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A miracle cure with estrogen

By Wesley Pruden
|
January 4, 2013

John Boehner thinks there’s too much of Barack Obama in Washington. Most of the Democrats think there’s a surplus of impertinent Republicans. Chris Christie says it’s Congress that turned Washington rancid. Everybody agrees something is rotten on the Potomac.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein

The ladies of the U.S. Senate think they’ve figured it out. It’s that beastly testosterone that’s making everybody but the ladies sick.

We’re less on testosterone,” says Dianne Feinstein of California. “We don’t have that need to be always confrontational. And I think we’re problem-solvers, and I think that’s what the country needs.”

Mrs. Feinstein and the 20 ladies of the Senate, the largest number ever, got together on the eve of the opening of the new Congress to talk about how efficient and gracious they are, and how lucky we are to have them in town. The girls’ day out got a big write-up in the Hill, the Capitol Hill political daily.

They’re Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, some almost young and some getting a little long in the tooth, and they come in various shades of gray. Benjamin Franklin, sexist old coot that he was, famously observed that women, like cats, are all gray in the dark. But what did he know? He never took the waters in Washington.

The senator from California is from San Francisco, where estrogen is regularly added to the drinking water, so she knows its many benefits. She got plenty of seconds for her motion. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska agrees that an excess of testosterone may indeed be what ails the capital, but it might be “the ego that is attached there.” Attached to what, she did not say, but ego – and vanity – has never been rationed in Washington. It’s attached to nearly everything.

The distaff senators (to use a term from the quaint past) agree that even when men aren’t so bad, the women are better. “What I find is,” says Susan Collins of Maine, “with all due deference to our male colleagues, that women’s styles tend to be more collaborative.” Claire McCaskill of Missouri says that’s because women “by nature are less confrontational,” and Mazie Hirono, newly arrived from Hawaii, says it’s because women are “problem-solvers.”

Amy Klobuchar of Maine thinks women, unlike men, have a sense of camaraderie. Sort of one for all and all for one, never a discouraging word for anyone, and everyone’s a pip. “I think there’s just a lot of collaboration between women senators and really standing up for each other that you don’t always see with the men.”

It’s the team mentality that women contribute, says Claire McCaskill. “Having us in the room, not only do we want to work in a bipartisan way, we do it. We actually work together, Republicans and Democrats, and women try to look at solving the problem rather than just going to political points.”

Well, it’s true that back in the real world, the men, rotters all, are pitching sticks and stones, never kind words, and no powder puffs. Time enough for that after you’re dead. Mr. Boehner was re-elected speaker of the House, but it was nothing like a vote of confidence. Some of soldiers in the Republican ranks think the speaker himself has inhaled some of that estrogen drifting over from the Senate side.

The speaker had been taking flak from his friends for delaying a vote on legislation to send billions of dollars in relief to the broken and battered in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. A couple of Republican congressmen from New York threatened to vote against him and were mollified only when he said he was sorry, more or less, and promised a vote within two weeks.

There’s no estrogen in the water in New Jersey. Gov. Christie told off the speaker good and proper, telling him that delay and diddling were exactly why “the American people hate Congress.”

What the speaker wants is a little love, a little balm for his wounds in the long struggle with President Obama at the edge of the fiscal cliff. He promised his troops Thursday that he’s through with the president, no more one-on-one. From now on it’s no more Mr. Nice Guy, and whatever the president wants will have to go through the regular legislative channels. Testosterone will reign.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

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California dreamin’ in Gruesome Gulch

By Wesley Pruden
|
January 1, 2013

LOS ANGELES—Californians take pride in the notion that everything in America starts here – the music, the clothes, the food, the fun and games of the celebrity culture. Now California is showing the nation something else, a view from the bottom of the fiscal cliff. Life from Gruesome Gulch, you might say.

Calif. Gov. Jerry Brown

It’s not pretty: Higher taxes, reduced public services, cuts in money for schools, crumbling bridges and highways, all the ills endemic to out-of-control welfare states.

Californians are still besotted with the dream of living off the lotus, though growing numbers of them are concluding that the game will be up soon. Thousands continue to flee California every year. Texas, Nevada, Arizona, Oregon and Washington are collecting most of the disillusioned emigrants, though thousands have made it to Georgia and South Carolina. There’s no John Steinbeck to tell a story of a trek very different from the journey taken in the opposite direction by the Joads of Oklahoma, but a study by the Manhattan Institute finds prosperous Californians fleeing dramatically higher taxes, tightening regulations, union power that pushes up high labor costs, more expensive electricity and ever more costly housing and commercial real estate. California is not quite the golden state it used to be.

