of the people.
Now, I realize that most of the show’s fans see the narrative in a vastly different light and the protagonist, Leslie Knopes, as the sort of idealist, compassionate, and principled politician Americans should love. “Parks and Rec” can be fantastically funny (and it has a big heart), but as I watched I was often reminded that many people glorify ideas like “public service” — a preposterous term that treats politics as if it were a sacrifice without pay, power, or prestige — and “doing something” as a moral imperative no matter how politicians get it done.
When I got back from my winter vacation, America was still being run by a two-term president who believes it’s his job to impose his notions of morality, safety, and decency on everyone, often trying to work around the limits the system places on him. This week Barack Obama is going to institute new restrictions on Americans unilaterally — expanding background checks, closing supposed “loopholes,” and tightening the process for law-abiding gun owners — because Congress “won’t act” and also because he believes it’s the right thing to do. Neither of them are compelling reasons to legislate from the White House.
No post-World War II president has justified his executive overreach by openly contending he was working around the law-making branch of government.
Perhaps no post-World War II president (and maybe none before) has justified his executive overreach by openly contending he was working around the law-making branch of government because it has refused to do what he desired. Whether a court finds his actions constitutional or not, it’s an argument that stands, at the very least, against the spirit American governance. Today, many liberals call this “leadership.”
The most likely result of his new gun push will be that hundreds of thousands of Americans who understandably fear the mission creep of government will end up buying a whole bunch of guns (Smith & Wesson and Sturm, Ruger & Co. stocks rose against the dipping market on Monday). The flow of donations to Second Amendment advocacy groups will almost certainly rise, and gun violence — which has fallen considerably over the past 20 years of gun ownership expansion — will not be addressed.
But more consequentially — and this may be the most destructive legacy of the Obama presidency — is the mainstreaming of the idea that if Congress “fails to act” it’s okay for the president to figure out a way to make law himself. Hillary’s already applauded Obama’s actions because, as she put it, “Congress won’t act; we have to do something.” This idea is repeated perpetually by the Left, in effect arguing that we live in direct democracy run by the president (until a Republican is in office, of course). On immigration, on global warming, on Iran, on whatever crusade liberals are on, the president has a moral obligation to act if Congress doesn’t do what he wants.
Perhaps Obama’s most destructive legacy is the mainstreaming of the idea that if Congress ‘fails to act’ it’s okay for the president to make law himself.
To believe this, you’d have to accept two things: 1) That Congress has a responsibility to pass laws on the issues that the president desires or else they would be abdicating their responsibility, and 2) That Congress has not already acted.
In 2013, the Senate rejected legislation to expand background checks for gun purchases and to ban certain weapons and ammunition, and they would almost certainly oppose nearly every idea Obama has to curb gun ownership today. Congress has acted, just not in the manner Obama desires.
“Change, as always, is going to take all of us,” Obama theorized the other day. “The gun lobby is loud and well organized in its defense of effortlessly available guns for anyone. The rest of us are going to have to be just as passionate and well organized in our defense of our kids. That’s the work of citizenship — to stand up and fight for the change that we seek.”
Get it? You can be with the loud and reprehensible gun lobby who supports allowing criminals to obtain guns “effortlessly,” or you can stand with the kids. Your choice!
Well, not exactly your choice. As a reactionary, I wonder is it really the duty of “citizenship” to cheer on a president who single-handedly constrains Americans from practicing one of their constitutional rights? If President Bush had instituted a series of restrictions on the abortion industry — since it has a loud, well-organized, and well-funded lobby that wants to make abortions “effortlessly” available — without congressional input, would that have been procedurally okay with liberals? You know, for the children? I don’t imagine so.
Is it really is the work of ‘citizenship’ to cheer on a president who single-handedly constrains Americans from practicing one of their constitutional rights?
Or is it okay this time because the president claims (and many in the media ape) that his initiatives will “combat gun violence in the U.S.?” Is the threat of violence enough to empower the executive branch to place strictures on rights clearly laid out in the Constitution without any debate? Does the same go for fighting terrorism when a Republican becomes president?
The truth is, Obama has attempted to govern without Congress ever since Democrats rammed the Affordable Care Act through. It was the first time any consequential reform was instituted by a single political party, poisoning any chance of building consensus on major legislation in the foreseeable future. Since then, Republicans have frustrated Democrats, and on nearly every issue that matters to Obama. Obama has gone as far as he can, and sometimes farther, to administer law through our loudest, largest, most powerful, and well-funded bureaucracies.
A lot of people justify this behavior for the most obvious reason: they don’t care about process; they only care about issues. It’s true that the upside of executive orders and actions is that they can be easily undone when a new president is elected. But with the intractability of both parties only becoming more pronounced, the temptation to use the Obama model of legislating through the executive branch will become increasingly attractive to politicians and their supporters.
The Constitution Is Not Incidental President Obama and the elite modern left think freedoms in our Constitution which are essential to the American experience are just incidental.
