“I stand on this rostrum with a sense of deep humility and great pride — humility in the wake of those great American architects of our history who have stood here before me; pride in the reflection that this forum of legislative debate represents human liberty in the purest form yet devised. Here are centered the hopes and aspirations and faith of the entire human race. I do not stand here as advocate for any partisan cause, for the issues are fundamental and reach quite beyond the realm of partisan consideration. They must be resolved on the highest plane of national interest if our course is to prove sound and our future protected. I trust, therefore, that you will do me the justice of receiving that which I have to say as solely expressing the considered viewpoint of a fellow American.
These days our men and women in uniform are usually treated with kindness and respect. Nobody begrudges someone in uniform getting to board a flight first, or getting comped a first-class seat. Even those on the left who think that people in military service are misguided dupes of evil militarists no longer indulge the open scorn and calumny prevalent in the Vietnam War era, when a uniform was a target for spittle and charges of “baby-killer,” when in 1971 John Kerry appeared before the Senate and accused U.S. troops of rape, torture, and mutilation. Yet under the surface of progressives’ seeming respect and sympathy there still lurks a subtle contempt for the virtues and values that make our warriors worthy of our gratitude and admiration.
American leftists have long indulged a stealth pacifism that naturally conditions their attitudes toward the military. After all, the U.S. is the source of global disorder caused by its corporate hegemons, who use the military to protect their access to the global resources and markets they plunder for profit. Better to appease an enemy than to unleash these capitalist legions. Remember the “no blood for oil” slogans during the protests against the Iraq War in 2003? Or the exaggerated coverage given to civilian casualties or the occasional brutality typical of every war ever fought? Or the national media attention given to anti-war protestors like Cindy Sheehan, while the numerous heroes who won Silver Stars and Navy Crosses were usually ignored?
With additional comments by Adam Andrzejewski founder of Open the Books , (www.openthebooks.com/) a project of American Transparency.
In 2014 under the aegis of Family Security Matters, Nancy Kennon and I published a comprehensive study of every Congressional and Senatorial election, including incumbents and challengers, highlighting all their top issues. We found almost unanimous bi-partisan concern with protecting our Veterans and their rights.
It stands to reason that all Americans would cherish those who, in the words of Hannah Sennesh, a Holocaust martyr and poet, would have “the heart with strength to stop its beating for honor’s sake” and for duty and country.
This was a welcome development from an earlier time during and after the Vietnam war, when veterans were derided and not accorded the respect they were due.
A young veteran John Kerry testified before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on April 22, 1971, that American troops “…had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam…” and accused the U.S. military of committing war crimes “on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.”
An aspiring young William Clinton, to justify his draft resistance, wrote “so many fine people have come to find themselves still loving their country but loathing the military.” To be fair, as president he proposed reforms in VA health care programs and expedited hearings on Veterans’ Affairs early in his administration. In 1994 he appointed Dr. Kenneth W. Kizer a physician trained in emergency medicine and Public Health, as Director of U.S. Veterans Health Administration to update and modernize the VA health system. This was another case of good intentions with poor implementation and very limited success.
Under President George Bush, a scandal erupted in 2007 detailing the systematic neglect, and frustration, and deteriorating facilities that veterans faced at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, ostensibly the top medical facility for veterans. What made this more poignant is the fact that so many were veterans of both wars initiated by the president. The scandal provoked caterwauling outrage and hearings to condemn the deplorable Army hospital environment. They led to negligible reform and the venerable hospital closed its doors in July 2011 after 102 Years of healing troops and veterans.
While the stigma and the libel against veterans ended, almost pari passu with the end of the draft in 1973, another national tragedy and scandal ensued.
The Missouri crybullies got their way, purging administrations for not taking their whininess seriously fast enough (thereby making them feel unsafe). And then they turned on the media which had been churning out their propaganda with more bullying and crying.
The Yale crybullies are still whinging on because the administrators who suggested that maybe they should grow up instead of whining about other people’s Halloween costumes still haven’t been fired.
Why haven’t they been fired yet? The Yale crybullies feel so unsafe. They need kitten pictures. They can’t even sleep now.
Jencey Paz, whinged that, “I have friends who are not going to class, who are not doing their homework, who are losing sleep, who are skipping meals, and who are having breakdowns.”
