An on-point evaluation of President Obama

There used to be a newspaper published in Washington, D. C., The Washington Examiner, which I enjoyed reading. Some time ago, the paper ceased publication, except for an online presence that still continues. Recently I saw a column by Noemie Emery on the Examiner's site, which I found quite interesting. Her columns in the Examiner when it was in print often reflected my own thought, and I think this column also shows a great insight, so I would like to reprint it.

President Obama, wrote the Washington Post's Greg Jaffe in a recent story about the president's view of his country, articulates “his vision of a nation that can acknowledge and, learn from, its mistakes.” Would that this vision applied to himself.

Now comes the main point, one that I think characterizes this President above all things that have been written about him:

Not only does Obama never learn from mistakes, he doesn't think that he makes them, and he denies that they even exist. Any regrets for the way he passed healthcare? Not that you'd notice. Any regrets about leaving Iraq? Nope — he still thinks he “ended two wars,” which the other side keeps on fighting.

The conventional view of what has gone wrong — that Obama lacked experience, and that first-term senators should be viewed with suspicion — is undercut by the fact that he has had six years of experience, and failed to learn from it. At home and abroad, Obama makes mistakes over and over, with the same result, and takes nothing from them. He disses his friends, placates aggressors and seems surprised that aggressors advance and whole regions catch fire.

He refuses to bargain with Congress, insults opponents, imposes unpopular policies by fiat and seems surprised when his measures result in court challenges, when polarization increases, opposition solidifies, divisions harden and gridlock prevails. Deal-making is the essence of politics, but Obama finds it demeaning, so he resorts to brute force when he has the means to (as in the still-festering matter of healthcare). Alternatively, as with immigration, Obama resorts to executive actions that stir angry resistance and are frequently halted by courts.

This has gone on since 2009, but Dana Milbank noticed only when Obama began slighting Democrats, whereupon he began taking offense. “Rather than accept that they have a legitimate beef, he shows public contempt for them,” the Washington Post columnist complains, writing that Obama dissed fellow Democrats to friendly reporters as being short-sighted and dense. (Of course, he's done that for years to Republicans, but they seem not to matter.) If Franklin Roosevelt was described as having a commonplace intellect but a brilliantly tempered political character, Obama seems to be his ultimate opposite: A man with an intellect that delights the elite but a temperament that is counterproductive in matters of government. This combination seems to work much less well.

A comparison with his predecessors is instructive.

Presidents can sometimes repair their mistakes, but only after they realize they've made them, which is something Obama can't do. George W. Bush stayed with his failed Iraq strategy until a bloody year followed by a political bloodbath in the 2006 midterms forced him to change course dramatically. John Kennedy failed in the Bay of Pigs and then in his first face-to-face meeting with Nikita S. Khrushchev, when he compounded his first bad impression by seeming irresolute.

Sensing at once that he had made a grave error — “He savaged me,” Kennedy said later of the Russian leader — he doubled the draft, increased defense spending and took Dwight Eisenhower's advice to have his councilors argue their cases before him and each other (instead of one at a time and in isolation), which led to the peaceful solution of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

But admitting mistakes — and taking advice — are not the skill set of the current incumbent, who finds them demeaning. The learning curve of the 35^th president between l961-63 had been exponential, while, as Josef Joffe recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “the 44^th president's learning curve has been flat for six years.”

It's not lack of experience that hampers Obama; it's his refusal to learn a thing from it. That's the trait we can't have in the 45^th president — and the one we must strive to avoid.

A valuable observation, and one with which I heartily concur.

Scott Walker in 2016?

Today I saw a column by Byron York in the Washington Examiner called “Looking to 2016, Iowa GOP gets jazzed about Scott Walker of Wisconsin” in which York mentions that lots of people, both those who supported Mitt Romney last year and those whose choice in the GOP nomination contest was “anyone but Romney,” are becoming enthusiastic about Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin for the 2016 nomination. While I have said, and I still maintain, that the best choice for the nomination would be Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, I would not be unhappy with Walker as a nominee. He is rather more conservative than I am, but he's gotten his programs — including the well-known reforms that got organized labor so hot under the collar that they mounted a recall campaign against him — through and written into law in a very blue State. And that counts for a lot. Anyone who could survive the viciousness of that recall campaign as Gov. Walker did deserves credit. So, while I prefer Christie, I would certainly be willing to support Walker if he were the nominee, and I would not want to work against him while he pursues the nomination, if he does, any more than any other rival of my preferred choice. He's not like Bachmann or Perry in 2012, who were anathema to me.

Cal Thomas returns to form

A bit over a week ago, I posted a message expressing my surprise at finding a column in the Washington Examiner by Cal Thomas with which I actually agreed. well, in Yesterday's Examiner I saw another column by him. And while it is not the very next column after the one I commented on last week (there was at least one more column between the two), I found it striking at just how much this column illustrated just how far apart Mr. Thomas and I are on most issues.

The subject of yesterday's column was, in large part, the improperly-named Federal Defense of Marriage Act of 1996. He begins:

Given his track record on marital fidelity, former President Clinton is not the person I would consult about “committed, loving relationships.” Clinton used those words in a Washington Post op-ed last week, urging the Supreme Court to overturn the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as the legal union of one man and one woman, which he signed into law.

In his column, Clinton said that 1996 “was a very different time.” No state recognized same-sex marriage and supporters of DOMA “believed that its passage ‘would diffuse a movement to enact a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, which would have ended the debate for a generation or more.’” Clinton says he now supports same-sex marriage based on justice, equality and the Constitution.

Now, while the slap at former President Clinton's marital history is, I believe, not entirely gratuitous, it really is out of place here — the issue is not Clinton's sex life, but the right of other people, who may be far more deeply committed, to enter into a relationship that they wish recognized as a marriage. But Cal Thomas is being a smarty-pants here, and bringing up Clinton's history to add an ad hominem reason to come out on the other side of the question. Whatever you think of Bill Clinton's conduct, it shouldn't be the issue in this discussion.

Mr. Thomas actually mischaracterizes DOMA anyway — it is only for Federal purposes that DOMA “defines marriage as the legal union of one man and one woman” — each state in fact can, at present, define it in that way or any other. And in fact, later in the same column, Mr. Thomas actually says:

The Constitution doesn't guarantee the right to marry. States, not the federal government, issue marriage licenses.

And this is a very important reason that DMA should be considered unconstitutional. But he continues:

Current laws restrict “underage” marriage, as well as polygamy. If same-sex marriage is approved, what's to stop polygamists from demanding legal protection and cultural acceptance? … So I ask, if “fairness” and “equality” are the standard, isn't it also “unfair” to “discriminate” against polygamists who wish to live in “loving” and “committed” relationships?

But while there is a case before the Supreme Court that addresses this issue — and I will get to that latter — DOMA does not have anything to do with whether a state should, or should not, permit any given couple (or set of more than two, if you bring in the question of polygamy) to marry. What DOMA says is that, even if a couple is married under the laws of the state of Massachusetts, the Federal Government will refuse to recognize that marriage if the two are both of the same sex. And that contravenes the usual Constitutional relationship between the states and Federal government. A simple Tenth Amendment argument makes DOMA unconstitutional.