The escape is not new; more Californians have left the state than newcomers have arrived every year since 2005. What is new is the accelerating trend. More than 4 million new residents arrived here in the go-go years between 1960 and 1990, attracted by mild and sunny weather, a lush and varied geography, and most of all by the fervent belief of nearly everyone that “anything goes” and “everything’s possible.” The future looked to bear no limit.

Now the future is here. Persuaded by Gov. Jerry Brown, Californians have adopted a number of new tax initiatives, including Proposition 30, which would raise the state sales tax to 8.25 percent, and an increase in the state income tax on taxpayers earning more than $250,000. Resistance to cutting entitlement to the lotus is great.

California has become radioactive in much of the West. You can still see an occasional frayed bumpersticker on the back roads of Colorado, pleading “Don’t Californicate Colorado.” The state’s politics would hardly be recognizable to Howard Jarvis, a perennial candidate for various offices whose Proposition 13, slashing property taxes by nearly 60 percent, set off the national tax revolt in 1978. Prop 13, opposed by most of the politicians and the big newspapers, was enacted in a landslide.

But lately Californians have returned to a diet of the lotus, the fruit in Greek mythology that delivers dreamy contentment and idle forgetfulness. The lotus is the unofficial state fruit. A new study by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Foundation blames the remarkably generous pay and pensions of state employes for California’s budget problems, now speeding toward terminal. The per capita salary of state employes, including benefits, is about twice the per capita salary of everybody else.

Nevertheless, Californians eagerly approved the $6 billion dollar bundle of tax increases in November, sold to voters as politicians from City Hall to the White House always sell taxes, as the only way to avoid closing the orphanages and throwing little match girls into the street.

“I know a lot of people had some doubts and some questions,” the governor told an election-night rally, “‘Can you really go to the people and ask them to vote for a tax?’ Here we are. We have a vote of the people. I think we are the only state in the country that says, ‘Let’s raise our taxes, for our kids, for our schools, and for our California dream.’”

The cost of delivering state services exceeds by a wide margin the per-worker costs in other highly unionized states, including New York, New Jersey and Illinois. In one remarkable case, an Afghanistan-educated psychiatrist arrived in California six years ago and got a state job paying $90,682 a year. Now he’s making $822,302 a year. He worked weekends and even performed some of his duties from home. The state is investigating how he piled up so much pay. “I’ve been put on leave for working too hard,” he told an interviewer.

California’s unemployment rate, above 10 percent for most of this year, is one of the highest in the nation, and the state has lost 855,200 private-sector jobs since 2008. Living here can still be golden indeed. The lush farms in the San Joaquin Valley can feed half the nation, the Napa and Sonoma vineyards produce some of the world’s best wines, and the high-tech corridor is thriving. A gulch will be a gruesome substitute.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

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Taking aim on the easy target

By Wesley Pruden
|
December 28, 2012

“What we must have is a national debate about guns.” So goes the media cliché of the moment. Everybody on the left is saying it, but nobody there means a word of it. All these wayward worthies really want is an opportunity to put piety on parade (and take your guns).

Quentin Tarrantino. Photo by Georges Biard

Everybody agrees that there’s too much violence in the culture. There’s even wide agreement on three major instruments of the violence – guns, the mentally ill, and the entertainment media. Gun owners, usually defined by liberals as “gun nuts,” are most tempting to blame in the wake of shootings like those at a high school and then at a movie theater in Colorado and lately at an elementary school in Connecticut.

Not so easy to blame is Hollywood, purveyor of wholesale violence, usually rendered as a romantic pursuit of justice. People like movies, even bad movies, and Hollywood’s chief customers are the young, the restless and the easily impressed. The shooters are nearly always found walking around in this market, looking for trouble.

The mentally ill, or at least mentally disturbed, are the hardest to identify, and the shooters are almost invariably the young men who ought to be safely locked away in a loony bin where they could do no harm to themselves or others. It’s just not fashionable in the salons of the left to say so.

The First, Second and Fourth Amendments, which guarantee free speech, gun ownership and freedom from illegal search and seizure, remain formidable obstacles to the government, which by nature seeks to restrict and control the freedoms of everybody. Who can say which of these guarantees is most important? Therein lies the dilemma of a free society where everybody wants to talk, just not to each other.

After the tragedy in Connecticut, President Obama quickly named the inevitable task force, theoretically to listen and then to report what it heard. He put Joe Biden in charge, which may be a clue to how much he thinks the panel’s own conclusions will be worth. It won’t matter, anyway, since we already know what he thinks about guns and what he would like to do about them. We know what his constituency thinks, too.

