Values

Democrats generally and liberals in particular can’t understand what the noise from Benghazi is about, though they’re willing to concede that the deaths of the American ambassador and three colleagues was a shame and maybe even a tragedy. The families of the dead deserve the nation’s thoughts, and even the prayers of the guns-and-religion clingers, and if any of the families can find condolences in mass-produced clichés they’re welcome. But whatever bad happened in Benghazi was a bureaucratic failure and the word at the White House is that bureaucrats can fix it.

Republicans generally and conservatives in particular can’t figure out why the ambassador and his three luckless colleagues were allowed to twist slowly, slowly in the toxic smoke of the burning consulate, and can’t understand why everyone else is not as outraged as they are. How much is a human life reckoned to be worth?

The left, which weighs everything on the scales of political expediency, can’t understand why American “special operations” standing by in Tripoli were so eager to fly to the rescue. Liberals and lefties can’t understand why, after being told to stand down, the soldiers were “furious,” as Gregory Hicks, the No. 2 diplomat in Benghazi, eloquently described them in his testimony to the House committee inquiring into the episode. The ambassador and his colleagues died pleading for help that never came because the president’s men and women were too surprised, too timid, too frightened to send it. “None of us should ever have to experience what we went through in Tripoli and Benghazi,” Mr. Hicks told the panel.

Ordinary Americans have thrilled with pride to the stories of blood and flesh spent to attempt the rescue of the helpless, whether the exploits of the famous 7th Cavalry riding through heat and choking dust to save the settlers and their families on the plains, or George S. Patton’s Third Army racing through ice and snow to relieve the 101st Airborne at Bastogne at Christmas 1944, or the Marines’ fighting retreat from the Chosin Reservoir in similarly frozen Korea in the winter of 1950. Soldiers throughout the nation’s history have redeemed the promise that no one will be left behind. The retreat from the reservoir, though not a triumph of arms, is rightly regarded as a special moment in the history of the Marine Corps. The photographs and newsreel footage of the Marines bringing out their wounded and frozen dead, stacked on their tanks, are iconic reminders of the debt fighting men owe to each other. Somebody tried.

The besieged defenders of Bastogne owed their rescue to Patton, often reckless and always spoiling for a fight. The Americans were trapped at Bastogne, having been ambushed by the Germans in a last attempt to force a negotiated surrender. They seemed on the lip of success. Patton promised the skeptical Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme allied commander in Europe, that he could turn his three divisions around overnight and fight their way more than a hundred miles to the rescue: “The kraut’s got his head stuck in a meat grinder, and this time I’ve got hold of the handle.” Ike gave the word, Patton gave the order, and Bastogne was soon relieved. Thousands of Americans were saved and the Germans never again mounted a sustained offensive. Somebody tried.

This is the lesson of the fighting spirit that seems no longer prized in certain precincts in Washington. There’s no evidence that this White House appreciates courage, reckless or otherwise, and the can-do spirit that saves causes otherwise lost. Barack Obama prefers to lead from behind. He’ll take the credit if everything works out OK - and if nothing good works out, he’ll make a nice speech (though lately even his gifts of gab have departed from him). He’s willing to mock the guns-and-religion clingers and still hasn’t figured out where the nation’s enemies are.

Hillary Clinton, celebrated at the Clinton White House for throwing lamps and for her contempt for anyone in uniform, has always had trouble recognizing enemies, too. (She thought it was the vast right-wing media conspiracy.)

Maybe we can’t blame these folks. It’s in the DNA. But a nation won’t long survive inability to recognize enemies and indifference to incompetence. It has to defend itself from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Let the investigations begin.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stood up to the enemy in Iraq, where he made an enviable combat record. But at the Pentagon, he appears to have fallen, not on his sword, but on a paperclip, attached to a point of religious doctrine.