When we discussed it yesterday morning on Face the Nation, the exact content of President Obama’s speech last night was not clear. It was still possible it could represent a marked change in strategy on the part of the White House, given that a steady drumbeat of criticism from fellow Democrats had put their approach to dealing with ISIS in its weakest political positioning yet. The intelligence community has been increasingly clear that, contra the evidence in prior fudged reports, ISIS is not contained.
The opportunity was there for President Obama to announce that he has reevaluated his approach in light of new information, and that the commitment necessary to crush ISIS would require a much more unified coalition and additional forces on the air and ground. It would have represented in a small way an act of unity with George W. Bush, who reevaluated his approach to Iraq in the wake of the 2006 elections, and risked significant political capital to fight for the surge policy to achieve a semblance of stability in the region. Instead, the speech turned out to be exactly what we have come to expect from this president: a stubborn insistence that his strategy is working.
Instead, the speech turned out to be exactly what we have come to expect from this president: a stubborn insistence that his strategy is working, despite the haters, and a glorious flame-throwing eradication of the amassed men of straw. As Rob Tracinski writes this morning, the speech was a lame attempt at a new framing for the conflict with ISIS, blameshifting to Congress for failing to enact a new AUMF or gun control measures. It will do nothing to achieve anything of the sort, in part because, as with most Obama speeches in his second term, it is more about divisiveness than unity.
Consider Obama’s dismissive line about his political opponents regarding guns. “What could possibly be the argument for allowing a terrorist suspect to buy a semiautomatic weapon?” Well, let us focus on one: that the denial of rights without due process of law is unconstitutional. Eugene Volokh:
“[C]an a person be denied constitutional rights, not based on a past criminal conviction or even a restraining order issued in court under a “preponderance of the evidence” standard, but based just on the government’s suspicion? The Feinstein proposal would have provided that the government could bar gun sales to a person if two conditions were met: “the Attorney General” “determines that the [buyer] is known (or appropriately suspected)” to have been involved in terrorism-related conduct “or providing material support support or resources for terrorism,” and if the Attorney General “has a reasonable belief that the [buyer] may use a firearm in connection with terrorism.”
“That’s a very low bar — denial of a constitutional right based on suspicion (albeit “appropriate[]”) about a person’s connections, and belief (albeit “reasonable” belief) about a person’s possible future actions … I can’t see how that’s constitutional. And though the bill would have let the buyer go to court to challenge the attorney general’s decision, the attorney general would simply have had to show by a preponderance of the evidence that the two elements were satisfied — that the attorney general appropriately suspected the buyer and that she had a reasonable belief about what the buyer may do.”
If you believe in civil liberties at all, the idea that the Attorney General of the United States could deny an explicitly guaranteed individual right in the Constitution based solely on suspicion, without having to show cause to the courts, should absolutely give you pause. As a matter of politics, it is the sort of grandstanding position and assertion of righteousness we have seen time and again from this administration, operating as it does without any humility or any respect for Constitutional norms. But if the White House thinks this message, combined with the New York Times front page editorial, is going to move the needle on guns at all they are deluding themselves almost as much as they are about ISIS. The problem is that the elite modern left thinks all these things which are essential to the American experience are just incidental.
(As an aside, this stance also is going to cause more difficulties for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Expect that Republicans in Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Ohio and Pennsylvania will be using the gun issue to great effect. But that comes later.)
The problem is that the elite modern left thinks all these things which are essential to the American experience are just incidental. They see no connection between Constitutional freedoms and the character of the people; between religious liberty and church attendance and family breakdown; between gun ownership and self-reliance and respect for property; between crushing free speech and destroying our capacity for free thought and creativity; between the loss of American stoicism and the all-encompassing welfare state. They see these originating factors as irritants or unimportant, and think they can all be gotten rid of without fundamentally altering the nature of who we are as a nation.
The liberal elites do this in part because such things are incidental to their own daily lives. Casting aside the Bill of Rights won’t fundamentally change who they are, at least not in any near term. So because you do not use guns, you don’t care about people who do, and you cannot understand why they would ever need or want such things. Same with church. Same with awful public schools, in neighborhoods you would never live. Your tribe of social justice warriors who left the campus will be just fine, so long as the government isn’t threatening gourmet coffee shops or wifi access or prestige cable dramas. The first priority of the United States government and the president is to secure our liberties – it always has been, and always ought to be.
There is one other point President Obama made – that as commander in chief, he has no greater responsibility than the security of the American people. It is the sort of thing lots of presidents have said. It also happens to be false. If the safety and security of Americans took precedence over all else, then The New York Times’s argument that every AR-15 in the country should be purchased at the cost of billions and melted down into slag would be more palatable – still wrong, but a matter for debate. This is not the case. The first priority of the United States government and the president is to secure our liberties – it always has been, and always ought to be.
Elite liberals like Obama and the New York Times editorialists do not understand that when they argue the American citizenry no longer has the capacity to bear arms, they are arguing that we have lost the capacity for self-government. They are not just saying you only have the right to self-defense as the Attorney General deems you fit; they are saying the inalienable rights of American individuals are subordinate to the will of high-minded politicians. Their interest is in keeping you safe and secure. Whether you are free is, in the grand scheme of things, incidental.