Another student howled at an administrator,
“In your position as master,” one student says, “it is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students who live in Silliman. You have not done that. By sending out that email, that goes against your position as master. Do you understand that?!”
“No,” he said, “I don’t agree with that.”
In the fourth televised GOP primary debate last night, eight Republican candidates for president laid out their positions as they sparred over taxes, immigration, government spending, and to a lesser extent, foreign policy.
They clashed heatedly over what it means to be a conservative and the immigration issue, particularly amnesty.
The debate venue was the same storied Milwaukee auditorium where Theodore Roosevelt gave a 90-minute speech Oct. 14, 1912 after being shot in the chest by a deranged saloonkeeper. Roosevelt, who served as president from September 1901 to March 1909 as a Republican, was campaigning at the time for president on the Progressive Party ticket.
Last night’s debate was — fortunately — less eventful.
It was also the best, most business-like of the four GOP primary debates so far.
It stood in stark contrast to the televised firing squad 10 Republican contenders faced on CNBC on Oct. 28. That was the debacle of a debate in which moderators acted like prosecutors cross-examining hostile witnesses and obnoxiously playing candidates off against each other.
Unlike left-wing CNBC charlatan John Harwood, the moderators of Fox Business Network last night recognized it was their job to elicit answers and facilitate constructive conversations, not oversee gladiatorial combat. FBN anchors Maria Bartiromo and Neil Cavuto, along with Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Gerard Baker, were well-behaved, reasonable, and professional. (The main debate transcript is available here.)
One of the evening’s more interesting multi-debater exchanges came when Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) trolled Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) over foreign policy and child tax credits.
After Baker told Rubio his tax plan includes a significant expansion of child tax credits that would raise the incomes of struggling parents, the moderator asked if there was “a risk you’re just adding another expensive entitlement program to an already over-burdened federal budget?”
Rubio stressed the paramountcy of the family in American society and said he was “proud” of his child tax credit increase, which he said was part of a “pro-family tax plan” that would strengthen the family unit.
Paul interjected, perhaps thinking of himself an an ideological gatekeeper like William F. Buckley Jr., saying,
We have to decide what is conservative and what isn’t conservative. Is it fiscally conservative to have a trillion-dollar expenditure? We’re not talking about giving people back their tax money. He’s talking about giving people money they didn’t pay. It’s a welfare transfer payment … Add that to Marco’s plan for $1 trillion in new military spending, and you get something that looks, to me, not very conservative.
Rubio shot back, saying “this is their money” that Americans have paid. Using an argument often employed by left-wingers, the senator said his program would allow parents to “invest” in their children, “in the future of America and strengthening your family … [the] most important institution in society.”
Paul replied, “Nevertheless, it’s not very conservative, Marco.”
Rubio said he wanted to rebuild the military and slammed Paul as “a committed isolationist.” Rubio added, “I’m not. I believe the world is a stronger and a better place, when the United States is the strongest military power in the world.”
It seems like every week there’s a new horror story of political correctness run amok at some college campus.
A warning not to wear culturally insensitive Halloween costumes sparked an imbroglio at Yale, which went viral over the weekend. A lecturer asked in an e-mail, “Is there no room anymore for a child to be a little bit obnoxious . . . a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?”
Students went ballistic. When an administrator (who is the lecturer’s spouse) defended free speech, some students wanted his head. One student wrote in a Yale Herald op-ed (now taken down): “He doesn’t get it. And I don’t want to debate. I want to talk about my pain.”
Washington Post columnist (and Tufts professor) Daniel Drezner was initially horrified by the spectacle but ultimately backtracked. Invoking Friedrich Hayek’s insights from “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” Drezner cautions outside observers that “there is an awful lot of knowledge that is local in character, that cannot be culled from abstract principles or detached observers.”
As a Hayek fanboy and champion of localism, I should be quite sympathetic. But this time, I think Drezner’s initial reaction was closer to the mark. The notion that the Yale incident is an isolated one defies all the evidence.
Milwaukee — It was, at last, a debate about policy. If the emergence of Donald Trump and the efforts of previous debate moderators to pit candidates against each other have forestalled the policy arguments that typically characterize Republican primary contests, Fox Business Network’s debate on Tuesday brought them to the fore.