When, 18 months ago, apologists for Islamic radicals complained that an instructor at the National Defense University, the military war college, was guilty of the sin of showing insufficient deference to radical Islam, the general first humiliated him, then cashiered him, to appease Muslim critics, some of them radical and no friends of the United States. Now the instructor has been rejected for battalion command and his promising Army career is effectively over.

Army Lt. Col. Matthew Dooley (a good Irish Catholic name), decorated for valor in Iraq, was an instruction leader at the Joint Forces Staff College in Washington, lecturing on the dangers of radical Islam, when he invited an authority on Islamic extremists to talk to his students about how the extremists operate. You might think that “knowing the enemy” is a good thing in senior Army officers. One passage in the materials used by a guest lecturer, former FBI agent John Guandolo, particularly enraged the critics:

“If Islam is so violent, why are there so many peaceful Muslims? This is similar to asking why there are so many Christians who are arrogant, angry and vindictive, if Christian doctrine requires humility, tolerance and forgiveness.” There were no protests from Christians, or Christian organizations. But one participant in the course complained to the Pentagon, and the witch hunt, led by the thoroughly frightened Gen. Dempsey, began.

Paperclip generals, more politician than warrior, naturally take their cues from the White House, and it’s reasonable to assume that the pressure from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was the prevailing pressure, intense and effective. President Obama bows low in the presence of Muslims, as we all know, and ordered effective cleansing of all references to Islamic terrorists. John Brennan, the hero of Benghazi and the new director of the CIA, insists there is no such thing as an “Islamic extremist.” The al Qaeda terrorists who blew up the World Trade Center had nothing to do with Islam, they were just terrorists trying to make a dishonest living. The Muslim major who shouted the Islamic battle cry, “Allahu Akbar” (“God is great!”) as he killed 13 and wounded 30 at Fort Hood, Texas, was guilty only of “workplace violence,” not “terrorism.” If he’s convicted of murder by court martial, he can apply for workmen’s compensation (and call John Brennan and Gen. Dempsey as supporting witnesses). Paperclip generals have sharp antennae and know who punches their tickets.

They know how to cover the part of their anatomy that most needs covering, too. Gen. Dempsey landed hard on Col. Dooley at a press conference, speaking as an academic and maybe even a theologian: “It’s totally objectionable,” he said of the colonel’s course work. “It was just totally objectionable, against our values, and it wasn’t academically sound. This wasn’t about, we’re pushing back on liberal thought. This was just objectionable, academically irresponsible.”

Such an emotional response was not quite what’s expected of a four-star general. A week later another general, only a two-star, was dispatched to blame the colonel for “institutional failure.” Gen. Dempsey’s spokesman, a Marine colonel, insisted his boss’ public denunciation of the “individual” had not poisoned the investigation. “[Col.] Dooley’s name is never even mentioned,” he told The Washington Times.

We can’t expect paperclip generals to show the fighting spirit of Stonewall Jackson or U.S. Grant, Blackjack Pershing or George S. Patton. They were men of their times and we’re stuck with our own times, and the men who populate the times. But the craven deference to the Islamic lobby, which often makes no distinctions between the millions of good Muslims and the bad Muslims, is a recipe for catastrophe.

The West in general and America in particular has shown remarkable patience and forbearance to the Muslims in our midst, according them, as we should, respect and a welcome into what we once called “the melting pot.” But somebody ought to instruct the paperclip generals that there’s an enemy out there in the dark, and it’s important to know who he is.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

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.

But there are no happy children within these walls. This is an abortion clinic made infamous by a doctor on trial for his life, charged with killing seven infants who survived abortions, and a woman who died during “the procedure.” The State of Pennsylvania wants to execute Dr. Kermit Gosnell for the crimes, if crimes they were. But it might not be so easy for the state. The law, as muddled abortion law makes clear, “is a ass.”

By the findings adduced in grand jury testimony, Kermit Gosnell stands convicted of monsterhood. He treated his patients badly and routinely killed live infants who to his great inconvenience survived their trip down the birth canal. “These killings,” the grand jury said, “became so routine that no one could put an exact number on them.” Most of the women are black, as the doctor is, and this is why the mainstream media ignored the trial until pressured to take notice.

