Conservative
Chronicle
THIS WEEK'S COVER TOPIC: Pacifists Diplomacy, by Pat Buchanan
The apologists: Obama’s silence signifying assent
F
or 50 minutes, Obama sat mute, blue-eyed bankers,” told Obama that any “The contrition tour goes beyond Latin
as a Marxist thug from Nicaragua future Summit of the Americas without the America. In China, Mrs. Clinton told au- TOPIC INDEX
delivered his diatribe, charging Castro brothers was unacceptable. diences that the United States must accept April 29, 2009
America with a century of terrorist aggres- Perhaps Obama believes in turn-the-oth- its responsibility as a leading emitter of
sion in Central America. er-cheek diplomacy, though it is hard to find greenhouse gases. In Indonesia, she said 10th Amendment
After Daniel Ortega finished spitting in much success in history for such a policy. the American-backed policy of sanctions Elder (20)
our face, accusing us of inhumanity toward Perhaps pacifism is in his DNA. Perhaps he against Myanmar had not been effective.
Williams (21)
Answer Man
Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Obama was asked his shares the indictment of America that is part And in the Middle East, she pointed out that Seamans (14)
thoughts. of the repertoire of every Latin demagogue. ostracizing the Iranian government had not Boyle, Susan
“I thought it was 50 minutes long. That’s persuaded it to give up its nuclear weapons Thomas (23)
what I thought.” WHATEVER his motive, in Trinidad, ambitions.”
Chavez, Hugo
Charen (28)
there were not two sides to the story. There Sandler wrote that Hillary brought to Chokepoints
HILLARY Clinton was asked to com- were the trashers of America on the Latino mind Bill Clinton: Bay (21)
ment: “I thought the cultural performance left and a U.S. president who wailed plain- “On a single trip to Africa in 1998 ... Bill Climate Bill
Karki (23)
was fascinating,” she cooed. Clinton apologized for American participa- DHS
Pressed again on Ortega’s vitriol, Hillary tion in slavery; American support of brutal Limbaugh (16)
replied: “To have those first-class Carib-
Pat African dictators; American ‘neglect and North (17)
bean entertainers all on one stage and to see ignorance’ of Africa; American failure to Saunders (18)
Buchanan
Sowell (16)
how much was done in such a small amount intervene sooner in the Rwandan genocide Financial Crisis
of space. I was overwhelmed.” of 1994; American ‘complicity’ in apartheid Blankley (15)
Thus the nation that won the Cold War, ... .” Foreign Policy
contained the cancer of Castroism in Cuba, Yet, as C.S. Lewis reminds us in God in Barone (27)
Interrogation
liberated Grenada, blocked communist the Dock, “The first and fatal charm of na- Jeffrey (26)
takeovers of Guatemala and the Dominican tively, “I’m thankful that President Ortega tional repentance is ... the encouragement it Liberal Justices
Republic, and poured scores of billions in did not blame me for things that happened gives us to turn from the bitter task of re- Schlafly (24)
aid into this region was left undefended by when I was 3 months old.” penting our own sins to the congenial one of
Life Insurance Bailout
Kudlow (14)
its own leaders at the Summit of the Ameri- But, the Bay of Pigs, had it succeeded, bewailing — but, first, of denouncing — the Mexico
cas. would have given Cubans 50 years of free- conduct of others.” Lowry (27)
Nor was this the only unanswered insult. dom instead of the brutal dictatorship they Bewailing the policies of Bush as fail- Miss USA Contestant
Hugo Chavez, who has called Obama an have had to endure. And it took place four ures and standing mute in the face of attacks
Gallagher (18)
New Foundation
“ignoramus” and Bush “El Diablo,” walked months before Barack was born. on his country and predecessors may come Krauthammer (12)
over to a seated U.S. president and handed Obama’s silence — signifying, as it does, back to bite Obama. North Korea
him the anti-American tract Open Veins of assent — in the face of attacks on his coun- Lee (31)
Numbers
Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pil- try is of a piece with the “contrition tour” of FOR WHEN Jimmy Carter assumed a Sowell (10)
lage of a Continent. his secretary of state. posture of moral superiority over LBJ and Obama Presidency
The book blames Latin America’s fail- “Clinton Scores Points by Admitting Richard Nixon, by declaring, “We have got- Bozell (25)
ures on white Europeans. Past U.S. Errors,” was the headline over ten over our inordinate fear of communism,” Morris (13)
Shapiro (13)
It opens, “Renaissance Europeans ven- Saturday’s New York Times story by Mark it came back to bite him, good and hard. Obama’s Criticisms
tured across the oceans and buried their Landler: Tyrrell (11)
teeth in the throats of the Indian civiliza- “It has become a recurring theme of Hill- April 21, 2009 Pacifist Diplomacy
tions.” ary Rodham Clinton’s early travels as the Buchanan (1)
Jacoby (4)
Civilizations? Before Pizarro and Cortez, chief diplomat of the United States: She Limbaugh (3)
the Inca and Aztec empires these conquista- says that American policy on a given issue Pirates
dors overthrew were into human sacrifice. has failed, and her foreign listeners fall all Greenberg (30)
Evo Morales, the Aymaran president of over themselves in gratitude.
Norris (5)
__________________________________________ Thomas (2)
Bolivia, who is using the race card against “On Friday, Mrs. Clinton said ... that the PAT BUCHANAN Russia
Bolivians of European descent, implied a uncompromising policy of the Bush admin- (c) 2009, Creators Syndicate Will (29)
U.S. role in an assassination plot against istration toward Cuba had not worked. ... __________________________________________ Secular America
him.
Buchanan (22)
Tea Parties
Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner, who al- Cain (6)
legedly received black-bag money from Chapman (9)
Chavez, ripped into America for its role in Charen (6)
Coulter (7)
the 1980s. Under Reagan, America aided Malkin (8)
Britain in the Falklands War, after the Ar- Texas
gentine junta invaded the islands, and as- Murchison (9)
sisted the Contras in their war of national Thomas, Cal
Tribune Media (19)
liberation to oust Ortega’s Sandinistas. Tolerance
Again, Obama offered no defense of his Malkin (10)
country. U.S. Hostage
President Lula da Silva of Brazil, who Calabrese (31)
blames the world financial crisis on “white,
2 April 29, 2009 Conservative Chronicle
PIRATES: April 16, 2009
Where credit is due — a job well done
C
onservatives have a point In fact, the idea of “sides” further divides Mogadishu Airport just as Rep. Donald THE BEST thing the president
when they criticize President us in ways that are not beneficial to the Payne’s plane was taking off. Payne, could do for the country — and himself
Obama and his fellow Demo- country. Polls will now be taken that (D-NJ), the highest-level U.S. official to — is to prove he is not a milksop. And
crats for not calling the mission in Iraq a will probably show a rise in public con- visit Somalia in years, was in Somalia if the president takes on the terrorists, he
“success” or a “victory.” But if they are fidence about Obama’s ability to handle to meet with the country’s prime minis- should have the full support of all Amer-
right about that — and they are — they our national defense. Would someone ter and other Somali officials to discuss icans, conservatives included. We can
cannot now withhold praise from Presi- argue if he had failed and his numbers ways to combat the growing pirate-ter- argue about the Left’s hypocrisy later.
dent Obama for the flawless rescue of declined that somehow an improvement rorist problem. When it comes to combating terrorists,
Captain Richard Phillips from the hands in Republican poll numbers would make The Obama administration is report- we are all in this together.
of terrorists masquerading as pirates. us safer? The last I checked, terrorists edly going to help Somalia form its own
__________________________________________
(More about the misuse of nomenclature were equal opportunity killers. Coast Guard so that it can defend itself CAL THOMAS
in a moment.) The hijacking of the merchant ship from terrorists and lessen their threat to (c) 2009, Tribune Media Services
and the kidnapping of Captain Phillips merchant ships. This, as well as a plan __________________________________________
ONE CAN be sure that had things are two more pieces in the much larger to put marshals on the vessels to deter
gone badly and Captain Phillips had been combat operation future ship seizures,
killed, or if the president had gone to the against terrorists (or is a good start, but Email Contact Info:
United Nations for a resolution con- as the administra- why wait for these
demning the kidnapping, or if the ran-
som was paid and the terrorists escaped,
tion has suggested
calling it, “overseas
Cal goals to be accom-
plished? Right now
Individual Columnists
conservatives would have been all over
the president, claiming they were right
when they said during the campaign (as
contingency opera-
tion”). What comes
next is equally im-
Thomas Somali terrorists are
believed to be hold-
ing more than 200
Blankley - TonyBlankley@gmail.com
Greenberg - pgreenberg@arkansasonline.com
Krauthammer - letters@charleskrauthammer.com
did Hillary Clinton) that Obama is too portant. hostages from other Lowry - comments.lowry@nationalreview.com
inexperienced to be in charge of Ameri- The United States should start calling nations. If they won’t agree to release Malkin - malkinblog@gmail.com
ca’s national security. these “pirates” by their true name. They these people now, how about a little mili- Saunders - dsaunders@sfchronicle.com
Will conservatives now hide behind are Islamic terrorists who make millions tary intervention? Let us demonstrate in Schlafly - phyllis@eagleforum.org
the excuse that it was the Navy Seals, the in ransom from ship hijackings and kid- no uncertain terms that America is not to Thomas - tmseditors@tribune.com
FBI and the bravery of Captain Phillips nappings. They don’t buy fancy cars and be trifled with. Will - georgewill@washpost.com
that were solely responsible for the suc- big houses like members of some drug There was a time when few would
cess of the mission and that the president cartels. Instead, they use the money to dare harm an American for fear of retali- North Star Writers
played only a supporting role, at best? finance terrorism around the world. Our ation. In recent years, that fear has sub- Herman Cain
One could make the same argument notion of pirates is of a “Peg-Leg Pete”- sided and now some terrorists may think Dan Calabrese
about Iraq; that the troops and not Presi- type with an eye patch, a parrot on his they’ll get a free ride with President David Karki
dent Bush should receive sole credit for shoulder and a cup of rum in his hand; Obama and his party, which is too often Gregory D. Lee
toppling Saddam Hussein and planting more of a character than a killer. That’s seen as preferring dithering to decisive-
the first seeds of democracy there. not the profile of Somali pirates. ness, hand-wringing to neck-wringing; Contact - dan@northstarwriters.com
We have become so polarized in There is word from some of the ter- U.N. resolutions to American resolve
America that one side cannot bring itself rorists that they plan revenge. On Mon- and purposeful action. Cartoonists
to praise any job done well by the other. day, a few of them fired mortars at the Heller - joe@hellertoon.com
Conservative
Chronicle
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Conservative Chronicle April 29, 2009 3
PACIFIST DIPLOMACY: April 21, 2009
Peace through weakness is guiding policy
O
bserving the Obama admin- was inflicting gratuitous “collateral dam-
istration’s approach so far to age” on Iraq and its people, and routinely
the war on terror is somewhat — and as a matter of policy — was bru-
reminiscent, if you’ll accept the crude talizing and torturing enemy prisoners in
analogy, of watching Panamanian boxing Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and everywhere
legend Roberto Duran’s rematch against else our heartless authorities could get
American boxing legend Sugar Ray their hands on them.
Leonard. Duran was within his rights to During the campaign, then-presiden-
say “no mas” and quit, but it didn’t keep tial candidate Barack Obama embraced
him from losing. these themes wholesale, saying we’d
alienated other nations with our unilater-
BUT HERE the analogy breaks down. alism, stirred up the Arab street against us,
While Duran could avoid further Leonard and become a virtual terrorist recruitment
blows by quitting, a nation under attack factory.
by a warring force cannot prevent further Democrats even argued, straight-faced,
attacks against itself simply by declaring that our “torture” of terrorist detainees
an end to hostilities. could imperil Ameri-
Yet that’s precisely can POWs, as if their
what the Obama ad-
ministration appears David beheadings were re-
sponses to our slap-
Limbaugh
to be doing in the ping. They said we
war on terror, most could change all that perhaps, nobly allying with Israel. It’s across the board, which could jeopardize
recently with its by reversing course even more ludicrous to entertain seriously essential weapons systems; insisting that
outrageously reck- and extending a hand the notion that if we’d just start being nic- we cashier war terminology by substitut-
less public release of friendship, peace er, we could improve our international im- ing “overseas contingency operations”
of classified Justice Department memos and cooperation to other nations, particu- age and make ourselves safer, especially for “war on terror” and “man-caused di-
on the legality of CIA interrogation tech- larly those of the Muslim world. when you consider that being nicer entails sasters” for “terrorist attacks”; and now
niques used on enemy prisoners. The unmistakable corollary of these lowering our guard and playing into the releasing internal CIA memos detailing
Democrats ceaselessly complained complaints against United States policy enemy’s hands on a number of fronts. enhanced interrogation techniques, which
about the Bush administration’s allegedly was that if we’d just quit being so arrogant have demonstrably prevented attacks and
misguided approach to the war, contend- toward the rest of the world and mean to BUT THIS is precisely the kind of saved lives.
ing it was too broad (Bush should have our enemies, er, criminal defendants, we silliness that is driving Obama’s foreign Obama pretended to agonize over his
focused almost exclusively on al Qaeda in could bring this war to an end. Or, at least, policy. From the get-go, Obama has been decision to release the memos over the
Afghanistan), that he engaged in cowboy we could diminish the terrorists’ resolve apologizing to the world for the “arro- objections of his own intelligence offi-
diplomacy, and his treatment of enemy by removing apparently legitimate com- gance” and brutality of the United States; cials, but there is no excuse for the dam-
prisoners was inhumane. plaints they have against us and retarding bowing before, kissing and warmly ac- age it will do to our national security by
Deny it if you choose, but the grava- their recruiting efforts. cepting America-bashing books from neutralizing the future use of these pro-
men of these complaints was that the It really does sound fantastic and silly foreign kings and dictators; flirting with cedures and inviting “the kind of institu-
United States, in many ways, was the bad that anyone could really believe that the nuclear disarmament while rogue nations tional timidity and fear of recrimination
guy, the aggressor nation that attacked United States has brought terrorist wrath rush, undeterred, to join the nuclear club; that weakened our intelligence gathering
Iraq without provocation or justification, upon itself by doing anything other than, contemplating serious defense budget cuts in the past,” in the words of former At-
torney General Michael Mukasey and ex-
CIA Director Michael Hayden. Making
it worse, we got nothing in return except
for Obama’s selective nod to “transpar-
ency,” as if it’s prudent to be transparent
with classified intelligence involving our
national security.
It is axiomatic that ideas have conse-
quences, a theme being played out by the
Obama administration’s turning a blind
eye to the magnitude of terrorist evil and
seeing a rough moral equivalence between
beheadings by terrorists and aggressive
American interrogation techniques to ex-
tract lifesaving information from terror-
ists.
COMMENTATORS who believe
Obama only released the “torture memos”
to appease his bloodthirsty, Bush-hating,
leftist base, which would be bad enough,
are missing the point that Obama shares
his base’s beliefs. Obama is commander-
in-chief, and his guiding foreign policy
doctrine is “peace through weakness.”
__________________________________________
DAVID LIMBAUGH
(c) 2009, Creators Syndicate
__________________________________________
4 April 29, 2009 Conservative Chronicle
PACIFIST DIPLOMACY: April 19, 2009
A question for Democrats on human rights
Are human rights still a Democratic Instead, she more or less announced in
priority? advance that talking to Beijing about
To Democrats of a certain age, such human rights was pointless, since “we
a question might seem incomprehensi- pretty much know what they’re going
ble. After all, it was a Democrat, John to say.” Besides, she told reporters,
F. Kennedy, whose inaugural address human rights must not “interfere” with
proclaimed “to friend and foe alike” more important issues, such as the eco-
that Americans would resist “the slow nomic crisis or climate change.
undoing of those human rights to China got the message. As Clinton
which this nation arrived in Beijing,
has always been dozens of pro-de-
committed.” It was mocracy dissidents
another Democrat, Jeff were placed under
Jacoby
Jimmy Carter, who virtual house ar-
made support for rest. True to her
human rights an word, the secre-
explicit foreign- tary of state made
policy concern, de- no fuss about the
claring at his inauguration: “Because regime’s brutality.
we are free we can never be indifferent Not long thereafter, the White House
to the fate of freedom elsewhere.” It picked Charles Freeman to head the
was Senator Henry Jackson and Repre- National Intelligence Council. A long- Cuba, making it easier for Cuban- didn’t give human rights the brush-off.
sentative Charles Vanik — Democrats time Beijing sycophant, Freeman had Americans to travel and send money to “We would like to see Cuba open up
both — whose landmark Jackson-Van- defended the 1989 Tiananmen Square relatives living there. The president’s its society, release political prisoners,
ik amendment helped win freedom for massacre, publicly regretting only that order was titled “Promoting Democra- open up to outside opinions and me-
tens of thousands of Soviet dissidents Chinese authorities didn’t crack down cy and Human Rights in Cuba,” but in dia,” she said on Thursday.
and refuseniks. even sooner. (He later withdrew his fact it said nothing at all about democ- By contrast, when a delegation of
name from consideration.) racy and human rights in Cuba. No- congressional Democrats returned
BUT somewhere along the way, To be sure, the U.S.-Chinese rela- where did it mention the Communist from a trip to Cuba a few days earlier,
Democratic priorities seem to have tionship has never turned solely on hu- tyranny of the last 50 years — there it was to gush about how “very engag-
changed. man rights. But Democrats have cer- was nothing about the denial of free ing” Fidel and Raul Castro are, while
For example: Secretary of State tainly traveled quite a distance since speech; the abuse and murder of politi- insisting that improvement in human
Hillary Clinton could have used her the days when Bill Clinton was blast- cal dissidents; the persecution of jour- rights not be made a condition of bet-
recent trip to China to vigorously de- ing the first President Bush for “cod- nalists, librarians and human-rights ac- ter relations with Washington.
fend human rights — to make it clear dling aging rulers with undisguised tivists; the relentless surveillance and Thus at a press conference on April
to those who rule the world’s largest contempt for democracy and human secret police; the regime’s stranglehold 7, Illinois Representative Bobby Rush
dictatorship that the new administra- rights.” on property and employment. extolled Raul Castro — a man with the
tion in Washington cares about the Closer to home, President Obama blood of hundreds on his hands — for
liberty and dignity of China’s people. last week relaxed U.S. policy toward THIS time, at least, Hillary Clinton his “sense of humor” and the way he
“laughed at himself” and how “down-
to-earth” and “kind” he was. Why, said
Rush, being with Castro “was almost
like visiting an old friend.” When a
reporter asked about Cuba’s human
rights record, Rush snapped that he
was engaging in a “double standard”
and called it “good business sense” not
to let human rights get in the way of
increased trade.
Another member of the delegation,
Cleveland Congresswoman Marcia
Fudge, resolutely defended the Cas-
tro brothers’ right to “run a nation the
way they believe is best.” After all, she
said, “there is no one way that people
should live.”
FUDGE was wrong — profoundly
wrong. All people should live in free-
dom. No one has the right to “run a na-
tion” like a prison camp. Every human
being is entitled to be treated with dig-
nity and equal justice. Those are core
American truths — truths most Demo-
crats once understood in their bones.
Do they still?
__________________________________________
JEFF JACOBY
(c) 2009, Boston Globe
__________________________________________
Conservative Chronicle April 29, 2009
PIRATES: April 21, 2009
Thomas Jefferson, U.S. hostages, Somali pirates
A
couple of weeks ago, So- our citizens but also instilled the notion
mali pirates hijacked a cargo within these pirates that America never
ship with 20 American crew will appease or tolerate captors and that
members on board. Thank God and the we never will pay their ransoms again.
Navy SEALs that they all got out alive. Some might not know that America
But will Americans be as lucky next has been dealing with African ma-
time? rauding mariners since our inception.
Though it’s not a direct parallel, I be-
DURING 2008 alone, these thugs lieve we need to do as Thomas Jeffer-
raided more than 130 vessels, resulting son did during the Barbary Wars, in
in 50 successful hijackings and mil- which Muslim extremists, or pirates,
lions of dollars paid in ransoms. With from the Barbary States (Tripoli, Tuni-
at least five well-organized pirate gangs sia, Algeria and Morocco, which were
off the Horn of Africa — including the semi-independent provinces of Turkey)
al-Shabab militia, which is a group of fought many countries, including the
Islamic extremists that some people new United States, that they considered
compare to the Tal- Christian nations.
iban — all seek- While the United
ing and splitting States was mopping
the spoils of these
sea traders, isn’t it
Chuck up from the Revo-
lutionary War, we
time America bet-
ter protects our
merchant mariners
Norris also were squaring
off against largely
Muslim pirates
Sea. As a result, our cargo and seamen
were captured, and our country’s lead-
ers were forced to negotiate with the
tion would be through the “medium of
war.”)
