Freedom

His stunning re-election last year erased all the fears that public adoration for him had cooled. Now, we were told, the romance would be as hot as ever. The Democrats would have a permanent majority; the pitiless application of state power would destroy the hated conservatives once and for all, with their pathetic obsessions with God, the Constitution and the traditional family, and it would be smooth sailing to an American welfare state, with everybody dependent on a government run by Democratic liberals, radicals and opportunists.

But that was before success began to recede. The president is not out of the game; presidents, with all the trappings and opportunities of power, never are, particularly a president with years left to control and manipulate the government. But this president is weakened to the point of ineffectiveness and his gloomy media chorus, if not yet silenced by cold reality, must now sing a different song.

No one, except for the vicious sopranos in that chorus, will be tempted now to accuse quite so loudly the president’s critics of racism, bigotry and intolerance just for pointing out the flaws in his agenda or taking note of his personal and presidential shortcomings. That dog, in the telling bucolic cliché, won’t hunt now. That dog is dead (and dead dogs smell bad).

The current scandals – Benghazi, IRS and the hounding of The Associated Press and other organs of the press – only emphasize what ails Mr. Obama and his administration, of the corruption and above all the incompetence. None of the scandals touch the president personally, nor are they likely to. Every president has a guard around him to make sure the dirt won’t stick to him. But it’s the accumulation of the dirt around him that renders him ineffective, impotent and what the English call “wet.”

The president was elected in the first place because the nation embarked on a guilt trip, with millions of white voters out to show contrite repentance for the sins of segregation and decades of racial oppression. Barack Obama looked like the perfect candidate for the guilt-trippers: attractive, well spoken, educated and what Joe Biden called “clean.” (This last could be construed as a bit racist, but Joe usually runs his mouth just to see what comes out of it, so he gets a pass). No one was willing then to look very hard at Mr. Obama’s background, his friendships with left-wing radicals and domestic terrorists, and his work as a “community activist” promoting left-wing causes. To look very hard would have ruined the thrill of a romance.

Deep in the bowels of the Senate and House Office Buildings, secreted away where there will be no distractions, Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, have put aside partisan differences to work for the common weal. This particular weal has never had it so good.

The issue at hand transcends taxes, immigration reform, the war on terrorism, even war and peace (if any). The hush-hush conversations, involving House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, are about how to exempt Congress and all the little grunions who attend every need of the congresspersons from . . . Obamacare, the health care monstrosity that we were told would be so good for us.

Discussions started months ago, when it suddenly dawned on these worthies that the Affordable Health Care Act would not be affordable for these highly paid daytime residents of Capitol Hill, and they must be exempt from the requirements that will bankrupt everybody else. Democrats and Republicans alike are aware of the “acute sensitivity” of embracing public hypocrisy with such enthusiasm, and the sticking point is whether Democrats can persuade Speaker Boehner and Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, to commit hari-kari with them. A source close to the talks tells Politico, the Capitol Hill political daily, “everyone has to hold hands on this and jump, or nothing is going to get done.”

The alternative is to reach deep into savings or borrow the cash to pay for Obamacare in the insurance exchanges, just like everyone else, as mandated by the president’s health-care scheme, and joined with such glee by congressional Democrats, and sanctified by Chief Justice John Roberts. If Congress and its go-fers, the aides who pamper, coddle and on occasion even go to the bathroom for the members, are to be treated like the rest of us, a lot of them will have to retire to K Street’s lobbying shops or go home to find honest work as florists, dog walkers, bicycle mechanics - or rest on the kindness of indulgent kin. “This could lead to a real brain drain,” says one congressional aide, “with the nation losing the counsel and wisdom of many of the best and brightest.” (Brains on the Hill. Who knew?)

These worthies are shameless, as we all know, and they’re all hiding in fear in broom closets, little-used toilets or whatever they can find in the shadows under the elms. Harry Reid’s office won’t talk about it. Steny Hoyer, the House minority whip, sent out an aide to say that he was looking for a way to implement Obamacare in a way that’s workable for everyone, “including members and staff.” John Boehner’s mouthpiece said his boss wants to spare everyone pain. “If the speaker has the opportunity to save anyone from Obamacare, he will.” First the speaker and his aides, of course.

Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, who led the Republican opposition to Obamacare in the Senate, thinks exempting anyone, even a member of Congress, is a bad idea. “I think if this is going to be a disaster, which I think it’s going to be, we ought to enjoy it together with our constituents.” Perhaps Congress could hire out-of-work musicians to play “Nearer My God to Thee” on election eve next November, like the violinists who bucked up the spirits of the doomed on the deck of the unsinkable Titanic as the great ship sank.

Obamacare could be the gift to the Republicans that keeps on giving, as President Obama himself knew it would be when he arranged to have it become effective only after he was safely re-elected to a second term. Democrats are terrified that the full reality of the disaster will become apparent to all just in time for the 2014 congressional elections. They’re being particularly nice to their Republican colleagues, because they must have bipartisan cover.

Republicans, being Republicans, are likely to give it to them. The health-care “reform” is tailor-made as a Republican talking point – no need to shout – and nobody knows this better than a Democratic congressman. The prospect of hanging, as Dr. Johnson famously said, “focuses the mind wonderfully.” So, too, the delicious prospect of a congressman having to endure the punishment he devised for someone else.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

The mayor begins enforcement of his new rules about how much soda is good for a New Yorker on March 12, vowing to take neither prisoner nor excuse. Hizzoner wants to be remembered as the mayor who stopped the gulping, slurping and burping that threatened to make Gotham unfit for human habitation. Gotham was in fact unfit for habitation not so long ago. Then Rudy Guiliani cleaned up the city, chased the crooks and thugs to wherever they went, probably New Jersey, wiped away most of the graffiti and washed the dirt off the face of the city that never sleeps.

Mike Bloomberg wants to be remembered as the mayor who swiped Mary Poppins’ bloomers and became nanny to the world. The soda smackdown follows earlier campaigns against sins of the palate – New Yorkers were eating too much sugar, salt, fats, cigarettes. Even babies were guilty. The New York Post surveyed the battlefield of today and reports that Hizzoner is after a lot more than an 18-ounce container of Coke, Pepsi and other drinks Hizzoner deems too sweet.

“If you order a pizza,” the Post reports, “you cannot get a large bottle of soda delivered with it. Already, Domino’s locations across the city are doing away with 1- and 2-liter bottles of soda . . . they’ll sell smaller bottles instead, costing you more money and increasing plastic waste.”

Pizza restaurants typically charge $3 for a 2-liter bottle of Coke or Pepsi, the Post says, and after March 12 a customer would have to buy six 12-ounce cans for $7.50. This will put a crimp in a lot of family occasions, but that’s a sacrifice the mayor, a billionaire, is willing to take.

An anonymous blogger has put together a comparison of what life in America was like before the mayor and his ilk came to make things tedious and tiresome for the rest of us. You don’t have to be a geezer to appreciate the simpler life in the days before the nannies arrived. These scenaries of past and present illustrate.

Only yesterday, Jack pulls into the parking lot at Happy Valley High, in from an early-morning quail hunt, and his shotgun is proudly displayed in the gun rack in the rear window. The vice principal walks over to admire the gun (much as Joe Biden might have done), and goes to his car to get his own shotgun out of the trunk. He and Jack compare guns, talk of bird hunts, and put them away when the bell rings.

Fast forward to Not-so-Happy Valley High, circa 2013. Jack’s grandson pulls into the parking lot with his shotgun showing in the gun rack. Lockdown! Someone calls the cops. The FBI arrives to arrest Jack. He spends two days in jail and never sees his truck or gun again.

Scenario Two: Fred wakes up with a headache, takes a small bottle of aspirin from the medicine chest and when he arrives at school his pal Jerry has a headache, too. Fred gives him two aspirin and within an hour they’re both OK.

Fast forward again: Fred’s grandson, also named Fred, is not so lucky. He has a headache, too, and takes a bottle of aspirin to school, circa 2013, and when his friend Glenn complains of pain in his knee he gives him an aspirin. The teacher sees it, calls the principal, who calls the cops. Fred is thrown out of school, charged with dealing drugs.

Or consider what happened to Francisco when he flunked English on the eve of graduation day at Venice High in the long ago. Having recently arrived from Mexico, he was allowed to graduate on his promise to make it up in summer school. He went on to college and became an astronaut .

His nephew Pedro, newly arrived from Quintana Roo in 2013, flunks English, too. He sues the teacher, the principal and the school, arguing that requiring a knowledge of English to graduate is racist. The ACLU joins the suit; Pedro wins. He gets his diploma by court order and English is taken out of the core curriculum. Pedro mows lawns for a living because he cannot speak English and cannot get a job.

