Class Warfare's Losing Record

By Salena Zito

Sunday, June 03, 2012

EAST PALESTINE, Ohio – Newspaper accounts of the day described with shock the “enormous crushing crowds” that gathered in cities and towns (including this one) to see William Jennings Bryan, the Democrats’ presidential candidate of 1896, as he made his way to Pittsburgh.

The old master of class warfare did not disappoint: Paper after paper chronicled his rhetoric and the “unheard of” adulation he received from what he termed “the masses.”

The nation had been in a deep depression, with high unemployment and violent labor strikes, in the three years leading to the presidential election between Bryan and Republican William McKinley, Ohio’s former governor.

Despite the social unrest, economic uncertainty and a 90 percent voter turnout in many areas, Bryan and his class-based message failed.

Fast forward to today: President Barack Obama has decided that class warfare will be his winning message for re-election – and Bain Capital will be his code word for that message, implicitly conveying all the meanings of his greater theme.

Bain is the venture-capital firm that Republican Mitt Romney helped to create; it has invested in or acquired hundreds of companies, including Staples, Burger King, Dunkin' Donuts, The Sports Authority, Toys "R" Us and The Weather Channel.

In some cases, it loaned seed money to promising entrepreneurs. It also engaged in leveraged buyouts and attempts to turn around struggling companies with new management, re-organizations and cash infusions.

Jobs usually are saved or created by firms such as Bain. However, the leveraged-buyout process often is messy, and people sometimes lose jobs in pursuit of greater profitability.

Traveling much the same path as Bryan here in Ohio and in neighboring Pennsylvania, Vice President Joe Biden has escalated Obama’s class warfare with fevered cries – “They don't get us! They don't get who we are!”

The attacks on Bain also can be seen as part of Team Obama's progressive narrative, according to Baylor University political science professor Curt Nichols. It “stresses distrust in the free market and champions greater governmental intervention in social and economic life.”

“Without care, sometimes this narrative can … promote simplistic ‘us versus them’-type views that stress conflict between the haves and have-nots” – classic class-warfare language, Nichols said.

Appeals to economic populism – pitting people against so-called “interests” – are as old as the Democratic Party; Andrew Jackson successfully used them in the presidential election of 1828.

Jacksonian Democrats never opposed capitalism, however, and most certainly did not support a stronger central government.

“It wasn't until decades after Karl Marx really got the idea going that American politics witnessed the first mainstream appeals to class warfare made by Bryan,” said Nichols.

Since Bryan remains the only major-party candidate to lose three elections, you have to wonder how well class warfare works with Americans.

This is why Newark Mayor Cory Booker and former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell both dismissed the argument as wrong.

What the Obama campaign misses is that the working class – white, middle-income, blue-collar Democrats – deeply resents the dependency class and will not respond positively to such rhetoric.

Successful populists such as Republican Teddy Roosevelt and Democrat Franklin Roosevelt did not allow their championing of “the little guy” to devolve into class warfare.

They realized that Americans tend to view the United States as a land of opportunity and do not begrudge anyone for becoming wealthy.

The line between these two attitudes is sometimes fine. Yet class warfare has never won an election, while appeals to economic populism sometimes have succeeded.

Besides the attacks on Bain Capital, the Obama campaign appears to be using an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink appeal. Gone are 2008’s lofty appeals to “Hope” and “Change” – but what remains?

In the fashion of Chicago pols throughout history, Obama appears to be targeting his appeals to each faction of the Democrats’ coalition – women, African-Americans, big labor, young voters, gays – with values-based appeals and material offerings.

These tactics may add up to less than a complete strategy, however.

And how does his new campaign theme – “Forward” – fit into this puzzle?

Perhaps it is just a catchy phrase. Yet those who consider it another code word know that it traditionally has been part of the lexicon of the European socialist movement.

Another appeal to class warfare?

Race Matters...To Racists

By Derek Hunter
Sunday, June 03, 2012

In February 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder said America is a “nation of cowards” on race because we don’t talk about it. So let’s talk about it.