Secretary of Defense Ash Carter made a historic announcement on Thursday stating the Pentagon will open all combat jobs to women with zero restrictions.
“This means that as long as they qualify and meet the standards, women will now be able to contribute to our mission in ways they could not before. They’ll be able to drive tanks, give orders, lead infantry soldiers into combat,” Carter said. This included special operation jobs like the Navy SEALS, Rangers, and Special Forces.
There are a few things to consider about integrating women into all aspects of combat military operations when the end state is maintaining the most elite and lethal fighting force in the world.
First of all, there has to be a mission standard, not a gender standard. That means all physical and mental requirements are set to a standard that is necessary to accomplish whatever mission each particular unit is tasked with. No quotas, no double standards, no “separate but equal” physical standards. An individual, man or woman, either qualifies or they don’t. No exceptions. This means only a few women will likely be able to qualify for these special operations and infantry units, and that’s okay. It’s about quality, not quantity. We want the best for the job.
Second, there’s a considerable amount of controversy surrounding unit cohesion and morale, and whether men will be willing to accept women in their ranks and whether it will detract from the mission. In my experience as a Kiowa Warrior helicopter pilot in a male-dominated unit, if women who are accepted to the same unit successfully accomplished the exact same tests, physical requirements, and had no special treatment, there won’t be an issue. Resentment will occur if female quotas are applied to each unit to satisfy political agendas. An individual, man or woman, either qualifies or they don’t. No exceptions.
That is why it is that much more critical to maintain the mission standard. There are always exceptions to the rules, but that’s called life. If people, regardless of their gender, can’t handle someone disliking them for no reason at all, they probably shouldn’t be trying out for the infantry or a special operations job.
Third, Secretary Carter’s decision to allow women to serve in all combat jobs now means that the Selective Service law is out of date and discriminatory towards men. In 1981, the Supreme Court ruled that a male-only military draft was constitutional because women were banned from combat jobs and the draft’s intent is to fill combat replacements during a time of war. Female exemption from combat jobs meant there was no requirement to register with the Selective Service. With Carter’s historic decision, American women could likely be signing up for the Selective Service within 30 days of their eighteenth birthday in the very near future.
Bottom line: qualified women should be given the opportunity to try out, the same way qualified men can. If we’re enforcing equality, there are no exceptions. Women should neither be given special treatment nor be used by politicians or appointees who want to fill quotas who think their presence in these new units will benefit optics.
Once the dust settles and the media buzz is over, the mission still has to be accomplished. National security must always remain the military’s top priority by ensuring that we have the best soldiers accomplishing their very daunting missions, regardless of their gender. Amber Smith is national security writer and commentator. She is a former U.S. Army Kiowa Warrior helicopter pilot-in-command and Air Mission Commander. She is a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan. For more information visit OfficialAmberSmith.com
What do you call it when elites fly their private jets to an international climate change conference to forge a deal with despots that caps American prosperity without our consent? You call it progressivism.
It took a handful of gunmen only one night to impede free expression in Paris. Yet, according to the president, a massive and expensive effort to curb the 0.1 to 0.2 C of warming we might see over the next decade — the worst case scenario predicted by alarmists — is the most critical project facing mankind.
It took a handful of gunmen only one night to impede free expression in Paris.
That doesn’t mean Obama won’t use the issue of terrorism to refocus our attention where it belongs. Millions of people might live in fear and suffer under the genuine, deadly threat of radical Islam, but the president contends the Paris conference itself is “a powerful rebuke to the terrorists” and an “act of defiance” in the face of extremism.
Why not? True believers are rarely dissuaded by reality. Socialist Francois Hollande, president of a country that was not only recently a target of Islamic terror, but also one that witnessed the bloodiest conflicts of the 20th century, claims that “never have the stakes been so high because this is about the future of the planet, the future of life.” Never?
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, a man whose divided nation still suffers unconscionable destitution and tyranny, told leaders that humankind has “never faced such a test” as climate change. Never?
These are preposterous exaggerations that have as much to do with history and science as the Book of Revelation. But that’s nothing new, is it? Obama alleged yesterday that without a climate change agreement there could be “submerged countries, abandoned cities, fields that no longer grow” — assertions that are no more than fearmongering, ratcheted up over the decades by frustrated environmentalists and now confidently thrown around by presidents. These prophecies are tethered to reality in the same way Donald Trump’s whoppers are, although the media treats the former with undeserving respect.
Transforming ideology into a ‘science’ is not a new development on the Left.
Transforming ideology into a “science” is not a new development on the Left. But the most useful indicators tell us that humanity’s prospects are on the upswing: poverty is declining, crops are producing higher yields, and humans are living longer and healthier lives despite the mild warming we’ve experienced. And in spite of these advancements (or maybe because of them) Western leaders are prepared, conveniently enough, to cap growth, spread wealth, and centralize power in the way progressives have always wanted to cap growth, spread wealth, and centralize power.
Ripe For The Taking
The world looks ready for a deal. Developing nations will receive reparations for the capitalist sins of advanced nations — around $100 billion each year. Corporations will be subsidized so they can create more unproductive industries to meet arbitrary caps. And the worst carbon offenders in the world will have to do nothing. What’s not to like?