Dr. Gosnell, finding humor in his grisly work, seemed to have aspired to be a stand-up comic. One witness said he joked after one abortion that the baby, at 19 inches in length and weighing six pounds, was so big he could “walk me to the bus stop.” When the survivor of another abortion writhed in pain as the doctor pressed a pair of scissors around his neck, preparing the snip his spinal column, the doctor joked: “That’s what you call a chicken with its head cut off.”

Another witness told how Dr. Gosnell put another survivor on a countertop to die while he attended the mother. He waited 20 minutes for the child to die, but after flailing its arms about but refusing to die, the doctor directed an assistant to “slit its neck.” She did and the child finally expired.

Dr. Gosnell is not typical of doctors who perform abortions; he was one of the rare ones who performed late-term abortions. His clinic is not typical, either. Patients lay in examining rooms reeking of cat droppings and splattered with blood from previous “procedures.” When the cops raided the clinic, they found the remains of 45 infants stored in “bags, milk jugs, orange juice cartons, even in cat-food containers.” The grand jury indictment said some fetuses were frozen in an office refrigerator and the doctor kept “rows of jars” filled with severed baby feet.

But as monstrous as he is, under the law as written and laid down by the Supreme Court he might not be a criminal. “Dr. Gosnell,” writes Jon A. Shields, an associate professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, in the Weekly Standard magazine, “fits the profile of a sociopathic killer. But unlike most such deviants, Gosnell could argue that he acted within his constitutional rights.”

This is where the slippery slope has brought us. Under Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton and the Supreme Court decisions that followed from it, doctors have an unbounded right to perform abortions until the moment of birth. The states can write exceptions, even banning third-trimester abortions, but exceptions must be allowed for the health of the mother, considering “all factors – physical, emotional, psychological, familial and the woman’s age – relevant to the well-being of the patient.” The decision goes to the doctor. Under Doe v. Bolton, the Supreme Court decreed that determining the necessity of an abortion is a “professional judgment” the “physician will be called on to make routinely.”

Prof. Shields thinks that the doctor, vile though he may be, is probably guilty under the law only of two relatively minor offenses. State law requires a second medical opinion for a third-term abortion and Dr. Gosnell did not get one. State law further requires that a doctor must try to save an infant who survives an abortion, and Dr. Gosnell did not do that, either. Given the permissive attitude toward abortion – even the president of the United States smiles on them, and as a state senator in Illinois, Barack Obama declined to vote for legislation protecting an infant who survives an abortion – executing Dr. Gosnell is not likely. Given the law as decreed by judges, he may beat the rap.

The horror of the Gosnell clinic is not what the justices of the Supreme Court thought they were protecting in 1973, nor would even Planned Parenthood make the Philadelphia sociopath their poster boy for abortion rights. Nevertheless, here we are. Nobody has enjoyed the slide down the slope.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

Rep. Peter King of New York is a Republican member of the House Homeland Security Committee (a title right out of George Orwell’s literary fancy) and the House Intelligence Committee (“intelligence” in the House? Who knew?). He wants everybody put under suspicion, if not arrest. He prescribes more cameras, more dogs, more surveillance, more neighbor-to-neighbor snooping to deal with the terrorists. Even if you don’t see something, say something. Call the cops.

“For instance,” he told MSNBC in the wake of the Boston massacre, “merchants, if they’re selling any components that can be used for a bomb, everywhere from ball bearings to beauty products, they can all make bombs. They should notify police.”

Eyeliner alert!

Merchants and even other shoppers must be on the scout to help police nab anyone buying mascara, lipstick, cold cream, face powder, rouge, body lotion, eau de cologne and perfume. Helena Rubenstein, Max Factor and Cover Girl must be added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List at once.