America’s first four presidents
in volatile areas, in the Mediter- Barbary pirates. (Washington, Adams, Jefferson and
such as off the Somali coast? Isn’t it ranean Sea. These sea bandits cruised Madison) each dealt with this east-west
time they are armed with better deter- the coastlines stealing cargo, destroy- IN 1784, envoys were dispatched conflict of powers to varying degrees.
rents than fire hoses, rubber bullets and ing villages, and enslaving millions of to secure peace and passage from the Though numerous negotiations and
sonic weapons? Isn’t it time our Navy Africans and hundreds of thousands of Barbary States. Treaties were made. treaties were made, including the Trea-
SEALs reach land and cut pirates off at Christian Europeans and Americans. Tributes and ransoms were paid. Our ty of Tripoli (1796-97), Tripoli (in pres-
the pass? Because America was a newborn na- cargo and captives were freed. And our ent-day Libya) still declared war against
Ransoms only enable these hooli- tion, we had relatively little naval de- ships traveled safely. But over the next the U.S. in 1801. It sometimes is called
gans. And negotiations never work with fense. Our rebellion against Britain decade and a half, we gave millions of America’s first official war. The Found-
them. We need to cut them off so that severed our protection by the Royal dollars to these radicals, including an ers believed in a foreign policy of non-
no one else goes missing in action. For Navy. And while France helped during estimated 20 percent of our federal bud- interventionism, but Jefferson realized
proof of that, we only need to look back the Revolutionary War, we were on our get in 1800! (Despite that, men such as that protecting America’s borders also
and learn from our revolutionary prede- own as of about 1783. And so our mer- Thomas Jefferson argued vehemently meant protecting American lives and
cessors. Our Founding Fathers not only chant ships were exceptionally vulner- against paying ransoms and tribute; Jef- property overseas.
demonstrated how we need to rescue able to attack in and out of the Great ferson believed the only road to resolu- He confessed to Congress in 1801
that he was “unauthorized by the
Constitution, without the sanction of
Congress, to go beyond the line of de-
fense,” but he still ordered a small fleet
of warships to the Mediterranean to
ward off attacks by the Barbary States.
Marines and warships were deployed
to the region. That eventually led to
the 1805 surrender of Tripoli. It would
take another decade, however, to defeat
those pirates completely, or, should I
say, cause them to retreat until a distant
time when they would attack our coun-
try again.
America’s victory back then over
those sea radicals is commemorated to-
day in “The Marines’ Hymn,” with the
words “From the halls of Montezuma,
to the shores of Tripoli, we fight our
country’s battles in the air, on land and
sea.”
THE VOICES of our forefathers
cry out from the Barbary Wars in the
hopes of imparting some wisdom to us.
As the adage goes, we either will learn
from history’s mistakes or be doomed
to repeat them.
__________________________________________
CHUCK NORRIS
(c) 2009, Creators Syndicate
__________________________________________
6 April 29, 2009 Conservative Chronicle
TEA PARTIES: April 17, 2009
Newsworthy: CNN versus the tea parties
W
hen thousands of people matter who is writing the checks — is windfall for Republicans ... Today the ing President Obama, argue that the
in all 50 states assemble not good for the economic or spiritual bite the federal income tax takes out of wealthy were disproportionately ben-
to protest government health of the country. working class and middle-class pay- efited by the Bush era tax cuts. But
policy, you might suppose that this is checks stands at roughly half the pre- as the American Enterprise Institute’s
news. Not according to the coverage THE TEA parties demonstrated Reagan level.” Kevin Hassett has pointed out, the tax
on the front pages of the Washington that resistance to big government A recent Gallup poll found that share shouldered by the wealthy in-
Post, New York Times, or the Wall persists in the hearts of many Ameri- only 46 percent of Americans say their creased more than the share of income
Street Journal. The “tea party” rallies cans. And yet, Roesgen has a shadow taxes are “too high.” Fifty-two percent going to that group during the past de-
went unmentioned. In Washington, of a point. When the vast majority of of those earning between $30,000 and cade.
D.C., despite temperatures in the 40s Americans are get- $75,000 said their
and a driving rainstorm, about a thou- ting benefits from taxes were “about STILL, the numbers suggest that
sand demonstrators assembled across the government but right.” IRS data income tax reductions are not going to
from the White House. The front page
of the Times found space for a big story
not paying the bill,
the constituency
Mona show why this
should be so. Those
be the royal road back to popularity for
the Republican Party. The path back to
with accompanying pictures of com-
peting public demonstrations in Kabul,
Afghanistan, but not a word about the
for tax reform does
shrink. As Ross
Douthat and Rei-
Charen earning more than
$388,806 in 2006,
the top one per-
political viability will have to be found
elsewhere. More on that in future col-
umns.
American protestors. han Salam note in cent of earners,
their book Grand New Party: “Just be- paid about 40 percent of the taxes.
PERHAPS this snub was intention- fore the Reagan tax cuts, a median-in- The top 5 percent, those earning above
al. Fox News (becoming a participant come four-person family paid about 12 $153,542, paid 60 percent of the taxes.
itself and not a recorder of events) had percent of their total income in federal And the top 10 percent, those earning __________________________________________
MONA CHAREN
been beating the drums for these ral- income taxes. Reducing that burden, more than $108,904, paid more than (c) 2009, Creators Syndicate
lies for days, and some pressies clearly predictably enough, yielded a political 70 percent of all taxes. Some, includ- __________________________________________
regarded them as therefore necessar-
ily illegitimate. One reporter, Susan TEA PARTIES: April 20, 2009
Roesgen, who “covered” the Chicago
tea party for CNN, was downright
confrontational with attendees she
interviewed, challenging a protes-
tor who referenced Abraham Lincoln
Tea parties: Tax Day anger
T
with “What does this have to do with
taxes?” The man attempted to explain. he Obama Administration, “Got change? Hide it before Obama this maneuver a WMD — a Weapon of
But the reporter interrupted him. “Did the Democrats in Congress, taxes it!” Mass Distraction.
you know that you are eligible for a the mainstream media and “The only thing wrong with social- USA Today’s lead headline the day
$400 rebate? Did you know that your the flaming liberal media are attempt- ism is that you eventually run out of after the rallies read “Thousands rally
state, the state of Lincoln, gets $50 bil- ing to downplay the organized anger other people’s money.” at Tax Day Tea Parties.” Adding up
lion out of the stimulus? That’s $50 expressed by hundreds of thousands of Is that overwhelming support? And the mostly understated news reports
billion for your state.” She then tossed people on April 15 at Tax Day Tea Par- is the $8 a week for a single worker and of crowd sizes in over 2,000 events
back to the anchor noting that “This is ties across the country. $13 a week for a working couple tax around the country would suggest hun-
really not family viewing.” relief? That’s the tax relief for 95 per- dreds of thousands is more accurate.
What Ms. Roesgen and others like THE president issued a press re- cent of working families the president But the liberals are not counting.
her do not understand is that some lease on tax day restating all the plati- and the Democrats are talking about. And a flaming liberal publication,
people are interested in more than their tudes he has touted ever since he was People’s Weekly World Newspaper,
own narrow self-interest. Perhaps the running for president. As usual, his claimed that “Tax Day Rallies cry
protestor she interviewed, who was rhetoric does not match the agenda be- ‘Tax the Rich!’” What planet are they
holding his 2-year-old son, is eligible
for a tax rebate. And perhaps his state
ing steamrolled through Congress by
his Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Sen-
Herman from?
I attended the Las Vegas tax day
will get a juicy piece of the stimulus
money. It is possible, just possible, that
such a bribe does not influence him.
ate Majority Leader Harry Reid and
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
The Democratic National Commit-
Cain rally, which attracted 2,500 people,
and I did not see one sign that said to
tax anyone more. I did not see one sign
Perhaps it doesn’t buy his support be- tee issued a statement on Thursday, that proclaimed overwhelming sup-
cause he is skeptical that his taxes can April 16,which acknowledged people’s And of course Speaker Pelosi port for the “Obama Plan” of trying to
remain low when the federal govern- frustrations and suggested that “what’s weighed in with equally misleading spend our way out of this financial cri-
ment is embarked on a record-shatter- clear is that the overwhelming major- statements when she said, “This tea sis. And I did not see one sign that said
ing spending spree. He may be offend- ity of folks support President Obama’s party initiative is funded by the high “socialism now.”
ed by the bailout culture, and worried plan to get the economy back on track, end — we call it Astroturf, it’s not re- But I saw lots of signs that were
that the obligations of taxpayers can- and provide 95 percent of working ally a grassroots movement. It’s Astro- clearly not in support of the Obama-
not remain low when it seems that ev- families with tax relief, because they turf by some of the wealthiest people in Reid-Pelosi direction of the country.
ery irresponsible borrower, failed car are not going to accept ‘more of the America to keep the focus on tax cuts Lots and lots of those signs!
company, and free spending state is same’ as an answer.” for the rich instead of for the great mid- Mr. President, Senate Majority Lead-
being rescued by the federal govern- People not accepting “more of the dle class.” Translated, let’s talk about er Reid and Speaker Pelosi, the anger is
ment. Additionally, he may be dubi- same” is an accurate message of the class warfare. directed at y’all! You have ignored the
ous that the government will spend tax day events, but overwhelmingly message and the people again.
the money wisely. It has been rumored supporting President Obama’s plan is I HAVE warned readers in the past
that government spending has pro- a joke. that when liberals disagree with a con- IT’S NOT just tax day anger any-
duced waste, fraud, inefficiency, and Here are some of the signs at the Las servative, or when they are in denial more. It is now everyday anger.
__________________________________________
corruption. But he also may simply Vegas tax day event where I attended: of the facts, they change the subject. HERMAN CAIN
believe that engorging the government “Stop the spending. Stop the bail- Casey Hendrickson of KXNT 840 AM (c) 2009, North Star Writers Group
and enfeebling the private sector — no outs. Stop the tyranny” out of Las Vegas appropriately calls __________________________________________
Conservative Chronicle April 29, 2009 7
TEA PARTIES: April 15, 2009
Obama’s recipe for change not my cup of tea
I
had no idea how important this they’re not called “tea-bagging parties.”
week’s nationwide anti-tax tea (That, of course refers to the cocktail hour
parties were until hearing liberals at Barney Frank’s condo in Georgetown.)
denounce them with such ferocity. The You know what else would be hilari-
New York Times’ Paul Krugman wrote a ous? It would be hilarious if Hillary Clin-
column attacking the tea parties, apolo- ton’s name were “Ima Douche.” Unfortu-
gizing for making fun of “crazy people.” nately, it’s not. It was just a dream. Most
It’s OK, Paul, you’re allowed to do that people would wake up, realize it was just
for the same reason Jews can make fun a dream and scrap the joke. Not MSNBC
of Jews. hosts.
The point of the tea parties is to note
ON MSNBC, hosts Keith Olbermann the fact that the Democrats’ modus ope-
and Rachel Maddow have been tittering randi is to lead voters to believe they are friends of O and of Congressional Demo- government won’t get its money to fund
over the similarity no more likely to crats. (“O” stands for Obama, not Oprah, layers and layers of useless government
of the name “tea par- raise taxes than Re- but there’s probably a lot of overlap.) bureaucrats, none of whom can possibly
ties” to an obscure publicans, get elect- And all that government spending on be laid off.
homosexual sexual
practice known as
Ann ed and immediately
raise taxes.
the Democrats’ constituents will be paid
for by raising taxes on the productive.
How much would you have to raise
taxes before any of Obama’s constitu-
“tea bagging.” Night
after night, they
sneer at Republicans
Coulter Apparently, the
people who actually
pay taxes consider
RAISE TAXES and the productive
will work less, adopt tax shelters, barter
ents noticed? They don’t pay taxes, they
engage in “tax-reduction” strategies, they
work for the government, or they’re too
for being so stupid this a bad idea. instead of sell, turn to an underground rich to care. (Or they have off-shore tax
as to call their rallies “tea bagging.” Obama’s biggest shortcoming is that economy — and the government will get shelters, like George Soros.)
Every host on Air America and every he believes the things believed by all less money. California tried the Obama soak-the-
unbathed, basement-dwelling loser on the Democrats, which have had devastating The perfect bar bet with a liberal productive “stimulus” plan years ago
left wing blogosphere has spent the last consequences every time they are put into would be to wager that massive govern- and was hailed as the perfect exemplar of
week making jokes about tea bagging, a effect. Among these is the Democrats’ ad- ment deficits in the ‘80s were not caused Democratic governance.
practice they show a surprising degree of miration for raising taxes on the produc- by Reagan’s tax cuts. If you casually men- In June 2002, the liberal American
familiarity with. tive. tioned that you thought Reagan’s tax cuts Prospect magazine called California a
Except no one is calling the tea parties All Democrats for the last 30 years brought in more revenue to the govern- “laboratory” for Democratic policies, not-
“tea bagging” — except Olbermann and have tried to stimulate the economy by ment — which they did — you could get ing that “California is the only one of the
Maddow. Republicans call them “tea par- giving “tax cuts” to people who don’t pay odds in Hollywood and Manhattan. (This nation’s 10 largest states that is uniformly
ties.” taxes. Evidently, offering to expand wel- became a less attractive wager in New under Democratic control.”
But if the Republicans were calling fare payments isn’t a big vote-getter. York this week after Gov. David Paterson They said this, mind you, as if it were
them “tea-bagging parties,” the MSNBC Even Bush had a “stimulus” bill that announced his new plan to tax bar bets.) a good thing. In California, the article pro-
hosts would have a fantastically hilarious sent government checks to lots of people The lie at the heart of liberals’ mantra claimed, “the next new deal is in tryouts.”
segment for viewers in San Francisco and last year. Guess what happened? It didn’t on taxes — “tax increases only for the As they say in show biz: “Thanks, we’ll
the West Village and not anyplace else in stimulate the economy. Obama’s stimu- rich” — is the ineluctable fact that un- call you. Next!”
the rest of the country. On the other hand, lus bill is the mother of all pork bills for less taxes are raised across the board, the In just a few years, Democrats had
turned California into a state — or as it’s
now known, a “job-free zone” — with a
$41 billion deficit, a credit rating that was
slashed to junk-bond status and a middle
class now located in Arizona.
Democrats governed California the
way Democrats always govern. They
bought the votes of government workers
with taxpayer-funded jobs, salaries and
benefits — and then turned around and
accused the productive class of “greed”
for wanting not to have their taxes raised
through the roof.
Having run out of things to tax, now
the California legislature is considering a
tax on taxes. Seriously. The only way out
now for California is a tax on Botox and
steroids. Sure, the governor will protest,
but it is the best solution ...
California was, in fact, a laboratory
of Democratic policies. The rabbit died,
so now Obama is trying it on a national
level.
THAT’S WHAT the tea parties are
about.
__________________________________________
ANN COULTER
(c) 2009, Ann Coulter
__________________________________________
8 April 29, 2009 Conservative Chronicle
TEA PARTIES: April 17, 2009
The million taxpayer march on Tax Day
L
et’s use liberal math to calculate But tens of thousands more came out in
attendance at this week’s nation- rain, snow and cold — in Bozeman, Mont.;
wide Tax Day Tea Party protests. Eau Claire, Wis.; Carson City, Nev.; White
When left-wing activists make crowd es- Plains, N.Y.; Bend, Ore.; Lansing, Mich.;
timates, the algorithm is: six figures = one Hilo, Hawaii; Nashville, Tenn.; and every-
million. An incomplete survey of news- where in between — with no media per-
paper accounts and organizer estimates sonalities or celebrities in sight.
pegged the Tea Party protest population at If only the condescending cable TV
a minimum of 250,000. We can now, there- anchors at CNN and MSNBC had paused
fore, officially call it the Million Taxpayer from wallowing in gutter puns about tea
March. bags, they might have reported an even
more significant phenomenon: Tea Party
OR THE Million Right-Wing Extrem- protesters were as vocal in their criticism of
ists March if you work for the Department Republicans as they were of Democrats. In
of Homeland Security. Salt Lake City, Utah, a crowd of 2,000 re-
To George Soros-funded grievance peatedly booed GOP Sens. Orrin Hatch and
professionals, 250,000 is an insignificant Bob Bennett, who both supported the $700
number. But unlike billion TARP bailout,
recent anti-war and and protested GOP
pro-illegal immigra-
tion rallies padded
Michelle Gov. Jon Huntsman’s
decision to accept
Malkin
with union workers, $1.6 billion in porky ents who refused to be silent about Ryan’s Before the grassroots Tea Party move-
college students and stimulus funds. complicity. He gave one of the most hys- ment took them by surprise, Beltway GOP
homeless people, the In Sacramento, terical speeches in the rush to pass TARP strategists argued fervently that the party’s
Tax Day Tea Party Tea Party organizer last fall; voted for the auto bailout; and traditional focus on taxes and spending had
demonstrations featured small-business Mark Meckler singled out California GOP voted with the Barney Frank-Nancy Pelosi become outdated. The re-branders pitched
owners, working taxpayers and families. Chair Ron Nehring for waffling on pro- AIG bonus-bashing stampede. Milwaukee their own expansive ideas to replace the
This wasn’t a weekend or holiday, mind posed $16 billion tax hikes. The crowd of blogger Nick Schweitzer wrote: “He ought anti-tax-and-spend agenda and inspire new
you. A quarter-million people took time off 5,000 greeted Nehring — who unsuccess- to be apologizing for his previous votes, voters. These included Gingrich’s “green
in the middle of the workweek to raise their fully tried to hitch his wagon to the Tea not pretending he was being responsible conservatism,” David Frum’s proposal to
voices against reckless taxing and biparti- Party movement — with a roar of boos and the entire time, but I don’t see one bit of raise carbon taxes, and open-borders Re-
san spending. catcalls. Speaker after speaker lambasted regret for what he did previously. And I’ll publicans’ plans for alternative forms of
Multimillionaire jetsetter Nancy Pelosi Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger be dam—- if I’m going to let him get away amnesty.
scoffed that the Tax Day Tea Party move- for abandoning fiscal-conservative princi- with it.” Newsflash: Eco-zealotry and in-state
ment was nothing more than “Astroturf” ples. The loudest chant of the day: “Throw Other Tea Party participants pointed out tuition discounts for illegal aliens didn’t
politics to protect the “wealthiest people” them out.” that Newt Gingrich, who jumped aboard bring out thousands of first-time activists
in America. Democratic Rep. Jan Scha- the bandwagon, flip-flopped on TARP in on the streets. Stay-at-home moms weren’t
kowsky called the peaceable assemblies IN MADISON, Wis., GOP Rep. Paul the space of a week last September and up all night making signs that read “Tax me
“despicable.” Other bitter, clingy Tea Ryan — hyped as a conservative “rock made common cause with Al Gore and more, please!”
Party-bashers grumbled that activists only star” — was well received. But I heard Nancy Pelosi in ads calling for immediate What resonated on Tax Day were non-
showed up where Fox News cameras were. from staunch fiscal-conservative constitu- action on “climate change.” partisan calls to roll back pork, hold the
line on taxing and spending, end the end-
less government bailouts, and stop the con-
gressional steamrollers that have pushed
through mountains of legislation without
deliberation. This is a teachable moment for
GOP public relations peddlers in Washing-
ton. While they search for the Holy Grail
of Re-branding in tony salons and country
club conferences, the agenda for 2010 is
smacking them in the face. It’s the three
T’s, stupid: Too Many Taxes, Trillions in
Debt, and Transparency.
THE GOP path to reclaiming power
lies with candidates who can make a cred-
ible case that they will support and defend
fiscal responsibility. That means acting on
fiscal-conservative principles now, not pay-
ing lip service later. The reckonable forces
of the Tea Party movement didn’t let op-
portunists escape accountability on Tax
Day. The GOP shouldn’t assume they’ll get
a pass on Election Day, either. As one of the
most popular Tea Party signs read: “You
can’t fix stupid, but you can vote it out.”
__________________________________________
MICHELLE MALKIN
(c) 2009, Creators Syndicate
__________________________________________
Conservative Chronicle April 29, 2009 9
TEA PARTIES: April 19, 2009
The truths (and anger) behind the tea parties
T
he banking collapse and the the cure will be worse, and less transi- get deficit had nearly quadrupled. But shocked to see trillions of federal dol-
economic meltdown have tory, than the disease. was that enough? Not nearly. Obama lars pouring out like water rushing
prompted many Americans Since last September, a federal bud- saw Bush and raised him, immediately over a broken dam. And like many
to turn to the federal government as get that was already growing steadily pushing through another fiscal stimu- reputable economists, they suspect
indispensable savior, telling Congress suddenly accelerated out of control. lus program with a price tag of $787 most of it will be wasted.
and the president: We hope you can fix The ride began in the winter of 2008, billion. The invocations of the Boston Tea
it; we want you to do whatever is nec- when Congress and President Bush Fiscal hawks thought the budget Party — on April 15, no less — sug-
essary to fix it; and we don’t care what agreed on a fiscal stimulus package of was out of control before. Now they gested that the protests stemmed from
it costs. $170 billion in tax look back on the anger about taxes under Obama. But
rebates and incen- pre-2008 profli- Obama has not actually increased in-
THAT was not the sentiment in evi-
dence at the tea party protests held on
tives. It picked up
speed in the fall,
Stephen gacy as a golden
age of budgetary
come taxes — only the federal tax on
tobacco, which the majority of people
Tax Day.
There, the message was one of great
skepticism about the efficacy of the
when the Treasury
spent $85 billion
to take over insur-
Chapman restraint.
The amount of
money involved in
don’t pay. His tax plan calls for cut-
ting income taxes for most Americans,
and not raising them on the rest until
government’s remedies and great ap- ance giant AIG and all this would be 2011.
prehension about the expense (along Congress approved $700 billion to res- staggering to anyone not benumbed by
with some of the extremist lunacy that cue failing financial institutions. the incessant torrent of bad news. But SO WHY did people rally across
accompanies any mass movement). By the time Barack Obama took of- judging from the tea party protests, the the country when they should have
The scale of the federal response to the fice in January, projected federal out- numbness is not universal. No matter been planning how to spend their tax
crises has come as a frightening sur- lays for this year had soared by nearly what the state of the economy, some refunds? Because their true dismay is
prise to many Americans, who suspect $1 trillion over last year, and the bud- Americans are still capable of being about the mushrooming of federal out-
lays, which the demonstrators regard
TEXAS: April 21, 2009 as a future tax increase in the making.
Which, of course, it is.