If a deal can be reached, Obama will have to trust that communist China — the world’s most prodigious carbon emitter — will voluntarily implement economic restraints around 30 years from now, by which time the U.S. will have to reach a 26 to 28 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Obama will implement them unilaterally. So China will have more of a say in what happens to our environmental policy than Congress. But Obama will also negotiate with a number of other unsavory despots, like the homicidal Robert Mugabe, who represents the African position at COP-21 negotiations. He will not, however, bring the deal to Congress, which represents the majority of the American people.
China will have a more say in what happens to our environmental policy than Congress.
The Paris agreement might be the biggest, most crucial international deal the world has ever known, but it is not important enough to be subjected to the traditional checks and balance of American governance. Global warming “does not pause for partisan gridlock,” the president explained this summer. Or, in other words, the president does not have to “pause” for Congress if he feels like using the regulatory state to implement his preferred partisan policy.
This kind of circumvention will be cheered by those who once feigned indignation when prior presidents abused executive power. This is really important, as you know. Obama hopes “to make climate change policy the signature environmental achievement of his, and perhaps any, presidency,” says an approving New York Times editor. Progressives are perfectly content to surrender freedoms to fight global warming. Perfectly content to give the executive unprecedented power to “act.” And when the private jets come back, and the pretend offsets are cashed in, and the moralizing begins, you will know they did it for your own good.
It
is amazing how out of touch liberals sound when confronted by evil. It
is almost as if true evil doesn't exist in their worldview, and in
their mind any action we take to combat evil somehow makes the enemy
stronger. Somehow it's better stick our heads in the sand and do
nothing. I'm amazed by how many articles I've read recently that says
ISIS can't be defeated. Um...we took on the Germans and the Japanese at the same time in WWII. I think we can handle 5,000 technologically backward thugs in the desert.
And
so what if they recruit more? Wouldn't certain annihilation serve as a
pretty good deterrent? Certainly it discourages terrorism more than
doing nothing (which seems to be the standard Liberal answer to evil).
Why not use this moment to truly unite as a race and say no to Muslim
terrorists who kill those with whom they disagree, destroy cultural
treasures, and make a mockery of the 'international community' of which
the President is so fond.
ISIS can only succeed if we overreact — so we shouldn’t
Amidst a week of fear over what the Islamic State can do, it's worth
stopping to be clear about what it can't do. It can't invade Paris. It
can't launch an air war against the United States. It can't even hold
its ground — ISIS expert Will McCants estimates the group has lost
between 20 and 25 percent of its territory in recent months.
The attack ISIS launched against Paris
is a horror. But it should take nothing away from its tragedy to say
more Americans have died from gun violence in seven days than died in
the Paris attacks. That's not to downplay the threat of terrorism, but
rather to highlight what makes it different: its capacity to terrorize.
"Terrorism is a crime against the mind," the security expert Bruce Schneier told me
after the Boston Marathon bombing. "The message of terrorist attacks is
you’re not safe and the government can’t protect you — that the
existing power structure can’t protect you."
Fear makes people do stupid things, and it makes countries do stupid
things, too. And it is fear that is ISIS's real weapon here.
ISIS can't hope to defeat America or France on the battlefield. It
can't turn back our jets or harm our aircraft carriers. It can only hope
to make us so afraid that we do something stupid that either helps it
or hurts us. ISIS can only succeed if, blinded by rage and terror, we
achieve its goals for it. There are at least two ways that might happen —
and one of them is already happening.
So far, 27 governors have said they won't accept Syrian refugees (though, for all the bluster, that's not a decision they have the power to make).
Their fear is understandable; large refugee inflows seem like an
obvious way ISIS could smuggle in foreign fighters. There's been a lot
of discussion about the (apparently fake) Syrian passport one of the
ISIS operatives carried, but its authenticity is almost beside the point
— it's clear that a terrorist could try to enter the country disguised
as a Syrian refugee, and for many, that's reason enough to close the
door.
But the backlash against the refugees plays into ISIS's hands. As Zack Beauchamp writes:
ISIS despises Syrian refugees: It sees them as traitors to the
caliphate. By leaving, they turn their back on the caliphate. ISIS
depicts its territory as a paradise, and fleeing refugees expose that as
a lie. But if refugees do make it out, ISIS wants them to be
treated badly — the more the West treats them with suspicion and fear,
the more it supports ISIS's narrative of a West that is hostile to
Muslims and bolsters ISIS's efforts to recruit from migrant communities
in Europe.
And that narrative benefits ISIS tangibly, not just spiritually.
"If they can spur a backlash against refugees, then they can recruit
from that population when the backlash occurs," says Daveed
Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of
Democracies. "This was their playbook in 2005 and 2005 when they were
known as al-Qaeda in Iraq. They would attack Shias, spark a backlash
against Sunnis, and then recruit by posing as the defender of the
Sunnis."