Anyway, we aren't seeing suits to legalize polygamy, or “underage” marriage, and as recently as the 1950s, perhaps more recently (I haven't checked on when the law was changed) a 12-year-old girl (but not a boy!) could get married legally in one state. The charge that “if we legalize this, next we will be asked to legalize that,” is always raised when someone is opposed to the first one, but wants to try to scare people who are willing to permit it by bringing up the second, which he believes that fewer will accept. And that is a fallacious argument. If we legalize same-sex marriage, perhaps a movement will arise to legalize polygamy, but if you don't want to see polygamous marriages legalized, the time to oppose them is when that bill comes up. When we lowered the voting age to 18 from 21, people didn't complain that if we did that, soon we would have to lower it to 16, or 14, or 10, or even 7! Yet that's the same type of argument. What the proper voting age is can be debated — and I would be amenable to an age below 18, as I think that at 14, my political beliefs were already formed nearly fully — but the debate should center on what is the proper age, and not whether a lowering now leads to a further lowering later. And the same applies to expansion of who is allowed to marry legally.

Yes, I believe that same-sex marriage should be approved, but DOMA is not about that; it is about the Federal Government recognizing marriages that are already legal under state laws.

What Cal Thomas is really getting at, however, is contained in the next piece of his column:

Since we are rapidly discarding the rules for living and social order set down in a book found in most motel room drawers, what is to replace it? Opinion polls? Clever legal arguments? Fairness? What exactly does “fairness” mean and who decides what's fair? Many things may seem “unfair,” but not all can, or should, be addressed by courts.

Of course, the reference to “a book found in most motel room drawers” is to the Bible — what Thomas, of course, means is the Christian Bible, which has a number of books I do not recognize as scriptural, but let us not get into that debate here — and now we get into the First Amendment. There are people like Mr. Thomas who think that this amendment permits laws that are designed to impose the standards of one particular form of Christianity upon all of us, and clearly the purpose of this amendment was to prevent such laws. And I say “one particular form of Christianity” because, contrary to what Mr. Thomas may wish, there are churches that will perform same-sex marriages, so their clergy do not seem to think the Bible condemns them.

The Court is considering DOMA, and it is also considering the separate issue of whether states should be required to allow gay marriage. These are different issues. DOMA should be ruled unconstitutional because the Federal Government should not prevent a state's legal right to sanction a marriage from being recognized Federally. The other question is more nuanced. Ultimately, however, I think there is an equal-protection issue, and just as the Court held in Loving v. Virginia that people of different races should not be prevented from marrying, they ought to apply the same logic to people of the same sex. But there is a state's rights issue that points the other way. So this decision is less clear.

The perils of purism

Yeaterday I ran a post about a column by Cal Thomas in that day's Washington Examiner which surprised me in that I often disagree with Thomas' columns, but found that particular column to be totally in accordance with my thinking. Today I'm also posting about a column in the Examiner, but while I am just as much in agreement with today's column as I was with yesterday's, this time it causes no great surprise, because the column is by Noemie Emery, whose posts I usually find make a lot of sense to me. As it happens, it says much the same thing as a remark in Thomas' column in yesterday's paper:

If the Republican “tent” isn't large enough for Chris Christie, then it will resemble a pup tent for some time to come.

Emery's column is entitled, “Conservative crisis management.” At the beginning of the column, she says:

When in a hole, keep right on digging. That's the attitude of a number of movement conservatives, who, in reaction to last year's shellacking, seem to want to make certain they never climb out.

And, addressing those conservatives, she makes the point (emphasis mine):

…don't complain about Republicans running the Bushes, John McCain, Bob Dole and Mitt Romney, when you run Alan Keyes, Pat Buchanan and Rick Santorum against them. If you want to win nominations, you might try running candidates. (And a better message might help matters, too.)

That's a powerful dig, but they deserve it. The fact is that most Americans are not far-right conservatives. If a conservative is to win their votes, he needs to be moderate enough to get the votes of people closer to the middle of the political spectrum, who would never support a Santorum. Which leads ino her next point:

check the urge to purge heretics, which died out long ago in most of the world. Movement conservatives now scourge their party's most popular governors. Yes, blue- and swing-state Republicans always enrage some conservatives; the problem is that conservatives need them if they want to become a national party. If they like to throw tantrums, they should keep on what they're doing. If not, they should throw them some slack.

Why? Andrew Cline explained this two years ago, just after Scott Brown, having thrilled conservatives by winning the seat of Ted Kennedy, enraged them with one of his first Senate votes. “Scott Brown does not represent the Republican National Committee in the United States Senate. He represents Massachusetts,” Cline said then, correctly. “If Scott Brown voted as though he were from Alabama, the voters of Massachusetts would send him there.”

The really important thing to note is what Emery says a little bit further along:

…Chris Christie, with his Ralph Kramden vibe, is the closest thing they are likely to get in New Jersey — and, though conservatives would prefer a Reagan conservative, in those states this is not in the cards. Christie and Bob McDonnell represent their blue and swing states, not Utah or Texas, and the alternatives to them are not stronger conservatives.

The alternative to Olympia Snowe isn't Ted Cruz, it's Angus King, who votes with the Democrats. The alternative to Scott Brown isn't Rand Paul, it's Elizabeth Warren. We have Obamacare now because of the Club for Growth and Pat Toomey, whose primary threat scared Arlen Specter back to the Democrats, where he became the 60th vote for Obamacare's passage.

In other words, the far right's insistence on purity has driven the center of American politics leftward, hardly a desirable goal from their point of view.

I wish Noemie Emery's words could be read by the people who keep insisting on ideological purity.

Cal Thomas, Chris Christie, and the CPAC

Usually, when I open my copy of the Washington Examiner and read Cal Thomas’ column, I find much to criticize. But today, when I read his column, I was surprised.

It began:

It's a safe bet that most conservative Republicans would rush to support a political leader with the following record, especially in a traditionally Democratic state:

Reversed a $2.2 billion deficit and brought it into balance without raising taxes, largely by reduced spending and eliminating wasteful and unaffordable programs, allowing for a projected fiscal 2014 budget surplus of $300 million.

Bipartisan pension and benefits reforms, saving the state $120 billion over 30 years.

Streamlining government by eliminating 5,200 government jobs.

Vetoing tax increase bills three times while cutting taxes for job creators.

Reforming the nation's oldest teacher tenure law by making it conditional on teacher performance in the classroom.

Reduced property tax increases to a 21-year low and capped them at a maximum 2 percent.

There's more, but shouldn't conservative Republicans be ecstatic by this record compiled by New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie?

Yes, Cal Thomas was singing the praises of one of my favorite Republicans, and taking the Conservative Political Action Conference to task for not inviting him to speak. Thomas was really making the case for Christie as exactly the kind of person the Republicans should be cultivating, using such language as:

… By not inviting him to speak, CPAC invites comparison with a pessimistic and hypercritical political environment of the past. If the Republican “tent” isn't large enough for Chris Christie, then it will resemble a pup tent for some time to come.