The problem is not just the spend-
Humor from a Texas point of view ing supposedly needed for the current
economic emergency. Obama claims
that he will cut the deficit in half, to
S
$533 billion, by the end of his first
neer, sneer, boo, hiss — and we brought with us into the Union, we drive and the energy those vehicles term. Two problems: 1) The Congres-
oh, boy! Did the “progres- brought the right — undoubted, but consume. They want, it seems, national sional Budget Office says the more
sives” ever pour it on my similarly impractical — to divide into education standards — a goal furthered, likely number is $672 billion, and 2)
governor, Rick Perry of Texas, for his five states. We’ll have to stick around as one hates to acknowledge, by a for- that is 46 percent more than the defi-
playful reference at a Tea Party event to a bit longer. That shouldn’t deprive us mer Texas governor, George W. Bush cit in 2008. Worse yet, the CBO says
“secession” as an option possibly form- of the right to remind fellow Americans via the No Child Left Behind Act. the deficit will then resume its upward
ing in the minds of sensible Texans. of some practices and virtues our land We may even wind up with national trajectory, reaching $1 trillion by 2018
Why would we be thinking about such? could do well to renew. standards for humor. A joke, son, ain’t and nearly doubling the national debt
Because of “progressive” depredations a joke no more, and that’s the truth. The over the next decade.
in Washington, D.C., the governor said, governor of Texas no more demanded The realism about expenditures is
if not in so many words.
William secession from the Union than he called
for a Lone Star Beer to be brought him.
the encouraging thing about the pro-
tests. It’s easy to convince people that
Murchison
THE establishment harrumphed and He raised an eyebrow; he winked. Nev- the government should take less of
gagged and generally went red. Gail er mind. A stalwart “progressive” trying their money. It’s harder to persuade
Collins of the New York Times: “Have to show up conservatives is ever alert to them that the government should pro-
you noticed how places that pride them- serendipitous events and occasions. vide them less in the way of benefits
selves on being superpatriotic seem So maybe he shouldn’t have said and services. Yet the teabaggers took
to have the most people who want to A key one is regard for the inher- it. That’s from one perspective. Here’s the view that whatever Washington
abandon the country entirely and set up ent right of local people, even under a another: A Union of the sort our wise plans to provide, they don’t want —
shop on their own?” Etc. Ad infinitum. federal union, to defend and oversee and virtuous founders thought they not at this price, anyway.
Come on, lady, back off a little. No their own modes of life. In other words were creating is as loose and flexible as The country has gotten into a pain-
one’s going anywhere — as well you — golly gee! — Texans might not want a Union can realistically be made; ac- ful fiscal predicament because both
certainly know. Nobody’s called for a exactly the same things Californians commodative of divergent viewpoints, parties have let us believe we can have
secession convention. I looked up and want. They might wish lower taxes and and all the stronger for it, all the more more and more goodies from Wash-
down the street this morning; not a less regulation by government. Their united, too. ington at no additional cost. The recent
single effigy of Nancy Pelosi dangled approaches to education and health care explosion of federal spending has suc-
from the live oaks. Driving to the of- and energy might differ as well. So also THE UNION we seem to see dead ceeded in one way: It has exposed that
fice, I heard no suggestion that we hang the ways they deal with simple matters ahead through the windshield, with the assumption for the fiction it was.
Harry Reid, Chris Dodd, or, preferably, like eating: more sirloins in Texas, more people of 50 different states all cuffed
both to a sour apple tree. tofu on the Left Coast. together in mutual subservience, isn’t LIKE Bernie Madoff’s investors,
No matter. Sigh. The progressives what the founders had in mind. Good we now face the bleak truth that the
have the bit between their teeth and ALAS, the Obama regime, as we for Rick Perry on that score: He raised a comfortable future we expected is
seem bent on the usual pretense that may decide to start calling it one of useful subject, even if to his own detri- gone. Everything the federal govern-
these Texans are a bunch of ingrates these days, has other notions. It appears ment. Let’s enjoy. Such a moment may ment is doing will be forcibly extracted
whom we shouldn’t trust as far as we to cherish uniformity, the close align- not come again for a long, long time. from our future earnings. The tea party
can throw a grand piano. ment of ideals and methods: everybody protesters see that and are angry. Can
Well, you know what? It’s too much doing the same thing the same way for the rest of the country be far behind?
__________________________________________ __________________________________________
trouble seceding, even if we could. And, the same reasons. WILLIAM MURCHISON STEPHEN CHAPMAN
pace the governor, we can’t. Rather The Obamanistas may want uniform (c) 2008, Creators Syndicate (c) 2009, Creators Syndicate
than the secessionary right he alleged rules regarding the cars and trucks we __________________________________________ __________________________________________
10 April 29, 2009 Conservative Chronicle
TOLERANCE: April 21, 2009
Civility and tolerance in the age of Obama
T
hey told us if Barack Obama were UNC administration apologized for the stu- And White House adviser David Axelrod lion-dollar TARP and embracing the pork-
elected, the nation would come to- dents’ tantrum, but took no steps to examine calls the Tea Party folks “unhealthy?” laden stimulus law after voting against it.
gether. Souls would be fixed. Spir- its own culpability for fostering a climate of Speaking of unhealthy, angry white liberal “Go home!” they shouted. The only color
its would be healed. Public discourse would intellectual vandalism and intolerance. actress Janeane Garofalo venomously played that mattered to protesters: the red ink of
be elevated. Welcome to civility and toler- — The nightly airwaves turned into a soft- the race card: “It’s about hating a black man government debts.
ance in the Age of Obama: porn cesspool last week as liberal journalists in the White House. This is racism straight
— Celebrity leech/trash blogger Perez derided and slimed up and is nothing but BUT IN the Age of Obama, there’s no
Hilton took to the Internet and TV airwaves hundreds of thousands a bunch of teabagging room for such nuance and inconvenient
to humiliate a beauty pageant contestant who of Tea Party protesters rednecks.” The theme truths. A decent young woman is a “dumb
gave what he considered an “offensive” an- across the country who Michelle was echoed by Jeffrey b—ch” for holding the same view of marriage
swer about gay marriage. Hilton, inexplica- oppose reckless taxing Kimball, a professor as the Obamessiah. A conservative campus
bly serving as a judge for the Miss USA con-
test, asked Miss California, Carrie Prejean,
whether she supported the legalization of
and spending by both
major political parties.
Award-winning CNN
Malkin emeritus of history at
Miami University in
Oxford, Ohio, who
speaker is bullied as a hatemonger by wild-
eyed hatemongers. A grassroots movement is
debased as a bunch of racist vulgarians by a
gay marriage. Prejean respectfully answered: anchor Anderson castigated the “ex- media mob of racists and vulgarians. Civil-
“I think that I believe that a marriage should Cooper, mimicking his bottom-of-the-barrel treme right” for organizing against Obama ity and tolerance have taken a left-hand turn
be between a man and a woman. No offense competitors at MSNBC, smugly indulged because “he’s black and he’s liberal.” down a one-way street. So much for chang-
to anybody out there, but that’s how I was in sexual puns about “teabagging.” MSN- Tell that to the thousands of activists in ing course.
raised.” President Obama, by the way, de- BC devoted the entire week to sophomoric South Carolina who practically booed and
__________________________________________
fines marriage the same way Prejean does. sexual slang and innuendo with references heckled white Republican Rep. Gresham MICHELLE MALKIN
to “nuts,” Dick Armey and “full-throated” Barrett off the stage at a Tea Party in Green- (c) 2009, Creators Syndicate
NO MATTER. Hilton immediately lam- protesters. ville last Friday night for supporting the tril- __________________________________________
basted Prejean as a “dumb b—ch” in a viral
YouTube video he taped after the pageant NUMBERS: April 16, 2009
Sunday night. He apologized the next morn-
ing for the attack, then retracted his apol-
ogy, then escalated his divisive rhetoric. On
Tuesday afternoon, Hilton told an MSNBC
female anchor that he was thinking of an
Magic numbers in politics
W
even more vulgar epithet — the “c-word”
— as he listened to Prejean’s answer. The fe- ords are not the only things just to process a loan, and these costs are than whites, and (3) resorted to more expen-
male anchor said nothing. Basking in his new that enable political rhetoric a higher proportion of the total cost for a sive subprime mortgage loans than whites.
role as thought and speech enforcer, Hilton to magically transform real- small loan than for a large loan. All this led to pressures and even quotas
told CNN’s Larry King that beauty pageant ity. Numbers can be used just as creatively When Oregon imposed a limit of 36 per- for banks to lend to more low-income and
contestants must bow to the tolerance mob: — and many voters are even more gullible cent annual interest on what a finance com- minority applicants. That in turn led to low-
“Yes. I do expect Miss USA to be politically about statistics than they are about words, pany could charge, that meant charging less er mortgage lending standards, more risky
correct.” apparently because statistics seem more ob- than $1.50 for a hundred dollar loan for a mortgages, higher default rates and the col-
And apparently, the Miss USA organizers jective. couple of weeks. A dollar and a half would lapse of financial institutions that bought
agree. Instead of apologizing for Hilton’s vile probably not even cover the cost of process- these more risky mortgages or securities
behavior, the pageant director of the Miss THE latest Congressional crusade is to ing the loan, much less the risks of default. based on them.
California contest, Keith Lewis, sent a note clamp down on small finance companies Not surprisingly, most of the small fi- We have seen and heard the same kinds
to Hilton throwing Prejean under the bus: “I that provide “payday loans” and check- nance companies making payday loans of things when statistics about other racial
am personally saddened and hurt that Miss cashing services in many low-income in Oregon went out of business. But there differences have been cited in the same stri-
CA USA 2009 believes marriage rights be- neighborhoods where there are few banks. are no statistics on how many low-income dent voices when other statistics showed
long only to a man and a woman. ... Religious A common practice in making small blacks laid off more than whites during eco-
beliefs have no place in politics in the Miss loans of a few hundred dollars for a few nomic downturns or the children of black
CA family.” weeks is to charge about $15 per hundred women having higher infant mortality rates
But gutter profanity and misogyny do?
— At the University of North Carolina at
dollars lent. Politicians, the media, commu-
nity activists and miscellaneous other busy-
Thomas than the children of white women.
What we have very seldom seen or
Chapel Hill last week, former GOP Congress-
man Tom Tancredo came to speak against
legislative proposals to provide illegal alien
bodies are able to transform these numbers
into annual percentage charges of several
hundred percent, thereby creating moral
Sowell heard in such parading of statistics are other
statistics — which are readily available
— showing that (1) whites are turned down
students in-state tuition discounts not avail- melodramas and demands that the govern- for mortgage loans more often than Asian
able to law-abiding Americans and legal im- ment “do something” about such “abuses.” people turned to loan sharks or had their Americans, (2) whites resort to subprime
migrant students. Protesters at the institution Of course, these loans are seldom bor- electricity cut off or had to do without their loans more often than Asian Americans, (3)
of higher learning responded by blocking rowed for a year. They are often loans for a medicine. whites have been laid off more in a down-
Tancredo with massive banners and scream- couple of weeks or less, to meet some dif- This is just one of the many ways in turn than Asian Americans, and (4) the chil-
ing, “No dialogue with hate.” Adults in the ficulty of the moment by people who live which self-righteous busybodies leave hav- dren of white mothers have higher infant
room stood by while students smashed a win- from payday to payday, whether they are oc in their wake, while going away feeling mortality rates than the children of moth-
dow a few feet from where Tancredo stood. being paid by a job or are receiving checks noble. ers of Filipino or Mexican ancestry, even
Physically threatened, Tancredo was forced from Social Security, unemployment com- though these mothers receive less prenatal
to leave without delivering his remarks. pensation or welfare. STATISTICS played a key role in cre- care than white mothers.
The alternative to getting a payday loan ating the housing boom and bust that led
ACCORDING to campus reports, for a may be having the electricity cut off or not to the current economic crisis. Back in the IN OTHER words, numbers do not
week leftists had prepared to mount a speech- having money to buy some medication. It 1990s, politicians, the media, community “speak for themselves.” Politicians, the me-
squelching demonstration. The same thuggish is worse to borrow from illegal loan sharks, activists like Jesse Jackson and others all dia and others speak for them — very loud-
tactics have been used at Columbia Univer- who have their own methods of collecting. made a lot of noise about statistical studies ly, very cleverly and often very wrongly.
__________________________________________
sity, Georgetown University and Michigan While $15 per hundred dollars may showing that (1) non-whites had lower rates THOMAS SOWELL
State University to shut down speakers who sound like a high rate of interest, it is not all of home-ownership than whites, (2) were (c) 2009, Creators Syndicate
support strict immigration enforcement. The interest. The finance company incurs costs turned down for mortgage loans more often __________________________________________
Conservative Chronicle April 29, 2009 11
OBAMA’S CRITICISMS: April 16, 2009
Obama’s regrettable precedent: Criticism of U.S.
A
nother Democratic presi- Jimmy frequently has piped up against
dent has shattered prece- America and whoever might be presi-
dent. Democratic politicians dent. He did it as recently as 2005,
take great pride in shattering American when he said, “I think what’s going on
precedents, and they do so with such at Guantanamo Bay and in Abu Ghraib
regularity that it is surprising there are and other places is a disgrace to the
any precedents left to shatter, except, United States of America.”
I guess, for the precedents Democrats Now along comes the precedent-
establish on the ruins of earlier prec- shattering President Obama, traveling
edents. I hope that through Europe on
when the next Re- his virginal pass-
publican president
comes along, he
R. Emmett port — a passport
that was used pre-
or she will shatter
a few Democratic
precedents. Given
Tyrrell cisely once before
he became a nation-
al political figure.
the serial bungling His tour of Europe
of the Obama administration, I shall was the burlesque of a preening pop-
not be surprised to see that precedent- injay. He gave the queen an iPod. His
shattering Republican come along in wife gave her a friendly squeeze. Oh,
2013. yes, and the president declared that the
official language of German-speak- IT WAS in Strasbourg, France, is how one talks as a community orga-
DURING his recent European per- ing Austria is “Austrian.” All that was among what he might call the Stras- nizer or a motivational speaker, both of
egrination, our haughty president be- amusing, but the criticism of his home- bourgundians, that he was most criti- which Obama seems to have been, but
came the first American president to land while in Europe was not. Actual- cal of his country. Said our president: now he is the president of the United
speak ill of America while on foreign ly, I am tired of hearing his criticism of “Instead of celebrating your dynamic States!
soil. Actually, it is rare for an Ameri- his homeland when he is at home. We union and seeking to partner with you There was a time, a couple of de-
can president to speak ill of America know he believes America was a failed to meet common challenges, there have cades ago, when this sort of carping
anywhere. President Barack H. Obama state before he became president. Now been times where America has shown about America was cited as the prod-
does it practically everywhere. Now let him return the country to the bipar- arrogance and been dismissive, even uct of “liberal guilt.” Doubtless, had
that Fidel Castro has quieted down and tisanship that he promised. derisive.” Yes, he said “derisive,” and President Obama been sounding like
the French left is in abeyance, Presi- While in Europe, our sententious he continued: “On both sides of the this in 1984, say, at the Democratic
dent Obama has become America’s president blamed America for geno- Atlantic, these attitudes have become National Convention, critics such as
leading critic. cide and torture. He brought up Hiro- all too common.” Then he concluded: Jeane Kirkpatrick would be chiding
Until the ex-presidency of Jimmy shima and Guantanamo. He accused “They are not wise. They do not repre- him for “liberal guilt.” Mind you, at the
Carter, it was unheard of for a former us of arrogance. What can President sent the truth. They threaten to widen time, I took issue with this diagnosis of
president to speak ill of his country or Obama possibly have against arro- the divide across the Atlantic and leave our liberal friends. Then and now, they
of the sitting president while traveling gance? Since his emergence on the us both more isolated.” After reading do not believe they have been guilty
abroad. Jimmy broke that precedent national stage a year or so ago, he has that preachy drivel, I have to say that of any moral or intellectual failing. If
early in the presidency of the man who given me the impression that he con- not even Jimmy Carter is capable of you listen to the precedent-shattering
beat him, Ronald Reagan. Since then, siders arrogance among the virtues. such empty moralizing. Perhaps this President Obama, you will note that he
is accusing other Americans of failures
and vice, not himself. This is not lib-
eral guilt; it is liberal arrogance. It was
liberal arrogance in the past, and so it
is today. It is going to wear thin with
my fellow Americans very shortly.
CONSIDER this one last slap at
two great men after one of America’s
greatest triumphs for peace and jus-
tice. While gloating over America’s
financial decline, our president noted
to his European audience that a new
financial order is being created by the
world’s top 20 financial powers, not
by “just Roosevelt and Churchill sit-
ting in a room with a brandy. ... But
that’s not the world we live in, and it
shouldn’t be the world that we live in.”
Whoever told our president that the
post-World War II world came from
these two great men “sitting in a room
with a brandy” misinformed him. His
knowledge of history is as defective
as his knowledge of Roosevelt’s and
Churchill’s tastes.
__________________________________________
R. EMMETT TYRRELL
(c) 2009, Creators Syndicate
__________________________________________
12 April 29, 2009 Conservative Chronicle
NEW FOUNDATION: April 17, 2009
Obama gives us the sting, in four parts
F
ranklin Roosevelt gave us $180 billion a year for 10 more years
the New Deal. John Kennedy of surges in Iraq. Heck, why not make
gave us the New Frontier. the “deficit reductions” $10 trillion
In a major domestic policy address — the extra $8 trillion coming from
at Georgetown University this week, refraining from repeating the $787
Barack Obama promised — eight billion stimulus package annually
times — a “New Foundation.” For through 2019.
those too thick to have noticed this The Puzzler: He further boasted of
proclamation of a new era in Ameri- his frugality by saying that his budget
can history, the White House web site would reduce domestic discretion-
helpfully titled its speech excerpts “A ary spending as a share of GDP to the
New Foundation.” lowest level ever recorded. Amazing.
Squeezing discretionary domestic
AS IT happens, Obama is not the spending at a time of hugely expanding
first to try this slogan. President Carter budgets is merely the baleful residue
peppered his 1979 State of the Union of out-of-control entitlements and debt
address with five “New Foundations” service, which will increase astronom-
(and eight more just naked “founda- ically under Obama. To claim these as
tions”). Like most achievements in
of Carter’s endeav- fiscal responsibil-
ors, this one failed, ity is testament not
perhaps because Charles to Obama’s frugal- eral social engineering — is a terrible the current money-from-helicopters
Krauthammer
(as I recall it being ity but to his bra- thing to waste. spending almost trivial by compari-
said at the time) it zenness. The Swindle: The Obama admin- son.
sounded like the The Non Se- istration is spending money like none In the New Foundation speech,
introduction of a quitur: “To make other in peacetime history. Obama is Obama correctly (again) identifies the
new kind of under- sure such a cri- smart. He knows this is fiscally un- skyrocketing cost of Medicare and
garment. sis (as we have today) never happens sustainable. He has let it be known Medicaid as the key fiscal problem.
Undaunted, Obama offered his New again,” Obama proposes his radical privately and publicly that he intends But then he claims that Medicaid and
Foundation speech as the complete, health care, energy and education re- to cure the imbalance with entitlement Medicare reform is the same as his
contextual, canonical text for the do- forms, the central pillars of his social reform. health care reform, fatuously citing
mestic revolution he aims to enact. It democratic agenda. But Obama’s own as his authority a one-day meeting of
had everything we have come to ex- words contradict this assertion. Notes AN EXCELLENT strategy. If hand-picked interested parties at his
pect from Obama: the Washington Post: “But as his ad- it takes throwing nearly $1 trillion “Fiscal Responsibility Summit.”
The Whopper: The boast that he had mirable summation of recent history of “porky” (to quote Sen. Charles Here’s the problem. The heart of
“identified $2 trillion in deficit reduc- made clear, these pursuits have little Schumer) stimulus spending to soften Obama’s health care reform is uni-
tions over the next decade.” It takes to do with the economic crisis, and up a Democratic Congress and make versality. Covering more people costs
audacity to repeat this after it had been they are not the key to economic re- it amenable to real entitlement reform, more money. That is why Obama’s
so widely exposed as transparently covery.” Obama rarely fails to repeat then fine. Reforming Social Security, budget sets aside an extra $634 bil-
phony. Most of this $2 trillion is con- this false connection. A crisis — and Medicare and Medicaid would save lion in health care spending, a down
jured up by refraining from spending the public’s resulting pliability to lib- tens of trillions of dollars, and make payment on an estimated additional
spending of $1 trillion. How does the
administration curtail the Medicare
and Medicaid entitlement by adding
yet another (now universal) health care
entitlement that its own estimate ac-
knowledges increases costs by about
$1 trillion?
Which is why in his March 24 news
conference, Obama could not explain
how — when the near-term stimula-
tive spending is over and his ambitious
domestic priorities kick in, promising
sustained prosperity and deficit reduc-
tion — the deficits at the end of the
coming decade are rising, not falling.
The Congressional Budget Office has
deficits increasing in the last seven
years of the decade from an already
unsustainable $672 billion annually to
$1.2 trillion by 2019.
THIS IS the sand on which the new
foundation is constructed. Obama has
the magic to make words mean almost
anything. Numbers are more resistant
to his charms.
__________________________________________
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
(c) 2009, Washington Post Writers Group
__________________________________________
Conservative Chronicle April 29, 2009 13
OBAMA PRESIDENCY: April 22, 2009
The Obama Doctrine: ‘Don’t blame me’
P
resident Barack Obama’s recent filibuster, Ortega bragged about Central blamed for things that happened when liberty around the globe. America gener-
foreign policy triumphs have his America’s opposition to U.S. foreign he was a child; after all, how was he sup- ally needs a clean slate far less than any
supporters cheering. From his policy: “We all got together, united so we posed to stop Bill Ayers from blowing other country on the face of the earth.
