In our time, asking how a young man of scarce achievement got into position to win the Democratic Party’s nomination for president courts the contemporary synonyms for “impious”: “birther,” “conspiracy theorist,” and, of course, “racist.” Granted, to inquire into what formed a president is not as important as to understand what he does. Nevertheless, because fully to know where anyone is going requires grasping whence he comes, let us open ourselves to wonder how, minus miracles, a 10-year-old boy without obvious talent who had lived in Indonesia since age six ends up with an eight-year scholarship to Hawaii’s most exclusive school; a scholarship to Occidental College; a transfer into Columbia University; acceptance into Harvard Law School, and editorship of its law review; and how he goes from job to prestigious job without apparently mastering any of the previous ones. No wonder some of Barack Obama’s supporters treat him as if he were anointed by an extraterrestrial power.
A Nutshell History of Climate-Change Hysteria
At a time when the push is on to subject humanity to more crazy, shortsighted progressive environmental programs (read carbon regulations) to “save the earth” from its human population, a brief look at progressive airy predictions of the past is in order.
Enlightenment from the campus teach-ins of the 1960s and early 1970s slowly invaded conventional college classrooms so that the hippie-generation mentality of the time eventually became the hip academic norm. But, excitement over such topics as the planet’s imminent collapse from too many people and too much ice quickly waned when population increases yielded no global food fights and Mother Earth began to melt her once-advancing ice caps.
The Republican Who Can Win
To win the presidency in 2012, the Republican candidate will require certain strengths. Among them, a credible passion for ideas other than cost-cutting and small government. He or she will have to speak in the voice of Americans who know in their bones the extraordinary character of their democracy, and that voice will have to ring out steadily. That Republican candidate will need, no less, the ability to talk about matters like Medicare and Social Security without terrorizing the electorate.
What If Jews Had Followed the Palestinian Path?
It is doubtful that there has ever been a more miserable human refuse than Jewish survivors after World War II. Starving, emaciated, stateless—they were not welcomed back by countries where they had lived for generations as assimilated and educated citizens. Germany was no place to return to and in Kielce, Poland, 40 Jews who survived the Holocaust were killed in a pogrom one year after the war ended. The European Jew, circa 1945, quickly went from victim to international refugee disaster.
Yet within a very brief time, this epic calamity disappeared, so much so that few people today even remember the period. How did this happen in an era when Palestinian refugees have continued to be stateless for generations?
Weiners, Wusses and Wonks
What hath Anthony Weiner wrought? Clarity.
It is now crystal clear that our elites — the ruling class, the insiders who tell us where, when, and how to live our lives–are nothing more than a collection of Wieners, Wusses and Wonks. And as surely as the words of telegraph inventor Samuel Morse (“What hath God wrought”) signaled the beginning of the modern mass communication era and the transformation of the United States for the 20th century, so will this Democrat leader’s grotesque digital dissemination of his private parts bring about the transformation needed by this century — the realization that our political and media elites are among the worst this nation has to offer.
Introducing Herman Cain
‘How many of you think Herman Cain won the debate?”
Twenty hands shot up.
“Well, we can stop right there,” said Frank Luntz, a fast-talking political consultant, as he paced before a Fox News focus group on May 5. “This is unprecedented.”
Killing Bin Laden: An Act of Absolute Moral Clarity…and then there’s “President Boring.”
On May 1, 2011, President Obama announced to the world that he had personally shot Osama bin Laden in the head.
Well, not exactly. But it was close.
“I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al-Qaida,” he said. “I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden … I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside Pakistan. And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action … Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan …”
Race, Fantasy, and the New Yorker’s Editor
A New Yorker article by editor David Remnick gives away the game in the headline, “Trump, Birtherism, And Race-Baiting.”
According to Remnick, the “irrepressible jackass” Trump has inspired idiot America to believe a series of fantasies about Barack Obama: “There is the birther fantasy; the fantasy that Bill Ayers wrote “Dreams from My Father”; the fantasy that the President has some other father, and not Barack Obama, Sr.; the fantasy that Obama got into Harvard Law School with the help of a Saudi prince and the
Forbes Explains Bad Economy: Weak U.S. Dollar, Spending Binge
Steve Forbes is hopeful that U.S. principles will ultimately help the nation beat China.