Republicans should be focused on deconstructing failed liberalism and styling their alternative in positive terms, not rejecting one of their own. Hating President Obama is not a policy. Intellectually defeating his policies is.

I often believe Cal Thomas is on the wrong side of issues. But not this time. I applaud his sense in calling for Republicans to recognize Gov. Christie’s accomplishments. Of course, I would be happy if he is the 2016 nominee. But just as conservative orthodoxy scuttled former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s attempt to be the GOP standard-bearer, I am afraid they may do the same with Christie. And it would be a shame.

Ben Carson, President Obama, and the National Prayer Breakfast

In today's Washington Examiner, I saw a column by Cal Thomas that really took me by surprise. It seems that at the National Prayer Breakfast, neurosurgeon Ben Carson said some things that were critical of President Obama. Now I think it is nice to see a prominent person of African-American origin willing to buck the Obama worship of most of his co-ethnics. And I would have thought that someone like Cal Thomas would feel the same, as Mr. Thomas is someone who likes Pres. Obama's policies, if anything, even less than I do. But Thomas's column was critical of Dr. Carson!

Apparently, Cal Thomas feels that the time and place were inappropriate for Dr. Carson to make his comments. I don't agree. Dr. Carson is a medical doctor. The practice of medicine has been complicated by “Obamacare.” If Dr. Carson feels as strongly about the effect Pres. Obama's policies have had on his profession, a time when the media are present is the best time to make this known — National Prayer Breakfast or not.

Don't give Pres. Obama a victory by default

I've remarked before about Noemie Emery, a columnist for the Washington Examiner, whose columns I usually find very close to my own thinking, and in yesterday's paper she had another very good column. It's too long to quote in its entirety — please follow the link to read the whole column — but the main point is that, by fragmenting, the Republican Party is making it easier for President Barack Obama to foist his far-left agenda on the American people. She points out, for example:

In 2008, during the fiscal implosion, they took two weeks off from the campaign against him to engage in a tong war over the much-loathed Troubled Asset Relief Program that turned a difficult race into one already lost. Between 2010 and 2012, they threw away four seats in the Senate -- two to primaries, one to Todd Akin, and one when they drove Olympia Snowe out of politics. This gave us Obamacare, when a primary election threat drove Arlen Specter back to his old party, where he morphed from a critic to an ardent supporter of that much-despised and badly formed legislation.

In particular, one section of her column is particularly apropos:

…last week, Republicans turned the lame duck into a TARP rerun, capped by a half-baked attempt to dismember the speaker, which embarrassed both him and themselves. This is what happens when people decide that some on their side are really The Enemy and get distracted from those with whom they have much larger differences. So before they move even more down this dream-scene-for-Democrats road map, there are three facts they might think of and four things they should do.

Fact No. 1 is to realize a political party isn't a church nor a cult but a mechanism to get diverse people who share some things in common to work toward a common position of power that none could achieve on their own. Fact No. 2 is that unless you can convert your principles into actual policies, standing upon them does no one a favor. If you believe in your principles but can't convert others, you are not an asset. If you antagonize them, you and your principles are a real liability, and perhaps you should shut the hell up.

Fact No. 2 [she means 3] is that because no coalition big enough to win power can ever be pure or completely united, and no pure wing or segment can be big enough to win or rule on its own, it is in everyone's interest to cherish the mavericks. Each party needs members who vote with them sometimes. Conservatives dreamed of the day they could rid themselves of the Snowes, Lugars and Castles; that day has come, and they and their party are weaker than ever. Many conservatives would kill now to have those seats back.

Sometime soon, before the debt ceiling crisis writes a thrilling new chapter, Republicans should sit down together and try to agree on four things: to name the shared goals that they want to move forward; to decide what to do to in a practical manner (in the real world, not an imagined alternative); to find their best spokesmen, and have him (or her) speak for them all; and to remember exactly who their real enemies are — who, in the real world, are not themselves.

The Tea Party loves the Gadsden flag symbol, with its poised-to-strike rattler and "Don't Tread on Me" message, but there is another illustration of that era that it ought to note: Benjamin Franklin's cartoon of a snake, chopped into 13 small pieces, unable to make any threatening noises. Beneath it was Franklin's exhortation for unity among the 13 Colonies: "Join, or Die."

She is right on the nose there. There is another blog I like, which has been relatively inactive lately, called “Big Tent Revue.” The name, I presume, comes from the remark that the GOP should be a “big tent” under which people of differing opinions, but with some in common, can all find shelter. This is a good image. If the Republican Party tries to purify itself to become a single-dogma party, the Democrats will win by default on every issue. Let us try to prevent this.

Newtown and abortion clinics - connected?

Amazingly, Gregory Kane has managed to take the Newtown killings and use them as a basis for a column about abortion. His column in yesterday's Washington Examiner was entitled “Culprit is society that devalues human life” and among the ridiculous analogies he made (addressed to President Obama, if you need to know who the “you” was supposed to mean) was:

On Friday, a gunman walked into the Connecticut elementary school and methodically, fatally shot 20 children and six adults.

He has been identified as 20-year-old Adam Lanza, who apparently killed himself after the shootings. Now imagine the following hypothetical situation:

Lanza isn't 20, but a 30-something surgeon who, five to 10 years ago, sucked those same 20 children down a tube while they were still in the womb.

Would we be talking about the slaughter of 20 innocent children? Or would Lanza receive praises from you and others like you for being an avid supporter of women's reproductive rights?

How anyone can consider the little bit of tissue inside a uterus of a pregnant woman — which, I concede, has the potential of becoming a human being — as the equivalent of a real living 6-year-old boy or girl is beyond my comprehension. People get over a miscarriage, which is, after all, the death of just such a bit of tissue in a uterus, in a way the parents of the Newtown children will never get over their children's deaths.

But Kane has to make such stupid analogies as an excuse for his anti-abortionism.

Angus Jones, Gregory Kane, and "values"

Before getting into the main point of this post, let me say that, although I used to watch a good deal of television, and mostly situation comedies, I do not have time to devote to watching the “tube,” and have never seen a single episode of “Two and a Half Men,” so this is not a comment on whether that show is “filth” or not, as its teen-aged co-star, Angus Jones, recently claimed. This post is not about the show, but addresses both Jones' comments and the column, appearing in yesterday's Washington Examiner, in which columnist Gregory Kane strongly defended Jones.

First of all, I have no problem with either Jones or Kane's right to express their opinions. But in Jones' case, it seems to me that if he really thinks as he says he does, and feels that the show, which has been the cause of his earning millions of dollars, is such “filth,” he should take all that money and (assuming the producers are not going to accept its return) donate it to charity, so he can live the life of a typical boy of his age. But he seems happy to keep his money.

In Kane's case, my point is somewhat different. It seems that Kane thinks Jones was unfairly criticized because he stood up for his religious values. Well, just as Kane has the right of freedom of speech, under our First Amendment, so do the more secular, and even atheistic, people he denounces. Kane seems to feel that in this country, people who favor “Christian values” (or “religious values” in general, as he manages to include Muslim minister Louis Farrakhan among those he singles out for praise) are being silenced in this country, while those advocating their contrary are given open free rein. I just see that everyone is able to speak out on both sides. Kane asked why Jones had to apologize — I think Jones' apology, as hypocritical as it might be, was because he realized he might be out a lot of money, not because secular forces were exerting pressure on him! (Kane also takes the media to task for not proofreading their headlines. That's the sort of thing I admit I might do, as I am a compulsive corrector of spelling/grammatical errors. But I've seen errors in the Examiner, too, so that is not really fair of him.)