“To be fair to [Mr.] Obama,” writes John Cassidy in New Yorker magazine, “nobody should underestimate the hatred, ignorance, baloney, mendacity and borderline lunacy that would confront him if he were to . . . take on the gun lobby.” So why talk to “the other side?” Mr. Cassidy is only a little more hysterical than average.

So good luck with that “national debate.” Good luck, too, in Hollywood. Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood producer who has pumped more trash and gore into the bloodstream than almost anyone else, in a fit of pretension called a “filmmaker summit” in the wake of public outrage after the Columbine shootings. “I think as filmmakers,” he said, “we should sit down – the Marty Scorseses, the Quentin Tarantinos and hopefully all of us deal in violence in movies – and discuss our role in that.”

Not that violence in movies has anything to do with inspiring impressionable young men copying the violence in real life. “If we don’t get gun-control laws in this country we are full of beans. To have the National Rifle Association rule the United States is pathetic.” Alas, this is the level of Hollywood’s understanding of how America works.

How to control the crazies, certified and uncertified, is difficult. We’re paying the price now for dismantling public psychiatric hospitals 50 years ago, which made civil libertarians feel good about themselves but which is judged now to have been a public catastrophe. Thousands of unstable men and women were set loose on the streets with a bottle of pills and told to swallow them on schedule.

The three largest mental-health hospitals remaining, write E. Fuller Torrey and Doris A. Fuller in the Wall Street Journal, are the psychiatric wings at Riker’s Island in New York, the Cook County Jail in Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Jail. The feds, who can’t run public housing, public health care and education, observes the Wall Street Journal, can’t be trusted to identify and deal with crazy people, either, but several of the states have established effective outpatient programs.

The First Amendment protects Hollywood’s gore machine. The first amendment guarantees even irresponsible speech but does not require it, a distinction often lost on those who abuse it. Getting crazy people off the street would be difficult. The Second Amendment protects the right of the law-abiding to own a gun. That’s the target of the gun-control hysterics.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

» FULL COLUMN

The amazing grace of Christmas morn

By Wesley Pruden
|
December 25, 2012

The strip malls and the Main Streets fall silent. The ringing cash registers and the happy cries of children are but ghostly echoes across silent streets. But the Christ child born in a manger 2,000 years ago lives, liberating the hearts of sinners and transforming the lives of the wicked.

The authentic story of the redeeming power of the Christmas message is nowhere more vividly illustrated than in the incredible life of an English slaver named John Newton.

John Newton was born 300 years ago into a seafaring family in Liverpool. His mother was a godly woman whose faith gave her life meaning. She died when John was 7, and he recalled as the sweetest remembrance of childhood the soft and tender voice of his mother at prayer.

His father married again, and John left school at 11 to go to sea with him. He easily adopted the vulgar life of seafaring men, though the memory of his mother´s faith remained. He reckoned that religious faith could be important, he recalled many years later, “but I loved sin." On shore leave, he was seized by a press gang for another ship, HMS Harwich, where life grew coarser. He ran away, was captured, put in chains, stripped before the mast and flogged without mercy. “The Lord had by all appearances given me up to judicial hardness. I was capable of anything. I had not the least fear of God, nor the least sensibility of conscience. I was firmly persuaded that after death I should merely cease to be."

The Harwich traded him to a slaving ship, bound for West Africa to take aboard human cargo. “At this period of my life," John later reflected, “I was big with mischief and, like one afflicted with a pestilence, was capable of spreading a taint wherever I went."

John´s new captain liked him, and took him to his home on an island off the African coast, where he had married a cruel African princess. She grew jealous of John. He fell ill, and the captain departed John was left in the woman’s care. HMS Harwich was barely over the horizon when she threw him into a pigsty, blinded him, and left him in delirium to die. He did not die, but was kept in chains in a cage and fed swill. Word spread through the district that a black woman was keeping a white slave, and many came to taunt him. They threw limes and stones at him, mocking his misery. He would have starved if slaves waiting passage to the Americas had not shared their meager scraps of food.

Five years passed and the captain returned. When John told how he had been treated he was denounced as a liar. When he was finally taken aboard HMS Harwich again, he was treated ever more harshly, allowed to eat only the entrails of animals butchered for the crew´s mess. “The voyage quite broke my constitution," he would recall, “and the effects would always remain with me as a needful memento of the service of wages and sin." Like Job, he became a magnet for adversity. His ship crashed onto the rocks, and he despaired that God´s mercy remained after his life of hostile indifference to the Gospel. “During the time I was engaged in the slave trade," he said, “I never had the least scruple to its lawfulness."