How ISIS benefits from a war
If you listen to ISIS's rhetoric, the group is particularly angry
over the West's use of airstrikes and drones. In a statement claiming
credit for the Paris attacks, ISIS said:
Let France and all nations following its path know that they will
continue to be at the top of the target list for the Islamic State and
that the scent of death will not leave their nostrils as long as they
partake in the crusader campaign, as long as they dare to curse our
Prophet (blessings and peace be upon him), and as long as they boast
about their war against Islam in France and their strikes against
Muslims in the lands of the Caliphate with their jets, which were of no
avail to them in the filthy streets and alleys of Paris.
ISIS wants to sell its followers on a holy war to defend Islam, kill
the infidels, and build the glorious caliphate. What it's getting,
instead, is a merciless, impersonal pounding from air-dropped ordnance.
Ideally, ISIS would like to be left alone to build its state. But if
that's not going to happen, pulling the West into an endless ground war
in a heartland of the Muslim world is a much better recruiting
opportunity than inviting young men to sit and around and wait to be
bombed. A chance to fight the infidels in defense of your land is more
appealing than a chance to die at the hands of their superior
technology. For that reason, says Gartenstein-Ross, "inserting ground
troops into Syria could play into their hands."
Similarly, ISIS's attack in Paris has led to resurgent sentiment in
America that the West is locked in a war not just with ISIS but with
"radical Islam" — a formulation that many experts believe ISIS would
prefer, as it alienates Muslims and helps ISIS portray itself as
defenders of its faith rather than as a gang of medieval thugs,
extortionists, and murderers. (Here's a very good rundown of the "radical Islam" issue.)
"Nothing about what these assholes are trying to do is going to work"
I am not going to pretend that I have the answer to how the West
should respond to ISIS. But in terms of how we should think about ISIS, I
remember something Schneier said:
The damage from terrorism is primarily emotional. To the extent this
terrorist attack succeeds has very little do with the attack itself.
It’s all about our reaction. We must refuse to be terrorized. Imagine if
the bombs were found and moved at the last second, and no one died, but
everyone was just as scared. The terrorists would have succeeded
anyway. If you are scared, they win. If you refuse to be scared, they
lose, no matter how much carnage they commit.
To that end, the best reaction to ISIS I've seen has come from, of
all places, a British comedian on HBO. I doubt John Oliver knows what to
do about ISIS either, but he does know how to keep them in perspective.
"Nothing about what these assholes are trying to do is going to work," Oliver said. "France is going to endure. And I'll tell you why: If you're in a war of culture and lifestyle with France, good fucking luck."
ISIS isn't strong. It's weak. That doesn't mean it's not dangerous,
or that it can't hurt us. But we shouldn't pretend these are invincible
superterrorists. They're murderers fighting a war that they will lose
and we will win. Part of how they recruit young fighters is by
pretending that's not true — pretending they have a chance in this
fight, that they are strong, that they have the West on its heels. We
shouldn't indulge their fantasies. We can mourn their victims without
believing their propaganda.
The thing you need to remember about ISIS, says Gartenstein-Ross, is
it is not just weak in the West, it's also loathed across the Middle
East: "America is unpopular in the Middle East, but if we had ISIS's
approval rating, we would see that as a very, very serious strategic
problem. They have a terrible brand. So part of what we need to do is
simply avoid making mistakes that will let them present themselves as a
defender of Muslims. We need to make sure Muslims continue to
overwhelmingly reject ISIS."
Yale’s Idiot Children Hysterical Yalies protest a free-speech panel.
By Kevin D. Williamson — November 10, 2015
New Haven, Conn. — Really, Yale — you shouldn’t have! All this for little ol’ me?
It wasn’t really for little ol’ me, in fact. On Friday, I was honored to be a guest of the William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale, where I participated in a panel on freedom of speech with the wonderful writer Harry Stein and Professor Bradley A. Smith, a noted law scholar. The Yale kids did their screaming best to prevent us from having a conversation about free speech — the Yale kids are utterly immune to irony — but the event went much as planned. Coming and going, we were chanted at by idiot children screaming, “Genocide is not a joke!”
Of course it isn’t. Yale kids, on the other hand . . .
For the first several years of my life, I thought that “Yale man” was a synonym for “caveman,” because the only references to Yale I’d ever heard were from Thurston Howell III, who greeted displays of barbarism with “Heavens! A Yale man!” I thought of that when the police officer was obliged to carry the shrieking protester out of the venue where he’d come to put a stop to our free-speech discussion. If you’re wondering about the genocide thing, so were we. Turns out it’s a fairly typical college story — which is to say, a fairly stupid story — the short version of which is that Yale’s sensitivity babysitter sent out a pre-Halloween e-mail reminding all the smart Ivy League kids not to dress up like Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer; Professor Erika Christakis offered a reply bemoaning that college campuses have become “places of censure and prohibition”; a few students consequently went bonkers because their safe spaces were being invaded; and — here’s where we come in — Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, one of our panelists, remarked that these hysterical ninnies were acting like Professor Christakis had burned down an Indian village.
Which is to say: The idiot children were screaming about Lukianoff because he said they were overreacting to Christakis’s criticism that they tend to scream and overreact.
Well played, idiot children.