So to recapitulate, I condemn neither Jones nor Kane for expressing themselves. But I think they both need to acknowledge the opposite side's right to express itself as well, and Jones, in particular, is ill-poised to condemn the people who have given him an amount of money that most teenagers (or even adults) would find beyond their dreams.

Comments on this election

Tom Bowler has a blog he calls “Libertarian Leanings,” with which I am often in agreement. And he wrote a post dated November 8, called “Four More Years,” which bears some repetition.

To say that I'm surprised by the outcome of the election is an understatement. I thought Romney would win, and win big, but look how wrong I was. We get another four of Barack Obama.

It's really quite disheartening. Call it a missed opportunity. For all of his faults Mitt Romney is a smart and talented executive. A Romney presidency would undoubtedly have meant explosive economic growth, and might also have gotten us long way toward putting our nation's finances on a sound footing. We have that debt crisis facing us. We need economic growth.

Obama doesn't. In his second term Barack Obama has once again inherited the mess left by George W. Bush. We'll be hearing about that mess for another four years. Obama's victory speech confirms it: The continuing economic stagnation is in no way connected to Barack Obama's policies. Just look at his prescription.

But that doesn't mean your work is done. The role of citizens in our democracy does not end with your vote. America's never been about what can be done for us; it's about what can be done by us together, through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government. (Cheers, applause.) That's the principle we were founded on.

This country has more wealth than any nation, but that's not what makes us rich. We have the most powerful military in history, but that's not what makes us strong. Our university, our culture are all the envy of the world, but that's not what keeps the world coming to our shores. What makes America exceptional are the bonds that hold together the most diverse nation on Earth, the belief that our destiny is shared — (cheers, applause) — that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations, so that the freedom which so many Americans have fought for and died for come with responsibilities as well as rights, and among those are love and charity and duty and patriotism. That's what makes America great. (Cheers, applause.)

I am hopeful tonight because I have seen this spirit at work in America. I've seen it in the family business whose owners would rather cut their own pay than lay off their neighbors and in the workers who would rather cut back their hours than see a friend lose a job.

In his only mention [of] liberty[,] Obama instructs us that our arguments are “a mark of our liberty.” We might have thought that liberty is what draws people to our shores. No. They are drawn by “the bonds that hold together the most diverse nation on earth.” It is our strength, he tells us.

He says nothing about the freedom to strive for a better life for ourselves and our families. Instead, we must share. You business owners, sacrifice. You workers, expect less. Take that pay cut so that fellow part-timers can share in the ever shrinking wages. There's just not going to be enough to go around, and you'd better get used to it.

While a Romney presidency promised to unleash the entrepreneurial spirit, in Obama's world entrepreneur is just another job, a government job. The best and brightest will find their way to prosperity in striving to be middlemen, standing between citizens and their entitlements, doling them out according to prescribed formulas of fairness. That is the true strength of Obama's America.

While I might have disagreed with Bowler's expectation that “Romney would win, and win big,” (I figured it would be close, but I thought Romney could pull it out) I certainly agree with most of what he said in this post. But one thing I will not join in is a chorus of columns and blog posts saying what the writer thinks the GOP must do in subsequent elections to come up with a winning candidate. For example, Byron York's column in Friday's Washington Examiner is titled “In 2016, GOP needs a candidate voters believe in.” Frankly, I don't know what it takes to win an election in this country. I simply cannot imagine why anyone at all would vote for a Barack Obama against either a John McCain or a Mitt Romney — and yet, majorities of the people have done so. And because of that, I just give up on trying to figure out what it takes to win an election.

Of course, I can probably point to racism as the real reason that Obama could win both elections: not a racism of whites against African-Americans, as the absence of that was proved by the fact that Obama got millions of whites' votes, but a racism of African-Americans against whites, in that the African-American population refused to vote for a white candidate running against one of their own, no matter how unqualified he was or how terribly he has handled the Presidency. Obama got 95% of the African-American vote in 2008, and 93% this year. If Obama had simply gotten the normal proportion of the African-American vote that Democrats get — and that is still an overwhelming majority! — Mitt Romney would be getting ready to move into the White House.

And that is perhaps the best hope for 2016. Without an African-American at the top of the ticket, the African-American vote will break Democratic by more like its usual proportion, and a Republican can win then. The problem is that Barack Obama will have had his shot at ruining this country's economy already, and that may be irreversible.

Another take on the Missouri Senate election

In the past, I've rather liked a lot of the posts by Washington Examiner columnist Noemie Emery. Friday's paper had an interesting column regarding the Senate election in Missouri, for whom the Republican primary winner, Todd Akin, has gone so off-the wall that the likes of Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh think he should give up:

In 2006, unexpectedly bounced from his own party's ballot, Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman decided to run as an independent on a third-party line. The moment he did, he became the de facto Republican candidate, as the GOP decided to ignore its own nominee, neither funding nor mentioning him. Everyone understood what was happening, and Republicans voted for Lieberman. The state was (and is) Democratic, and Lieberman won.

In 2012, the Republicans' best way out of the mess in Missouri, now that they are left with a loon as a candidate, may be to do the same thing: Run a third-party line with the “real” candidate. But this time, actively fund and back him, with rollouts, endorsements and cash. This is because the installed nominee is not merely a blank, as he was in Connecticut, but a full-blown flake and media flame-out who needs to be wholly disowned.

Distance must be put between Todd Akin and the rest of the party and ticket, and this is best done by running against him. Link him to the Democrats and to Claire McCaskill, whose creature he does seem to be. During the primary, Democrats spent at least $1.5 million on television promoting him to Republican voters as the most conservative candidate. They also urged Democrats to go out and vote for him. By defining him now as a Trojan horse figure set to blow up and embarrass his party, Republicans could make the campaign against him appear more legitimate. They could also undermine liberals' efforts to link him to Romney, Ryan and other conservatives. If these are actively running against him, how tied together can they possibly be?

It's an open question who the third candidate should be, but it is one easily solved. Jennifer Rubin has brought up the name of John Danforth. Sarah Palin suggests Sarah Steelman (whom she endorsed), but she ran a few points behind Akin in the primary, and Missouri's “sore loser” law prevents runners-up from running in write-in campaigns. As the National Review's Jim Geraghty notes, a successful write-in candidate needs a simple name that is hard to misspell and a proven appeal to large blocs of voters, traits that he finds in one possible entrant: “If only some figure, well known to Missouri voters… would step forward and declare, “The name's Bond … Kit Bond.”

Other ex-senators are thick on the ground, and if Steelman can't run, she could campaign with and for them, driving a stake through the fake ‘war on women’ that the left wing is trying to wage. Campaigns such as these would give Missouri's voters a choice other than the other two ghastly options, and sever the links the liberals are trying to forge between Akin and saner Republicans. Who knows? They might even win.