The wanton sinner, the arrogant blasphemer, the mocker of the faith of others was driven to his knees: “My prayer was like the cry of ravens, which yet the Lord does not disdain to hear." Miraculously, he was rescued, and arrived back in England to reflect on the mercies God had shown him despite his wanton life. He fell under the preaching of George Whitefield and the influence of John Wesley, and with repentence and belief was at last born again into the new life in Christ.

On Christmas day of 1807 he died at the age of 82, leaving a dazzling testimony to the miracle born of Christmas. “I commit my soul to my gracious God and Savior, who mercifully spared and preserved me, when I was an apostate, a blasphemer and an infidel, and delivered me from that state on the coast of Africa into which my obstinate wickedness had plunged me." His testimony, set to music, would become the most beloved hymn of Christendom:

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

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Running out the clock on Benghazi

By Wesley Pruden
|
December 21, 2012

There’s no mystery about why Hillary Clinton spends so much time on airplanes to dreary places that everybody else avoids like the plague (or the stomach flu). The climate anywhere is better than in the comfortable ineptitude of Foggy Bottom.

Hillary Clinton

The report of an independent panel inquiring into what happened in Benghazi, and why, blames the State Department bureaucracy, essentially for not having a clue about what was going on in Libya. A panel of diplomats would never say anything like that, but the message written between the lines is plain and clear.

The panel blames intelligence officers – i.e., the CIA – for relying too much on “specific warnings” of imminent attacks, waiting for the details of the enemy’s game plan, and ignoring what should have been telegraphed from the seat of their pants. Everyone in Libya knew that the militias were all over the eastern part of the country, having already shot up a British diplomat’s motorcade and set off a bomb outside the American mission in Benghazi. The evil-doers were looking for evil to do. The Americans were the obvious targets.

A lot of people at Foggy Bottom were apparently busy with morning and afternoon siestas. The panel specifically blames the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Bureau and the Near Eastern Affairs Bureau for failing to pay attention to what was going on around them:

Systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels with two bureaus [resulting in security] that was inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place."

Well, duh. Anyone reading the newspapers or watching television, despite the mainstream media’s determination not to go after the story, knew that much. The panelists did not address the politics of the disaster, or why President Obama and his administration have worked so hard to avoid talking about their bungling and ineptitude and subsequent attempt to cover it all up with self-righteous blather.

Forgotten in all this is the obscure and infamous home-made video that nobody saw, mocking the prophet Mohammed. Mr. Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Susan Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations, all got on television as often as they could to blame the video for the attack on the consulate in Benghazi. You might have thought the video was about to ignite World War III. Nobody in the administration wants to talk about those lies and evasions now.

The latest evasion is what happened to Mrs. Clinton’s emphatic assertion, after the row raised by the many skeptics willing to believe their own eyes and ears, that “I take responsibility.” She did not explain what she meant. But taking responsibility requires more than just saying she takes responsibility. Susan Rice was then chosen to walk the plank that Hillary had so cleverly avoided. Having women available to take the heat is a tempting prerogative for this president. When Mitt Romney brought up Benghazi in the familiar timid and ham-handed way in the second presidential debate, Candy Crowley, the moderator, ran the usual media interference for Mr. Obama.

Mrs. Clinton, who no doubt has answers to more questions than anyone else -- since she is paid to run the State Department -- then disappeared. She had more important things to do in Lower Slobbovia. When she returned to redeem a promise to testify before Congress about how the Benghazi debacle happened, she fell ill with the belly bug, no doubt acquired in Lower Slobbovia, a common malady of diplomats suddenly on the spot. Then she fell and got up with a knot on her head. It’s not clear just when Hillary fell, whether before or after the belly bug bit. (We wish her a full and speedy recovery, by the way. Belly bugs are no fun and taking a lick on the head isn’t, either.)

She says she can’t wait to reschedule an appearance in January before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. But by then, with a little luck, we’ll be talking about her successor, probably Sen. John Kerry, the famous Vietnam war hero, Francophile and keen windsurfer.

Delay and obfuscation have marked the Obama administration’s reaction to the Benghazi debacle since the slain ambassador, Chris Stevens, first begged for the help that never arrived. Four Americans, including the ambassador, paid for the timidity and ineptitude with their lives.

The president and his minions were desperate to run out the clock in October, struggling to stumble across the goal line. Now Hillary is desperate to stall, even it means an occasional bump on the head, until her successor takes over. The public may never get the promised explanation. Until then, we’re entitled to think the worst. We’ll probably be right.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

» FULL COLUMN

When tragedy strikes, the hysterics rule

By Wesley Pruden
|
December 18, 2012

"If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs . . . yours is the earth and everything that's in it, and which is more, you'll be a man. . . "

Cardinal Donald Wuerl

Well, maybe. But Kipling is an old guy who has nothing to say to us. Being a man is not even the proper 21st century response to crisis. We’re all modern here, so we must emulate frightened, hysterical old women like Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City, who thinks he knows how to silence the guns.