Of course, these idiot children aren’t children. These are young adults who can serve in the military, get married, buy firearms, drink alcohol, etc. They are at the beginning years of adult life, but they are entirely unprepared for adult life. It’s fashionable to blame Yale and other elite institutions for this sorry state of affairs, but, while the colleges certainly do their share of damage, the truth is that these children are maladjusted buffoons when they show up in New Haven. Yale doesn’t make them into hysterical ninnies — their families do.
There is a certain strain of upper-middle-class American culture that cultivates an excess of self-importance that grows cancerous when it isn’t counteracted by a deep understanding that the world is full of things that are much more important than you are: God, country, the rest of the human race. That American striver culture has many invaluable aspects — it is the culture that produces the high-achieving students who go to Yale and other elite institutions — but in the absence of transcendent values it turns everybody into a miniature Donald Trump. If your concerns in life are limited to personal economic advancement and status whoring, then everything — literally — is about you. That’s when you see things like Lena Dunham’s dopey political advertisements, which reduce citizenship to another shallow channel of self-satisfaction: Never mind patriotism, never mind history, never mind anything else — what does your vote say about you? How do it make you feel?
I understand why the idiot children at Yale are so sensitive. Really, I do. I sometimes list in my mind all of the poor, suffering people who get a raw deal in this life, and Yale students are always right at the top, with the Bangladeshi orphans and women traded by sex traffickers in Vietnam. Yale isn’t a safe space, Congo isn’t a safe space — it all makes sense, as long as you don’t expect it to make sense.
No, genocide isn’t a joke. I’m sure that the women and children being raped to death by Boko Haram appreciate that the idiot children at Yale are making stern faces and pumping their fists. As for me, I think that they’re clowns, and worse than that, really: They’re bad citizens, and defective people from defective families. They aren’t motivated by good will, but by fear: of the dawning realization that they, as people, aren’t really all that important, despite having been told all their lives how important they are.
We’re all real sorry about your safe spaces and your pacifier and your stuffed puppy, Caitlyn. Really we are. Yet the perpetual revolution of configured stars continues in its indifference, and the lot of man is ceaseless labor, and though you may find the thought terrifying — and thinking itself terrifying — it may turn out to be the case that the screaming in the dark you do on campus is more or less the same screaming in the dark you did in the crib, the same howl for the same reason.
— Kevin D. Williamson is roving correspondent for National Review.
Many people may share Senator Bernie Sanders' complaint that he was tired of hearing about Hillary Clinton's e-mails. But the controversy is about issues far bigger than e-mails.
One issue is the utter disaster created by the Obama administration's foreign policy in Libya, carried out by Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.
An even bigger issue is whether high officials of government can ignore the law and refuse to produce evidence when it is subpoenaed. If they can, then the whole separation of powers -- the checks and balances in the Constitution -- gives way to arbitrary government by corrupt officials who are accountable to no one.
This is not the first time Hillary Clinton has defied the law to cover up what she had done. When Bill Clinton was president, back in the 1990s, both he and Hillary developed the strategy of responding to charges of illegal actions on their part by stalling and stonewalling when either courts or Congress tried to get them to produce documents related to these charges.
Hillary claimed then, as now, that key documents had disappeared. Her more recent claim that many of her e-mails had been deleted was just Hillary 2.0. Only after three years of stalling and stonewalling on her part has the fact finally come out this year that those e-mails could be recovered, and now have been.
By this time, however, Hillary and her supporters used the same tactics that both Clintons used back in the 1990s -- namely, saying that this was old news, stuff that had already been investigated too long, that it was time to "move on."
That was Hillary 1.0. More recently Hillary 2.0 said, melodramatically, "What difference, at this point, does it make?"
One of the things that the former Secretary of State was now trying to cover up was the utter disaster of the Obama administration's foreign policy that she carried out in Libya.
Having intervened in Libya to help overthrow the government of Muammar Qaddafi, who was no threat to America's interests in the Middle East, the Obama administration was confronted with the fact that Qaddafi's ouster simply threw the country into such chaos that Islamic terrorists were now able to operate freely in Libya.
Just how freely was shown in September 2012, when terrorists stormed the compound in Benghazi where the American ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, was staying. They murdered him and three other Americans who tried to defend him.
Moreover, the terrorists did not even have to go into hiding afterwards, and at least one of them was interviewed by journalists. That's how chaotic Libya had become.
Meanwhile, there was an American presidential election campaign in 2012, and Barack Obama was presenting himself to the voters as someone who had defeated Al Qaeda and suppressed the terrorist threat in the Middle East.
Obviously the truth about this attack could have totally undermined the image that Obama was trying to project during the election campaign, and perhaps cost him the White House. So a lie was concocted instead.
The lie was that the attack was not by terrorists -- who supposedly had been suppressed by Obama -- but was a spontaneous protest demonstration against an American video insulting Islam, and that protest just got out of control.
Now that Hillary Clinton's e-mails have finally been recovered and revealed, after three years of stalling and stonewalling, they showed explicitly that she knew from the outset that the attack that killed Ambassador Stevens and others was not a result of some video but was a coordinated terrorist operation.