Having nothing to say, Democrats are avid to run on distractions, from Seamus the dog to Rafalca the horse to Harvey, the invisible friend of Harry Reid, who keeps feeding him tidbits about Romney's taxes. They will continue to feed such distractions to the public till November, to drown out all talk of real issues like downturns and downgrades and “jobs,” the three-letter word that Joe Biden immortalized. This will never blow over, until it is made to. Unless Akin bows out, there's just one way to do it.

Ms. Emery has an interesting idea. The problem is that it will only work if one alternative candidate comes out. Otherwise, the vote will be split, and Claire McCaskill will still win. So who will do it?

One difference between Republicans and Democrats

Gregory Kane is a columnist whose column I read in the Washington Examiner a couple of times a week. as you might know, sometimes I agree with his columns, and sometimes I disagree strongly. But a column of his that appeared in yesterday's paper pointed out one important point. Most of the column was talking about Congressman Todd Akin's comment on abortion. And while you can read the whole column, I'm not going to quote anything but the one part I want to emphasize, the end of his column:

Finally, Mr. President, although you tried to lump all Republicans into the Todd Akin bin, I feel compelled to remind you that there are pro-choice Republicans. One of them is former Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich, who heads Mitt Romney's campaign in that state.

Mr. President, can you name one prominent pro-life Democrat?

The point is that the Republican Party still has room for a lot of different opinions. The Democratic Party seems not to.

Even a Democrat has to admit it

When I was growing up in New York City, the New York Post, which my parents regularly read, was a liberal Democratic paper, published by Dorothy Schiff and putting Herblock's cartoons from the Washington Post on its editorial page. After a couple of changes of ownership, it is now, under Rupert Murdoch, a solidly conservative and Republican paper; Murdoch may be a lot of things I do not like, but he's well to the right of the ownership of the Post in my youth. But the column from the Post that I saw today, entitled “See no evil,” was by Phil Mushnick, who describes himself as a “registered but less-than-loyal Democrat.” And it deserves quoting, because it really goes to show how biased most of the media are today:

As a registered but less-than-loyal Democrat, I long scoffed at the long-held notion that the news media have a left-leaning, anti-Republican bias.

I didn’t believe it, primarily because I chose not to believe it. Plus, the media confirmed for me that mine was the noble side. Heck, there was no other side.

But I now know — and have for some time — that I was pulling my own leg. The notion of such a bias is not merely a notion; it’s true.

Our news media, especially as seen and heard during nationally broadcasted news, engages in highly selective story-choosing, story-telling and subsequent indignations and outrages that are first weighed on political scales.

After this preamble, Mushnick goes to the specific incident that led to this conclusion:

David Plouffe helped Obama get elected in 2008, and rejoined his campaign this year. In between, he cashed in.

Early this month a spectacular story was given tiny attention, and none, as far as I watched, on nightly national newscasts.

In December 2010, David Plouffe, soon to be reappointed a senior adviser to President Obama, gave two speeches in the desperately poor country of Nigeria.

Speeches for which he was paid a total of $100,000.

Holy moly! What did he have to say in Nigeria that was worth 100 grand? He must have revealed the cure for a country ranked 158th among 177 in economic development, a country in which an estimated 70% of humanity live — barely, and not for long — in severe poverty and in the mortally unhealthy conditions that accompany nothingness.

But, no, that wasn’t it.

Plouffe was invited and paid by MTN, Africa’s largest wireless-phone operator — and a company that does business with nuclear weapons-headed, radical-Islamized Iran.

Oh, so he must be a telecommunications wizard, a guy whose take on tech is well worth, oh, $50,000 an hour, even in Nigeria.

But no, that wasn’t it, either.

So, why was Plouffe paid $100,000? What could he share with MTN and Nigeria? Shoot, for 100 grand MTN could have landed KC and the Sunshine Band!

According to MTN, Plouffe was in demand “because of his expertise and knowledge of the US political scene.”

Whoa!

A penny for your thoughts? For 100 grand, this fella should have been registered as a foreign agent, or at least as a reverse lobbyist for a large international business.

A few months later, Plouffe rejoined the Obama administration as a top adviser.

But MTN wasn’t Plouffe’s only questionable off-season client. In 2009, during his first break from being an Obama adviser — Plouffe managed Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign — Plouffe accepted $50,000 to speak to a group in Islamic, oil-rich Azerbaijan.

Turns out this group was connected to Azerbaijan’s occasionally democratic, occasionally despotic and often corrupt government.

When human-rights organizations protested Plouffe’s acceptance of such big dough from such a connected group — as if a senior White House advisor had no idea with whom he was dealing and knew nothing about the country in which he was speaking — Plouffe donated his fee to the purportedly nonpartisan National Democratic Institute.

So, Plouffe floats in and out, in and out: In as a top advisor in the Obama administration White House, out to give big-ticket speeches carrying insights on dealing with US politics and governance to dubious audiences in faraway places. And he’s now back in again.

Incredible stuff.

Yet, nine days ago, White House spokesperson Eric Schultz insisted that any attempt to suggest that Plouffe is not on the up-and-up or that there are any strings attached to the man is “simply misplaced.”

Really?

But that’s plenty good enough for the vast majority of the news and political media, as this Plouffe story never generated the attention it deserved — and still deserves. It was dead on arrival.

Now, imagine if a senior advisor in the last Bush administration — either Bush administration — had done as Plouffe has. Imagine if a top, inside Bush operative and persuader had such a résumé, eager for personal foreign business enrichments in exchange for “his expertise and knowledge of the US political scene.”

Woo, boy, fireworks! All over the nightly news! For weeks! Forever! And for good reason!

Nearly everyone, as opposed to just a few, would be familiar with the name David Plouffe — surely the caper would have been branded “Plouffegate” — and Plouffe would be forced to resign.

Take it from a registered Democrat no longer in denial: Fireworks!

And while the Plouffe story was mostly being ignored, Mitt Romney was in Israel, where he had the audacity to note, with gentle yet indisputable accuracy, the “cultural” achievement in that country compared to the rest of that part of the world.

Now that caused fireworks.

TV news and political reporters not only characterized Romney’s truth-telling as “a gaffe” — hard evidence that the GOP presidential candidate speaks first and thinks later — they gathered before him, offering him — shouting to him — an opportunity to “apologize.”

It was the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, stuck to describe pornography, who famously said, “I know it when I see it.”

Similar goes for news media bias in this uninspected, widely ignored Plouffe intrigue: I know it when I don’t see it.

It's a shame that this is so, but when I look at the whole picture, I think Mushnick has something there. I knew about this story, because I read it in the Washington Examiner, which is one of the exceptions to this leftist bias of our newspapers. But as he said, it got little press. Doing a Google search (using "david plouffe" nigeria as my key), I found several stories about this, but none of the top ones were in the sites of well-known publications. All were on relatively little-known sites. So I think Mushnick is confirmed.

Obama's mischaracterization of Romney's tax plan

President Obama has criticized Mitt Romney's proposed tax plan's as “Robin Hood in reverse,” taking from those less well off to give breaks to the wealthy.:

Obama says Romney's tax plan would give tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans while forcing middle-class families to pay up to $2,000 a year in additional taxes.