President Obama should ignore Congress and write out an executive order tomorrow morning to make the streets safe for everyone, including all the little kitties. “The president,” Bloomberg says, “can introduce legislation even if it doesn’t get passed.”

Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California promises to introduce legislation to curb the power of “the gun lobby.” Sen. Charles Schumer of New York gets in his usual rail about guns and the nuts who own them. Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, where people-shooting is the municipal sport, says it’s time “the leadership in Congress will have a vote of conscience.” Since only gun hysterics have a conscience we can imagine how Hizzoner expects that vote to go.

It’s not just the politicians who are wetting their pants. Someone should call 911 because the CNN newsroom needs medical help. “For the past three days,” cried one correspondent on air, “I have been on the verge of tears every second and most of the people here have been crying 24 hour straight.” Ed Schultz of MSNBC, where creepy crawlies have leapt from Chris Matthews’ thigh to run up and down random legs in the newsroom, thinks there’s no time for due process: “It’s the confiscation of these types of weapons that counts and will have an impact.” Bob Schieffer of CBS News is relieved that the Connecticut shooter is a good Judeo-Christian American: “If this person had had, I’m sorry to say this, but if he had had an Arab name people would be going nuts about what we ought to do right now.” What an odd thing to say. People with Arab names have done evil things sometimes – the Fort Hood massacre comes to mind – and there’s no record of anybody going nuts over it. But it sounds like the right thing to say.

Hysteria and frenzy are clearly the way the politicians and media elites think we should deal with tragedy. These media worthies might better spend their tears and lamentations over the reckless coverage of the tragedy, when speculation, supposition and make-believe were presented as fact. Errors included the wrong number of the dead, the false identification of the shooter, the wrong guns identified, and the way the shooter was dressed. Tragedy was compounded by media ghouls who descended on surviving children and parents, stuffing microphones the size of beer cans in their faces to ask, “how did it feel?” Alas, editors have been chased out of the media.

Only reluctantly, some questions are raised now about whether such shooters are usually crazy, and what to do about them. A recent survey by Mother Jones magazine found that 38 of the 61 shooters in massacres over the past three decade “displayed signs of mental health problems prior to the killings.”

Prof. William Jacobson of the Cornell University Law School suggests that laws inspired by the ACLU make it difficult to identify and intervene with known nuts. “Will we address mental-health and educational-privacy laws, which instill fear of legal liability for reporting potentially violent mentally ill people to law enforcement? I doubt it.”

No one wants to talk about the tawdry and violent pop culture that has become a tsunami of blood and gore. An entire generation has been poisoned by a steady diet of television and movie shootings, knifings, explosions and assorted trauma.

Cardinal Donald Wuerl, archbishop of Washington, suggests we need to look into our hearts.

“What is it in our culture, what is it in our society that leads to this type of violence? Is it that we are so focused on ourselves? Is it that we don’t regard the dignity of every single person, the value of every single life, as something precious? Have we created such a mindset in our country that human life isn’t considered any longer precious, sacred, something we’re not allowed to take? We have to do some soul-searching.”

Good questions all, but there’s more media bang-bang with guns.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

» FULL COLUMN

Another low bow to radical Islam

By Wesley Pruden
|
December 14, 2012

Barack Obama says he’s a Christian. Good for him (and for the Gospel). But rarely has a Christian paid such obeisance to another faith and ideology. The president’s bow and scrape to Islam knows no end. That’s not so good.

Gen. John Allen

The U.S. Army is soon to issue a handbook instructing soldiers to copy Mr. Obama’s example of when and how to defer to an alien ideology that stands against everything Americans are taught, whether by faith, ethics, morals or another code of good conduct.

The new manual, which runs to 75 pages, orders American military personnel to refrain from saying anything to offend the Taliban in Afghanistan, to be careful not to criticize the practice of sexual relations with children, the abuse of women, beheadings, massacres of girls and the killing of “unbelievers” and Muslims who Taliban enforcers regard as insufficiently devout in the faith. Holding to what they have been taught, whether at Sunday school or a mother’s knee, is presumably OK for American soldiers, at least for now. But they must keep such ideas to themselves.

The manual, issued in the name of the U.S. Government, obviously at the command of the commander in chief, suggests that Western ignorance and arrogance and not the Taliban are responsible for the surge in deadly attacks by Afghan soldiers against the soldiers of the allied coalition.

U.S. troops should prepare for “psychologically challenging conditions” in Afghanistan, and be prepared for “stressors” that some American soldiers have remarked from previous deployments, such as finding Afghan security forces “profoundly dishonest and [having] no personal integrity,” and “gutless in combat,” and “ignorant and basically stupid.”

