Last week, the White House issued a new “study” on the supposed progress states have made in implementing the “health exchanges” that are central to constructing the Obamacare system. According to the administration’s spin, some 28 states are “on their way” toward establishing the exchanges, so everything is apparently well under control. In other words, nothing to worry about here. Full speed ahead!
But is that really what’s going on here?
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Back in December, when he was just one more Republican running for his party’s presidential nomination, Rick Perry condemned the Obama administration for its “war on religion.” Days later, Barack Obama’s loyal aide Valerie Jarrett preached politics from the pulpit of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. The juxtaposition might have looked odd, except that Perry had a point: Religion that does not conform with liberalism is an enemy of the Left.
Liberalism has become, in some respects, sexual libertinism. It’s not just “anything goes.” It’s that we now have a fundamental right to anything goes, and taxpayer-funded tools to sustain that lifestyle. You see that in regulations and explicit campaigning. It’s some of what’s behind over-the-top “war on women” rhetoric, even when well intentioned.
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Let me build on Charles Krauthammer’s great Friday column, “The GOP’s Suicide March.” Krauthammer argues that just as President Obama’s class-warfare, soak-the-rich mantra started lagging in the polls, some Republicans on the campaign trail started making the case that Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital was involved in nothing more than vulture capitalism, looting companies, and destroying jobs. Keeping class envy alive.
I’m not going to name names, because everybody knows who these Republicans are. Instead, I want to go positive, and commend Mitt Romney himself. Romney did his best in the second South Carolina debate to fight for free-market capitalism and Adam Smith, and against the spread of Obama-style crony capitalism and class envy.
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Newt Gingrich’s ardent admiration for Franklin Delano Roosevelt owes more to the latter’s unflinching wartime leadership than his welfare-state policy prescriptions. This week, though, the former Speaker is also undoubtedly in accord with FDR’s aphorism, “I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.” To his great credit, Newt has made an enemy of CAIR.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, that is. The nation’s best known cheerleader for radical Islam — or, as Fox News compliantly puts it, “the largest Muslim civil liberties group in the United States” — has issued a blistering press release that labels Gingrich “one of the nation’s worst promoters of anti-Muslim bigotry.” The occasion for this outburst is the imminent Republican primary in South Carolina.
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Stephanie Cutter, an adviser to the Obama reelection campaign, wrote a scathing memo the other day about Mitt Romney’s experience at Bain Capital, subtitled “Profit at Any Cost.”
Cutter sounded like a sworn enemy of private equity. Except a few years ago, she was a spokeswoman for J.C. Flowers, a private-equity firm. Why do work for J.C. Flowers when there are so many other worthy ventures needing communications help that don’t make insane amounts of money and pay incredibly well?
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Willard Mitt Romney these days could not be more explicit about abandoning President Obama’s carbon dioxide restrictions.
“Irresponsibly,” Romney wrote in an August 28 op-ed for the Foster’s Daily Democrat in New Hampshire, “the EPA declared carbon dioxide, the same carbon dioxide that humans exhale, to be a ‘pollutant’ that poses risks to human health.” He also observed: “Congress had the good sense not to compound our economic challenges by imposing cap-and-trade’s extraordinary costs on the American people.”
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If you wish for peace, prepare for war. — Latin adage
In the immediate aftermath of September 11, a rough consensus emerged about the messages the Clinton administration was sending to potential adversaries. The failure to respond to the attacks on our forces in Mogadishu, the non-response to the bombings of our embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, and toleration of the assault on the USS Cole — all persuaded al-Qaeda that the United States was a “weak horse” that could be attacked without fear. Our limp response to provocations thus encouraged aggression.
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“In all my courses, I really have to teach the basic messages of my life… that the rewards, the satisfactions, are not in being partner or making a million dollars, but in recognizing evils, recognizing injustices, and standing up and speaking out about them even in absolutely losing situations where you know it's not going to bring about any change—that there are intangible rewards to the spirit that make that worthwhile.”
When Derrick Bell gave this interview to National Public Radio in 1992, he was in the middle of a very public unpaid leave of absence that ultimately led to separation from Harvard Law School to protest the school’s failure to hire a tenured Black woman to the faculty. In 1985, he had resigned his post as Dean of the University of Oregon’s School of Law when that school wouldn’t hire an Asian American woman professor; almost 30 years earlier, he resigned from the Department of Justice rather than give up his membership in the NAACP in order to keep his job. Throughout his long, storied career as a lawyer, law professor, and legal scholar until his death last October at age 80, Derrick Bell was well-known for his willingness to stand up and speak out about the injustices he saw around him, even when it cost him his own positions. His activism within and outside the “ivory tower” of academia changed the odds for the generations that followed in his footsteps and learned from his example. I was very pleased to have him as one of my superb supervising attorneys my first year out of law school when I joined the NAACP Legal Defense Fund staff.