Mr. King thinks the Boston massacre should lead to the installation of more and more cameras. “Privacy,” he says, “involves being in a private location. Being out in the street, there’s not an expectation of privacy. Anyone can look at you, can see you, can watch what you’re doing. A camera just makes it more sophisticated.”

Good citizenship requires good citizens to keep their window blinds open, to enable the camera to get a good view. When you get up in the middle of the night to visit the facilities, turn on the lights. The camera must get a good look.

Mr. King wants the cops to have “jammers” to disable cell phones, preventing terrorists from detonating “improvised explosive devices” by remote control: “I feel strongly that local police should have access to jammers. I believe they should have more co-operation with the military –- right now there are legal issues, as far as military being involved in this.” Ah, yes. Those pesky “legal issues” always get in the way of hysteria. But the great thing about hysteria is that it blows away impediments like a Constitution.

This is the theory of law enforcement lifted from a comic strip. Fearless Fosdick was the crack detective from Al Capp’s “Li’l Abner" who was assigned to find a can of poisoned pork and beans planted by evil-doers somewhere in the city, and he was dispatched to prevent an innocent shopper from buying the lethal beans. Fearless ranged through the supermarkets of the city, tipping his hat to anyone about to buy a can of beans, and drilling them through the heart with the assurance that “it’s nothing personal, ma’am.” Dozens died, but none by bean poisoning. If the federal cops get enough cameras, dogs, jammers and enough neighbors snooping on their neighbors, no one has to worry about poisoned beans or pressure cookers, ball bearings, nails, jars of mascara or cold cream.

Government by hysteria -– and insult -– is the order of the day. Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York says the U.S. Senate’s failure to pass “a watered-down, minimal gun safety bill is simply unacceptable.” Unacceptable? What could that mean? Like the rest of us, he has to accept decisions by Congress, unless he has something sinister in mind. Vice President Joe Biden was moved to tears, whether by emotion or regret that he was not packing his shotgun, it is hard to say. Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City says “the only silver lining is that we now know who refuses to stand with [us]. . . .” Sen. Dianne Feinstein demands that senators “show some guts” and vote the way she wants them to vote. “If anybody cares, vote at least to prospectively ban the manufacture, the sale, the importation of military-style assault weapons.” It does not occur to her that some of the senators, especially the Democrats who joined the Republicans, have indeed been showing “some guts,” and voted as their constituents want them to vote. Not everybody subscribes to “San Francisco values.”

President Obama, who talks a lot about civility, has the responsibility for calming his mob. Hysteria is no way to confront a crisis. People who disagree with the likes of Messrs Cuomo, Biden, Bloomberg, Mrs. Feinstein and their ilk may be just as intelligent, just as reasonable and just as honorable as they are. Maybe even more so.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times

This has put Thatcher critics in a froth of toxic bile, as the accolades continue to pour in from all over the world. Civility is always scarce in politics – it is, after all, a contact sport – but some of the rage in Old Blimey moves close to the edge of the charts.

A cartoon in the Guardian, a leading newspaper of the left, depicted the Iron Lady descending into hell, the front page of the Socialist Worker headlined her death with the single word "Rejoice," and a movie marquee in the tough neighborhood of Brixton paid its respects with the message "Margaret Thatchers Dead LOL," for "laugh out loud." The BBC called the song, "Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead" tasteless and offensive, but played it to mark her death, anyway.

Sally Bercow, the wife of John Bercow, the speaker of the House of Commons, announced that she would not accompany her husband to the funeral Wednesday at St. Paul’s Cathedral. It wasn't clear whether she was making a feminist point or she's just eager to throw a brickbat at a womanly better. Or maybe she was just throwing a fit of wifely pique.

"As Commons speaker, John will be attending the funeral," she said, "and rightly so. But I'm not obliged to participate in my husband's public life – last time I looked this was the 21st century. John holds public office and an important position, not me."