Nevertheless, Hillary 2.0, along with President Obama and national security advisor Susan Rice, told the world in 2012 that the deaths in Benghazi were due to the video, not a terrorist organization that was now operating freely in Libya, thanks to the policy that got rid of the Qaddafi government.
Yet that key fact was treated by the media as old news, and what was exciting now was how well Hillary 2.0 outperformed the Congressional committee on television. If the corruption and undermining of the American system of Constitutional government eventually costs us our freedom, will the media say, "What difference does it make now?"
At the recent televised debate among candidates for the Democrats' nomination for president, Hillary Clinton declared that "the wealthy pay too little" in taxes and "the middle class pays too much."
Some people might wish to argue about whether that is true or not, but no rational argument can be made on either side of this issue, because the words used are completely undefined. Nor is Hillary Clinton the only one who talks this way.
It is one of the many signs of the mindlessness of our times that all sorts of people declare that "the rich" are not paying their "fair share" in taxes, without telling us concretely what they mean by either "the rich" or "fair share."
Whether in politics or in the media, words are increasingly used, not to convey facts or even allegations of facts, but simply to arouse emotions. Undefined words are a big handicap in logic, but they are a big plus in politics, where the goal is not clarity but victory -- and the votes of gullible people count just as much as the votes of people who have common sense.
What a "fair share" of taxes means in practice is simply "more." No matter how high the tax rate is on people with a given income, you can always raise the tax rate further by saying that they are still not paying their "fair share."
Advocates of higher tax rates can get very specific when they want to. A recent article in the New York Times says that raising the tax rate on the top one percent of income earners to 40 percent would generate "about $157 billion" a year in additional tax revenue for the government.
This ignores mountains of evidence, going back for generations, showing that raising tax rates does not automatically mean raising tax revenues -- and has often actually led to falling tax revenues. A fantasy expressed in numbers is still a fantasy.
When the state of Maryland raised its tax rate on people with incomes of a million dollars a year or more, the number of such people living in Maryland fell from nearly 8,000 to fewer than 6,000. Although it had been projected that the tax revenue collected from such people in Maryland would rise by $106 million, instead these revenues FELL by $257 million.
There was a similar reaction in Oregon and in Britain. Rich people do not simply stand still to be sheared like sheep. They can either send their money somewhere else or they can leave themselves.
Currently, there are trillions of dollars of American money creating jobs overseas, in places where tax rates are lower. It is easy to transfer money electronically from country to country. But it is not nearly so easy for unemployed American workers to transfer themselves to where the jobs have been driven by high tax rates.
Conversely, there have been some reductions in high tax rates that brought in more tax revenues at the lower rates. This happened as far back as the Coolidge administration in the 1920s. It also happened in the Kennedy administration in the 1960s, the Reagan administration in the 1980s and most recently in the Bush 43 administration. There was a similar reaction in Iceland.
There is nothing inevitable about either a higher or a lower amount of tax revenues, whether the tax rate is raised or lowered. The government can only set tax rates. How that will affect the tax revenues actually received depends on how people react, and you can know that only after the fact. Sophisticated projections have often been laughably wrong.
Contrary to the way some people on the left conceive of the world, neither rich people nor poor people are inert blocks of wood, to be moved about like pieces on a chess board, to carry out some grand design from on high.
Even outright confiscations of people's wealth, including whole industries in some countries, have failed to spread prosperity, and have even led to collapsing economies.
But politics is not about what happened in the past. That is left for historians. What politicians are interested in is what they can get the public to believe in the present and to vote on in the future. Plans to "soak the rich," who are not paying their "fair share," have worked politically, time and time again -- and may well work yet again in the 2016 elections.
Thomas' anectdotes about Hispanic baseball players and Indian spelling bee champions is thought-provoking. The fact that some groups over-index in certain populations is never attributed to discrimination (nor should it - that would be ridiculous). Why is it different in any other performance-based population (school & work)?
One of the many painful signs of the mindlessness of our times was a recent section of the Wall Street Journal, built around the theme "What's Holding Women Back in the Workplace?"
Whenever some group is not equally represented in some institution or activity, the automatic response in some quarters is to assume that someone has prevented equality of outcomes.
This preconception of equal outcomes requires not one speck of evidence, and defies mountains of evidence to the contrary. Even in activities where individual performances are what determine outcomes, and those performances are easily measured objectively, there is seldom anything resembling equal representation.
For 12 consecutive years -- from 2001 through 2012 -- each home run leader in the American League had a Hispanic surname. When two American boys whose ancestors came from India tied for first place in the U.S. National Spelling Bee in 2014, it was the 7th consecutive year in which the U.S. National Spelling Bee was won by an Asian Indian.
We all know about the large over-representation of blacks among professional basketball players, and especially among the star players. The best-selling brands of beer in America were created by people of German ancestry, who also created China's famed Tsingtao beer. Of the 100 top-ranked Marathon runners in the world in 2012, 68 were Kenyans. The list could go on and on. Although blacks are over-represented among professional football players, even the most avid National Football League fan is unlikely to be able to recall seeing even one black player who kicked a punt or a point after touchdown.