Less than three months before voters go to the polls in January, the candidates clashed on some of the major issues that have divided the Republican party over the past six years: The night’s big moments did not come from one candidate trashing another, but from policy exchanges, first on immigration and then on defense spending. After months of headlines dominated by a real-estate mogul-cum-reality-television star, it was a welcome change of pace.
The event was steady and studious, and the upshot was predictable — an evening that did little to alter the trajectories of individual candidates or the broader narrative of the race. In the course of two hours there were no knockout punches, no major gaffes, no made-for-opposition-research moments. Each of the candidates went silent for a stretch, but none completely disappeared as in previous debates — perhaps because the stage had shrunk to only eight, the smallest primetime grouping to date.
During his meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu at the White House yesterday, President Obama stated that the “security of Israel is one of my top foreign-policy priorities.” Of course, this sentiment might have been slightly more believable had President Obama a) said those words in something other than a lethargic tone, or b) not listened to Netanyahu’s statement with the humor of a human death star
Although Netanyahu claims that the meeting was productive, major problems continue to corrode U.S.-Israeli relations.
Front and center is President Obama’s flawed approach to dealing with Israel. On crucial issues, the White House continues to treat Netanyahu’s government disdainfully and as irrelevant to its Middle Eastern policy. The Obama administration has long acted grumpily toward Israel. Consider former Middle East adviser Dennis Ross’s perspective on the idiotic accusation of racism Susan Rice lobbed against Netanyahu. According to Ross, Rice believed that “the Israeli leader did everything but ‘use the N-word in describing the president.”
While Mr. Netanyahu’s conduct has not been perfect — he deserves criticism for his spokesman’s anti-Obama rant — Israel’s emotion at the American president’s perceived lack of interest is understandable. After all, facing an international plague of anti-Israel boycotts, Western delusions about Gaza, and an Iran armed with nuclear weapons, Israel worries that its American support is perishing and that it will soon stand alone. And while Israel’s worries reflect a broader dysfunction of President Obama’s diplomacy (one that is also indirectly fueling sectarian paranoia in the Middle East), Israel’s concern has an obvious historical foundation — the Holocaust. Sadly, however, President Obama believes he can paper over this widening chasm with the false elixir of increased aid and the inexcusable prisoner release of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard.
It was like a wake inside the Department of Homeland Security’s D.C. headquarters on Tuesday, according to a source inside the DHS. The previous evening, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the Obama administration’s immigration amnesty plan again, holding that the president has “no statutory authority” to take such unilateral action.
The court upheld the preliminary injunction issued February 16 by federal district court judge Andrew Hanen. Assuming the administration abides by the court order, the amnesty plan remains on hold.
Texas led a coalition of 26 states that filed suit against the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) program that President Obama announced last November. They challenged the program on the grounds that it violated both the notice and comment requirements of the federal Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and the Take Care Clause of the Constitution.
DAPA would grant “lawful presence” to more than 4 million illegal aliens and give them Employment Authorization Documents (EADs) — renewable, three-year work permits. Moreover, as the government admitted in its opening brief, granting “lawful presence” status would make them eligible to receive “social security retirement benefits, social security disability benefits, or health insurance under Part A of the Medicare program.” The government did not deny the district court’s finding that such aliens would also become eligible for earned-income tax credits and entitled to numerous state benefits such as unemployment insurance and driver’s licenses.
The president’s Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) is the most extraordinary display of presidential lawlessness in recent memory. On Monday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals rightly blocked that lawlessness from proceeding further.
Last November, President Obama announced that he would be halting enforcement of congressional statutes for certain illegal immigrants residing in the United States — some 5 to 6 million, by most estimates — and extending to them work permits, among a number of other benefits. He justified this politically as a necessary response to congressional inaction, and legally as “prosecutorial discretion.”
It was neither, as Texas federal judge Andrew Hanen made clear in February, when he granted an injunction blocking implementation of the action to Texas and 25 other states, which had sued the administration. The president “is not just rewriting the laws,” Hanen wrote; “he is creating them from scratch.” The Obama administration appealed to the Fifth Circuit to stay the injunction, but in May, a three-judge panel refused.