Colleagues in the Commons rallied around her husband, as everyone usually will when a spouse makes a public spectacle. Said one fellow member: "John Bercow handled it brilliantly. He got just the right tone. As for Sally, as the old saying goes, 'she wants to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral'."

Some of the "protests" of the honors for Mrs. Thatcher are reminiscent of the tasteless stunts of the Westboro Baptist Church, so called, at soldiers' funerals in America. There's a tradition in Britain, where good manners are otherwise prized, of mixing Bronx cheers (as they're called here) with accolades for prime minsters. They wouldn't do that for the queen or senior royals, says Robert Worcester, an American who founded Mori, one the Britain’s leading polling firms. Rude posters and placards are expected outside St. Paul's during the funeral. "Good riddance" will be among the kindest sentiments.

There's considerable affection for Mrs. Thatcher throughout England, but memories are short and the misery she inherited and largely put right are mostly forgotten, particularly among trade unionists. Mr. Worcester of Mori observes that it isn't likely, for example, that a Navy ship would be named for Mrs. Thatcher, more out of fear than custom. "Shipbuilders would put down their tools rather than honor a woman many trade unionists blame for taking their unions out of politics."

Robert McGeehan of the Institute for the Study of the Americas, a London think tank, observes that there was no public celebration of the death of Richard Nixon, though he was equally reviled on the stinky left. “This really shows the dissimilarity between the two countries,” he told The Associated Press. He couldn’t recall "anything remotely resembling the really crude approach we’ve seen here. There is a class ingredient here we simply don't have in America. They like to perpetuate this. The bitterness goes from father to son."

But not only in England. There’s no scarcity of pique and envy in America, too. Some critics on the left are trying to turn the Iron Lady into something made of lesser mettle. She wasn't really all that tough, and there was a liberal hiding among her convictions, gasping for air, writes Matt Latimer, briefly a speechwriter for George W. Bush, in the Washington Post. There's "something troubling in the Republican celebration of her political intransigence, and it is not just the fact that it's largely a myth."

There’s something frightening about a tough woman with courage and conviction, when all about her the Nancy men are trembling in their Gucci loafers. That "intransigence" might be expected of the men, too.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

The mockery of Christianity, and not just the ridicule of individual Christians, has even won the sanction of the courts. The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court, which will sanction everything weird and contentious, ruled in 2011 that “hostility to religion” is OK, after a 16-year-old Mormon boy sued his teacher for ridiculing him for his beliefs and said there was no more evidence of the works of God than “there is a giant spaghetti monster living behind the moon.” The class was expected to reward him with a hearty laugh.

Such contempt is not just here, either. In Britain, the BBC commissioned a study to ask why Christians have become the butt of so many “fashionable” jokes. Ann Widdecombe, a novelist, onetime Tory member of Parliament and generally a pricker of intellectual pretense, said the BBC asked her to look at why mockery of Christians has become so prevalent “and to try to explain to a secular world why it matters so much to Christians.” It matters because nobody like to hear his most sacred convictions of conscience mocked, and particularly if his are the only such convictions of conscience ridiculed. Television producers, she observed, feign respect for, or more likely fear of, the followers of Islam and avoid laughing at the Prophet or exploiting abundant opportunities for poking fun. She catalogued a long list of examples of mockery and ridicule of Christianity.

In one program she had to get special permission to watch, which had made even the BBC executives retch and lock it in the vaults where it could never be seen in public, two “skeptics” yukked it up with a representation of the body and blood of Christ, putting chutney on a communion wafer and ordering two bottles of wine to go with it. The program was an episode of a sketch comedy series, and one of the creators, Anil Gupta, professed not to understand why anyone would take offense.

“Stand-up comics tend to make two assumptions,” Miss Widdecombe concluded, “that Christians have no sense of humor and that all their audiences are unbelievers. The first [assumption] is so ignorant as to need no answer but the second explains the trend towards thinking that even the most sacrilegious mockery can be fun. Such comics work on the principle that only stupid people believe in God and that their audiences are too intelligent to do so and will therefore share any joke directed at any aspect of religion.”