Nothing like this can happen, of course. Not in New York, anyway. The Soda Jerk will guarantee it.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

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.

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.

A new survey by Gallup asked Americans how much trust and confidence they have in the mass media – newspapers, television and radio – when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately and fairly: a great deal, a fair amount, not very much, or none at all. The result shows that “trust” disappeared long ago. Trust becomes disgust.

Gallup has been taking this measurement over the past decade or so, and the erosion of trust has been consistent and steady since at least 1998. Twelve years ago, 53 percent of Americans told Gallup that they had “a great deal” or at least “a fair amount” of trust in the media. By this year, only 40 percent of Americans put their trust in newspapers, television and radio to tell them what’s going on in the world. A remarkable 60 percent said they had “not very much” trust or “none at all.”

This should frighten editors and publishers, but it won’t. With few exceptions, they’re locked in to their high-minded prejudices and the noble conceit that the role of the media is not to report the news but to tell readers, viewers and listeners what to think about the news. This trend is vividly illustrated by the coverage of the presidential campaign this year. This latest survey was taken in the second week of September, so it’s hot off the press.

The results work out to a pretty miserable “favorable percentage.” If the media were a baseball team, it would be mired so deep in the cellar that it couldn’t even see next year. When Gallup asked these questions in the l970s, when the Watergate scandal was in full bloom with a new sensation across the front page every morning, the percentage of those who had a great deal of trust in the media was consistently in the high 70’s. Even allowing for the usual partisan divide – Gallup finds that Democrats, enjoying the liberal stroking of their “good” prejudices, alone in their approval of the press – this is a disastrous portent for the future of the mainstream media.

Two examples from the week’s news illustrate how and why. Mitt Romney finally released the awaited dump of information on his tax returns, after Sen. Harry Reid’s fanciful accusation that Mr. Romney did not pay any taxes for six years obsessed the media for weeks. The dump revealed that Mr. Romney had actually paid more than his fair share of taxes and that he gave away nearly 30 percent of his earnings to charity.

This compares to President Obama's 21 percent for charity -- and only 1.5 percent from Joe Biden, the miserly old uncle in the attic. Joe’s talent for squeezing every penny until Abe squeals recalls Bill Clinton’s taking deductions for old underwear he gave to charity. (To be fair, Bubba’s skivvies were little worn, since most of the time they were around his ankles.)

The reporters and pundits who were so obsessed with Mr. Romney’s taxes mostly passed on “analyzing” these facts. But the far more serious sin the media ignored was the debacle in Libya, where Islamic terrorists killed the American ambassador who, despite fervent pleas, had been left stranded in a hostile land without sufficient security.

For days the president, his secretary of state and the ambassador to the United Nations scoffed at the notion that the terrorism was the work of terrorists, and insisted it was spontaneous rioting by devout Muslims angry about a video they had never seen. It couldn’t have been the work of terrorists, because Mr. Obama had gone to Cairo as soon as he was inaugurated to bow to the imams and apologize for America being America. Nobody was any longer mad at us.

The big media had no interest in following the story; the celebrity journalists knew the president and they knew he was a stout fellow. He meant well and deserved a second term. Everybody knew that. When Philippe Reines, who holds Hillary Clinton’s horse at the State Department, was questioned closely about why the administration thought it necessary to tell such whoppers about the death of an ambassador, he blew his stack and resorted to trite schoolyard vulgarity.

The Obama administration finally conceded that it had been trying to sell a lie about what really happened in Libya, exposed by a few brave dissenters to the media consensus. Dissent was the work that all reporters and pundits once did, back in the day when “the press” was trusted to do its job. The fatal slide continues.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

The news from Libya gets darker, and the worst of the bad news for the president is that if everybody at the White House is “on message” it’s because everyone gets to make up his (or her) own message for nobody to believe.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who obviously needs a good night’s sleep, got in a war of adjectives with some of the caliphs of the Arabian knights. She fired the first volley of adjectives at the infamous video about the Prophet Mohammed, which the White House, against all available evidence, insists is the sole cause of the deadly riots. The video is “disgusting and reprehensible,” she said, “and it appears to have a deeply cynical purpose: to denigrate a great religion and provoke rage.”

