Tea Party Has Elites on the Run by Tony Blankley
Not long after the tea party sprang into being in the spring of 2009, America's elites started vilifying the movement.
Not long after the tea party sprang into being in the spring of 2009, America's elites started vilifying the movement.
Entitlement reform has become a leading issue in this year's Republican primaries.
While public attention was diverted by whether or not Florida pastor Terry Jones and Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf had reached a compromise, a report critical to our national security went virtually unnoticed.
With the end of combat in Operation Enduring Freedom presidentially certified, all eyes rivet toward Afghanistan.
Neoconservatives, Reaganites and other militarily assertive factions in the United States are sometimes accused of thinking it is always 1938 (Britain's appeasement of Hitler at Munich) -- that there is always a Hitler-like aggressor being appeased and about to drag the world into conflict.
With apologies to George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward and their 1935 classic song, "Summertime" (and the living is easy):
The cheerful, jaded, sneering question de jour from liberal journalists and Democratic Party commentators (I know, there's a pretty fine distinction) is, "What will the Republican Party do if it gets back the House?" The question is phrased along the line of what a car-chasing dog would do if it caught the car.
"Wiki" is a cute Hawaiian word for "quick" -- borrowed by Ward Cunningham, creator of the first Internet wiki -- from the name of a fast little interterminal shuttle at Honolulu International Airport.
In the last fortnight: 1) The NAACP called the tea party racists; 2)
Andrew Breitbart called the NAACP racist; 3) Shirley Sherrod called
Republican opponents of Obamacare racists; 4) Secretary of Agriculture Tom
Vilsack called Shirley Sherrod racist; 5) many in mainstream media called
Andrew Breitbart racist; 6) Howard Dean called Fox racist; and, 7) it was
revealed that liberal journalist Spencer Ackerman proposed calling Fred
Barnes and Karl Rove racist.
Over the past year, the Democrats fixed on what they thought was a devastating four-word slogan to defeat Republicans in 2010: "The Party of No." Unlike many campaign slogans, it was fair enough. After all, the Republicans had opposed almost unanimously all of President Obama's major bills (socialized health care, stimulus, nationalization of GM and Chrysler, "cap and trade," financial overregulation, multitrillion-dollar yearly deficits, tax increases, etc.)
Abraham Lincoln: "I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence." Lincoln address in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, Feb. 22, 1861:
The Afghan War may be the first one we lose primarily because our civilian leadership did not understand the effect of its public words on our government, our allies and our enemy. Throughout the summer and fall of 2009, as experts were getting more pessimistic about success in Afghanistan, President Obama began having second thoughts. He was conflicted between his campaign statement that Afghanistan was the good and necessary war and his supporters' concerns that America not get bogged down in another unwinnable Vietnam.
There seems to be one thing on which everyone can agree. From archconservative pundits to archliberal White House staffers responsible for Solicitor General Elena Kagan's confirmation to the Supreme Court, all agree that the test is whether she is in the "mainstream of current legal thought."
Is it possible for an American president to carry out accidentally an isolationist foreign policy? That odd question crossed my mind last week as I talked with various foreign-policy experts about the Middle East, Russia and Afghanistan. There can be no doubt that by his words and his travels, President Obama intends to be anything but an isolationist president.
Since last summer, President Obama has publicly doubted whether Afghan President Hamid Karzai's corruption and incompetence make him a fit partner for our policy goals in Afghanistan.
Historically, the American public -- confident, independent and undemanding-has not expected much out of Washington. Live your silver lives of limousines, private jets, power and celebrity; just do no permanent damage to the nation.
This country is divided into three parts concerning national politics. About a third think President Obama is moving in the right direction, with many of them impatient for the president to be bolder with his leftist agenda.
In the opening hours and days of an unanticipated event -- such as the current off-shore oil leak, usually not much can be reliably learned about the details of the intruding event -- but much can reliably be learned about the humans responding to it.
In the last few weeks, I have found myself debating on radio and TV programs whether various financial instruments have any social utility -- any "real world" purpose other than "speculation or gambling." (Disclosure: I give professional advice to a number of financial organizations.)
Former President Bill Clinton last week inadvertently demonstrated Karl Marx's shrewd observation, "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce." The historical event in question is the attempt to deter by smearing a broad-based, popular, American anti-high-tax, anti-big-central government movement as likely to induce seditious violence against the government.