European tour, where he apologized for could defeat the expansionist policy of the things up, or JFK from botching the Bay Secondly, the Obama Doctrine demon-
American arrogance, to his most recent United States.” of Pigs? He can’t even be blamed for sub- strates Obama’s massively overweening
trip to Latin America, where he gladly Obama responded with patriotic fervor, sidizing Ayers’ terrorist sympathizing or sense of self-importance. Foreign leaders
accepted an anti-American screed from defending his country. Or not. “I’m grate- Ortega’s dictatorial ranting — after all, he are not idiots — if they sense they can
Hugo Chavez, Obama has soared from ful President Ortega did not blame me for can’t rewrite history, can he? Hence the elicit concessions from America simply
triumph to triumph. things that happened Obama Doctrine: it by inflating Obama’s confidence, they’ll
when I was three wasn’t me. I’m busy do it. Even assuming Obama’s supposed
AT LEAST that’s what E.J. Dionne
of the Washington Post would have us
months old,” Presi-
dent Obama mew- Ben junking America’s
philosophical past,
international popularity, that popularity
does not translate into a better interna-
Shapiro
believe. This week, Dionne celebrated led. In short: don’t says Obama. Give tional deal for America. Foreign leaders
Obama by enshrining what he calls “the blame me. me a few years to can stroke Obama’s ego while undermin-
Obama Doctrine,” in which America It’s an answer remake America. ing America’s strength in the world. The
“seeks to regain the world’s sympathy that echoes back to Then we’ll talk. world’s fawning patronage of Barack
by acknowledging that while the United the 2008 campaign. Obama seems to Obama does not mean the world will treat
States is a great nation built on worthy When Obama was questioned about his believe that if he just discards American America as an ally.
principles, it is not perfect.” association with unrepentant terrorist Bill history — if he apologizes for our actions
There’s a shorter way to phrase the Ayers, he famously scoffed, “I was 8 years in Europe, in Latin America, in the Mus- THAT IS because nations view each
Obama Doctrine: “Don’t blame me.” old.” In short: don’t blame me. lim world — the rest of the world will offer other historically, not based on what
On Saturday, at the Summit of the In Obama’s own mind, the globe be- America a clean slate. That demonstrates, they’ve done the past few months. View-
Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, Dan- gan spinning only with his glorious exit first and foremost, a tremendous lack of ing Germany as a peaceful socialistic
iel Ortega spoke for 50 minutes. In his from Ann Dunham’s uterus. He can’t be pride in America’s legacy of freedom and country, ignoring its fascist past, would
fail to explain their panoply of foreign
OBAMA PRESIDENCY: April 22, 2009 and domestic policies. Viewing Russia as
a corrupt mobocracy ignores its undercur-
rents of communistic thuggery, relics of
Obama’s stealth leap to socialism the Soviet era.
Similarly, other nations identify Amer-
ica with the Constitution, the Declaration
P
of Independence, the toleration for and
resident Obama showed his take back in return for their money would dig its way out from under federal con- bloody elimination of slavery, the libera-
hand this week when the New be preferred stock, not common stock. trol. The reason, of course, is that com- tion of Europe, and the fight against com-
York Times wrote that he is con- “Preferred” means that these stockhold- pany executives do not like the restric- munism (all of which our enemies label
sidering converting the stock the govern- ers get the first crack at dividends, but tions on executive pay and compensation racist imperialism). They identify Amer-
ment owns in our country’s banks from only common stockholders can actually that come with TARP money. It is for ica with a philosophy of private property
preferred stock, which it now holds, to vote on company management or policy. this reason that Chrysler Motors refused and capitalistic entrepreneurship (all of
common stock. Now, by changing this fundamental ele- TARP funds. which our enemies label greedy exploita-
ment of the TARP plan, Obama will give With bank profits up and financial in- tion). They do not identify America with
THIS seemingly insignificant change Washington a voting majority among the stitutions trying to give back their money, Barack Obama — hence their shock at
is momentous. It means that the federal common stockholders of these banks and there is no need for the conversion of the America’s election of this “international
government will control all of the major government stock from preferred to com- man.”
banks and financial institutions in the na- mon — except to advance the political The Obama Doctrine is Obama’s
tion. It means socialism.
The Times dutifully dressed up the Dick socialist agenda of this administration.
Meanwhile, to keep its leverage over
suggestion to the world that he is more
representative of the New America than
Morris
Obama plan as a way to avoid asking the economy intact, the Obama adminis- American history itself. The Obama Doc-
Congress for more money for failing tration is refusing to let banks and other trine states that Obama’s election has
banks. But the implications of the pro- companies give back the TARP money completely redefined America. America’s
posal are obvious to anyone who cares until they pass a financial “stress test.” philosophical roots have been hewn away,
to look. Nominally, the government justifies replaced with the more humble concilia-
When the TARP intervention was first other financial institutions. The almost this procedure by saying that it does not tion of Obamaism.
outlined by the Bush administration, it did 500 companies receiving TARP money want companies to become fully private The international community couldn’t
not call for any transfer of stock, of any will be, in effect, run by Washington. prematurely and then need more help be happier. If Obama is right, they have
sort, to the government. The Democrats And whoever controls the banks con- later on. But don’t believe it. They want decades of American surrender in store.
demanded, as a price for their support, trols the credit and, therefore, the econo- to keep the TARP money in the banks so And if Obama is wrong — if America
that the taxpayers “get something back” my. That’s called socialism. they can have a reason and rationale to comes to its senses and decides to stand
for the money they were lending to the control them. up once again for its traditional philoso-
banks. House Republicans, wise to what OBAMA is dressing up the idea of the phies — the international community
was going on, rejected the administration switch to common stock by noting that THE Times story did not influence will, at the very least, make hay while the
proposal and sought, instead, to provide the conversion would provide the banks the dialogue of the day. People were sun shines.
insurance to banks rather than outright with capital they could use without a fur- much more concerned with the death of
cash. Their plan would, of course, not in- ther taxpayer appropriation. While this is 21 horses at a polo match. Much as we THE OBAMA Doctrine is a mea
volve any transfer of stock. But Sen. John true, it flies in the face of the fact that an will miss these noble animals, we will culpa for America from a self-obsessed
McCain undercut his own party’s conser- increasing number of big banks and bro- miss our economic freedom more. president who puts himself before coun-
vatives and went along with the Demo- kerage houses are clamoring to give back try. And it’s a godsend for America’s en-
cratic plan, assuring its passage. the TARP money. emies.
__________________________________________ __________________________________________
But to avoid the issue of a potential for Goldman-Sachs, for example, wants DICK MORRIS BEN SHAPIRO
government control of the banks, every- to buy back its freedom, as do many (c) 2009, Creators Syndicate (c) 2009, Creators Syndicate
body agreed that the stock the feds would banks. Even AIG is selling off assets to __________________________________________ __________________________________________
14 April 29, 2009 Conservative Chronicle
LIFE INSURANCE BAILOUT: April 16, 2009
TARP for life insurers? This is nuts
I
s bailout nation about to strike one. This is nothing but a bailout. Actual-
again? Sure looks like it. Accord- ly, it’s a precautionary bailout, since none
ing to a bunch of front-page news of these insurers has failed.
stories, life-insurance companies are Despite the stock market rally and
about to get TARPed. This is nuts. proliferating signs of an economic come-
back, a new TARP regime is being pre-
THE PUBLIC is clamoring for an end pared in case insurers lose more money
to TARP and bailout nation. That’s a key in their stock portfolios, or their bond
message coming from the heartland tea investments, or their residential- and
parties that are cropping up spontaneous- commercial-mortgage purchases. (By
ly around the country. This is turning into the way, corporate bonds — which are
a real populist uprising against rising tax- heavily owned by life insurers to pay out
es (especially state, retirement contracts
local and property — are rallying big-
taxes), TARP and all
the federal bailouts Larry time, with prices
rising and yields de-
— and the trillions
of dollars of deficits
and debt being used
Kudlow clining.)
But for those
insurers who may
for financing. lose money on their
If Team Obama ignores this uprising, investments, tough luck. A lot of these in-
it has a political tin ear. surers own variable annuities, which are ment-plan money, or worse, setting prices haps control large swaths of our econo-
While commercial banks of all sizes retirement products that guarantee mini- on your insurance policy.” my? And do these life-insurance mavens
are increasingly profitable and want to mum returns no matter what happens to A recent Bloomberg accounting of the know what they’re getting into by going
pay back their TARP money, the Trea- the stock market. Most of these products federal financial-rescue package puts the on the hook to Congress? And does any-
sury Department is now proposing to ex- won’t come due for 10 years or more. grand total at $2.5 trillion for taxpayers body remember that free-market capital-
tend bailout funds to life-insurance com- And the break-even point is something on the hook. That’s a lot of future debt. ism is about success and failure?
panies, most of which are in no danger of like 600 on the S&P 500 index, which is And that total does not include the Feder-
failing. And for those that are in danger, now above 850 and rising. al Reserve’s $1.7 trillion, which is about JUST SAY no to expanded TARP for
surely it’s time for a bankruptcy proceed- to grow by at least another $1.5 trillion. insurance companies or anybody else.
ing instead of more taxpayer money. NOT ALL life insurers would be eli- It’s unclear right now how much money That’s the real message of the home-
We are already on the hook for banks, gible for bailout funds — only those that the life insurers might get from TARP. grown tea-party revolts against bailout
GM and Chrysler, and lube jobs for guar- own federally chartered banks or thrifts, And with members of Congress on recess nation and the higher taxes, deficits and
anteed government-backed GM warran- like Hartford Financial, Genworth, Pru- — and undoubtedly hearing a mouthful debt being used to finance it. Folks tried
ties. And the banks themselves may go dential, MetLife and Lincoln National. from constituents who are fed up with to tell Washington on the April 15 tax day
to war against an Obama administration But a recent Wall Street Journal article bailout nation — it remains to be seen if that enough is enough. They can’t take it
that wants to maintain control over the indicates that a number of life insurers our elected lawmakers will actually back anymore.
__________________________________________
big-bank sector and prevent these finan- are doing very well and still have triple-A up the Treasury’s life-insurance bailout. LARRY KUDLOW
cial institutions from paying down TARP. gilt-edged ratings. These include Mass- But is there any limit to this adminis- (c) 2009, Creators Syndicate
It’s as if Team Obama is saying: “Don’t Mutual, New York Life, Northwestern tration’s intentions to interfere and per- __________________________________________
worry about the taxpayers. Just keep Mutual and TIAA-CREF.
expanding government control over the A senior executive at a large Midwest-
economy.” ern insurance company e-mailed me to ANSWER MAN: April 26, 2009
And now comes life insurance. But say he’s against an insurance-industry
when will this country stop saving losers
and start rewarding winners?
Meanwhile, no one has proven that
life-insurance companies constitute true
TARP: “Those that are in trouble, includ-
ing Conseco, Genworth, Phoenix, The
Hartford, etc., should go the way of the
dodo bird. Imagine some Treasury bu-
The Answer Man
systemic risk to the financial system. No reaucrat investing your 401(k) or retire- NAME SNOW WHITE’S 7 PALS
1. How many of Snow White’s sev- 6. Name the noted movie star who
en dwarfs can you name? was the husband of the actress in the
2. What was the first full-fledged preceding question.
federal organiza- 7. What was the
tion for U.S. intel- world’s first na-
ligence and secret
operations, which Andy tional park?
8. Name the
was active in World
War II?
3. What federal
Seamans most visited site in
the entire national
park system.
unit replaced the 9. What newspa-
organization in the preceding ques- per adopted the slogan “All the News
tion? That’s Fit to Print” in 1896?
4. The animals we know as mules 10. It was formed in 1873 and be-
cannot produce offspring; they are in- came known as the North-West Mount-
fertile. What animals breed to make ed Police. What is that Canadian fed-
mules? eral police force known as now?
5. What famed actress died in a
plane crash on her return to Holly-
wood from a fund-raiser for the United
Seamans continued on page 19
Service Organizations?
Conservative Chronicle April 29, 2009 1
FINANCIAL CRISIS: April 21, 2009
Honest talk about Chinese currency manipulation
L
ast week, the Obama ad- Frank to major free market economists political spectrum — have called for (and as close to a 21st-century Walter
ministration declined to cite and Republicans — currently agrees hearings on the causes of the financial Bagehot as we have), in his 2008 book,
China for currency manipu- that the gravamen of any new finan- failures. Though they may well have Fixing Global Finance: “Many blame
lation despite the fact that most ex- cial re-regulations must be to guard ideological oxen they plan to gore at the United States’ predicament on the
perts — including Treasury Secretary against financial institutions and major such hearings, I agree with them that policies of the Federal Reserve and
Timothy Geithner during his confir- players taking systemic risks that may there ought to be extensive public lax regulation of the financial system.
mation testimony — do not deny the undermine national and international hearings. These arguments are not without merit,
obvious currency-rate fixing by China. finance again. While cause and effect in human but they are exaggerated.” He goes on
Almost certainly, this decision reflect- And, while the day may well come affairs is inevitably a muddled matter to make a powerful case that China’s
ed merely a tactical judgment not to when that risk will arise, for at least (scholars still debate the causes of the currency-rate fixing supercharged the
offend China, given China’s vital role the next year (and probably for sev- French Revolution and the cures of the current account imbalances and led to
in the international economic recovery eral years), the problem will be trying Great Depression), we owe it to our the disaster.
effort. to induce financial institutions to trust hopes for future prosperity to make a What makes Wolf’s argument pi-
one another, trying to induce holders serious effort to understand what just quant is that he cites — and relies on
BUT Chinese currency manipu- of capital to take any chances on in- happened and why. That brings me for the “significance” argument — the
lation provides a vestment. Thus, the back to the question of Chinese cur- powerful lecture “Reflections on Glob-
useful entry point financial danger rency manipulation. al Account Imbalances,” delivered in
into an important for the time being A growing body of leading experts 2006 in India by Lawrence Summers
Washington de- Tony is not risk taking; believe that the Chinese refused to al- — then a private citizen and now Presi-
Blankley
bate: Do we under- it’s risk aversion. low their exporting strength vis-á-vis dent Obama’s chief economic adviser.
stand well enough At their heart, fi- the United States to be reflected in a It is doubly interesting that Sum-
— and are we in nancial relations true value of their basic monetary unit, mers gave the following dust-cover
a political position are based on trust. the yuan (also known as the renminbi). endorsement last year to Wolf’s book:
to discuss honestly That trust has been By pegging it to the dollar, they ran up “Wolf is the world’s preeminent finan-
— the causes of the current financial shattered. It almost certainly will take huge surpluses and recycled the money cial journalist. This book should be
and economic crisis to be ready, this new financial regulations, particularly back to the United States. read by anyone who cares about the
year, to enact financial re-regulation in the United States, to rebuild that future of the international system.”
legislation? trust. BUT more significantly, the global Major reviews of his book all point
I would argue not only that we do But for the regulations to serve that account imbalances — profoundly ex- to the centrality of this currency-ma-
not understand enough yet but also necessary function, they must be seen aggerated by their fixing the yuan — nipulation charge against the Chinese.
that we have plenty of time before to reflect a correct assessment of the may have been the primary cause of the For example, the review in the Observ-
new financial regulations need to be causes of the current calamity, as well world financial crisis. The case against er — a British newspaper — by Will
enacted. (Disclosure: I have given as a credible and timely check on those this act of “exchange rate protection- Hutton, states: “Wolf is tough on Chi-
professional advice to a financial in- dangers — and still permit the finan- ism” (professor Max Corden coined na’s role in all of this and his book will
stitution.) Everyone — from President cial system to generate prosperity. the phrase) was put forcefully and pre- be very unpopular with the Politburo
Barack Obama to House Financial A number of members of Congress sciently by Martin Wolf, the Financial and Chinese Communist party, which
Services Committee Chairman Barney — mostly from the left side of the Times’ chief economic commentator want to blame the hegemonic US for
the crisis.”
White House public talking points
cite “Wall Street greed” and the short-
comings of our health, energy, carbon
and education policies as major causes
of the crisis. It would appear that the
president’s senior economic adviser
may have a somewhat different point
of view.
BOTH the administration and the
two major parties in Congress owe the
public their best non-ideological, non-
partisan public analysis of the causes
of the current conditions. The financial
re-regulation decisions they make may
well decide whether our grandchildren
live in prosperity or poverty. Let’s not
rush to write and pass this fateful leg-
islation, as we did with previous eco-
nomic legislation, until the public and
the government know what we are do-
ing — and the politics permit an hon-
est discussion.
__________________________________________
TONY BLANKLEY
(c) 2009, Creators Syndicate
__________________________________________
16 April 29, 2009 CONSERVATIVE FOCUS: Department of Homeland Security
Homeland Security slanders and opinions
T
here has been a lot of outrage acts of violence by right-wing groups but to be an internal report. This has to be af- over TV depicting conservatives as Timothy
over the Department of Homeland then to go on to imply it’s only a matter of fecting the thinking, direction and actions McVeigh clones. Then she issued a disin-
Security’s leaked summary report time. It’s kind of like those stubborn media of those responsible for keeping this nation genuous statement, that “we do not — nor
on “Rightwing Extremism,” but by far its reports decrying black-voter suppression in safe from true terrorist threats. This report will we ever — monitor ideology or political
most odious aspects are its implications that Florida in 2000, though the Commission seeks to poison the minds of agents to make beliefs.”
military veterans are fertile targets for radi- on Civil Rights could never find any actual them believe that returning veterans warrant
cal, violent groups and that right-wingers are evidence to support its greater scrutiny and WELL, Secretary Napolitano, you sure
inclined toward racism. charge. that conservatives are could have fooled me — and anyone else
How dare these prone to bigotry. who can read for himself. You (or someone
INFORMATION from this April 7 re-
port was provided to law enforcement of-
people issue such in-
flammatory garbage?
David How dare they
slander military vet-
in your charge) are not only monitoring the
ideologies and political beliefs of conserva-
ficials to help them prevent terrorist attacks
against the United States.
The “Key Findings” are way light on ob-
How dare they say
that the election of the
firstAfrican-American
Limbaugh erans by suggesting
they are more prone
than the average
tives but also poisoning law enforcement
agents with a bias against them and suggest-
ing their beliefs lead to violence against the
jective facts but heavy on subjective opinion president is a “unique citizen to criminal, government. Shame on you.
— opinion clearly colored by the worldviews driver” for radicalization and recruitment? I seditious and violent activity? As the Wash-
and biases of those issuing the report. Right know it serves the political cause of the left ington Times’ editors note: “A 2000 Justice April 17, 2009
off the bat, DHS admits it “has no specific in- to continue to divide the races, but this is a Department study found that ‘veterans were
formation that domestic rightwing terrorists government-issued document we’re talking incarcerated at less than half the rate of adult
are currently planning acts of violence, but about here that was designed to guide the male nonveterans.’ Veterans are more likely
__________________________________________
rightwing extremists may be gaining new re- approach to homeland security and law en- to be peace officers.” DAVID LIMBAUGH
cruits by playing on their fears about several forcement. Adding insult to injury, Homeland Se- (c) 2009, Creators Syndicate
emergent issues. The economic downturn I don’t care that this was only intended curity Secretary Janet Napolitano was all __________________________________________
and election of the first African American
president present unique drivers for right-
Are you a right-wing ‘extremist?’
wing radicalization and recruitment.”
There’s more. “The possible passage of
new restrictions on firearms and the return
W
of military veterans facing significant chal-
lenges reintegrating into their communities hile the rest of us may be wor- Maybe they are too busy worrying about Since there are state and local police
could lead to the potential emergence of ter- ried about violent Mexican right-wing “extremists” who don’t like forces all across the country, an FBI to in-
rorist groups or lone wolf extremists capable drug gangs on our border, or abortions or illegal immigration, or who fa- vestigate federal crimes and a Department
of carrying out violent attacks.” about terrorists who are going to be released vor the division of power b etween the state of Justice to prosecute those who commit
At the risk of incurring the scrutiny of from Guantanamo, the Director of Home- and federal governments established by the them, as well as a Defense Department with
the DHS, I must say that these gratuitous land Security is worried about “right-wing Constitution. military forces, just what role would a fed-
sentences are outrageous. In the first place, extremists.” In one sense, the Department of Home- eral police force play?
I don’t know anyone playing on “fears about land Security paper is silly. In another sense, Maybe it was just one of those bright
several emergent issues” more than the cur- JUST WHO are these right-wing ex- it can be sinister as a revealing and disturb- ideas that gets floated during an election
rent administration, of which the DHS is a tremists? ing sign of the preoccupations and priorities campaign. Yet there was no grassroots de-
part. Even when President Barack Obama is According to an official document of of this administration — and their willing- mand for any such federal police nor any
delivering a speech on the economy purport- the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, ness to witch hunt and demonize those who media clamor for it, so there was not even
edly geared toward reassuring Americans right-wing extremists include “groups and dare to disagree with them. any political reason to suggest such a thing.
that things will be all right, he has to stoke individuals that are dedicated to a single is- What would be different about a new
their fears and anxieties about other financial sue, such as opposition to abortion or im- federal police force, as compared to exist-
shoes he expects to drop in the near future. He migration.” It also includes those “rejecting ing law enforcement and military forces? It
and his aides are the ones who have signaled
they have something to gain from keeping
federal authority in favor of state or local
authority.”
Thomas would be a creation of the Obama admin-
istration, run by people appointed from top
the public in crisis mode, that “something”
being the opportunity to make foundational
changes to our economy and the relationship
If you fit into any of these categories,
you may not have realized that you are con-
sidered a threat to national security. But ap-
Sowell to bottom by that administration — and
without the conflicting loyalties of those
steeped in existing military traditions and
between government and the private sector. parently the Obama administration has its law enforcement traditions.