Voter ID

Progressives are up in arms over the prospect of voters being required to show something at the polls they must show regularly to function as a productive member of society – a photo ID. It’s because progressives, particularly progressive Democrats, have a vested interest in preventing as many people as possible, especially minorities, from becoming productive members of society.

Productive members of society – and those who aspire to be – don’t need or want government to do for them what they can do for themselves. The socialists, communists, fascists and anarchists – in other words, progressives – obviously don’t have the support to win elections. They must find many votes beyond their core supporters to survive. So they attempt to manipulate minorities.

They play the race card. They attempt to convince them Republicans, particularly conservatives, are racists.

Never mind only a few generations ago, it was Democrats who were lynching black people in the South, turning water cannons on them, toying with the idea of using eugenics to eliminate them and, always, trying to prevent them from voting. Since the party of slavery couldn’t own the bodies of black people anymore, it turned to trying to own their minds.

And votes. In the last 50 years, progressives have become quite interested in minority votes as the popularity of their message has waned. They pushed for a web of government dependence to entangle minorities – direct subsidies of just enough money to encourage complacency, public housing that serves as a staging ground for continuing criminal enterprises, an education system that coddles and babysits but does not, no matter how much money is sunk into it, educate, and, from their leaders, the soul-crushing rhetoric of victimhood and entitlement. Utopia is only an election cycle away – if we can get rid of those damn Republicans.

How else to explain how U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., has been in office since 1965? It certainly isn’t because he has helped his district in Detroit. It looks like a nuclear bomb went off … twice. You can tell what it used to be when you drive through, and it’s sad. There is no one in that district not named Conyers whose life is better off since he assumed office, yet he’s re-elected by overwhelming margins every two years. Why?

They vote Democrat because they are told Republicans will only make things worse. Never told – or asked – is how things truly could be worse. But it’s folly to seek logic in irrational thought.

Which brings us back to voter ID laws.

Holder told a group of black preachers this week the push in some states to require a government-issued ID to vote constituted an assault on minority voting rights. He seemed unconcerned about protecting the integrity of that right.

Holder claims requiring a photo ID to vote would disenfranchise minorities disproportionately…somehow. MSNBC harps on this point relentlessly, and progressives from Rev. Al Sharpton to U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., equate voter ID laws with a return to Jim Crow. But why? Do these progressives fear their partners in democracy are too stupid to obtain a driver’s license or state-issued photo ID?

The sad part is the rhetoric surrounding this issue figures only to get worse.

Get real, progressives. Almost everyone has a photo ID these days. You have to have one to deal with banks, stores, school registrars, property managers, traffic cops and with the HR people where you work. Progressives should be encouraging minorities to get IDs, not concocting excuses so they don’t have to. A few years ago, they demanded illegal aliens have access to drivers’ licenses. Was that Jim Crow? Only if you want to keep those people lashed to the ship of government dependency.

There’s no upward mobility in that plan. You can’t even move across the street. You’re just stuck where you are, where your parents were, where your children will be. But you’ll keep voting for Democrats because there will always be “leaders” who you view as having the job of helping you telling you the alternative is worse.

Democrats know upward mobility is not their friend. Even the prospect of it threatens their power structure. That’s why they don’t want you having a photo ID. It’s crucial to helping you improve your life on your own. And if you can improve your life on your own, you don’t need them or anything they’re selling.

If vote fraud is such an insignificant thing – as progressives falsely claim – then why not root it out completely? Because the party that always seems to ensure the polls in St. Louis stay open just long enough to get right amount of votes to pull out close elections at the 11th hour, or miraculously finds forgotten “lost” votes in car trunks or offices after the number needed to win is known has no interest ensure the integrity of our “sacred” right to vote. They need Mickey Mouse and the offensive line of the Dallas Cowboys on the rolls in every jurisdiction.

Because they want to win. And they’re willing to do anything to win.

They will cheat the process they hold so dear. They will oppress the people they claim to champion. They will spend $10 trillion on the war on poverty and make not a dent in the poverty rate.