Should there be an article titled: "What's Holding Black Kickers Back in the NFL?" Could it be that blacks are more interested in playing positions where there is more action and -- not incidentally -- more money?
Should there be an article titled: "What's Holding Back Whites in the National Basketball Association?" Or an article titled: "What's Holding Back Non-Asian Indian Kids from Winning the Spelling Bee?" Lawsuits claiming discrimination have been won on the basis of statistical disparities far smaller than these.
Among the many reasons for gross disparities in many fields, and at different income levels, is that human beings differ in what they want to do, quite aside from any differences in what they are capable of doing, or what others permit them to do. Observers cannot just grab a statistic and run with it, though that is what is done too often in the media -- and even in courts of law.
Particular opportunities are seized by some groups and used to rise from poverty to prosperity. But, for other groups, those same opportunities might as well not exist, because other groups are oriented in different directions, and those opportunities might not even catch their attention.
As regards statistical disparities in the representation of women in various occupations or at different income levels, a number of outstanding female scholars, including Professor Claudia Goldin of Harvard, have shown many ways in which women's circumstances and priorities differ from those of men.
Men, for example, don't get pregnant. And where children are raised by a single parent, that parent is a mother far more often than a father. You cannot work the 60-hour weeks that are needed to reach the top in some fields when you have children to raise.
But we seldom hear about such facts, while we constantly hear charlatans loudly proclaiming numerical "gender gaps" in employment or pay, and suing for discrimination.
Charlatans are only half the story. The other half includes people who are gullible enough to be led around like sheep by those exploiting the prevailing political correctness dispensed in our schools, colleges and the media.
Moreover, the sheep in both high and low positions often also implicitly believe that the cause of statistical disparities must have originated wherever the statistics were collected, and therefore must be the fault of the employer -- even though the factors behind those disparities may have originated far from the employer and long before the people involved reached the employer.
So long as there is widespread gullibility, there will be charlatans ready to exploit it for their own benefit, either politically or financially.
The 'Affordable Housing' Fraud Thomas Sowell | Sep 29, 2015
Nowhere has there been so much hand-wringing over a lack of "affordable housing," as among politicians and others in coastal California. And nobody has done more to make housing unaffordable than those same politicians and their supporters.
A recent survey showed that the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco was just over $3,500. Some people are paying $1,800 a month just to rent a bunk bed in a San Francisco apartment.
It is not just in San Francisco that putting a roof over your head can take a big chunk out of your pay check. The whole Bay Area is like that. Thirty miles away, Palo Alto home prices are similarly unbelievable.
One house in Palo Alto, built more than 70 years ago, and just over one thousand square feet in size, was offered for sale at $1.5 million. And most asking prices are bid up further in such places.
Another city in the Bay Area with astronomical housing prices, San Mateo, recently held a public meeting and appointed a task force to look into the issue of "affordable housing."
Public meetings, task forces and political hand-wringing about a need for "affordable housing" occur all up and down the San Francisco peninsula, because this is supposed to be such a "complex" issue.
Someone once told President Ronald Reagan that a solution to some controversial issue was "complex." President Reagan replied that the issue was in fact simple, "but it is not easy."
Is the solution to unaffordable housing prices in parts of California simple? Yes. It is as simple as supply and demand. What gets complicated is evading the obvious, because it is politically painful.
One of the first things taught in an introductory economics course is supply and demand. When a growing population creates a growing demand for housing, and the government blocks housing from being built, the price of existing housing goes up.
This is not a breakthrough on the frontiers of knowledge. Economists have understood supply and demand for centuries -- and so have many other people who never studied economics.
Housing prices in San Francisco, and in many other communities for miles around, were once no higher than in the rest of the United States. But, beginning in the 1970s, housing prices in these communities skyrocketed to three or four times the national average.
Why? Because local government laws and policies severely restricted, or banned outright, the building of anything on vast areas of land. This is called preserving "open space," and "open space" has become almost a cult obsession among self-righteous environmental activists, many of whom are sufficiently affluent that they don't have to worry about housing prices.
Some others have bought the argument that there is just very little land left in coastal California, on which to build homes. But anyone who drives down Highway 280 for thirty miles or so from San Francisco to Palo Alto, will see mile after mile of vast areas of land with not a building or a house in sight.
How "complex" is it to figure out that letting people build homes in some of that vast expanse of "open space" would keep housing from becoming "unaffordable"?
Was it just a big coincidence that housing prices in coastal California began skyrocketing in the 1970s, when building bans spread like wildfire under the banner of "open space," "saving farmland," or whatever other slogans would impress the gullible?
When more than half the land in San Mateo County is legally off-limits to building, how surprised should we be that housing prices in the city of San Mateo are now so high that politically appointed task forces have to be formed to solve the "complex" question of how things got to be the way they are and what to do about it?
However simple the answer, it will not be easy to go against the organized, self-righteous activists for whom "open space" is a sacred cause, automatically overriding the interests of everybody else.
Was it just a coincidence that some other parts of the country saw skyrocketing housing prices when similar severe restrictions on building went into effect? Or that similar policies in other countries have had the same effect? How "complex" is that?