Once a taboo in America, aggressive atheism has slipped poison into the mainstream and become a fashionable potion in the salons of the elite. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens have made millions – well, a lot of thousands, anyway – with books espousing the joys and consolations of their faith in, by definition, nothing. This is evidence that a black hole may be better than no hole at all. In fact, there’s even a chaplain for atheists at Harvard, though it’s not clear what an atheist could want from a minister to the soul. (“Please help me, Padre, I’m afraid I’m coming to believe in God.”) Since atheists want to borrow customs and rituals from the religious, we can expect they’ll soon organize themselves to endow colleges, hospitals and contribute millions to the lame, the halt and the poor.)

The late Mr. Hitchens, a fine and friendly fellow when he stepped down from his soapbox, said religion, though not necessarily believers in religion, “should be treated with ridicule, hatred and contempt.” In the weeks he lay dying he seemed haunted by a fear that at the end he would reach for the consolations of faith, and warned everyone that if anyone heard that he had had a deathbed conversion not to believe it. Curious, and ineffably sad.

Christ told his disciples to expect the scorn of the world and be not dismayed by it, that theirs is the kingdom of heaven. But it’s hard to remember Christ’s counsel, to forgive and pray for those who revile the faith and speak the name of Jesus Christ only as an oath. Christians could remember the story of the blacksmith and a visitor who watched as the smithy pounded hammer and iron against his anvil.

“My, my,” said the visitor. “You must wear out a lot of anvils.”

“No,” the smithy replied. “My great-grandfather used this very anvil. But I do wear out a lot of hammers.”

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

From now on – “going forward,” in the cliché of washingtonspeak – reporters and pundits need not interview candidates for Congress. They’ll just talk to their kids to see what the candidates think. The Children’s Hour hasn’t been this popular since Jimmy Carter reassured us that he had consulted little Amy about arms control and she agreed that nuclear war is not good for living things.

Rob Portman, the senator from Ohio who was almost Mitt Romney’s running mate, took his marching orders from his son after the boy told Mom and Dad that he was gay. The senator couldn’t wait to announce it in the newspapers, writing a long op-ed about it in the Columbus Dispatch. We’re all for privacy in modern America until we get the urged to “share” the smarmy details of our lives.

Mr. Portman explained the deviation from his convictions of the past, when as a member of the House of Representatives he voted for the Defense of Marriage Act now being argued at the Supreme Court, as a function of evolution. Evolution has hit hard in Washington, as the pols line up to tell everyone how they’ve learned to appreciate the yucky expansion of the marital bed.

First it was President Obama, whose mind turned out to be a triumph of Darwinian speculation. Then it was Joe Biden, or maybe the vice president leaped first and the president tagged along; then Hillary Clinton, followed by Bubba, who can’t remember everything he evolved from in that dark and mysterious land of the magic huckleberry. Evolution soon spread across the partisan aisle, first to Mr. Portman and then back across to Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri.

A first cousin of Chief Justice John Roberts arrived in Washington from San Francisco on Monday and announced that she is a lesbian and will attend the Supreme Court hearings as a guest of Cousin John. “He’s a smart man,” says Jean Podrasky. “He is a good man. I believe he sees where the tide is going. I do trust him. I absolutely trust that he will go in a good direction.” Ordinarily no one can guess what a Supreme Court justice will say or do, but Justice Roberts demonstrated in the Obamacare decision that he tries to fit respect for the Constitution into his decisions when he can, but a good public opinion of the court is more important. Like Justice Anthony Kennedy, he’s a swinger, too.

Over the weekend Karl Rove, ever in pursuit of the hip and the hot, said he could “imagine” the next Republican presidential nominee endorsing same-sex marriage. Karl suffers a stunted imagination. Republicans of Karl’s ilk are demonstrating evolution on steroids and by 2016 there may not be room on either ticket for anyone but a man of lace, lavender and peau de soie. Or Hillary.