The president cites a study by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center that says millionaires would receive a tax cut of approximately $250,000 a year if the former Massachusetts governor gets his way.

“He'd ask the middle class to pay more in taxes so that he could give another $250,000 tax cut to people making more than three million dollars a year,” Mr. Obama said.

The only thing is, that's total nonsense. Romney's plan does not raise taxes on anyone: it lowers them on anyone that would see any change at all.

As I read in Diana Furchtgott-Roth's column in the Washington Examiner:

What's the best way of trashing Mitt Romney's tax plan? In these days of class warfare, it's to say his plan would result in tax cuts for high-income earners but tax increases for everyone else.

That's what the Tax Policy Center, a nongovernmental think tank under the auspices of the left-leaning Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, reported last week.

But here's the trick — the TPC did not analyze the Romney proposal. Instead, it analyzed tax proposals not found at the Romney website. It also imposed its own set of conditions on the tax changes, such as requiring that they be “revenue-neutral.”

As a result of this manipulation, the TPC claims Romney's proposal would lead to tax relief for high-income filers and tax increases for everyone else. In fact, Romney's proposal does not call for a single tax increase.

In most of America, such claims would be dismissed as second-rate political mischief. In Washington, the TPC's claims are cited by leading politicians.

President Obama cited the Center's document last week at Rollins College in Florida, a battleground state. He said, “He's asking you to pay more so that people like him can pay less. So that people like me pay less.”

Donald Marron, director of the Center, told me he assumed the proposal was revenue-neutral because of comments made by Romney in the past, even though he admitted that revenue neutrality is not part of the tax proposal.

However, when the Congressional Budget Office or the Joint Tax Committee analyzes the effects of budget and tax legislation, they use written proposals, not sponsors' comments, taken in or out of context.

Had the Tax Policy Center been more meticulous, it would have noticed the simple description of the Romney tax proposal on his website. After describing the damage that high top marginal rates do to small-business hiring, the site states that Romney's plan would:

• Make a permanent, across-the-board 20 percent cut in marginal rates
• Maintain current tax rates on interest, dividends and capital gains
• Eliminate taxes for taxpayers with adjusted gross income below $200,000 on interest, dividends and capital gains
• Eliminate the death tax
• Repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax

Most fifth-graders could read this plan and see that it never once calls for raising taxes on anyone. Nor does the Romney tax plan call for giving tax cuts to high-income Americans before there are tax cuts for middle- and low-income Americans, as alleged by the TPC.

In fact, low-and middle-income earners would get tax cuts that upper-income Americans will not enjoy, such as a zero tax rate on income from dividends and long-term capital gains.

After falsely claiming the tax plan must be “revenue-neutral,” the TPC asserts that lower rates must be funded by getting rid of tax breaks such as “the mortgage interest deduction, the exclusion for employer-provided health insurance, the deduction for charitable contributions, and benefits for low- and middle-income families and children like the [earned income tax credit] and child tax credit.”

These draconian provisions are invented by the TPC to make Romney's tax plan look ridiculous. It is impossible to find them in the Romney plan.

Examiner readers can judge for themselves. Read the plan printed above. Does a 20 percent cut in your income taxes rate, and no taxes on dividends, interest, and capital gains for low- and middle-income earners, sound like a tax hike to you?

President Obama has no business attacking Mitt Romney for making tax proposals he never made. But he's never cared that much for the truth anyway.

Surprise! a column by Cal Thomas that makes sense

Regular readers of this blog know that I often read Cal Thomas' column in the Washington Examiner, and usually disagree with what he says there. So it came as a surprise when I saw his column in yesterday's paper, because just about all he said made sense and I agreed. The column began:

President Obama's attempt to spin the latest discouraging unemployment numbers as “a step in the right direction” is like telling passengers aboard the Titanic to ignore the sinking vessel and listen to the live music.

A Wall Street Journal analysis of the June unemployment figures offers little comfort, nor does it produce confidence that the economy will improve before the election.

“The U.S. unemployment rate was unchanged at 8.2 percent in June,” the Journal reports, “but a broader measure rose to 14.9 percent as the ranks of the underemployed grew. … The reason the rate didn't decline was that while the number of employed increased, so did the labor force by a larger 189,000 people.” The broader unemployment rate includes temporary and part-time workers who would prefer a full-time job, as well as people who want to work but have given up looking for jobs. The president's policies, which appear to have stifled economic growth, continue to contribute to the dismal jobs outcome.

Figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics should cause headaches for the Obama re-election team and an opportunity for Mitt Romney to offer a better path. Hispanic and Latino unemployment remained essentially unchanged at 11.0 percent. African-American unemployment rose by 184,000 to 14.4 percent, making one wonder why so many black voters continue to support a president who is doing them little good. The number of unemployed women has increased by 780,000 since President Obama took office. The unemployment rate among white men and women remained at 7.4 percent, but whites don't seem to figure much into Obama's re-election strategy.

June marked the 41^st consecutive month in which the unemployment rate has been above 8 percent, the longest streak at such a high level since the Great Depression. President Obama promised that if Congress passed his stimulus plan, unemployment would be around 5.6 percent by now. In 1992, when Bill Clinton became president, the unemployment rate was 7.5 percent. In October 2008, under George Bush, the unemployment rate was 6.5 percent.

Here's more from an analysis by James Pethokoukis of The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, a conservative think tank: “The average duration of unemployment ticked up to 39.9 weeks. … Job growth during the three-year Obama recovery has averaged just 75,000 a month for a total of 2.7 million.” He contrasts this with the first three years of the Reagan recovery when “job growth averaged 273,000 a month for a total of 9.8 million.”

Pethokoukis adds, “If you adjust for the larger U.S. population today, the Reagan recovery averaged 360,000 jobs a month for a three-year total of 13 million jobs.”

Now, all this is simply a citation of statistics, and there is not much for anyone to agree or disagree with, but then comes Cal Thomas' opinion. And, contrary to so many columns of his, nearly all of what he says could have been said by me as well. Here goes:

President Obama has said we “can't afford to go back to the failed policies of the past,” implying they didn't work. Those past numbers look a lot better than the ones he's posting. We're waist-deep in a financial “Big Muddy,” to paraphrase Pete Seeger, “and the big fool says to push on.”

If Obamacare is not repealed and replaced by a Republican Congress and a President Romney, its sharp tax and spending increases will lead, among other things, to employers hiring even fewer people and laying off the workers they have. There is no healthy economic future if we continue along this line.

But more than a change of administrations is needed. We also must change the way many of us think about the proper role of government, which functions best when it's limited. When people are not limited by government, they do better for themselves and the nation. Why then do so many turn to government when it consistently fails to perform better than the private sector in most categories?

Mitt Romney should be hammering on this theme and not let the Obama campaign pound him as an out of touch, jet-skiing, rich guy. This election is, or ought to be, about whether the country can stand another four years of incompetent, overspending, overtaxing government, or whether it should return to the safe harbor of living within our means and doing more for ourselves.