The manual’s bottom line, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal, is that “troops may experience social-cultural shock and/or discomfort when interacting with [the Afghans]. Better situational awareness/understanding of Afghan culture will help better prepare [coalition] forces to effectively partner and to avoid cultural conflict that can lead towards . . . violence.”

The Army, citing “etiquette,” specifically orders soldiers to avoid “conversation topics” such as “anything related to Islam, mention of any other religion and/or spirituality, debating the war, making derogatory comments about the Taliban, advocating women’s rights and equality, directing any criticism towards Afghans, and mentioning homosexuality and homosexual conduct.” The manual, according to the Journal, is the work of the Army’s Center for Army Lessons Learned at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. Some lessons, alas, are still to be learned.

Some of this advice would be just good manners at a proper dinner party for the elites and the effetes, where custom forbids talking about religion or politics. But bitching about anything and everything is a soldier’s cherished right. Any top sergeant (or major general) could tell you that bitching is crucial to good morale.

Nor is this the first time the Army has issued a manual to GIs with advice about avoiding cultural potholes. Every GI arriving in Britain in 1942, to train with our British cousins for the invasion of France, received a 31-page pamphlet detailing how to get along with the natives. Some of the advice is quaint today: Don’t use the word “bloody” if women are present; “it’s one of their worst swear words.” Never apologize for “looking like a bum;” to the British “this means you look like your own backside.” American GIs were reminded that a British female officer or non-commissioned officer is entitled to give orders to a man; “the men obey smartly and know it is no shame.” Both American and Brit were civilized, of course. That made everything easier.

It’s the tone and tint of the manual that offends. The Army of yesteryear would never feel it necessary to beg for an enemy’s mercy or cultural indulgence. Ike did not caution Americans not to speak ill of the Nazis on the eve of D-Day lest they abuse his soldiers. FDR did not describe the beheading of American pilots by the Japanese in 1942 as “workplace violence” lest he offend the men of Nippon. Ike and FDR counted on soldiers and Marines to be big enough to take care of themselves.

The Army manual offends American fighting men today, too. Marine Gen. John Allen, the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, neither endorsed the manual nor agreed to sign a foreword written in his name. “Gen. Allen did not author, nor does he intend to provide, a foreword,” a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition said. “He does not approve of its contents.”

We should thank him for small mercies. No thanks at all to the commander in chief. All is not lost, not yet.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

» FULL COLUMN

The game plan at the lip of the cliff

By Wesley Pruden
|
December 11, 2012

Barack Obama ain’t afraid of no stinkin’ fiscal cliff. Why should he be? When the rest of us go over the cliff, doomed to pain and oblivion among the soup cans, plastic bags and empty soda-pop bottles at the bottom of the abyss, he’ll be soaring over the rooftops as only a tin-pot messiah can.

When the George W. Bush tax cuts expire at midnight on New Year’s Eve, with the rest of us singing a tearful adieu to Auld Lang Syne, the president will be popping corks. He’ll have his higher taxes. The joke will be on us, but nobody at the bottom of the cliff will be laughing.

Barack Obama’s goal is to raise taxes, and how he does that is of small consequence. He is determined not to cut spending. This has become clear enough to all. He will have redeemed FDR’s famous mantra – “Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect” – in a way that Mr. Roosevelt could never have imagined. Mitt Romney’s infamous “47 percent,” the Americans who get a monthly government check, will balloon toward a hundred percent. Cuts, reforms, restraints, disciplines of any kind will be silly notions of the past. Dependency will be enthroned.

Once this is understood, there’s no mystery about why the “negotiations” between the Democrats and the Republicans have never amounted to very much. Mr. Obama reads the November 6 election result as a landslide, though 51 to 49 is far from a landslide. Nevertheless he is bold, and acting as if it were. He, and even a lot of timid and fearful Republicans, never absorbed the home truth that nothing recedes like success.

For now, everything is going his way. Mr. Obama’s vision of America is one he learned in his community-organizing days. Americans have to give up the idea that America is, in Lincoln’s memorable formulation, the exceptional nation, and learn to be miserable in solidarity with both Upper and Lower Slobbovia.

The president’s intelligence chiefs have given him the “good news” that by the year 2030, only 18 years from now, the United States will no longer be the world’s great superpower. “In terms of the indices of overall power – Gross Domestic Product (GDP), population size, military spending and technological investment – Asia will surpass North America and Europe combined,” reports the National Intelligence Council of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. That mouthful of titles and capital letters comprise the president’s own intelligence gurus.