Handicapping Supreme Court deliberations is a fool’s game, as any lawyer will tell you, and ordinarily the justices don’t read the Gallup Poll, or Rasmussen, either. But this is a new day and who knows? Justice Roberts’ cousin may be on to something.

The latest uninformed speculation is that the high court will find a middle ground, to leave it to the states to define marriage and what sanction to give synthetic versions of it. The Washington Post, always lustful about the latest fashion, decrees that “the political argument over same-sex marriage is over.” That’s what other wiseheads said about Roe v. Wade 40 years ago.

Nobody wants another 40 years of angry debate and contentious argument over a “right” found not in the Constitution but in a “penumbra,” like the one the high court found to support Roe v. Wade. If the justices find another one the debate will no more end than a penumbra ended the abortion debate. Like the abortion debate, the same-sex marriage argument is one between personal convenience and moral conviction.

Gays in America seek something beyond the power of the courts to convey – the blessing of the straight society they profess to disdain, and the recognition that homosexual union is equal to marriage as society has known it since before the Flood. Thousands of years of tradition, nurtured by the church, the synagogue and the mosque, can’t be dissolved by whim or caprice, however artful.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

The elites are willing to tolerate religious faith as long as a believing Christian keeps it to himself and never acts on it or even talks about it. It’s OK, barely, to be a “cultural Christian,” who often isn’t really a Christian at all as Christ defined the faith in the New Testament. The new pope rebukes this synthetic Christianity, urging a return to “the Christ of the Cross” who came to redeem humankind with a sacrificial death on Calvary. This puts Pope Francis clearly at odds with cultural Christians who would reduce the faith of our fathers to a catechism lifted from the pages of the New York Times.

“I don’t think he’s what we need right now in the Catholic Church,” Madeline Cuomo, the sister of the current governor of New York and member of a powerful family with a lot of the vowels in their name that Daddy Cuomo imagined kept him out of the White House, tells Crain’s New York Business magazine. “We’re looking to move the Church forward, with gay marriage and women priests. He’s going to turn back the clock.”

Her father, the former governor, offers more unsolicited advice for the new pope, with an avuncular pat on the head: “The way he’s lived has been simple and admirable, but it has not taught him how to deal with the high pressure of huge problems in the Church. . . . The whole question of women, the question of marriage – not even the question of same-sex marriage, which is a recent development – but the whole idea of priests not being allowed to be married. That’s led to a lot of unhappy relationships and ugly relationships by people who are basically sick. That’s something this new pope will have to deal with.” And he had better deal with it at once, and with it in a way “forward” pleasing to those for whom Cuomo, pere and fils, speak.

Women, wedding bells and furtive sex are much on the mind of the new pope’s critics and tutors. Some of them obviously expected a lady, perhaps someone nominated by the National Organization for Women, to succeed Benedict XVI. (Hillary Clinton was currently between engagements, and as a Methodist she could have been a two-fer, a bow not only to feminism but to the spirit of ecumenical sisterhood.) The media, big and little, insists on running everything through the filter of the modern, the secular and the political. The Associated Press, perhaps being deliberately provocative, suggests that the election of Francis might have been, if not illegal, at least offensive to “international standards for the election of a world leader.” The Associated Press man at the State Department asked the department spokesman whether she “thinks the election of the pope was OK. [Does it meet] the free and fairness standard? No, I’m curious. I mean, and with all due respect. I’m not accusing the Vatican of doing anything improper, but you seem to take issue with theocracies in places like Iran, and you celebrate the theocracy in the Vatican.” This exchange followed:

The State Department flack: “He is the head of the [Catholic] church.”

The reporter persisted: “Is it then correct that the United States does not take a position on whether the election of the pope was free and fair and transparent? Without universal suffrage . . . ”

The State Department spokesman, after further research, returned to the podium to say that since the government regards Vatican City a sovereign juridical state, if a request from the international organization monitoring elections were to “come forward, we would take it very seriously.”