A secretary of state, any secretary of state, rarely gets to use a large-caliber word like “reprehensible,” and Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, fired back with large-caliber words of his own. The video is “heinous and evil.” A president, even of a Muslim nation whose language is written in purple ink, rarely employs “heinous,” which is of a slightly deeper hue than “reprehensible.”

Mrs. Clinton paid tribute, sort of, to the First Amendment, which represents the principle on which America was founded, but she couldn’t resist the temptation to add a demeaning footnote. “There are, of course, different views around the world about the outer limits of free speech and free expression, but there should be no debate about the simple proposition that violence in response to speech is not acceptable.”

The footnote was not unnecessary, since the First Amendment does not guarantee happy speech, intelligent speech or even responsible speech. It guarantees free speech. But others in the government eagerly repeated the semi-apology over the first hours after the rioting exploded. This could have been a teaching moment about why Americans revere a Constitution that, in the words of the Weekly Standard, “was not written on behalf of poets and philosophers and film producers but to enshrine the rights of all citizens.” Instead, the White House tried to keep the focus on the video, to distract attention from its incompetence.

The White House keynote of distraction was sounded first by Jay Carney, the president’s press agent, when he insisted the riots were not aimed at his boss, the government, or even at “the American people,” but only at the video. Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., sounded even sillier when she insisted the storming of the American consulate in Benghazi was not planned and organized as a deliberate assault on America and its diplomats, but was a “spontaneous” happening against the movie. In her telling, it was probably a bunch of guys in Benghazi, loitering on the corner talking about the what was under the chadors the girls wore, and just happened upon a cache of automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades, and when one of the good ol’ boys suggested they attack the American consulate from three directions, they thought, well, why not? Guys, you know, like, will be guys.

The Libyan government’s insistence that the riots were not spontaneous, but highly organized and led by outsiders from Yemen and Mali, sounds like special pleading – blaming outsiders is always tempting for governments under siege. But it comports with what everyone so far knows.

If the president wants to find someone to blame, he should look at the face in his mirror. He imagined that a few honeyed words would make the Islamic world love him (and maybe even tolerate the rest of us) merely by making goo-goo eyes at those who want to kill us. We’ve had three years of goo-goo and the Muslim red-hots are still killing American soldiers, occasional civilians and selected diplomats.

Now the government is playing movie critic. The video is not likely to win an Oscar this or any other year, but criticizing the religious faith of others, and not just the faith of Christians and Jews, is well within what Hillary Clinton calls “the outer limits of free speech.” Apologizing, whether by word or deed, for America is asking for trouble. Nobody does apology for America better than Barack Obama, but now we see what he gets for it, even if he doesn’t.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

And then it was gone. The result, such as it was, was not quite what the media had in mind.

The good guys and the bad guys looked well-cast: doe-eyed innocents, eager to kiss, shout and fondle in pursuit of the love that shouts its name, against evil church folk determined to deprive gay brides of their rightful ration of peau de soie and gay husbands of their rightful perch atop a wedding cake.

The controversy was presented as the latest offensive against same-sex marriage, which most Americans regard as not quite marriage at all, led by a corporation determined to compel everyone to “eat mor chikin,” and wolf it down before the cows come home. The villainy was compounded by the outrage that the corporation was owned by born-again Christians.

Dan Cathy, a devout and successful Baptist businessman, openly talks of his faith and operates on a business model based on Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, as recorded in Matthew 5:41: “And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.” Two miles is more generous than one.

Quoting from the Bible was villainy compounded for liberals gagging on their celebrated tolerance, understanding, and goodwill for all. The contretemps was fueled when Mr. Cathy, chairman of Chick-fil-A, gave an interview to Baptist Press, meant mostly for church folk, and was asked to explain the success of Chick-fil-A, a family business that has grown from a single diner in suburban Atlanta to a chain of 1,608 restaurants with annual sales of $4 billion. What he actually said, and how he said it, was lost in the din of outrage over what others, not so well-meaning, said he said.

“We don’t claim to be a Christian business,” he actually said. “There is no such thing as a Christian business.” He recalled a fellow Christian once reminding him, “Christ never died for a corporation. He died for you and me.” But as an organization, “we can operate on biblical principles. So that is what we claim to be. We ask God to give us wisdom on decisions we make about people and the programs and partnerships we have. And He has blessed us.”

Chick-fil-A restaurants are closed on Sundays, “to give employees the opportunity to attend religious services or to have a day of rest,” and the Chick-fil-A Bowl, which matches top college football teams from the Southeastern and Atlantic Coast conferences, is never played on Sunday. The game always opens with a prayer, by ministers of various denominations. It’s in the contract with the bowl.