With rapid rise of other countries,” the report goes on, “the ‘unipolar moment’ is over and no country – whether the U.S., China or any other country – will be a hegemonic power. The United States’ relative economic decline vis-à-vis the rising states is inevitable . . . ”

These are only opinions, of course, but the intelligence agencies are occasionally correct in their estimates and appraisals. But there is in the assessment a noticeable whiff of barely suppressed glee, and a suggestion that this could be the good news the president has been waiting for. Mr. Obama, a happy native of Hawaii, is nevertheless a man of the third-world attitudes and sensibilities inherited by birth, nurtured when he grew up in Indonesia, and it’s just these sensibilities that endear him to sordid allies on the left who dream of a world liberated from American example and influence.

Preaching the angry exploitation of the “rich,” as he defines “rich,” comes naturally to him and the Democratic left. Envy and covetousness are powerful emotions, easily manipulated, and Mr. Obama is a master of manipulation. Demonizing a neighbor in a bigger house who drives a new car is easy work. A new Battleground Poll finds that 60 percent of Americans polled now think raising taxes on households – not individuals but households – making more than $250,000 a year is a good idea. The president has done a splendid job of portraying these taxpayers as big-bellied plutocrats who summer in France, winter in St. Moritz, and dine on roast swan.

But nearly 70 percent in the Battleground Poll think raising taxes on small-businesses earning more than $250,000 is a bad idea. Republicans have done a lousy job of explaining that many, perhaps most, of the “rich” Americans and these small businesses are one and the same. That’s why abusing small businesses is likely to send the country reeling into another recession at the bottom of the cliff. This one won’t be George W.’s fault.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

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Over the cliff in a barrel

By Wesley Pruden
|
December 7, 2012

The Republicans are looking for the best way to fall off Fiscal Cliff, which has become a place fixed in the geography of public opinion, like Sioux Falls and Grand Canyon. If a man can survive going over Niagara Falls (another famous fixed place) in a barrel, maybe the Republicans can survive falling off Fiscal Cliff in a barrel with John Boehner.

Eric Cantor. Photo by Gage Skidmore.

The latest Republican gimmick is to split the difference on income-tax rates between the current rate of 35 percent and the Clinton-era rate of 39.6 – and with substantial cuts in government spending. This is the solution the pilots of an earlier generation might call “coming home on a wing and a prayer.”

There’s no indication that President Obama will bite, nor is there any reason why, from his point of view, he should. He has read the fear in Republican eyes and he’s willing – maybe eager – to jump off the cliff in the sure and certain confidence that with the compliant mainstream media at his back, he can successfully pin the blame on the Republicans for the consequences.

He can even promise spending cuts, secure in the knowledge that he won’t have to actually make them. Promises are a sucker’s game, and there’s no shortage of suckers. Mr. Obama clearly wants to humiliate the Republicans – re-election was not enough – and he and his Democratic allies think his victory on Nov. 6 arms him with a mandate to do as he pleases.

There’s no longer an argument over whether to raise taxes, only by how much. Some of the Republicans eager to cave now and get the details of surrender out of the way talk bravely of demanding spending cuts as the price of higher taxes to finance the president’s big-spending schemes, but they know in their hearts that actual spending cuts are a pipe dream. Raising taxes first, cut spending later, is a scheme that has never worked. Republican presidents played that shell game, too.

But Rep. David Camp of Michigan, the Republican chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, tells Politico, the political daily, that he is “reserving judgment” on such a scheme. “It depends on the entire package,” he says. “What are the spending [cuts] going to be? You can’t consider that on its own without looking at all the other factors that might go into it.” We can take that as a probable yes, as soon as everybody indulges in a little more big talk.

Rep. Nan Hayworth of New York sounds ready to quit now, with a few goodbye clichés. “There’s certainly a movement among us to accept that we indeed may have to not let perfect be the enemy of the good. If we can truly get a visionary plan, then I think we will certainly be happy to give that the most thoughtful consideration.”

The Republicans, including the speaker, are negotiating as if they actually believe that President Obama is negotiating in good faith. The speaker’s offer of $800 billion in new taxes sank without a salute. The president insists on soaking “the rich,” even though the most thorough soaking wouldn’t yield enough to make a sizable dent in either debt or deficit. But it satisfies Mr. Obama’s cult of covetousness, cupidity and spite, which dreams of a scorched-earth class war, and would redeem all his speeches from the president’s community-organizing days.

Mr. Obama called in the Business Roundtable this week for a little charm offensive. He told them that he’s rooting for the success of big business because when big business does well, “then small businesses and medium-sized businesses up and down the chain are doing well.” Someone should explain to the president that a strong economy is based on the jobs generated by small business, not big.