I know I’m naive, but the only violent eye on you. Reportedly, the FBI and the Defense In short, a federal police force could be-
right-wing extremist groups I’ve ever seen According to the same official document, Department are cooperating with the De- come President Obama’s personal domestic
are those played in Hollywood by unin- the Department of Homeland Security “has partment of Homeland Security in inves- political army, his own storm troopers.
formed, whacked-out leftist actors. I’ve al- no specific information that domestic right- tigations of returning veterans from Iraq
ways wondered where all these Hitler throw- wing terrorists are currently planning acts and Afghanistan. That people who have put PERHAPS there will never be such a
backs live. I’ve also never seen any of their of violence.” But somehow they just know their lives on the line for this country are federal police force. But the targeting of in-
recruiting signs posted at the local supermar- that you right-wingers are itching to unleash made the target of what is called the Vigi- dividuals and groups who believe in some
ket trolling for right-wing nut jobs prone to terror somewhere, somehow. lant Eagle program suggests that this ad- of the fundamental values on which this
“Clockwork Orange” ultra-violence. So-called “honor killings” by Muslims ministration might be more of a threat than country was founded, and people who have
in the United States, including a recent be- the people they are investigating. demonstrated their patriotism by volunteer-
CAN YOU imagine a pamphlet stuck heading of his wife by a leader of one of the ing for military service, suggests that this
under your windshield wiper as you return to American Muslim organizations, does not ALL THIS activity takes on a more sin- potential for political abuse is worth watch-
your car after shopping because your subser- seem to arouse any concern by the Depart- ister aspect against the background of one ing, as Obama tries to remake America to
vient stay-at-home wife didn’t do her bibli- ment of Homeland Security. of the statements of Barack Obama during fit his vision.
cal duty of attending to the grocery purchas- When it comes to the thuggery of last year’s election campaign that got re-
es that week? “Attention Fellow Fascists: ACORN — its members harassing the markably little attention in the media. He April 29, 2009
Seeking Scripture-Reading, Bitterclinging homes of bankers and even the home of suggested the creation of a federal police
Recruits to commiserate together the eco- Senator Phil Gramm when he opposed force, comparable in size to the military.
nomic downturn and then act on it.” things that ACORN favored — the Depart- __________________________________________
THOMAS SOWELL
How convenient for this report to admit ment of Homeland Security apparently sees Why such an organization? For what (c) 2009, Creators Syndicate
it has no specific information about plans for no evil, hears no evil and speaks no evil. purpose? __________________________________________
CONSERVATIVE FOCUS: Department of Homeland Security April 29, 2009 17
I am an extremist: Am I dangerous to the U.S.?
A
ccording to the U.S. govern- Evidently, neither you nor I ever was
ment, I am an extremist. I am supposed to read this “Assessment.” At the
a Christian and meet regularly bottom of the cover page is a warning that
with other Christians to study God’s word. it is “not to be released to the public, the
My faith convinces me the prophecies in media, or other personnel who do not have
the Holy Bible are true. I believe in the a valid need-to-know.” We’re Americans.
sanctity of human life, oppose abortion, and We have a need to know what’s going on in
want to preserve marriage as the union of our government, especially in an adminis-
a man and a woman. tration that promised
I am a veteran with to be “transparent.” A
skills and knowledge full copy of the report
derived from military
training and combat. I
Oliver is posted at http://
www.FreedomAl-
own several firearms,
and I frequently shoot
them, buy ammuni-
North liance.org.
The “Assess-
ment” purports to
tion, and consider alert law enforce-
efforts to infringe on my Second Amend- ment officials that “rightwing extremists”
ment rights to be wrong and unconstitu- — the term is used more than 35 times
tional. I fervently support the sovereignty — are intent on exploiting Americans who
of the United States, and I am deeply con- have strongly held beliefs on everything
cerned about our economy, increasingly from Christian faith to rising unemploy- THAT IS a frightening acknowledg- Under the heading “Disgruntled Mili-
higher taxes, illegal immigration, soaring ment, U.S. sovereignty and the Second ment that political speech is being moni- tary Veterans,” the report alleges: “Right-
unemployment, and actions by our govern- Amendment. It vilifies those of us in these tored in America. It is also wrong. It’s not wing extremists will attempt to recruit and
ment that will bury my children beneath a categories by references to neo-Nazis, rac- “perception.” It is fact. According to the radicalize returning veterans in order to
mountain of debt. ists, militias, white supremacists and other Bureau of Labor Statistics, the manufac- exploit their skills and knowledge derived
“hate groups.” Notably, the report includes turing and construction sectors have lost from military training and combat. These
APPARENTLY, all this makes me a a warning that right-wing extremism “may 161,000 jobs and 126,000 jobs, respec- skills and knowledge have the potential to
“rightwing extremist.” At least, that’s what include groups and individuals that are tively, last month alone. boost the capabilities of extremists — in-
it says in the April 7 “Assessment” issued dedicated to a single issue, such as opposi- In its “Key Findings,” the DHS manu- cluding lone wolves or small terrorist cells
by the Office of Intelligence and Analysis tion to abortion or immigration.” script boldly charges that “rightwing ex- — to carry out violence.” These unsubstan-
at the Department of Homeland Security. Though the report proffers a passing ref- tremists may be gaining new recruits by tiated claims are followed by reminders
The nine-page report, titled “Rightwing erence to the First Amendment, it is replete playing on their fears about several emer- that Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the
Extremism: Current Economic and Po- with bias against conservative thought, gent issues” and offers this warning: “The Oklahoma City federal building in 1995,
litical Climate Fueling Resurgence in writing and communications. On Page 3, possible passage of new restrictions on was a military veteran. Omitted is any ref-
Radicalization and Recruitment,” is full law enforcement authorities are warned, firearms and the return of military veterans erence to the fact that McVeigh was simply
of warnings about American citizens who “Rightwing extremist chatter on the Inter- facing significant challenges reintegrating one of more than 40 million veterans of the
share any part of my background or sub- net continues to focus on the economy, the into their communities could lead to the U.S. armed forces.
scribe to the beliefs above. It is one of the perceived (emphasis added) loss of U.S. potential emergence of terrorist groups or Thirteen lines after this egregious, un-
most alarming documents produced by our jobs in the manufacturing and construction lone wolf extremists capable of carrying conscionable slander against those of us
government that I ever have read. sectors, and home foreclosures.” out violent attacks.” who are military combat veterans, DHS
makes the stunning charge that “lone
wolves and small terrorist cells embrac-
ing violent rightwing extremist ideology
are the most dangerous domestic terrorism
threat in the United States.”
According to this DHS “Assessment,”
the most dangerous threat we face here at
home isn’t from radical imams preaching
violence in U.S. mosques and madrassas,
Islamists recruiting in our prisons, Somali
terrorists enticing young immigrants to
become suicide bombers, or Hamas, Hez-
bollah or al-Qaida operatives plotting mass
murder. No, according to DHS, the real
threat comes from what our government
labels “rightwing extremist ideology.”
MR. OBAMA should disavow this re-
port publicly and fire the officials respon-
sible for issuing it. Those who prepare his
remarks for the occasion should insert in
the teleprompter former Sen. Barry Gold-
water’s words on the subject: “Extremism
in the defense of liberty is no vice.”
April 17, 2009
__________________________________________
OLIVER NORTH
(c) 2009, Creators Syndicate
__________________________________________
18 April 29, 2009 Conservative Chronicle
DHS: April 16, 2009
Homeland insecurity: Targeting political thought
O
n April 7, the Department of a small percentage of military personnel When I queried the White House, a the government to catch those individu-
Homeland Security distrib- to join extremist groups during the 1990s spokesperson stood by this administra- als, prosecute and punish them to the full
uted a counterterrorism as- because they were disgruntled, disil- tion comment to the Washington Times: extent of the law.
sessment to local law-enforcement types lusioned or suffering from the psycho- “The president is focused not on poli- If Homeland Security officials want to
entitled “Rightwing Extremism: Current logical effects of war.” Thanks for your tics but rather taking the steps necessary issue an advisory that names such groups
Economic and Political Climate Fuel- service, vets, but Homeland Security is to protect all Americans from the threat and provides information that helps local
ing Resurgence in Radicalization and stuck on Oklahoma City bomber and of violence and terrorism regardless of law enforcement understand the modus
Recruitment.” The nine-page paper has Persian Gulf War vet its origins. He also operandi of criminal enterprises so that
many on the right questioning what is Timothy McVeigh. believes those who criminals can be apprehended, go to it,
going on in Washington. More mushy serve represent the guys.
THE assessment reads like a sopho-
thinking from the Debra J. best of this country,
BUT WHEN the Department of
Saunders
memo: “Rightwing and he will continue
more’s bad political science essay in, for extremists were con- to ensure that our Homeland Security releases an assess-
example, noting that right-wing extrem- cerned during the veterans receive the ment that opines that the “historical
ism “may include groups and individuals 1990s with the per- respect and benefits election of an African American presi-
that are dedicated to a single issue, such ception that illegal they have earned.” dent and prospect of policy changes are
as opposition to abortion or immigra- immigrants were taking away American That’s not good enough. The admin- providing to be a driving force for right-
tion.” jobs through their willingness to work at istration should make it clear that it will wing extremist recruitment and radical-
“This is a very unfortunately named significantly lower wages. They also op- not tolerate any hint that the federal gov- ization,” it makes me worry about the
document,” Department of Homeland Se- posed free trade agreements, arguing that ernment might be on the lookout for con- brains in DHS’s Office of Intelligence
curity spokesperson Sara Kuban told me. these arrangements resulted in Americans servatives and right-leaning veterans. and Analysis.
No lie. The not-quite-classified-but-also- losing jobs to countries such as Mexico.” Yes, I know there have been violent
not-meant-for-public-distribution assess- Many Democrats have opposed illegal right-wing nuts who have aggrandized
ment reads like a rookie mistake penned immigration and NAFTA, too. And what criminal thuggish behavior — even __________________________________________
DEBRA J. SAUNDERS
by political lightweights. But Kuban told business is that of Homeland Security, killing people — under the wrongly as- (c) 2009, Creators Syndicate
me it was written by “career officials” unless the individuals broke federal law? sumed cloak of conservatism. And I want __________________________________________
who had been working on the assess-
ment for more than a year. (Read: DHS MISS USA CONTESTANT: April 21, 2009
started working on this when George W.
Bush was in charge.) That career officials
would write such tripe should scare you.
Fox News posted a Jan. 26, 2009, as-
sessment entitled “Leftwing Extremists
Truth vs. the tiara: Carrie Prejean
S
Likely to Increase Use of Cyber-Attacks
over the Coming Decade.” This would usan Boyle has inspired mil- think it should be — between a man For Susan, the ridicule is over and the
suggest equal-opportunity political tar- lions of people with her will- and a woman. Thank you very much.” celebration launched. For Carrie, the
geting. ingness to brave ridicule in The pageant audience cheered Car- attacks have just begun.
Not so. The “left-wing” assessment pursuit of her dream. rie’s answer for its obvious genuine- Perez Hilton, the “celebrity” blog-
named entities — the Earth Liberation ness and for her equally obvious de- ger and pageant judge, proudly pro-
Front, Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, OH, SURE, it may have been a cency and civility. claimed himself the YouTube moment
the Hacktivist, the Internet Liberation staged moment, but that is not Susan’s of the pageant. His is the new face for
Front — and explained the methods used fault, and it does not detract an ounce gay marriage in this country. Here is
in specific and recent cyber-attacks. It
also warned how specific groups — log-
from her triumph: Middle-aged, plump
women without beauty queen looks Maggie what he said about Miss California:
“She’s a dumb b—ch. ... I could not
Gallagher
gers, farmers and named corporations (Yes, a demographic for which I have believe when she became first runner-
— were or could be targeted. That is, the a certain affinity!) who dare to get up up. If that girl would have won Miss
“left-wing” assessment included infor- in front of millions and risk public em- USA ... I would have gone up on stage
mation that would be useful to officials barrassment are not so common. Su- — I (kid) you not — I would have
investigating crimes. san’s triumph is real and heartwarming gone up on stage, snatched that tiara
The “right-wing” document, how- to us all. In the latest CBS News poll, just a off her head and run out the door.”
ever, targeted, not activities, but politi- But I have a very real heart, as well, third of Americans agree with Perez I don’t believe the response — ha-
cal thought — opposition to abortion, for another dramatic and inspiring act Hilton about gay marriage. (Both Ver- tred, ridicule, name-calling — by
immigration amnesty and gun laws. of courage that just took place on the mont and California already had civil Perez Hilton is supported by most gay
While the “left-wing” assessment re- national stage, this time by a woman unions.) Even among what CBS News people or by most gay marriage sup-
ported on known criminal activities, the who in one sense is Susan Boyle’s twin called “young adults” (18- to 45-year- porters. But, sadly, it is increasingly
“right-wing” document started with the — and in another sense her opposite. olds), only 41 percent support gay the visceral and public response of
acknowledgment that Department of Carrie Prejean is very young and marriage. Among even younger folks the gay marriage movement to anyone
Homeland Security intelligence “has no very beautiful. She spoke for millions (18- to 29-year-olds), an August 2008 who disagrees with its views.
specific information that domestic righ- of other Americans, including young Pew poll found just 54 percent support
twing terrorists are currently planning Americans whose voices are being ig- gay marriage, while 37 percent op- THANKS, Carrie. America can —
acts of violence.” (The italics are mine.) nored, when she said she doesn’t think posed and nine percent were silent or and will — do better than the parody
Then: “The economic downturn and the other states should follow Vermont’s uncertain. of Hollywood values on display Sun-
election of the first African American lead on gay marriage: In a split-second before a huge audi- day night.
president present unique drivers for right- “Well, I think it’s great that Ameri- ence, Carrie had to choose between the
wing radicalization and recruitment.” cans are able to choose one or the other. truth and the tiara. In an act of grace,
... In my country, in my family, I think she chose to surrender the title rather
VETERANS groups are furious at that I believe that a marriage should be than her beliefs.
the paper’s suggestion that law enforce- between a man and a woman. No of- __________________________________________
MAGGIE GALLAGHER
ment look out for disgruntled military fense to anybody out there, but that’s HERE’S another difference be- (c) 2009, Universal Press Syndicate
veterans, as it noted “the willingness of how I was raised, and that’s how I tween Susan Boyle and Carrie Prejean. __________________________________________
Conservative Chronicle April 29, 2009 19
CAL THOMAS: April 17, 2009
Cal Thomas celebrates 25 years in syndication
Cal Thomas is one of the most highly and ultimately hoped to get picked up by a What was the newspaper market like self, much less the auto makers. I care about
regarded voices on the American political syndicate. At the time, there was a short- when you first started writing your column? what is happening to this country and I know
scene. He has authored 11 books, including age of quality commentary, especially on In 1984, there was a dearth of conserva- large numbers of my readers do, too. They
Common Ground: How to Stop the Partisan conservative cultural issues. All of the syn- tive commentary in newspapers, and in the tell me so.
War That is Destroying America, co-written dicates I approached turned me down. Then media in general, especially on social is-
with Bob Beckel, and he regularly appears I called Tom Johnson, publisher of the Los sues. Aside from William F. Buckley, Jr. and What is the most memorable interview of
as a panelist on Fox News Watch. Embraced Angeles Times and a friend. Tom put me in George Will, the conservative voice was in your career?
by local newspapers, he has been capturing touch with the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, large part goofball stuff. It took a lot of hard Through the years, I have been privileged
America one reader at a time, and has ex- where I was eventually signed. The Wash- work and determination. I visited newspa- to interview Presidents and dignitaries, in-
tended his reach to include more than 500 ington Times was the first subscriber for my pers one-by-one, to convince them of the cluding George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter,
papers nationwide. Cal celebrates his 25th syndicated column, which began on April 17, value of this type of commentary. Through Ronald Reagan, Benjamin Netanyahu, Me-
anniversary as a newspaper columnist on 1984. the process I made many friends across ideo- nachem Begin and Yitzhak Rabin. I’ve had
April 17, 2009. In a recent interview with In the past 25 years, I have seen politi- logical divides. the pleasure to meet many more, among
TMS, he shared a few thoughts on his pro- cal commentary transform, and not always them Ariel Sharon, Anwar Sadat, JFK, Lyn-
lific career. in positive ways. We have all witnessed How have you seen political journalism don Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford
dramatic changes in the political landscape. change during the past 25 years? and Bill Clinton.
Cal Thomas, early career Maintaining a healthy dialog is critical. We We are losing a lot of the old journalistic The most wonderful interview I’ve ever
I started in radio at the age of 16, play- used to talk to each other, now we just talk at ethic that served people well. The revolv- done was outside of politics and govern-
ing rock music and delivering the rip-and- each other. There are more ways to commu- ing door between politics and journalism has ment. I love the theater, and as a teenager I
read news for an independent radio station in nicate, but fewer conversations. The result is become common practice, and more people dreamed of meeting Julie Andrews. In fact,
suburban Washington, DC. When I went to everybody is talking but fewer people are lis- with political backgrounds are showing up as Julie Andrews single-handedly made me a
college, I got a job as a copy boy for NBC tening. I do not seek to convert the audience commentators and reporters. This deepens fan of musical theater. I have admired her
news, working alongside some of the most to my point of view, but to present ideas and the level of the public’s cynicism about the work for more than 40 years, and in 2007, I
prominent names in news, including David let readers contemplate them. media, and builds a perception that we are out had the opportunity to interview her on After
Brinkley and Sander Vanocur. It was heady for ourselves. I was a reporter before I was Hours on Fox News. She was as charming
stuff for a 19-year-old. Even at the time, I How would you describe your role as a a columnist, and I do more than just live up and delightful as I expected. The interview is
knew I was learning from the masters. I ap- columnist? to my syndicate, which requires me to avoid available on YouTube.
proached the job as a student, soaking up the George Will once described me as a “mor- conflicts of interest. I regard this opportunity
knowledge and experience of my mentors. al environmentalist;” I like that. I try not to be to publish my opinions as a privilege and I
Part of the job was to file news scripts, which a lapdog to Republicans or an attack dog to seek to write and act responsibility.
I would take home at night and study. NBC Democrats. I feel a personal responsibility People feel that something has been lost seamans
News was my greatest writing class. to share my views on universal issues like in the country, and they are not having a say
In 1983, I wrote my first book Book Burn- character, integrity, family and financial re- in whatever process is creating that loss. The
ing, and penned a 700-word column, based sponsibility. As a society, we have millennia average person — who had nothing to do Seamans from page 14
on the same subject. I’d never written for a of human history, and we know what works with AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac or the ANSWERS
newspaper, and sent the column, unsolicited, relationally, economically and socially. I am destruction of our retirement funds — are 1. Snow White’s dwarfs are Bash-
to the NY Times. Much to my surprise, they trying to draw on a wealth of history and paying more and more in taxes to a govern- ful, Doc, Dopey, Grumpy, Happy,
printed it, and the paper was deluged with knowledge, and apply it to the contemporary ment that failed to provide oversight and Sleepy and Sneezy. Orleans, Vt., An-
mail. I approached several other newspapers, debate. increasingly looks incompetent in running it- swer Man-er Norman MacFarlane sent
us this question.
2. The organization was the Office
of Strategic Services.
3. The OSS was replaced by the
Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA.
4. Male donkeys and female horses
are the parents of the infertile mules.
5. It was Carole Lombard.
6. Carole Lombard’s husband was
Clark Gable.
7. Yellowstone National Park be-
came the first national park in 1872.
8. The most visited site in the na-
tional park system is the Blue Ridge
Parkway, which is in North Carolina
and Virginia.
9. This is the slogan of the New York
Times.
10. The police force is the Royal
Canadian Mounted Police.
Take “The Answer Man” to work or
to school. Challenge your friends for
“Bragging Rights.” Send your ques-
tions and answers to: The Answer
Man, Andy Seamans, Horizon House
#603, 1300 Army Navy Dr., Arlington,
VA 22202.
__________________________________________
ANDY SEAMANS
(c) 2009, Creators Syndicate
__________________________________________
20 April 29, 2009 Conservative Chronicle
10TH AMENDMENT: April 16, 2009
Rediscovering the 10th — too little, too late
T
he New Deal, launched al- what it said and said what it meant.
most 80 years ago, repre- The court, for example, unanimously
sented a giant leap toward struck down the National Industrial
collectivism. But only in the last few Recovery Act as the result of a lawsuit
weeks, as a result of President Barack by a chicken slaughterhouse, which
Obama’s New Deal Reloaded, have resented federal control of its business
some 20 states rediscovered the Con- because it operated exclusively within
stitution and the 10th Amendment. New York state. So the Supreme Court
pointed to Article I, Section 8, which
ARTICLE I, Section 8 of the Unit- reads, “Congress shall have Power ...
ed States Constitution sets forth the (t)o regulate Commerce ... among the
limited duties and obligations of the several States,” and said the Consti-
federal government. The Founding tution limited Congress to legislation frog: Heat the water slowly and gradu- Washington the money in the first
Fathers designed involving interstate ally so the frog doesn’t react until it’s place. He refuses, however, to accept
a federal govern- commerce, not in- too late and it perishes. Thus, Perry federal money, such as unemployment
ment that focuses
primarily on na-
Larry trastate commerce.