Chick-fil-A contributes millions of dollars to college scholarships, foster-care programs for children, and conference and retreat centers. “That morphed into a marriage program in conjunction with national marriage ministries. We are very much supportive of the family – the Biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business.”

That’s all fairly unexceptional to the customers who drop in for the chicken sandwich that has made Chick-fil-A second only to the rival whose customers famously lick their fingers when dining on chicken. Little of any of this made it into most media accounts of Dan Cathy’s remarks, which were widely construed as an attack on “same-sex marriage,” which he had mentioned only by mild implication in answer to an interviewer’s question about statements he'd made in an earlier radio interview. Asked whether it was true that some people oppose his support of marriage as most Americans see it, i.e., a vow joining a man and a woman, he replied: “Guilty as charged.”

Controversy exploded in the media like grease splashed on a red-hot griddle. Gay-rights advocates, always eager to take offense at the beliefs of other people, tried to make their disagreement a civil-rights complaint, though Chick-fil-A sells its chicken sandwiches, “waffle fries” and soft drinks to anyone. When the special pleaders of the lavender lobby suggested a boycott of the restaurants, thousands of friends of Chick-fil-A responded by showing up to “eat mor chikin.”

But the crowds that caused traffic jams at the restaurants in places coast to coast were about more than a wedding and a chicken sandwich. This was a positive push-back from the public, some religious and some not, weary of being told by soreheads, pretending moral superiority, that only soreheads have the right to their opinions. The lesson the soreheads learned is that playing chicken, and especially “chikin,” is a fool’s game.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

We’re all terrorists now.

The Department of Homeland Security, ever on the scout for opportunities to blow taxpayer money, commissioned one of those “studies” so popular among college professors, to find clues that would identify prospective terrorists before they blow up airplanes, bring down skyscrapers and otherwise wreak havoc.

The “new studies" show that just about everybody must be dreaming of terrorism, plotting mayhem and chaos and teaching others how to do it.

Something called the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (learned professors dream of being paid by the word) went to work at the University of Maryland and produced a $12 million magnum opus called “Hot Spots of Terrorism and Other Crimes in the United States, 1970-2008.” And not a moment too soon.

Islamic terrorism, the scourge of the civilized world, like bubonic plague in an earlier time, largely gets a pass; the study does not even mention the first attempt to bring down the World Trade Center in 1993 in the name of Allah. But the professors have got the number of the rest of us.

The NCSTRT, to use the popular acronym for the consortium, took definitions from a study it did last year called “Profiles of Perpetrators of Terrorism.” (Professors never tire of quoting themselves.) You might never guess who the perps who populate professorial dreams might be. These are some of the characteristics the feds at the Department of Homeland Security can use to identify terrorists: anyone who thinks his “way of life” is under attack, anyone “fiercely nationalistic,” “anti-global” or “suspicious of centralized federal authority,” or “reverent of individual liberty.”

These categories include, at one time or another, nearly all of us – liberals who continue to rail at how George W. Bush intended to do wicked things to dissenters, and conservatives who are saying similar things now about Barack Obama. Railing, some of it on target and some of it not, is what Americans do. Robust speech frightens the Department of Homeland Security and its minions, who are not, after all, necessarily steeped in the history, traditions and habits of the republic.

Some of this has made it into the mainstream press, so called, but much of it hasn’t, and the task of reporting it has often been left to Internet sites like prisonplanet.com and infowars.com that monitor the fine print of government regulations and handouts. “The most flagrant example,” reports prisonplanet.com, “was the infamous 2009 report published by the Missouri Information Analysis Center and first revealed by Infowars, which framed Ron Paul supporters, libertarians, people who display bumperstickers, people who own gold or even people who fly a U.S. flag, as potential terrorists.

"The rush to denounce legitimate political beliefs as thought crimes, or even mundane behaviors, by insinuating they are shared by terrorists, has accelerated in recent months. Under the FBI’s Communities Against Terrorism program, the bulk purchase of food is labeled a potential indication of terrorist activity.”