He repeated his mantra that only he holds the key to recovery. “What’s holding us back right now,” he told the assembled CEOs, “is a lot of stuff that is going on in this town. And I know that many of you have come here to try to see, is there any way we can break through this logjam. Nobody wants to get this done more than me.”

Just do it his way. Rep. Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, seems unimpressed. “An obsession to raise taxes isn’t going to solve the problem. We can’t just keep borrowing money and raising taxes and expecting the problem to go away. That is our point to the president.”

That’s precisely beside the president’s point. He has bigger plans at Fiscal Cliff.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

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The peace talks to nowhere good

By Wesley Pruden
|
December 4, 2012

Negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians can’t go anywhere good. Both Arab and Jew know it. Barack Obama poses as the honest broker, but he, too, knows that talk of a lasting resolution of differences is 100-proof moonshine.

The Palestinians won’t settle for anything less than all Israelis dead, or shipped off to somewhere far away. The Israelis, unreasonable as they may seem in the salons of the West, are determined not to settle for anything less than survival.

The fashionable opinion in the salons of the West is that the dispute is all about land, territories and borders, considerations that could be negotiated by civilized men of good will. If the Israelis give a little, the Palestinians give a little, then all can be reconciled: “If your friends like my friends, and my friends like your friends, then we’ll all be friends together, and won’t that be fine?”

But the dispute is not about land. It’s about Israeli survival. The Palestinians and their radical Islamic allies insist they have one goal in mind, the destruction of the lonely outpost of civilization in a region of mindless violence, where trying to keep your head has a very specific meaning.

They’re emboldened by the 138-9 vote in the United Nations General Assembly to grant “non-member observer” status to the Palestinian Authority, which they regard as official recognition of statehood. Synthetic statehood is only the beginning. “One day,” Mahmoud Abbas, the chairman of the Palestinian Authority, told enraptured crowds when he returned triumphantly from New York, “a young Palestinian will raise the Palestinian flag over Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the state of Palestine.”

This is the reality from which so many of the elites in the West avert their eyes. On the day after the vote at the U.N., the Israeli cabinet heard a summary of the inflammatory language the Palestinian Authority feeds tirelessly to its constituency, particularly in the schools. Several examples were culled from remarks Mr. Abbas delivered to the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 27, leading up to the grant of “non-member observer” status. He repeated some of them last week. The creation of Israel, he said, represents “one of the most dreadful campaigns of ethnic cleansing and dispossession in history.” This was meant as a not-so-subtle reminder that history can repeat itself.

On the Facebook page of a high school in the town of Tulkarem, a photograph of Adolf Hitler is displayed over the words: “I could have killed all the Jews in the world, but I left some of them so you will know why I killed them.” Maps of the region, distributed by the Palestinian Authority, do not even show Israel, a harbinger of the happy day envisioned by Mr. Abbas and his ilk.

“This is additional proof that we are not talking about a disagreement over territory,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the cabinet, “rather about the rejection of Israel’s existence.”

The elites in the West willfully ignore this reality, in part from cowardice, in part from ancient attitudes that refuse to die. Collaboration is held to be a virtue in France; no one was surprised when it voted to grant what the Palestinian Authority regards as “sovereign” status. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, talking a good game, told a podcast audience Sunday that “Germany will always stand by Israel” – except when it scuttles away, as it did when crunch time came at the U.N. General Assembly.

The Germans abstained from voting on Palestinian “non-member observer” status. So did Britain. The message to Israel was clear: “Call us anytime when you need help. With a little bit of luck we won’t be home.”

A test of American resolve comes this week, when the Senate is expected to vote on bipartisan legislation to cut off all aid to the Palestinian Authority if it appeals to the kangaroos of the U.N.’s International Criminal Court to punish “crimes” by Israel. That sounds tougher than it is. The aid would be cut off only if President Obama, a professed Christian who nurtures a schoolboy crush on Islam, determines that the Palestinians are not engaging in “meaningful negotiations” with Israel. Good luck with that.

“Jaw, jaw” is always better than “war, war,” as Winston Churchill famously remarked, even when one side gets all the discouraging words. The Israelis soldier on, stubbornly resisting the second-guessing of cowardly “friends,” because they have no choice. The prospect of hanging, as Dr. Johnson reminds us, concentrates the mind – and the will.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

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How Wes saw things on May. 23, 2012

Playing word games to avoid responsibility

Now for something entirely different: BP’s gusher in the Gulf seems to be capped, with nothing but tiny oil “seeps” and “bubbles” to foul the waters, and we can start building the gallows at last. A public hanging has always been good clean fun (unless you’re the hangee), and a waltz in 4/4 time at the end of a rope can be a favorite public entertainment again.

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