Spinning numbers won't cure an ailing economy anymore than wishful thinking will improve the condition of a dying man. This administration has put America on a path to socialism. It's for Romney to make the case that the administration's “medicine” is actually killing us.

The only thing I might fault Mr. Thomas on is that he seems to imply that Mitt Romney is failing to make the points in question. And I don't think that is so. But in general, Mr. Thomas gets it right this time. Unusual for him.

Once more, Cal Thomas has it wrong

Cal Thomas is a man whose columns in the Washington Examiner never fail to strike me as full of fallacies. To anyone who considers me to be of the political Right and Thomas likewise, this may be surprising, but it goes to show how much is encompassed by the term “right-wing.” Today's column, entitled “The ‘Oprahfication’ of America,” shows how far apart we are. It begins:

When asked at the close of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 what the Founders had wrought, Benjamin Franklin famously said, “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

That question might also be put to the five Supreme Court justices who voted last week to uphold the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which mandates health insurance for most Americans, based on twisted logic that it is a tax and thus within the power of the Congress to impose on an already overtaxed people.

In fact, Mr. Thomas needs to read the Constitution more carefully. Yes, I would have preferred that the PPACA be ruled unconstitutional, but Chief Justice Roberts' reasoning that (1) it is a tax and (2) therefore constitutional is hardly “twisted logic.” It is certainly a collection by the IRS of money from the public, which needs to be declared on the income tax return. To argue that therefore it is a tax, even though it was declared by its sponsors not to be one, is certainly a way of reading the law, even if not the way I would have done so. Then, Mr. Thomas goes on — I've omitted some words:

Among the avalanche of post-mortems delivered by “experts” and pundits to the court ruling, one may have gotten closest to answering the question about what was in the mind of Chief Justice John Roberts and how it reflects on what our nation is becoming.

Paul Rothstein, a professor at Georgetown Law School, taught Roberts when he was a student. In an interview with Washington radio station WTOP, Rothstein said it was empathy for the uninsured and disdain for partisanship that swayed Roberts, making his the decisive vote.

”It's a very odd decision,” said Rothstein. “The conservative guy went liberal.”

Rothstein further speculated about Roberts' motives when he said the chief justice's experience with his own health issues and working in big business might have contributed to his decision. Rothstein said Roberts had good health care when he needed it and that “He was probably thinking about the millions of people who are less fortunate than he is.”

Rothstein said Roberts needed to land on “the right side of history and morality,” and these, too, probably influenced his vote.

Notice in all of this there is nothing about the Constitution. And what's this about morality? Whose morality would that be? Is it a fixed morality or one based on opinion polls and wanting to land on “the right side of history,” whatever that means? Liberal justices regularly decide cases based on such nonconstitutional irrelevancies. Why must a conservative?

This is the “Oprahfication” of America in which feelings trump truth and personal experience and class guilt rule, not the Constitution. Oprah Winfrey, who endorsed Obama in 2008, might head a new cabinet department should Obama win a second term: the Department of Feelings.

The Supreme Court didn't worry about morality and which side of history it was on when it decided to make prayer and Bible reading illegal in public schools a half-century ago -- and what about the “morality” of ripping constitutional protection from unborn babies? Whose moral code decided that case?

This sounds like selective morality by those academics who will write history. Such reasoning is not based on sound legal principles like the Constitution, much less a moral code created by One more “supreme” than the Supreme Court.

Well, first Mr. Thomas quotes Prof. Rothstein on Chief Justice Roberts' motives, then remarks, “Notice in all of this there is nothing about the Constitution.” Now first of all, Prof. Rothstein may have taught Chief Justice Roberts, but this does not make him clairvoyant about the Chief Justice's motivation. Just because Prof. Rothstein did not mention the Constitution does not mean that Chief Justice Roberts did not keep it firmly in mind. And in fact his decision is firmly grounded in that document. He mentioned that PPACA was not authorized by Art. I Sect. 8 Clause 3 (the Commerce Clause) or Clause 18 (the “Necessary and proper” clause), but fell under Clause 1 (the Taxing Clause). If Mr. Thomas actually read this decision, he would find this out.

But it is clear that to Mr. Thomas, the governing document is not the Constitution, in any case, but his reading of the Bible. Certainly, when he says, “what's this about morality? … The Supreme Court didn't worry about morality and which side of history it was on when it decided to make prayer and Bible reading illegal in public schools a half-century ago -- and what about the “morality” of ripping constitutional protection from unborn babies? Whose moral code decided that case?” he reveals this. Prayer (which cannot be other than according to some religion's ideas) and Bible-reading (Whose Bible? Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant Bibles do not agree, not to mention Moslems and other religions, who have other scriptures that are not to be found in Cal Thomas's Bible) cannot be other than part of an establishment of religion. And if Cal Thomas claims otherwise, I would love to debate him. And his gratuitous reference to “unborn babies” is even further afield, as even within his own precious Christian religion, denominations differ as to when a “baby” begins to be. As I say, it's not just the Bible that he is trying to elevate above the Constitution, but his reading of the Bible. And it is not the job of the Supreme Court to base their decisions on the Bible — even less their job to base them on Cal Thomas's reading of the Bible. So I praise them for just those acts — “mak[ing] prayer and Bible reading illegal in public schools a half-century ago” — for which Mr. Thomas condemns them. But when he speaks of “One more ‘supreme’ than the Supreme Court,” he clearly oversteps his bounds. Cal Thomas has every right to act in accordance with his own religious beliefs — the First Amendment gives him that right. And if he wants to defer to “One more ‘supreme’ than the Supreme Court,” as an individual he can do so. But to the Justices of the Supreme Court, this is not an option. They have sworn oaths to uphold the Constitution — oaths to whatever Supreme Being they respect. And their failure to uphold that Constitution, in consequence, as a violation of their oath, is an abomination before that very “One more ‘supreme’ than the Supreme Court” to whom Mr. Thomas refers.

An[other] infuriating column by Cal Thomas

Yesterday I read a column in the Washington Examiner written by Cal Thomas, and as usual, Mr. Thomas' positions I find infuriating. Now in this column, he is actually advocating a position I share — that Obama should be opposed — but I think for all the wrong reasons. Thomas begins his column (named “The Gospel According to Obama”) with the paragraph:

It is one thing to talk about “fairness” when it comes to allowing gays and lesbians to marry; it is quite another to claim biblical authority for such relationships.

President Obama cited the Golden Rule about treating others as you would like to be treated. In doing so, he ignored the totality of Scripture and the notion that the Lord alone sets the rules for human behavior.

Now, Mr. Thomas seems to think that he alone is an expert on Scripture; or, more likely (since, if I recall correctly, he is a Roman Catholic) that all of the world is bound by what the Pope has said, and Mr. Thomas' deference to Papal infallibility should be shared by all. Now, whatever I may think about President Obama, I believe that he, as much as Cal Thomas, has an equal right to interpret the Scriptural meaning — and, in fact, I claim this right for myself as well. And in particular, since there are churches that are willing to solemnize gay marriages (even if his own is not), Mr. Thomas is in addition imposing a religious test contrary to both the spirit and the letter of Article VI, paragraph 3 of the United States Constitution:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.