The court was also
opposes constitutional-law-professor-
turned-President Obama’s massive
compensation dollars, because of the
strings attached. But the very uncon-
tional security, the
rules of naturaliza-
tion and a handful
Elder concerned about
the delegated, enu-
merated balance
federal intrusion into the states via the
“bailout” plans.
stitutionality of the federal govern-
ment engaging in activities beyond
those specified under Article I, Sec-
of other matters. of power among BUT THE resistance represents tion 8, and sticking its nose — con-
And the Ninth and 10th amendments the three branches of government too little, too late. ditions or no — into the lives of the
to the Constitution leave all other — legislative, executive and judicial In describing the constant blatant states doesn’t seem to bother him. In
rights and powers to the people and to — especially the president’s use of assault on the Constitution, one hard- other words, it’s OK for the federal
the states, respectively. legislative power, because FDR is- ly knows where to start. The federal government to play nanny and violate
Texas Gov. Rick Perry, standing sued the executive order authorizing government runs Social Security, a the Constitution — provided it does so
with members of his state Legislature, the code imposed on intrastate com- 50-state Ponzi scheme that makes without strings.
said: “The 10th Amendment was en- merce. Chief Justice Charles Evans Bernie Madoff look like an under- Ever since the ratification of the
acted by folks who remembered what Hughes wrote: “The President, in ap- achiever. What about Medicaid? It is Constitution, federal lawmakers have
it was like to have a very oppressive proving a code, may impose his own a federal/state program of health care attempted to circumvent it. President
government — to be under the thumb conditions, adding to or taking from for the poor. What about the Depart- Franklin Pierce vetoed an 1854 bill to
of tyrants in an all-powerful govern- what is proposed. ... (T)he discretion ment of Education? It unconstitution- help the mentally ill, saying, “I can-
ment. Unfortunately, the protections it of the President in approving or pre- ally involves the federal government not find any authority in the Constitu-
guarantees have melted away over the scribing codes, and thus enacting laws in state-run education and comes with tion for public charity” and that such
course of the years.” for the government of trade and indus- rules and mandates attached to the spending “would be contrary to the
During the early days of Presi- try throughout the country, is virtually money. letter and the spirit of the Constitution
dent Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s unfettered.” Gov. Perry, mind you, intends to and subversive to the whole theory
New Deal, the Supreme Court actu- Gov. Perry likened the intrusion of accept some federal bailout money upon which the Union of these States
ally ruled that the Constitution meant the federal government to boiling a because, as he puts it, Texans sent is founded.” And President Grover
Cleveland, when vetoing an 1887 ap-
propriation to help drought-stricken
counties in Texas, said: “I feel obliged
to withhold my approval of the plan to
indulge in benevolent and charitable
sentiment through the appropriation
of public funds. ... I find no warrant
for such an appropriation in the Con-
stitution.”
Today large numbers of Americans,
to the extent that they even know about
Article I, Section 8, couldn’t care less
about it.
FDR personified this view at the
swearing-in ceremony for his second
term. He later said that when it came
to the words “support the Constitu-
tion of the United States,” he thought,
“Yes, but it’s the Constitution as I un-
derstand it, flexible enough to meet
any new problem of democracy — not
the kind of Constitution your court has
raised up as a barrier to progress and
democracy.”
WHAT 10TH Amendment?
__________________________________________
LARRY ELDER
(c) 2009, Creators Syndicate
__________________________________________
Conservative Chronicle April 29, 2009 21
CHOKEPOINTS: April 22, 2009
Grab the planet by the throat and squeeze...
P
irates, Iran’s corrupt tyranny Cargo vessels connecting Asian and the Arabian peninsula) from Djibouti and at odds with the United States and Unit-
of mullahs and now interna- European economic powers (India and Eritrea (in Africa) and further constricts ed Nations. It has a variety of reasons,
tional cyber attackers all seek China to Western Europe) face an ex- shipping traffic approaching Suez. some legitimate (for example, Ethiopia
to exploit economic and psychological pensive choice: either take the long, Straits have always posed problems reneged on a border demarcation agree-
chokepoints. slow route around Africa’s Cape of Good for mariners. Odysseus had to squeeze ment), some less so (Eritrea supports So-
Hope or take the Suez shortcut but risk his ship between Scylla and Charbydis, mali Islamists in league with al-Qaida).
GEOGRAPHY provides Somalia’s attacks by pirates figurative monsters In May 2008, after meeting with
pirates with a throat to choke. Somali pi- operating from So- portraying the literal Eritrea’s president, Iran’s Mahmoud
rates pursue a strategy of attacking vul- malia’s convenient threat of narrowing Ahmadinejad announced that Iran and
nerable cargo ships as they approach or (and police-less) Austin cliffs, shoals and Eritrea shared “common views” on re-
Bay
exit a global maritime bottleneck, in this shores. The pirates, whirlpools. Today’s gional and global issues and were pre-
case Egypt’s Suez Canal, which connects like wolves eyeing literal monsters in- pared “to resist” the hegemonic system.
the Red and Mediterranean seas. a cattle herd gather- clude sea mines and The hegemonic system is the American-
The Gulf of Aden, where the majority ing in a valley pass, anti-ship missiles. led global system, which relies on cargo
of Somali pirate attacks occur, lies be- try to select the most No, the Bab al vessels passing through narrow straits.
tween the Horn of Africa and the Arabian vulnerable targets. Mandaab hasn’t been closed by mines
Peninsula. Sea lanes to and from the In- Now move north, and once again ge- and missiles — not yet. However, in late ERITREA’S attack on Djibouti sent
dian Ocean meet and narrow in the Gulf ography aids outlaws. The Bab al Man- spring 2008, Eritrea suddenly launched that message, an echo of the message
of Aden, making it a grand geographic daab, the strait connecting the Red Sea a brief border war with Djibouti over Iran sends every time it threatens to close
funnel for the Red Sea and Suez. and the Gulf of Aden, splits Yemen (on waterfront property. Eritrea, like Iran, is the Strait of Hormuz. That strait connects
the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf, and
10TH AMENDMENT: April 22, 2009 at least 30 percent of the world’s oil sup-
ply transits Hormuz in tankers. Close the
Hormuz chokepoint, and you damage
Parting company: The right to secede modern economies. Threaten to close it,
and the price of oil spikes — and Iran’s
mullahs pocket the cash. (As a histori-
T
cal note, today’s United Arab Emirates,
exas Gov. Rick Perry rattled delegates met to ratify the Constitution. to declare federal laws that have no next door to Hormuz, was once a “pirate
cages when he suggested that In their ratification document, they said, constitutional authority null and void coast,” with Hormuz providing targets.)
Texans might at some point “The People of Virginia declare and and refuse to enforce them. This isn’t a conspiracy theory, it’s
become so disgusted with Washington’s make known that the powers granted While the U.S. Constitution does geo-strategic chokepoint reality. Local
gross violation of the U.S. Constitution under the Constitution being derived not provide a specific provision for and even tribal issues actually propel
that they would want to secede from from the People of the United States nullification, the case for nullification many small-scale conflicts around the
the union. Political hustlers, their me- may be resumed by them whensoever is found in the nature of compacts and globe, but geography attracts other inter-
dia allies and others, who have little the same shall be perverted to their in- agreements. Our Constitution repre- ested parties and troublemakers. Radi-
understanding, are calling his remarks jury or oppression and that every power sents a compact between the states cal Islamists were very interested in the
treasonous. Let’s look at it. not granted thereby remains with them and the federal government. As with Achehnese rebellion on the Indonesian
and at their will.” any compact, one party does not have island of Sumatra. Yes, they shared re-
WHEN New York delegates met on a monopoly over its interpretation, nor ligious concerns, but Aceh Province also
July 26, 1788, their ratification docu- can one party change it without the con- bordered the entrance to the Straits of
ment read, “That the Powers of Gov- sent of the other. Additionally, no one Malacca, which connect the Indian and
ernment may be resumed by the People, Walter has a moral obligation to obey uncon- Pacific Oceans.
Williams
whensoever it shall become necessary stitutional laws. That’s not to say there The U.S. Navy will argue that com-
to their Happiness; that every Power, is not a compelling case for obedience pletely closing a major strait like Hor-
Jurisdiction and right which is not by of unconstitutional laws. That compel- muz is tough to do, and the Navy is
the said Constitution clearly delegated ling case is the brute force of the federal correct. But if an admiral says he hasn’t
to the Congress of the United States, government to coerce obedience, pos- pondered the military, economic and po-
or the departments of the government As demonstrated by the ratification sibly going as far as using its military litical challenges presented by near-si-
thereof, remains to the People of the documents of New York, Rhode Island might to lay waste to a disobedient state multaneous (likely coordinated) outlaw
several States, or to their respective and Virginia, they made it explicit that and its peoples. attacks that affect two or three major
State Governments to whom they may if the federal government perverted the straits, he’s spinning you.
have granted the same.” delegated rights, they had the right to FINALLY, here’s my secession
On May 29, 1790, the Rhode Island resume those rights. In fact, when the question for you. Some Americans ac- CYBER attackers also probe for
delegates made a similar claim in their Union was being formed, where the cept and have respect for the Tenth digital chokepoints. Computers guide
ratification document. “That the pow- states created the federal government, Amendment, which reads, “The pow- America’s electrical grids — they are an
ers of government may be resumed every state thought they had a right to ers not delegated to the United States information nexus. Two weeks ago, U.S.
by the people, whensoever it shall be- secede otherwise there would not have by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it intelligence agencies revealed that hack-
come necessary to their happiness: That been a Union. to the States, are reserved to the States ers (likely from China and Russia) had
the rights of the States respectively to respectively, or to the people.” Other inserted software that “could damage
nominate and appoint all State Officers, PERRY is right when he says that Americans, the majority I fear, say to (electrical grid) infrastructure.” Black-
and every other power, jurisdiction and there is no reason for Texas to secede. he— with the Tenth Amendment limits outs wreak economic havoc. Knocking
right, which is not by the said constitu- There are indeed intermediate actions on the federal government. Which is a out power nationally is a psychological
tion clearly delegated to the Congress short of secession that states can take. more peaceful solution: one group of and political shock. Cyberspace is com-
of the United States or to the depart- Thomas Jefferson said, “Whensoever Americans seeking to impose their vi- plex terrain, but the same idea obtains:
ments of government thereof, remain to the General Government assumes un- sion on others or simply parting com- squeeze a vulnerable throat.
the people of the several states, or their delegated powers, its acts are unau- pany?
__________________________________________ __________________________________________
respective State Governments to whom thoritative, void, and of no force.” That WALTER WILLIAMS AUSTIN BAY
they may have granted the same.” suggests that one response to federal (c) 2009, Creators Syndicate (c) 2009, Creators Syndicate
On June 26, 1788, Virginia’s elected encroachment is for state governments __________________________________________ __________________________________________
22 April 29, 2009 Conservative Chronicle
SECULAR AMERICA: April 17, 2009
Rendering unto Caesar in secular America
A
t the request of the White film director and was titled “Relationships
House, Georgetown Univer- Beyond Monogamy.”
sity covered up all the sym- At Loyola of Chicago that week, the
bols in Gaston Hall, before the Great Man Student Diversity and Cultural Affairs Of-
spoke, including IHS, the millennia-old fice presented “Brother to Brother,” a film,
monogram for the name of Jesus Christ. the Newman Society reports, about “a ho-
Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the So- mosexual African-American who is trans-
ciety of Jesus, had adopted the monogram ported in time to cavort with the allegedly
in his seal and it became an emblem of the homosexual Langston Hughes.”
Jesuit order. The movie is said to be part of “a se-
mester-long ‘Color of Queer Film Series,’
WHEN it comes to rendering unto sponsored by the university.”
Caesar, Georgetown is not going to be At Catholic Seattle University, that
outshone by Notre Dame, which stole a first week of Lent was “Transgender
march by offering the nation’s avatar of Awareness Week,” featuring a “session
abortion a doctorate on allegedly trans-
of laws degree, ho- gender Bible heroes
noris causa. and heroines and
Actually, it is re- Pat ‘Criss-Cross Day’
Buchanan
grettable the IHS in where students are
Gaston Hall was not encouraged to ‘come
covered up in shame dressed for the day the population is maintained only by mass The figure is surely higher among the
the first week of in your best gender- immigration and, secondarily, by conver- college young.
Lent. For that week bending outfit.” sions. Second reason for the triumph of secu-
Georgetown’s feminist and homosexual This is surely anecdotal evidence to Self-identified Christians in the United larism is that it long ago captured the Su-
clubs, such as GU Pride, put on a Gomor- confirm Newsweek in the conclusion States have fallen from 86 percent of the preme Court. Since the Everson decision
rah festival about alternative lifestyles reached in its cover story of Holy Week, population in 1990 to 76 percent today. of 1947, justices have expunged Christi-
called “Sex Positive Week.” “The End of Christian America.” Those who say they have no religion have anity and all its books and symbols from
Monday, according to the Newman Indeed, not only are many once-Catho- doubled as a share of the nation from eight the public square and public schools.
Club, featured a speaker for Black Rose, lic colleges and universities now wander- to 16 percent. Where 69 percent of Ameri- Voluntary prayer, the Ten Command-
which “provides a forum for many differ- ing in what Pope Benedict XVI calls a cans said we are a Christian country in ments, Bible reading, Christmas plays
ent expressions of power in love and play. “desert of godlessness,” Catholic belief 1990, only 62 percent say that today. and carols, Nativity scenes, Easter vaca-
This can include dominance & submis- and practice are not remotely what they America is being systematically de- tion, before-game prayers, benedictions
sion, bondage and discipline, fetishism, were before Vatican II. Where three-fourth Christianized and secularized. at graduations — all have been ordered
cross-dressing, to name a few.” of Catholics attended mass weekly in the For the social, moral and cultural rev- terminated by unelected judges — against
Ash Wednesday’s talk was “Torn About 1950s, today it is one-fourth. A third of all olution of the 1960s, rooted in non- and the will of the majority.
Porn,” advertised as a “discussion about Catholics raised in the Faith have fallen anti-Christian beliefs and values, has cap- Abortion on demand, too, was imposed
arguably alternative forms of pornography away. tured the culture, and converted many of by judicial fiat.
that are not supposed to be exploitative, the young. Among Americans 18 to 29, a Thus, as America ceases to be a Chris-
but rather radical and empowering.” ONE IN ten American adults is a fourth profess to be atheist, agnostic, or of tian country, it is ceasing to be a demo-
Saturday’s talk was by a pornographic lapsed Catholic. Catholicism’s quarter of no religious faith. cratic one.
Consider. In every referendum in 16
states, where homosexual marriage has
been on the ballot, majorities ranging from
52 to 86 percent have voted to outlaw it as
an absurdity and an abomination.
Yet, in Massachusetts, California and
Iowa, unelected judges have imposed it, as
they will in other states, regardless of what
the people want or how the people vote.
For secularism has become the established
religion of the American state and judges
are the high priests of the new order.
Yet, one wonders if they know what
lies at the end of the road upon which they
have set the nation.
For five decades, Americans resisted
Godless Communism. If they come to re-
alize they did so to save Godless Capital-
ism, or Godless Socialism, what happens
to loyalty and love of country?
TO LOVE one’s country, said Edmund
Burke, one’s country ought to be lovely. If
this is not God’s country anymore, whose
country is it?
__________________________________________
PAT BUCHANAN
(c) 2009, Creators Syndicate
__________________________________________
Conservative Chronicle April 29, 2009 23
CLIMATE BILL: April 15, 2009
The tyranny of the carbon control freaks
A
n absolute monstrosity of a tain on an impromptu black market all (the original liberal la-la land), own a geothermal and biomass by 2025. To
climate bill was introduced the household items they would ban black vehicle or plasma TV? heck with the laws of physics. Con-
in Congress last week, in the (which has already begun happening We’ve zoomed right past George gress has declared it, waved its mag-
name of saving us all from the “dan- with incandescent light bulbs, since Orwell’s 1984 and into something even ic wand, and evermore it shall be so.
ger” that is carbon. It clocks in at a they stupidly mandated compact fluo- more invasive and controlling and evil Do they honestly think they have the
massive 648 pages, a veritable phone rescents), the bill calls for the feds to than Big Brother. power of God? Not to mention that this
book-sized paean to totalitarian micro- bring legal charges in U.S. District On what planet could any of this is the direct outlawing of coal, oil and
management of every last detail of all Court against “any person possessing possibly be constitutional? There is nuclear power, but in a slower piece-
of our lives. or distributing in no way that the in- meal fashion that they hope no one will
commerce any cov- terstate commerce notice.
THIS legislative Frankenstein re-
writes building codes to affect every
ered product which
does not comply.” David clause — a co-fa-
vorite of the social- LASTLY, there’s the EPA’s re-clas-
Karki
single thing in your home, from the We will all be ist left, along with sifying of carbon as a “dangerous pol-
type of shingles on the roof (have to criminals, simply the equal protec- lutant” — never mind that CO2 is nat-
meet “solar reflectance standards,” for using common tion clause, when urally four percent of the atmosphere
whatever the heck those are) to fur- household devices it comes to falsely and all plants breathe it as we do ox-
naces, washers/dryers, dishwashers, that the enviro-loo- justifying infinite ygen – which will prompt a second
showerheads, faucets, toilets, lamps, nies declare to be “wasteful.” government — allows for intrusive- avalanche of new freedom-crushing
light bulbs ... you name it, if self-ap- If you like the War on Drugs, you’ll ness so vast that it obliterates the rest regulations, covering everything from
pointed energy dictator Rep. Henry love the War on All Non-Green Energy of the document in which it resides. lawn mowers to livestock flatulence
“Nosferatu” Waxman thinks it uses one Consuming Devices. Ready to go to And that’s only the half of it; the (“enteric fermentation”).
tiny bit too much, it’s banned. jail for doing laundry? Or bathing? Or breathtaking arrogance and hubris con- The end result of all this will be eco-
And if you defy the dictators on keeping your thermostat set one degree tinues with a mandate that 25 percent nomic destruction. The gargantuan tax
the Potomac and dare to hoard or ob- too high? Or, if you live in California of electricity come from solar, wind, increase all this represents — as ev-
eryone will have to throw out all their
SUSAN BOYLE: April 21, 2009 old stuff and buy and install new, much
more expensive stuff that complies with
this insanity — will ruin this country.
Pretty woman — internal beauty The lifestyle and standard of living to
which we’ve become accustomed will
be lowered for everyone, as the basics
F
of modern existence consume a much
or two days I contemplated Cowell asks her to share her dream. PEOPLE are crying, not from the ex- larger share of our income.
the phenomenon that is Susan Boyle says she wants to be like the Eng- ternal beauty represented by Holden, but But even more than that, this bill
Boyle. As nearly everyone must lish musical theater legend Elaine Paige. because of the internal beauty projected will be the complete destruction of per-
know by now, Boyle is the Scottish singer Cowell seems to struggle to hide his dis- by Susan Boyle. sonal liberty. These green fascists want
who blew away the judges, the audience dain, as if to say, “yes, and I’d like to be I have worked in television most of to control everyone and everything,
— and by the millions of YouTube hits — prime minister.” He asks her what she my professional life. I see many women down to the most minute and trivial
much of the world with her performance intends to sing and she announces, “I before they have their hair and makeup detail of our lives. Or, to quote one of
on the Britain’s Got Talent television pro- Dreamed a Dream” from Les Miserables. done. Most are good looking enough; the charges against King George III in
gram. One of the judges is heard to mutter, “a some are just average. But when they the Declaration of Independence: “He
difficult song.” emerge from their makeovers, they have has erected a multitude of New Offic-
SUSAN BOYLE’S performance is been transformed into something they are es, and sent hither swarms of Officers
not the entire story, however. She’s had not. Reality was before. They are now to harass our people and eat out their
her magnificent voice since she was a
young girl. We are the story because of Cal someone’s fantasy.
Even though we know where physical
substance.”
The one who is a criminal here isn’t
Thomas
our reaction to her. beauty ultimately leads — to wrinkles and an average person with older light bulbs
Watch the seven-minute YouTube sometimes to despair — we still worship or whose showerhead doesn’t meet
video to get the full impact. One sees two it. The 18th-century English poet Thomas with the enviro-wackos’ approval, but
young men assisting Susan backstage. Gray got to the heart of it when he wrote: Rep. Waxman and his fellow despots
We quickly size her up: a nearly 48-year- “The boast of heraldry, the pomp of in Congress and the EPA. They are us-
old woman with graying hair, a dress that The music begins and not 12 bars pow’r, ing environmentalism as a front for the
looks as if it might have been purchased elapse before a stunned audience erupts And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er most thuggish dictatorial control imag-
at the British equivalent of Wal-Mart hug- in applause. All those hypocrites who gave. inable. This must be fought with every
ging a body that even she described as thought nothing good could come from Awaits alike the inevitable hour: fiber of our being and stopped any way
“like a garage.” Frumpy is the word that this dowdy woman because our narcissis- The paths of glory lead but to the it can.
first comes to mind. tic culture has taught us that the only thing grave.” For those patriotic Americans at-
As she walks on stage, the condescen- that matters is beauty, not depth of charac- In an interview with a British newspa- tending Tea Party protests across the
sion is as thick as a London fog. The judges ter, suddenly want to embrace what sec- per, Susan Boyle said, “Modern society nation today, I’d suggest you forget the
are Piers Morgan, a former tabloid news- onds ago they had instinctively rejected. is too quick to judge people on their ap- little bags of Lipton. Incandescent light
paper editor, the irritating Simon Cowell, More music, more words and the au- pearances. There is not much you can do bulbs and three-gallon flush toilets
the show’s creator and also the co-host on dience is on its feet cheering. Slowly, the about it; it is the way they think; it is the should be the symbols of this nascent
America’s talent reality show American gorgeous Amanda Holden rises to applaud way they are. But maybe this could teach revolution.