Derrick Bell was the oldest of four children, whose parents Derrick Sr., a mill worker and department store porter, and Mildred, a homemaker, taught them the need to stand up for what was right. Derrick was the first person in his family to go to college and the only Black student in his class at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. After law school he joined the Department of Justice in 1957, and was working in its Civil Rights Division when his superiors began pressuring him to drop his NAACP membership, spurring him to resign and return to Pittsburgh to take a job with the NAACP instead. His actions caught the attention of Thurgood Marshall, then head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who invited Derrick to come work with him in 1960. Derrick spent the next six years fighting Civil Rights Movement legal battles in the South, supervising more than 300 school desegregation cases, including a number I inherited in Mississippi after moving to practice law in that state in 1967.
After leaving the Legal Defense Fund, he served as deputy director of the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare before beginning his career as a law professor at the University of Southern California Law School. He first joined Harvard Law School’s faculty in 1969, and in 1971 became its first Black tenured professor. Two years later he published Race, Racism and American Law, the casebook that colleagues and friends noted “would help define the focus of his scholarship for the next 38 years” and “heralded an emerging era in American legal studies, the academic study of race and the law.” For the rest of his professional life his scholarship highlighted the inequalities that continued to define American life and law. When he left Harvard Law School in 1980 to become the dean at Oregon Law School, he was one of the first Blacks to serve as dean at a predominantly White law school. But personal firsts were never the point for him. He returned to Harvard Law School after resigning from Oregon but quickly found he was led to take a principled stand again rather than keep quiet or be patient about the injustices he saw in the law school’s traditional hiring and tenure practices. Derrick remained dedicated to our collective good and to changing the odds for others his whole life.
After leaving Harvard Law School a second time Derrick went to New York University Law School which remained his academic home for the rest of his life. Always a beloved teacher and mentor, his classes and books like Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism brought his provocative, accessible style of thinking and writing about race in America and the law to a wide audience. He was a lantern for many and will live on in the many lives he touched and helped shape.
Ron Paul knows even less about the history of our enemies than he does about their proper treatment under the Constitution. He actually interrupted Monday night’s Republican candidates’ debate so he could interject the following:
I would like to point out one thing about the Taliban. The Taliban used to be our allies when we were fighting the Russians. So Taliban are people who want — their main goal is to keep foreigners off their land. It’s the al-Qaeda — you can’t mix the two. The al-Qaeda want to come here to kill us. The Taliban just says, “We don’t want foreigners.” We need to understand that, or we can’t resolve this problem in the Middle East. We are going to spend a lot of lives and a lot of money for a long time to come.
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Columbia, S.C. — Fighting to regain momentum in the South Carolina primary, Rick Santorum has shown little of the pizzazz that has characterized so many of the poll frontrunners this cycle.
“I may not be flashy and have a bunch of applause lines,” he admitted Tuesday, speaking at the Flight Deck restaurant in Lexington, S.C. “But what I’ve got is good, solid principles and I’m not changing my mind every ten minutes.”
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Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has described the Muslim Brotherhood as “secular.” Vice President Joseph Biden recently said that the Taliban “is not our enemy.” According to John Brennan, assistant to the president on counterterrorism, terrorists who proclaim they are motivated by religion should not be described using “religious terms.” Where do ideas such as these come from? The answer, in large measure, is from advisers — so perhaps it would be instructive to examine more closely what those advisers are actually saying.
U.S. Navy Commander Youssef H. Aboul-Enein “has advised at the highest levels of the defense department and the intelligence community,” according to the jacket notes on his book, Militant Islamist Ideology: Understanding the Global Threat, published by the Naval Institute Press. Raymond Ibrahim, a young analyst for whom I have great respect, recently gave the book a withering review. My reading is less harsh. I think that Commander Aboul-Enein, who was born in Mississippi and raised in Saudi Arabia, is grappling, seriously and sincerely, with the pathologies that have arisen from within the Muslim world, and is struggling to formulate a coherent American response. That should not suggest, however, that his efforts have been entirely successful.
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During Monday night’s debate in Myrtle Beach, Mitt Romney was compellingly and cogently pushed — by Rick Perry, no less — on the issue of releasing his tax returns. The former Massachusetts governor sputtered. “I have nothing in them that suggests there’s any problem and I’m happy to do so,” he replied. “What’s happened in history is people have released them in about April of the coming year, and that’s probably what I would do.”
But even the transcript, with its awkward constructions and noncommittal “probably,” doesn’t quite capture the unfortunateness of the response. It was quite simply Romney’s weakest moment in his weakest debate, combining all of the silly tropes alleged by his opponents into a single caricature of a slippery, well-heeled frontrunner trying to coast through the primaries.
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