So Mr. Thomas is way off base. And later in the same column, he says:

I recently wrote that it is becoming increasingly difficult for people who believe the Bible is God's Word to impose their beliefs on those who disagree with them. But it is something altogether different for those who disagree with them to claim the Bible doesn't say what it actually says. Obama apparently hopes there are sufficient numbers of biblical illiterates — and he could be right about this — who either don't notice his sleight of hand, or don't care.

Again, Cal Thomas knows “what [the Bible] actually says,” while Barack Obama does not. But then he slips into a different argument:

Thousands of years of human history have sustained marriage between one man and one woman.

In other words, “this is how it's always been.” But of course, until the 1860s, “how it's always been” included slavery; and one can name all sorts of things that once upon a time could be described as “how it's always been.” That does not mean they were right. But then, Thomas goes back to the Bible, and fires off a number of biblical quotations, but fails to note that the Bible also says he should not eat pork, that a widow should marry her late husband's brother, etc., etc. So why do these quotes carry more weight? After these quotations, Mr. Thomas goes on:

Liberal theologians have tried to modify, or even change, what is contained in the Bible, and there are those in our time who are following their example with the issue of same-sex marriage. People are free to accept or reject what Scripture says, but not to claim it says something it does not. In modern times, that's called spin. In an earlier time, it was called heresy.

What “liberal theologians” say deserves as much credibility as Mr. Thomas, who is offering only one interpretation of what Scripture says, an interpretation which he certainly has a right to hold to, but not to bind anyone else to. Now, Mr. Thomas does say one thing which I actually find to make some sense:

As he seeks to justify his position on same-sex marriage and other issues with at best a questionable use of and at worst a denial of Scripture, President Obama might be said to be preaching another gospel. This could possibly lead to a fissure in his solid support among African-Americans, costing the president votes in November. It will also likely galvanize the culture warriors. Minorities mostly vote for Democrats, but they don't like their faith denied. That could cause some of them to stay home on Election Day, or even vote for Mitt Romney.

While I might challenge Mr. Thomas' characterization of President Obama's position as “at best a questionable use of and at worst a denial of Scripture,” I can certainly agree that there are African-Americans who might weaken their support for him, or possibly even vote for Mitt Romney, as a result of this; not many, because they seem so proud of having one of their number. But in the same issue of the Examiner, for example, columnist Gregory Kane, an African-American conservative who never did support Obama, mentions that his mother's support for Obama has been lost as a result of this stance.

In a sense, I should not gloat over someone casting a vote for Romney for a reason which I think should not govern a voter's decision. I shudder to think of the fact that I have people like Cal Thomas on “my team.” But I reason this way: Obama may lose some votes for the wrong reason. But if he does, I can't really shed any tears. Any reason that someone votes for Mitt Romney against Barack Obama helps remedy the terrible wrong that resulted from the 2008 election.

Can Barack Obama make the American people forget the economy?

Yesterday's editorial in the Washington Examiner began:

What issues are most important to voters this presidential election year? If you said the economy, jobs and the budget deficit, congratulations, you are like the rest of America. But if you said gay marriage, birth control and pranks Mitt Romney pulled in high school in 1965, then you either already are, or may have a future in the liberal media.

Very apropos. Obviously, President Obama does not want people to focus on the economic issues that point out how totally unsuccessful, even after three years of trying, the Obama administration is at fixing what is wrong with the economy. He and his media allies would rather direct people's attention to Mitt Romney's nearly half-century-ago harassment of a seemingly-gay classmate, or a vacation he took where he strapped his dog's shelter on top of his car (also decades ago). They figure that they have to make people dislike Romney so much that they will forget about people's being out of work, or being forced to take a health plan poorly suited to their needs, or all the other things that Obama's administration has foisted on the American people. Hopefully he will not succeed. We need to make clear that Obamanomics is the issue in 2012, not something Mitt Romney did to a fellow high-schooler almost 50 years ago.

Truth: a casualty of liberal thinking?

As I have mentioned more than once, I get a lot of material for my posts from columns I read in the Washington Examiner. Many of the columns do not really share my opinions, and I've agreed with some and disagreed with others. (In some, I have not really cited the column, such as one by Gene Healy on Gary Johnson, though it was because of that column that I wrote my most recent post, which was about Johnson.) And yesterday I saw another column I'd like to cite; this one by the Examiner columnist I tend most to agree with: Noemie Emery. Her column, in yesterday's paper, was entitled “The year of losing touch with reality”: among some of the things she says is

Somewhere in the recent past (say, about the time “Dreams From My Father” was published), liberals decided reality wasn't really their thing. It was too dull. It didn't give closure. Sometimes the endings weren't right. So it turns out that Obama's main squeeze in his young days was a “composite,” digitally enhanced for your reading experience.

Then, it turned out that even the blond, blue-eyed, whey-faced Elizabeth Warren, running against Scott Brown in Massachusetts for his seat in the Senate, was hired by Harvard as an American Indian, though the proportion of Cherokee in her bloodline was just 1 in 32 parts. Just how pale-faced is Warren? A lot more than George Zimmerman, the brown-skinned son of a Peruvian mother who is accused of murdering Trayvon Martin. He was described by the New York Times as a “white Hispanic,” because if you're going to characterize a death as a lynching, the one who commits it had better be white.

I have to say that I enjoyed seeing those words in her column, and I felt I really needed to quote them. She also goes on to say, later in the same column,

What could be less real than that? Well, there is one thing — conjecture about what would have been in an alternative universe, in which much is asserted and nothing proved. These have become mainstays for President Obama, whose case for re-election is based not on what has happened, but what could, would or might have occurred under different conditions, which he is allowed to make up. One is his belief that his stimulus averted a second Depression. A second is to charge that a President Romney would not have made the call to take out Osama bin Laden and then to attack Romney for a “decision” he never had the opportunity to make. The supposed evidence for this claim came from a wide-ranging interview on general strategy that Romney had given five years earlier.

I recommend that you read the entire column, but these excerpts show how Noemie Emery tells it “like it is.” More power to her.

Libertarianism and isolationism

Some people who care deeply about freedom, and would be, on that account, termed libertarians, also seem to be fervent isolationists. I don't see the connection — in fact, as I said in an earlier post, I cannot see why freedom is good, but exporting it is bad. But we all know how much of an isolationist Ron Paul is, and he's one of the most extreme libertarians around. Today I saw another example.

The Washington Examiner, as I have said in the past, is a conservative paper, not only in its own editorial policies, but in its choice of columnists. Almost all its columnists would be described as more conservative than I am. But two of the columnists, John Stossel and Gene Healy, are better described as libertarians than conservatives. (Healy is a vice-president at the Cato Institute, certainly a libertarian credential.) And today, Healy's column showed that, like Paul, he qualifies as an isolationist.

Today's Gene Healy column was entitled: “Is Rubio running for veep, or Globocop?” And in it he takes Sen. Marco Rubio to task for advocating what Healy terms a “neoconservative” foreign policy. (Read Healy's column: here.)

Perhaps I too am a “neoconservative.” (I'm not quite sure what that means!) But to me, helping people attain freedom, not just in the USA but all over the world, is a good thing. And there's where I part company with Gene Healy.