Idol, and Amanda Holden, a beautiful, and the contrast could not be starker. Two them a lesson, or set an example.”
blonde English actress. The message they women are standing, one the incarnation THEY would represent the clue
send with their facial expressions and of all we define as beautiful, the other ex- LET’S HOPE it does both. government doesn’t have, and the place
body language is reinforced by cutaway uding a depth of beauty that Holden and where this bill needs to go.
__________________________________________
shots of the audience: What are you doing the entire audience wishes it possessed. CAL THOMAS
__________________________________________
DAVID KARKI
here? Shouldn’t you be mopping the stage The faux beauty is paying tribute to the (c) 2009, Tribune Media Services (c) 2009, North Star Writers Group
instead of singing on it? reality. __________________________________________ __________________________________________
24 April 29, 2009 Conservative Chronicle
LIBERAL JUSTICES: April 21, 2009
Ginsburg’s judicial activism goes international
S
upreme Court Justice Ruth failed to mention its judicial activism in
Bader Ginsburg wasn’t dozing legalizing same-sex marriage.
off when she appeared recently Ginsburg claimed that our failure to
at a symposium at Ohio State Universi- cite foreign decisions has resulted in di-
ty’s School of Law. Credited with writ- minished influence for the U.S. Supreme
ing several feminist precepts into U.S. Court. Most of us can think of many other
constitutional law based on the spurious reasons why judicial activism is deplored
notion that our Constitution is a “living” by Americans.
(i.e., re-interpretable) document, she now Ginsburg’s views may not seem so far
wants to expand that process to welcome out when we are confronted with Barack
foreign law. Obama’s appointments. His choice of
Harold Koh, former dean of the Yale Law
TAKING a gratuitous swipe at her School, to be the State Department’s le-
Supreme Court colleagues who have spo- gal adviser may be a harbinger of things
ken out against to come.
citing foreign law Koh has been
(which, as gentle-
men, they will Phyllis quoted by other
lawyers as tell-
Schlafly
graciouslypretend ing a 2007 audi-
they didn’t hear), ence that “in an
Ginsburg said, appropriate case,
“Why shouldn’t he didn’t see any Sharia courts in the United Kingdom tionalist. Trans-nationalists believe the
we look to the reason why Shar- have already been permitted to decide “living” Constitution allows us to import
wisdom of a judge from abroad?” Any ia law would not be applied to govern a cases of domestic violence, rather than the fiction of what is called international
first-year law student should be able to case in the United States.” Sharia is the referring them to British criminal courts. law into U.S. law (i.e., “domesticate” it),
answer that question: because all judges, Muslim law that, among other extreme Under Sharia, which Muslims consider thereby putting the United States under a
before donning their black robes, raised punishments, allows stoning women to the unalterable law of Allah, men have global legal system.
their right hands and swore “to support death for the “crime” of being raped. the right to beat disobedient wives. Since Obama called himself a “citi-
this Constitution.” Although much of American law was zen of the world,” pledged to “rejoin the
The Court’s four conservatives all op- copied from the British, I wonder if Ruth ONE FEMINIST who got the mes- world community” and declared in his in-
pose citing foreign laws or decisions in Bader Ginsburg would agree with Arch- sage about the mistreatment of women auguration speech that U.S. power “does
rulings on U.S. cases. Chief Justice John bishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams was former Rep. Pat Schroeder. Her final (not) entitle us to do as we please,” we can
G. Roberts Jr. was explicit during his when he said that use of Islamic law is legislative achievement was to get Con- assume that his appointments will reflect
confirmation hearings, explaining that now “unavoidable” in Britain. He wants gress to pass a law making the practice of those views. One test of his commitment
no foreign judge was appointed by or to allow the United Kingdom’s large and female genital mutilation a U.S. federal to globalism will be his relationship with
confirmed by anyone accountable to the growing Muslim population to bypass crime. the International Criminal Court (ICC).
American people. British law in Muslim neighborhoods In a Fordham Law Review article, President Bush withdrew the United
Ginsburg even deplored U.S. failure and use Sharia for marital disputes and Koh revealed himself as a thoroughgo- States from the ICC on May 6, 2002.
to cite the Canadian Supreme Court. She inheritance. ing globalist, or in his term, a trans-na- Standing up for American sovereignty, he
rejected the jurisdiction of a foreign court
that is not bound by the U.S. Constitution,
our laws or our due process protections.
Shortly after Obama was sworn in as
president, U.S. Permanent Representa-
tive to the United Nations Susan Rice
praised the ICC as “an important and
credible instrument for trying to hold ac-
countable the senior leadership responsi-
ble for atrocities committed in the Congo,
Uganda and Darfur.” This olive branch
extended to the ICC raised foreign “ex-
pectations” that the United States will ac-
cept the authority of the ICC.
Some even argue that the ICC can
grab and try U.S. political and military
leaders even though the United States is
not a party to the treaty. Just this year, an
impudent Spanish court tried to assert ju-
risdiction over six Bush administration
officials.
IT SHOULD be the Senate’s duty to
require all judicial nominees to proclaim
their fealty to the U.S. Constitution as
written and their rejection of the use of
any foreign laws or courts.
__________________________________________
PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY
(c) 2009, Creators Syndicate
__________________________________________
Conservative Chronicle April 29, 2009 2
OBAMA PRESIDENCY: April 22, 2009
Obama welcomes America-bashing
O
f all the bizarre fictions I think my presence here indicates, the
that the media have spread United States has changed over time.”
about Barack Obama, the Now there’s a powerful defense of
strangest is that’s he non-ideological. your country, President Obama.
The supreme purveyor of this fantasy Obama’s so egotistical he thinks
is Obama himself. During his trip to America has two historical eras, Be-
Tobago to meet with Latin American fore Obama and the Glorious Now.
leaders, the president claimed, “we After sitting through a 50-minute dia-
can make progress when we’re willing tribe from that communist thug Daniel
to break free from some of the stale Ortega, who ranted that America had
debates and old ideologies.” That’s a unleashed a century of expansionist
pretty funny sentence when your for- aggression, Obama’s response wasn’t
eign policy reeks of Jimmy Carter, fer- national, just personal: “I’m grateful ica: Five Centuries of Pillage of a bleeding the Americas to death.
mented since 1977. that President Ortega did not blame me Continent. Its author, Eduardo Ga- Yet one more powerful — oh, never
for things that happened when I was leano, typically described America mind.
IN A room stuffed with Marx- three months old.” under President Bush as a terrorist American reporters saw this as a
ist crackpots like Venezuela’s Hugo Apparently, that sorry act of aggres- war machine in a 2006 Pacifica Radio glorious moment. Time’s Tim Padgett
Chavez and Ni- sion was John F. interview: “This $2,600 million spent said the hate-America gift was appro-
caragua’s Daniel Kennedy’s failed each day to kill other people, this ma- priate, because Obama “proved at the
Ortega, Obama
came not to lec- Brent Bay of Pigs attempt
to rid Cuba of Fi-
chine of killing peoples, devouring the
world resources, eating the world re-
Trinidad summit to be the first U.S.
president to get it.” Obama “gets” the
Bozell
ture, but to charm. del Castro. Few sources each day. So this is a terrorist America-haters. But how would he
America’s just one corrected Obama’s structure indeed, and we are in danger, respond to the charge that Franklin
country among mistake — that lost so President Bush is right, I think. We Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor Policy”
many, and he was battle occurred a are suffering a terrorist menace.” or John Kennedy’s “Alliance for Prog-
“inclined to lis- few months before ress” was just more imperialistic ag-
ten and not just talk.” There were no the world was transformed by his birth. BUT WHEN Chavez handed him gression? Is it simply inappropriate
“junior partners” in the Americas, just The president was asked later what he Galeano’s 30-year-old communist dia- to defend American presidents, even
partners. He came not to defend Amer- thought about Ortega’s speech, and he tribe, Obama could only say, “I think when they’re Democrats? The “evil
ica, but to calmly hear it trashed, and said, “It was 50 minutes long. That’s it was, it was a nice gesture to give me empire” narrative must always be lis-
win people over with his charisma. what I thought.” a book. I’m a reader.” Being obsessed tened to with respect — and without
Obama believes in his charisma far There’s another powerful way with himself, Obama also said he rebuttal?
more than he believes in America. to defend your country, President should have given Chavez his books. Only Obama deserves respect, ap-
“I didn’t come here to debate the Obama. He added that Chavez’s harsh rhetoric parently. Padgett thought the Latin
past,” Obama declared. “I came here Obama was just as non-confron- didn’t mean they couldn’t engage in leftists should show respect by reading
to deal with the future.” He explicit- tational with that other thug Chavez, civil dialogue. There’s only one thing the president’s own masterful books in
ly claimed his own biracial skin dis- who pressed him with a copy of a wrong with that sentiment: It’s not civ- order to admire his “common-sense,
played a new openness on America’s book-length anti-American diatribe il dialogue for Chavez to demand that post-ideological political philosophy.”
part: “As has already been noted, and called The Open Veins of Latin Amer- Obama read about how his country is To glimpse at the warped worldview
of our media elite, look no further than
a news “analysis” by Steven Hurst of
the Associated Press, who compared
Obama favorably to ... Mikhail Gor-
bachev. Apparently, like Gorbachev,
Obama presides over a corrupt and
crumbling empire: “During his short
— by Soviet standards — tenure, he
scrambled incessantly to shed the
ideological entanglements that were
leading the communist empire toward
ruin. But Obama is outpacing even
Gorbachev.”
THE LEFTIST media look at
Obama and see themselves. There
are no “ideological entanglements.”
They’re just out to make the world a
better place, insisting that America
needs to shrink itself into a smaller,
quieter, less “judgmental” partner, and
do so while the Western hemisphere
goes off a left-wing cliff.
__________________________________________
BRENT BOZELL
(c) 2009, Creators Syndicate
__________________________________________
26 April 29, 2009 Conservative Chronicle
INTERROGATION: April 22, 2009
CIA waterboarding: Intel that stopped L.A. attack
“Soon, you will know.” On Tuesday, the CIA confirmed to me
That is the ominous statement an un- that it stands by assertions credited to the
cooperative Khalid Sheikh Mohammed agency in this 2005 memo that subjecting
(KSM), mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, KSM to “enhanced techniques” of interroga-
terrorist attacks, told his Central Intelli- tion — including waterboarding — caused
gence Agency interrogators when they ini- him to reveal information that allowed the
tially asked him, after he had been captured, U.S. government to stop a planned 9-11-
about additional planned al Qaeda attacks style attack on Los Angeles.
on the United States. The previously classified memo was re-
leased by President Obama last week.
IN MARCH 2003, KSM became the Before they were waterboarded, both
third and final terrorist ever waterboarded KSM and Abu Zubaydah did not believe
by the CIA. The other two were Abu Zubay- Americans had the will to stop al Qaeda, the
dah and Rahim Al-Nashiri. 2005 Justice Department memo says, citing
So few were wa- information from the
terboarded because CIA.
the CIA was so strict
in the criteria for de- Terence “Both KSM and
Zubaydah had ‘ex-
Jeffrey
ciding when the tech- pressed their be-
nique could be used. lief that the general
As CIA Acting U.S. population was
General Counsel John ‘weak,’ lacked resil- memo, referring to information CIA pro- which led the CIA (to) Hambali’s brother,
A. Rizzo explained in ience and would be vided to Justice. al-Hadi. Using information obtained from
a 2004 letter to then-Acting Assistant At- unable to ‘do what was necessary’ to pre- multiple sources, al-Hadi was captured, and
torney General Daniel Levin of the Justice vent the terrorists from succeeding in their “YOU have informed us that informa- he subsequently identified the Garuba cell.
Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, the goals,’” said the memo. “Indeed, before the tion obtained from KSM also led to the With the aid of this additional information,
CIA would only resort to waterboarding a CIA used enhanced techniques in its inter- capture of Riduan bin Isomuddin, better interrogations of Hambali confirmed much
top al Qaeda leader when the agency had rogation of KSM, KSM resisted giving any known as Hambali, and the discovery of the of what was learned from KSM.”
“credible intelligence that a terrorist attack answers to questions about future attacks, Guraba Cell, a 17-member Jemaah Islami- A CIA spokesman confirmed to me on
is imminent,” “substantial and credible indi- simply noting, ‘Soon, you will know.’” yah cell tasked with executing the ‘Second Tuesday, as I first reported on CNSNews.
cators that the subject has actionable intelli- After he was waterboarded, KSM pro- Wave,’” said the memo. com, that the CIA stands by the factual as-
gence that can prevent, disrupt or deny this vided the CIA with information that al- “More specifically, we understand that sertions made here.
attack” and “(o)ther interrogation methods lowed the U.S. government to close down a KSM admitted that he had (redaction) large While waterboarding was exceedingly
have failed to elicit the information within terror cell already “tasked” with flying a jet sum of money to an al Qaeda associate rare in CIA interrogations of al Qaeda ter-
the perceived time limit for preventing the into a building in Los Angeles. (redaction) ... . Khan subsequently identi- rorists, it was routinely used on certain
attack.” “You have informed us that the interroga- fied the associate (Zubair), who was then members of our own armed forces who
Rizzo’s letter, as quoted here, was cited tion of KSM — once enhanced techniques captured,” said the memo. “Zubair, in turn, went through “Survival, Evasion, Resis-
in a May 30, 2005, memo to Rizzo from were employed — led to the discovery of a provided information that led to the arrest tance, Escape” (SERE) training. According
then-Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney KSM plot, the ‘Second Wave,’ ‘to use East of Hambali. The information acquired from to another previously classified memo that
General Steven G. Bradbury, also of the Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner these captures allowed CIA interrogators Obama released last week, some branches
Office of Legal Counsel. into’ a building in Los Angeles,” says the to pose more specific questions to KSM, of the U.S. military stopped using water-
boarding in training certain troops not be-
cause waterboarding had harmful long-term
effects, but because it was so universally ef-
fective in extracting information.
“With respect to the waterboard, you
have also orally informed us that the Navy
continues to use it in training,” said a 2002
Office of Legal Counsel memo to the CIA’s
Rizzo. “You have informed us that other
services ceased use of the waterboard be-
cause it was so successful as an interroga-
tion technique but not because of any con-
cerns over harm, physical or mental, caused
by it. It was also reported to be almost 100
percent effective in producing cooperation
among trainees.”
According to the CIA, it produced coop-
eration in the mastermind of 9-11 and thus
yielded information used to stop a 9-11 type
attack on the West Coast.
PRESIDENT Obama says he has pro-
hibited the interrogation techniques de-
scribed in the Justice Department memos he
released. Next time the CIA catches a KSM,
they must be kinder and gentler with him.
__________________________________________
TERENCE JEFFREY
(c) 2009, Creators Syndicate
__________________________________________
Conservative Chronicle April 29, 2009 27
FOREIGN POLICY: April 20, 2009
Back to the future: Obama’s foreign policy
A
s Barack Obama finishes W. Bush’s surge strategy, decided to som be paid and that the pirates not be 21st century” in which he called for “a
up his second major foreign keep large numbers of troops there for set free. And he authorized the use of world without nuclear weapons.” A no-
tour, a pattern in his approach another 19 months and an unspecified deadly force, with the happy result that ble goal, and one shared incidentally by
to foreign policy seems to be emerging. number after that. Responsibly, he de- three Navy Seal bullets killed three pi- Ronald Reagan. And how did he propose
On pressing matters of obvious impor- cided not to snatch defeat from the jaws rates and the captain was rescued. Some to start? By negotiating a new nuclear
tance, he has made responsible decisions of victory. On Afghanistan, in line with critics grumbled that he had no other arms control treaty with Russia, getting
that have not been far out of line with the his campaign rheto- course. But I give the Senate to ratify the nuclear test ban
policies of his predecessor and current ric that this was the him credit here, as treaty and stopping U.S. production of
necessities. But when it comes to setting
priorities for the future, he has chosen
good war Bush was
neglecting, he has
Michael on Iraq and Afghan-
istan, for making
fissile material.
That’s all Cold War stuff. Disarma-
to emphasize initiatives that seem more
appropriate to situations America faced
in his college years, the late 1970s and
decided to send in
more troops, and his
envoy Richard Hol-
Barone responsible choices
under considerable
pressure.
ment talks with the Soviets were a cen-
tral feature of American foreign policy
from the late 1960s to the late 1980s,
early 1980s, than to the threats America brooke has pressed His choice of a time when a U.S.-Soviet nuclear war
faces today. the Pakistani government to fight the Is- priorities for the future is another thing. would have produced enormous destruc-
lamist terrorists, too. The climax of his European trip was his tion. But the prospect of a U.S.-Russian
CANDIDATE Obama campaigned On Easter week, confronted with the speech in Prague on April 5 (don’t look nuclear war today is pretty much nil. It’s
as the man who would lead us out of Iraq. seizure of an American ship captain by for it on the White House web site; the worthwhile to continue the Nunn-Lugar
President Obama, admitting belatedly Somali pirates, he authorized negotia- latest speech text there is dated Feb. 27) program of corralling Russia’s loose
and begrudgingly the success of George tions but apparently insisted that no ran- on “the future of nuclear weapons in the nukes — one of the few issues Obama
worked on as a senator — but making
MEXICO: April 16, 2009 disarmament talks with Russia a first pri-
ority is a policy out of the distant past.
To be sure, Obama did talk about
Support Mexico in its trajectory nuclear threats from North Korea and
Iran, with talk being the operative word.
But he promised to defend against the
P
wayward states with “a missile defense
resident Barack Obama went rightly considered such powerful play- — that Mexico’s drug-trafficking prob- system that is cost-effective and proven”
to Mexico and, unlike many of ers operating outside the rule of law in- lem emanates from north of the border, — code words indicating that he shares
his presidential predecessors, tolerable. the source of dollars to buy the cartels’ most Democrats’ hostility to missile de-
didn’t stay in a remote resort, but in the He has undertaken a courageous drugs and of guns to arm them. fense left over from the Cold War era,
midst of Mexico City, the sprawling fight, with all of Mexican officialdom Mexico needs to hear this message when they feared it would destabilize the
metropolis of 20 million. — at least the uncorrupted portion for reasons of prickly national pride, U.S.-Soviet balance of terror. The real
— under threat. In contrast to the tra- even if it is beside the point. Americans need today is a system robust enough
THE VISIT — Obama’s first stop in ditional Latin American way of internal aren’t going to stop using drugs, nor to repel and deter the much smaller but
Latin America — and the locale — the warfare, Calderón is respecting civil are we going to decriminalize them to much likelier threats from North Korea
capital where an American president liberties. And he has sought to continue collapse their market price. Even if the and Iran.
hadn’t visited in 12 years — sent the to reform the increasingly open Mexi- supply of American guns dried up over- And what was Obama’s major policy
signal that the United States is commit- can economy. night, the rest of Latin America bristles announcement before embarking on his
ted to a country that is a punching bag with surplus weaponry. trip to Latin America? Lifting restric-
in American domestic politics, but an No, the ultimate solution is within tions on travel and remittances to Cuba.
indispensable ally in a region buffeted
by revolutionary left-wing politics.
Rich Mexico. The country is fundamentally
engaged in a war of counterinsurgency.
In 1961, the year Obama was born, Cuba
was a central preoccupation of American
As if to underscore the stakes, on
the eve of Obama’s visit, another doz-
en were killed in a shootout between
Lowry As the classic theorist of such wars,
Bernard Fall, wrote, “When a country
is being subverted it is not being out-
foreign policy. Today, Cuba (popula-
tion 11 million) is not a major problem.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration
Mexican soldiers and drug traffickers. fought; it is being outadministered.” violates the NAFTA treaty by banning
Mexico now produces headlines — of Mexico is perceived in the U.S. as Mexico has to assert lawful governmen- trucks from Mexico (population 109
beheadings and similar acts of savage- the inevitably hopeless sad sack south tal authority in areas where the cartels million), refuses to ratify the free trade
ry by the traffickers — that one more of the border. This image ignores its dominate and improve its governmental agreement with Colombia (population
readily associates with the war zones of slow upward trajectory. Calderón is bet- capacity — something neglected by the 44 million) and, despite our need for
the Middle East. Last year alone, 6,300 ter than his predecessor, Vicente Fox, Merida Initiative — across the board. alternative fuels, makes no move to re-
people died in drug violence, more than who was better than his predecessor, scind the 54 cent tariff on sugar ethanol
the number of American troops killed Ernesto Zedillo, and so on. It is in our IT CAN be done, as demonstrated from Brazil (population 191 million).
in the entirety of the Iraq and Afghan interest to foster this (hardly inevitable) by our other central ally in the region,
wars. trend. In 2006, Calderón narrowly beat Colombia. It truly faced state collapse OBAMA campaigned as the candi-
A recent Pentagon analysis raised the Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a Hugo a few years ago, confronting a drug- date of hope and change. But on press-
prospect of Mexico becoming a failed Chávez sympathizer. fueled insurgency that controlled parts ing matters, he has, responsibly, not
state. That dire, frequently repeated of the country and fielded organized produced as much change as many of
phrase can be misleading. The Mexican LAST year, the U.S. government troops. Aided by the massive Plan Co- his supporters expected. And in setting
state is threatened, but not failed. Presi- passed the Merida Initiative, $1.4 bil- lombia from the U.S., President Álvaro priorities, he seems to be heading back
dent Felipe Calderón wants to do all the lion worth of aid over three years to help Uribe outfought — and outadministered to the distant past, to the disarmament
right things. Mexico in its fight against the cartels. — his country’s enemies. President debates of the 1970s and 1980s, to the
Drug violence has escalated because A worthy effort, although the aid has Calderón can do the same — provided frenzy over Cuba in 1961-62. Is that the
he rejected the modus vivendi previous been tied up in procurement disputes in we stand by him. change we need?