Who could have guessed that Costco or Sam’s Club, where everybody loads up hot dogs, pizza, sides of beef, fruit, vegetables and toilet paper by the ton and fruit juice and root beer in 60-gallon drums, are hotbeds of terrorist scheming. One program, under the aegis of the FBI, even calls using cash to pay for a cup of coffee suspicious, even though most coffee-shop cashiers frown on a customer paying for a $1.50 cup of coffee with a credit card.

Junk like this is of a piece with the continuing campaign to cast conservatives as nuts. It’s nothing new, there’s just more of it. A decade ago, a study by professors at California at Berkeley, Stanford and the University of Maryland, done for the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Science Foundation, concluded that “social conservatives” suffer from “mental rigidity,” “dogmatism,” and “uncertainty avoidance,” together with “associated indicators of mental illness.” President Obama only said it more succinctly and more colorfully, that some Americans won’t vote for him because “they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion.”

We’re all tempted sometimes to think those who disagree with us are crazy, but now comes the federal government to classify dissenters not merely nuts, but terrorists. Such is the new civility the president and his liberal friends commend to us.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

Chief Justice John Roberts is a clever surgeon, and he left a bloody mess to prove it. He’s in the Mediterranean now, on the island of Malta, lecturing to European lawyers about how to “grow” in office, basking in the applause of fans of the welfare state.

Some of our most intellectually resplendent pundits and academics are applauding, too. They’re calling him the dancing master of “finesse,” the lord of the “physics of American politics,” the genius of the conservative attempt to move judicial review back to the center.

What they’re not saying is that John Roberts has bequeathed to the rest of us a monstrosity of a health-care system, now embedded in the law, where it will only grow, fester and metastasize. Worst of all, Mr. Justice Roberts has given Congress, and all the Congresses to follow, the unrestrained power to rob, plunder and pillage and call it a “tax.”

The damage is likely to be catastrophic. The voters, we’re confidently told, can fix the damage in November if they elect a new president. That’s an enormous “if,” and absent a George McGovern or Walter Mondale there’s never a slam dunk in presidential politics. Despite his promise to “repeal and replace” as the first act of his presidency, Mitt Romney could have a compliant House but he’s unlikely to inherit a Republican Senate. Without enough congressional allies all the new president can do is shake his fist while Obamacare grows, festers and metastasizes.

Mr. Roberts is said by friends to have wanted most to enhance the “reputation” of the court by avoiding a “partisan” 5 to 4 decision overturning Obamacare. But he would write a passage to restrain Congress from doing bad things in future in the name of the commerce clause. He could have put his restraint of the commerce clause into a decision overturning Obamacare – the four conservatives on the court were eager to do it – but that would have meant no applause from the left. So the rest of us are stuck with Obamacare, the elites console themselves with a moral victory, and Mr. Roberts has established the reputation of the court as a lap dog for every Congress from now on, “moving forward” in cheerful disregard of enumerated powers.

“Justice Roberts's opinion,” writes John Yoo in the Wall Street Journal, “provides a constitutional road map for architects of the next great expansion of the welfare state. Congress may not be able to directly force us to buy electric cars, eat organic kale, or replace oil heaters with solar panels. But if it enforces the mandates with a financial penalty then suddenly, thanks to Justice Roberts's tortured reasoning . . . the mandate is transformed into a constitutional exercise of Congress's power to tax.”

Mr. Roberts, writes Mr. Yoo, professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley and a Justice Department lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, “may have sacrificed the Constitution's last remaining limits on federal power for very little – a little peace and quiet from attacks during a presidential election year.”

His friends say that criticism in the newspapers and on television gets easily under his skin, that he has been for so long the golden boy – Harvard Law, top-of-the-line Washington law firm (Hogan and Hartson), a clerkship for a chief justice (William Rehnquist) – that he imagines he was put where he is now to bask, and buff and burnish the reputation of the court all the better to reflect a shine and sheen on his own image.

The formula for ending partisanship in Washington – a city founded as the designated arena of partisanship – is simple: Republican and conservative deferral to the greater wisdom and higher nobility of Democrats and liberals. There’s never a suggestion that Democratic and liberal deferral would accomplish this as well. The president who appointed him to the court, and the conservatives who stood up to the media smear machine to help him win confirmation, quaintly reckoned that he would be less concerned with public relations and image-buffing than concern for the Constitution.

Instead Mr. Roberts, faced with one of the most important decisions of his career, took a walk into the wilderness [Wall Street Journal], or strolled into the land of the sophists [Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito]. The betting here is that, seduced and embraced, he’ll never return.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.