The question was hardly off the wall, whence come so many press questions. President Truman, a Baptist, tried to recognize the Vatican just after World War II, but outraged objections on First Amendment grounds from Protestants and others prevailed. Religion and the Constitution were taken more seriously then. Ronald Reagan succeeded in 1985, and the United States has since recognized the Catholic Church as its diplomatic equal.

Odd, but true.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

Nobody drones on like a United States senator and nobody loves the sound of his raspy voice like a senator. Rand Paul, the freshman from Kentucky who stars in the bad dreams of every Republican geezer in town, talked for almost 13 hours on the Senate floor this week to delay a confirmation vote on John Brennan as director of the CIA, and earned only the scorn of the geezers.

Mr. Paul’s remarks occasionally strayed a few degrees over the top (enough of the Hitler comparison), decrying the prospect of using drones against American citizens in America, but he strayed no farther over the top than almost any congressman on almost any day on Capitol Hill. Mr. Paul argued at length (though not at record length) that killing an American, even an evil terrorist with an American passport, deprives him of the due process guaranteed by the Constitution.

Challenging Barack Obama on anything will earn anybody the sneers and scorn of Democratic senators, but some of the Republican geezers joined the din of disdain, mostly about the temerity of a freshman senator talking when he should be listening to a housebroken geezer talk. It’s not the sharks who trouble the waters in Washington, but the minnows who nibble good men to death.

John McCain of Arizona rebuked the filibusterer just as he was sitting down, and just after Mr. McCain and a few of his Senate pals emerged from a cozy dinner with President Obama in the glow of fine wine and the warmth of a full belly of beef. Mr. McCain had a little patronizing advice for his talkative colleague: “Calm down, senator, the U.S. government cannot randomly target U.S. citizens.”

The presidential loser of '08 sent further advice on how to win friends and influence voters. “If Mr. Paul wants to be taken seriously he needs to do more than pull political stunts that fire up impressionable libertarian kids. I don’t think what happened is helpful to the American people.”

Nobody expected Mr. Paul’s filibuster to stop the confirmation of John Brennan, the senator least of all, but he set out to sound an “alarm” about the use of drones in what he calls the threat to Americans by their own government. He had written to the White House to inquire whether the government could order a drone strike against an American on American soil, and Attorney Gen. Eric Holder replied with reassurance that does not necessarily reassure. He said drones are limited to killing in conflict zones in Pakistan and Yemen, and the government has “no intention” to bomb any place specific.

So far the argument is about drones and the word “random.” How vague can the word “random” be? The U.S. government can, and already has, targeted American citizens without due process. The government had no drones at Ruby Ridge, where government agents targeted and killed a teenage American boy, and had no drones at Waco, where government agents set fire to a religious compound and 76 men, women and children burned alive, Americans all. The government’s record is not a good one. The government’s “intentions” can change, and “random” is a word even a jackleg lawyer could parse far into the next decade. It’s just not cricket to say so, and a geezer never would.

The confirmation hearings of John Brennan and Chuck Hagel reveal a lot about how Washington works, how weak and well-meaning geezers can conflate the good of the country with the good of their own biases. John McCain and Lindsay Graham took Chuck Hagel apart at his confirmation hearing, leaving him humiliated as few nominees have been humiliated. But when crunch time came, they fell into line, voting to confirm him despite all the flags they raised at his hearing, as if to say, “just kidding, guys.”

John Brennan escaped close scrutiny over his role in the fiasco at Benghazi, where four Americans, including an American ambassador, died because the Obama White House could not or would not send the help the ambassador begged for -- not even a drone.

The geezers know better, but it’s easier, quieter, and more refined to do nothing. When Rand Paul, over the top or not, stood up to demand answers to some of the questions the geezers themselves raised, he was ridiculed and told, like an irritable child, to calm down. Geezers think their role is to pour oil over troubled waters, when they should be striking a match.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.