Mexican leaders honored with the car- the U.S. and has barely begun trickling
__________________________________________ __________________________________________
tels and criminal gangs. So long as they into Mexico. Meanwhile, Obama has RICH LOWRY MICHAEL BARONE
didn’t interfere in politics, they were echoed a theme of Secretary of State (c) 2009, King Features Syndicate (c) 2009, Creators Syndicate
left to their illicit pursuits. Calderón Hillary Clinton on her Mexican trip __________________________________________ __________________________________________
28 April 29, 2009 Conservative Chronicle
HUGO CHAVEZ: April 21, 2009
An ugly handshake with Hugo Chavez
I
n one photo, President Obama If Barack Obama had been president in
is grinning as he clasps Hugo 1977, would he have shaken Pol Pot’s
Chavez by the hand. In another, hand? Chavez is not Pol Pot, of course.
he grasps Chavez warmly by the shoul- Nor even as evil as Ahmadinejad. Yet.
der. Those pictures disgusted several But despite his sometimes clownish be-
members of Congress. Some said so on havior, Chavez is more Mussolini than
national television. Charlie Chaplin.
Obama further justified his “cour-
RESPONDING to criticism of this tesy” toward Chavez by observing that
encounter, the president was by turns Venezuela’s “defense budget is prob-
cavalier and obtuse. About the left- ably 1/600th of the U.S. They own Cit-
wing rant of a book Chavez gave him, go. It’s unlikely that as a consequence
Obama said mildly, “It was a nice ges- of me shaking hands or having a polite
ture to give me a book. I’m a reader.” conversation with Mr. Chavez that we
Regarding the smil- are endangering the
ing greeting to an strategic interests of
oil-rich, America
hating, opposition Mona the United States.”
This is prov-
Charen
silencing, drug ing to be one of
smuggling Castro Obama’s favorite
acolyte, Obama as- straw men (and he
serted, “We had this has so many!). He the past decade since coming to power, tro in other ways. In his jails you can
debate throughout said something very Chavez has obstructed all U.S. efforts find people whose only crime was to
the campaign. This whole notion that similar about Iran during the campaign. to fight drug traffickers, banned over- oppose the regime. Humberto Quintero
somehow if we showed courtesy or But no one is suggesting that shaking flights by Drug Enforcement Agency was arrested in 2005 for capturing a se-
opened up dialogue with governments hands with Chavez endangers national aircraft and provided safe haven for nior FARC leader. Francisco Uson was
previously hostile that we were soft. security. And no sensible person be- FARC leaders. According to U.S. News sentenced to five and a half years for
Only the American people didn’t buy it. lieves that it is only through building and World Report, “It is no coincidence making public comments about human
And there’s a good reason the American militaries to rival our own that nations that during Chavez’s presidency, Ven- rights violations in Venezuela. Opposi-
people didn’t buy it. Because it didn’t can be threatening to their neighbors, to ezuela has turned into a major conduit tion television stations have lost their
make sense.” us and to the world. for the transshipment of cocaine. De- licenses, and opposition newspapers
Isn’t it the case that some leaders, by spite FARC’s killing of thousands of ci- have been closed.
their dangerous and destructive actions, IT WAS Obama himself who noted vilians and its continued holding of 700 Chavez is also leading, directing and
forfeit the right to warm greetings? Is soon after his election that Chavez is hostages, among them Venezuelans, the encouraging state-sponsored harass-
there anyone Obama would decline to providing support to the narco-terrorist oil-rich Chavez government confessed ment of Venezuela’s tiny Jewish com-
exchange friendly greetings with at a group FARC in neighboring Colombia. its direct support for and solidarity with munity. Venezuela has a 200-year histo-
diplomatic encounter? How about Rob- FARC has conducted a reign of terror in the region’s most notorious terrorist ry of benevolent treatment of its Jewish
ert Mugabe? Kim Jong Il? Chavez’s Colombia and also plays a major role in group.” minority. Chavez has changed all that
close friend Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? funneling drugs to the United States. In Chavez is mimicking his hero Cas- and aroused real fear. Synagogues have
been attacked, desecrated and vandal-
ized, their buildings spray painted with
epithets like “Death to Israel. Get out
Jews.” Half the Jewish population has
fled since Chavez came to power.
During the war between Israel and
Hamas last year, government media
outlets maintained a steady campaign of
vituperation against Israel and against
the Jews of Venezuela. A government
newspaper suggested confiscating the
property of Venezuelan Jews who sup-
ported Israel and distributing it to Pal-
estinians, denouncing Venezuelan Jews
in public, and boycotting Jewish-owned
businesses. The Cardinal of Venezuela,
Jorge Urosa, has been outspoken on
behalf of Venezuela’s Jews, as was the
Papal Nuncio, who last year had a hand
grenade lobbed onto his property for his
trouble.
ALL OF that should have been in
President Obama’s mind before he ex-
tended that friendly grin and handshake.
It’s not that he endangered national se-
curity. Rather, he diminished his own
moral standing and, by extension, ours.
__________________________________________
MONA CHAREN
(c) 2009, Creators Syndicate
__________________________________________
Conservative Chronicle April 29, 2009 29
RUSSIA: April 19, 2009
The incredible shrinking country — Russia
A
merica’s “progressive” pres- Other than vodka, for what manufac-
ident has some peculiarly tured good would you look to Russia?
retro policies. Domestically, Caviar? It is extracted from the fish that
his reactionary liberalism is exempli- manufacture it.
fied by his policy of No Auto Company Today, in a world bristling with new
Left Behind, with its intimated hope threats, the president suggests address-
that depopulated Detroit, where cattle ing an old one — Russia’s nuclear ar-
could graze, can somehow return to senal. It remains potentially dangerous,
something like the 1950s. Abroad, he particularly if a portion of it falls into
seems to yearn for the 1970s, when the nonstate hands. But what is the future
Soviet Union was rampant and coping of the backward and backsliding klep-
with it supposedly depended on arms tocratic thugocracy that is Vladimir
control. Putin’s Russia?
Putin — ignore the human Potemkin
ACTUALLY, what was needed villager (Dmitry Medvedev) who cur-
was not the chimera of arms control rently occupies the presidential office
but Ronald Reagan’s renewal of the — must be amazed and amused that
arms race that helped break the Soviet America’s president wants to treat Rus-
regime. The stately sia as a great power.
minuet of arms ne- Obama should in-
gotiations helped
sustain U.S. pub- George stead study perti-
nent demographic haps more than seven percent of chil- nomenon so extreme that it has given
Will
lic support for the trends. dren abandoned by their parents to or- rise to an ominous new term — hyper-
parallel weapons Nicholas Eb- phanages or government care or life as mortality.” Because of rampant HIV/
spending. erstadt’s essay “street children.” Furthermore, “mind- AIDS, extreme drug-resistant tubercu-
Significant arms “Drunken Nation” numbing, stupefying binge drinking of losis (XDR-TB) and alcoholism, and
agreements are in the current World hard spirits” — including poisonously the deteriorating health care system, a
generally impossible until they are un- Affairs quarterly notes that Russia is impure home brews — “is an accepted U.N. report says “mortality in Russia is
important. Significant agreements are experiencing “a relentless, unremitting, norm in Russia and greatly increases three to five times higher for men and
those that substantially alter an adver- and perhaps unstoppable depopulation.” the danger of fatal injury through falls, twice as high for women” than in other
sarial dynamic between rival powers. Previous episodes of depopulation — traffic accidents, violent confrontations, countries at a comparable stage of de-
But arms agreements never do. During 1917-23, 1933-34, 1941-46 — were the homicide, suicide, and so on.” Male life velopment. The report, Walker says,
the Cold War, for example, arms ne- results of civil war, Stalin’s war on the expectancy is lower under Putin than it “predicts that within little more than a
gotiations were another arena of great “kulaks” and collectivization of agri- was a half-century ago under Khrush- decade the working-age population will
power competition rather than an ame- culture, and World War II, respectively. chev. be shrinking by up to one million peo-
lioration of that competition. But today’s depopulation is occurring ple annually.” Be that as it may, “Russia
The Soviet Union was a third-world in normal — for Russia — social and MARTIN Walker of the Woodrow is suffering a demographic decline on
nation with first-world missiles. It had, political circumstances. Normal condi- Wilson Center in Washington, writing a scale that is normally associated with
as Russia still has, an essentially hunter- tions include a subreplacement fertil- in the Wilson Quarterly (“The World’s the effects of a major war.”
gatherer economy, based on extraction ity rate, sharply declining enrollment New Numbers”), notes that Russia’s de- According to projections by the
industries — oil, gas, minerals, furs. rates for primary school pupils, per- clining fertility is magnified by “a phe- United Nations Population Division,
Russia’s population, which was around
143 million four years ago, might be
as high as 136 million or as low as 121
million in 2025, and as low as 115 mil-
lion in 2030.
Marx envisioned the “withering
away” of the state under mature com-
munism. Instead, Eberstadt writes, the
world may be witnessing the withering
away of Russia, where Marxism was
supposed to be the future that works.
Russia, he writes, “has pioneered a
unique new profile of mass debilitation
and foreshortened life previously un-
known in all of human history.”
“HISTORY,” he concludes, “offers
no examples of a society that has dem-
onstrated sustained material advance
in the face of long-term population
decline.” Demography is not by itself
destiny, but it is more real than an arms
control “process” that merely expresses
the liberal hope of taming the world by
wrapping it snugly in parchment.
__________________________________________
GEORGE WILL
(c) 2009, Washington Post Writers Group
__________________________________________
30 April 29, 2009 Conservative Chronicle
PIRATES: April 14, 2009
Victory at sea and the American heroes
H
ome is the sailor, home from captain with his AK-47. That was all the
sea. Capt. Richard Phillips, his Seals needed to act. Three snipers, three
five-day ordeal happily con- perfect shots in the head. All fired at dusk
cluded, has been rescued in the finest tra- from a distance using night-vision scopes.
dition of the United States Navy, and his End of story. Beginning of celebration.
captors dealt with. Effectively and sum- There was a time when America cel-
marily. ebrated its heroes, when victorious troops
marched in victory parades and every
IN ORDER to save his ship and crew, schoolchild knew the names of heroic fig-
Capt. Phillips had made himself hostage to ures like Richard Phillips.
the cutthroats who’d seized his unarmed Let us revive those times. When the
(but scarcely undefended) ship in order to destroyer Bainbridge, which might as well
save his crew. have been christened the Defiant, makes
But in the end it it home, let sirens
was Capt. Phillips wail, horns blast and
who had taken the
pirates hostage. For Paul crowds cheer. For a
nation that does not
Greenberg
they found them- honor its victories
selves afloat in the may soon enough not
Indian Ocean off the have many.
Horn of Africa in a Some say these
little lifeboat, tied to are not heroic times. their captive, the Navy task force that had ing, deliberating and generally delaying as
an American warship, and running out of Capt. Richard Phillips, the crew of the steamed more than 300 miles to go to the part of a years-long process. Much as it has
food, water, fuel and strength. The pirates Maersk Alabama, and the U.S. Navy dem- captain’s aid showed no sign of confront- dealt with the massacres still proceeding in
had demanded $2 million and their own onstrate otherwise. ing the pirates.” Darfur. Or rather not dealt with them.
release in exchange for the captain’s life. Readers looking for their daily dose of Thank you, Mr. Vice President of the
They would get what they deserved. defeatism in the midst of this outrage could TO WHICH the U.S.N. now has re- Philippines, but some of us would just as
Once the U.S. destroyer Bainbridge depend on the New York Times to pro- sponded, in effect: Oh, yeah? soon consult with the U.S. Navy. It re-
had arrived on the scene, the brigands’ fate vide it. On Friday, a front-page article in There will always be those who think sponds. With dispatch.
was sealed whether they realized it or not. the Times (“Navy’s Standoff with Pirates self-defense entirely too hasty a concept. Other foreign officials echoed the Phil-
Three snipers, U.S. Navy Seals, waited on Shows U.S. Power Has Limits”) explained To quote Vice President Noli de Castro ippine vice president’s advice, saying it’s
the fantail of the destroyer, under instruc- that any chance of preventing these inci- of the Philippines during this ordeal, “any unlikely that American action in this sat-
tions not to fire unless the captain’s life dents was limited: military action is best done in consultation isfying instance will discourage pirates off
seemed in imminent danger. The Indian Ocean standoff between with the United Nations to gain the support the Horn of Africa. Well, we know of three
At the end of the fifth day of this saga of an $800 million United States Navy de- and cooperation of other countries.” Like pirates who have been decidedly discour-
the sea, two of the remaining three bandits stroyer and four pirates bobbing in a Sudan, whose government is the source aged. They should no longer be a problem
(a fourth had turned himself in for medi- lifeboat showed the limits of the world’s of the genocide in Darfur? Or maybe the for ship traffic.
cal attention) made their fatal error, poking most powerful miltary as it faces a boom- non-government of Somalia, the pirates’ If this doesn’t teach these brigands not
their heads out of the rear hatch of the life- ing pirate economy in a treacherous patch haven? to mess with the United States of America,
boat, giving the snipers a clear shot. The of international waters. ... While surveil- If the UN had been consulted, doubtless nothing will.
third could be seen menacing the bound lance aircraft kept watch on the pirates and its “Security” Council would still be debat- And because nothing may, let’s look to
that most reliable guide to the future for an
example to follow: the past. In the infancy
of this Republic, a young United States of
America followed the lead of European
powers and routinely paid tribute to the
pirates operating along the Barbary Coast
out of Algiers, Morocco, Tripoli and Tunis.
Piracy was their trade, the same one now
flourishing off the African coast.
But by 1803 a new American president
— Thomas Jefferson — had had enough.
Though he was a man of peace who pro-
posed to economize on the country’s de-
fenses, he ordered a naval squadron to the
shores of Tripoli to resolve this little mat-
ter. Forcefully.
That’s just what Lieut. Stephen Decatur
and his Marines proceeded to do, imposing
a blockade on the pirates’ home port, and
eventually a series of formal peace treaties
on all these rogue states. End of piracy. At
least in that time and place.
MR. JEFFERSON’S is a precedent
worth following. And a tradition worth re-
viving.
__________________________________________
PAUL GREENBERG
(c) 2009, Tribune Media Services
__________________________________________
Conservative Chronicle April 29, 2009 31
NORTH KOREA: April 17, 2009
North Korea: Words suddenly matter
N
orth Korea’s launch of a United Nations Security Council, to something? Is this President Obama significant direct threat to the United
multi-staged rocket, which demonstrate that its resolution cannot speaking, or President Bush? States. North Korea has demonstrated it
was allegedly to put a sat- be defied with impunity. This morning, Let’s not forget that Saddam Hus- possesses a nuclear weapon and has the
ellite into space, but in reality was a we were reminded again why we need sein defied the U.N. by ignoring 17 capability of launching an ICBM that
test flight of an inter-continental bal- a new and more rigorous approach to U.N. resolutions and then kicked out can reach the west coast of the United
listic missile (ICBM) capable of strik- address this threat its inspectors look- States. The only question that remains
ing anywhere from Anchorage to San ... this provocation ing for weapons of is whether North Korea has the ability
Francisco, has prompted condemnation
from the United Nations, and in particu-
underscores the
need for action, not Gregory D. mass destruction.
Saddam’s multiple
to reduce the size of its nuke to fit inside
the missile’s warhead.
Lee
lar the United States. just ... at the U.N. violations were not
Security Council, enough to convince AND HOW did the U.N. respond?
PRESIDENT Obama, while in Eu- but in our determi- then-Illinois State The Security Council wrote a sternly
rope at the time of the launch, said in nation to prevent Senator Obama worded statement condemning North
a speech, “North Korea’s development the spread of these that Iraq needed to Korea’s actions and threatened, once
of a ballistic missile capability, regard- weapons. Rules must be binding. Vio- be punished. President Bush took a po- again, financial and travel sanctions.
less of the stated purpose of this launch, lations must be punished. Words must litical beating for exercising a “new and Now that’s punishment for you. How
is aimed at providing it with the ability mean something.” (emphasis added). more rigorous approach” to address the about two sternly worded statements?
to threaten countries near and far with Defied with impunity? New and threat: Military action instead of empty That should persuade Kim Jong Il not
weapons of mass destruction. This ac- more rigorous approach to address words. So what changed? to conduct another test, shouldn’t it?
tion demands a response from ... the this threat? Action? Words must mean Then, as now, there is a perceived The U.N.’s weak response is typical,
predictable and in line with many oth-
U.S. HOSTAGE: April 20, 2009 er weak U.N. responses. It will hardly
convince Kim Jong Il that the U.N. is
serious about punishing him for violat-
Iran’s hostage for a weak president ing Security Council resolution 1718,
issued in October 2006, after North
Korea launched a test flight of an iden-
P
tical missile that self-destructed within
erhaps it would be a bit cheap similar place to where we left off in 1981 What they should get is a swift slap a minute of its launch. The resolution
to label it Iran Hostage Crisis II, — when Iran released its 53 long-held upside the head, perhaps in the form of demands that North Korea “not con-
but it would be criminal to take U.S. hostages at the very hour Ronald a naval blockade, until Ms. Saberi is re- duct any further nuclear test or launch
a dismissive attitude toward Iran’s impris- Reagan was taking the oath of office. leased. The worst thing that could happen of a ballistic missile.” Yet it did, and
oning of American citizen Roxana Saberi Please note: Once they no longer had here would be for Obama to give Iran be- who can blame it given the U.N.’s long,
on obviously phony “spying” charges. the luxury of slapping around the limp- hind-closed-door concessions to win Ms. dismal track record of not enforcing its
wristed Jimmy Carter, the Iranians had Saberi’s release, after which he would resolutions?
AND IT would be ridiculous not to no interest in poking the eye of the United claim credit for having won a peaceful, North Korea’s response to U.N. was
note how well the Obama Administra- States — at least not until they had a de- diplomatic solution. In fact, of course, equally predictable. After being pum-
tion’s attempt to make nicey-nice with the liverable nuclear weapon, which of course this approach would merely prove to the meled with the U.N.’s words of con-
mad mullahs is working out so far. they are still developing. But in the mean- world’s malefactors that Obama can be demnation, it immediately kicked out
Ms. Saberi, a freelance journalist and a time, why worry about U.S.-imposed rolled. its nuclear inspectors and announced it
native of Fargo, North Dakota, holds joint consequences from an administration that But he’s making that kind of obvious will restart its plutonium factory. Fur-
U.S.-Iranian citizenship, and has been liv- is willing to do little more than express its anyway, isn’t he? He’s slapping skin with ther, it will no longer participate in the
ing in Iran for the past six years working deep disappointment and vigorously raise Hugo Chavez and Daniel Ortega and the six-party talks with the U.S., South Ko-
on a book about Iran’s culture even as she concerns? Summit of the Americas while moving at rea, Japan, Russia and China.
also reports for National Public Radio and a shockingly breakneck speed to restore There are definitely parallels between
the BBC. This past week, she was con- diplomatic relations with Cuba, which has Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and this situa-
victed in a typical Iranian trial — behind
closed doors, without any of the so-called Dan done nothing whatsoever to earn such a
plum gift.
tion. Will President Obama unilater-
ally “punish” North Korea because the
Calabrese
evidence made public — of passing clas- And Obama is apologizing everywhere U.N.’s words suddenly matter? I don’t
sified information to U.S. intelligence ser- he goes in the world for America’s pro- think Kim Jong Il is crazy or desperate
vices. tecting of its own strategic interests prior enough to attack the United States with
The Iranians sentenced Saberi to eight to his ascension as amateur president. The a nuke because he knows that even the
years in prison. She could have gotten the One fears the Obama Administration message is clear: There’s no need to poke Obama Administration would retaliate
death penalty. will be loathe to let the fate of Ms. Saberi me in the eye, because I’m already blink- with many nukes of its own.
Thus far, President Obama has of- become a cause célèbre or a high-profile ing.
fered the milquetoast sentiment that he is priority. And if it does — which it should So far, extending the hand of friend- BUT considering Kim Jong Il is a
“deeply disappointed,” while Secretary of — there are several directions it could ship to Iran has gotten Obama nothing nut job who is masterful in extorting
State Hillary Clinton says the U.S. plans take, and given the inclinations of this ad- more than strong rhetorical rebukes and the U.S. and the world for billions of
to “vigorously raise our concerns.” Ooh. ministration, few of them are good. another American hostage, whose fate he dollars in aid to keep his subjects fed
That’ll scare ‘em. would be derelict to ignore. and happy, anything could happen. He
When then-vice-presidential candidate MOST likely, the Iranians want some- is using this self-made crisis to receive
Joe Biden said during the campaign that thing. Perhaps they want the U.S. to back MAYBE the world doesn’t quite work future foreign aid when he softens his
Obama would be tested internationally, off on the nuclear issue, or they want us the way Obama thought it did. Maybe rhetoric. But he might finally take his
and quickly, the surprise was that he said to apply pressure to Israeli Prime Minister the world works the way those of us who own words seriously and wait until the
it in public, not that it was true. Anyone Benjamin Netanyahu not to attack their remember the Carter presidency should U.S. has “rid itself of nuclear weapons,”
could see that an amateur president with a nuclear operations. Perhaps they want know that it does. as President Obama has suggested, be-
decided disdain for muscular foreign poli- some sort of concession with respect to fore attacking us with his own.
__________________________________________ __________________________________________
cy would be tested by international ne’er- Iraq. Perhaps they want us to take the pos- DAN CALABRESE GREGORY D. LEE
do-wells. Lest anyone thought it would sibility of future economic sanctions off (c) 2009, North Star Writers Group (c) 2009, North Star Writers Group
end with Somali pirates, we’re now in a the table. __________________________________________ __________________________________________
www.conservativechronicle.com
RUSH!
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