Because it’s not the defeat of poverty they seek. It’s political power. Their ideas won’t win elections, so their bought votes must.

Progressives Can’t Help Themselves

This Holy Grail of race-baiting politics causes discussions of politics to veer from constructive to avoidance. I got into a discussion on Twitter this week with MSNBC contributor and professor Karen Hunter (no relation, but her first reply jokingly told me I needed to change my last name) about her comment that Mitt Romney wants to be “president of Caucasiastan.”

I know the folly of engaging with someone whose first move is the race card, but I proceeded anyway.

After she acknowledged Rev. King’s dream was everyone being treated equally, she claimed to be the culmination of that dream, adding “which is why I know that Mitt’s vision of America is a nightmare for folks of color.” She didn’t explain why.

Karen also wondered whether I think “Romney cares about or even understands the needs of black/brown Americans?” Telling that Karen Hunter thinks “black/brown Americans” have special needs and need special attention, that certain Americans can’t thrive on their own, that they need the government that has served them so well these many years.

In just a few tweets, Hunter played every stereotypical card of a progressive. When she ran out, she ran out (she blocked me for pointing out that a terrible economy knows no race). But not before firing off the ever-thoughtful “Mitt just wants to be POTUS. He doesn’t actually care @ the people. We have more problems than the economy.”

Yes, we do – starting with progressives who embrace and foster division, envy and hatred. They push ideas that have failed everywhere because they believe those ideas failed only because they weren’t the ones implementing them.

But most of all they embrace race.

A progressive will look at someone, assess the amount of pigment in their skin and determine how that person should think and vote. Hell hath no fury like that of progressives when someone of color who dares stray from their pigmentally assigned expectations. Just ask Clarence Thomas.

The Way Out Is Up

Progressives talk about “social justice” and “leveling the playing field” – deep-sounding but meaningless platitudes meant only to distract. But they won’t acknowledge the fact their policies, their actions, are what caused the playing field to look like Dresden in the first place.

They ignore the starting line, where everyone is equal, and fixate on the finish line, when there isn’t one. It’s exactly what you’d do if you trying to make sure no one wins and convince people the deck is stacked against them.

That’s because what progressives want is power – government power, their power – and they have no problem using race baiting to steer votes their way.

Even if voter fraud were as rare as progressives claim, the real fraud is when they tell large chunks of the population their destiny is determined by their skin tone. A photo ID won’t set anyone free, but it is a passport to a society that values work, rewards diligence and offers an upward path. Progressives can’t have that because those who choose that path are significantly less likely to vote progressive.

Karen Hunter ended the last tweet listed above with the hashtag “#racematters.” She’s right, it does. To racists. That explains why it’s the obsession of progressives.

Twilight of the West

By Mark Steyn
Saturday, June 02, 2012

The Eurovision Song Contest doesn’t get a lot of attention in the United States, but on the Continent it’s long been seen as the perfect Euro-metaphor. Years before the euro came along, it was the prototype pan-European institution, and predicated on the same assumptions. Eurovision took the national cultures that produced Mozart, Vivaldi, and Debussy, and in return gave us “Boom-Bang-a-Bang” (winner, 1969), “Ding-Ding-a-Dong” (winner, 1975), and “Diggi-Loo-Diggi-Ley” (winner, 1984). The euro took the mark, the lira, and the franc, and merged them to create the “Boom-Bang-a-Bang” of currencies.

How will it all end? One recalls the 1990 Eurovision finals in Zagreb: “Yugoslavia is very much like an orchestra,” cooed the hostess, Helga Vlahović. “The string section and the wood section all sit together.” Shortly thereafter, the wood section began ethnically cleansing the dressing rooms, while the string section rampaged through the brass section pillaging their instruments and severing their genitals. Indeed, the charming Miss Vlahović herself was forced into a sudden career shift and spent the next few years as Croatian TV’s head of “war information” programming.

Fortunately, no one remembers Yugoslavia. So today Europe itself is very much like an orchestra. The Greek fiddlers and the Italian wind players all sit together, playing cards in the dressing room, waiting for the German guy to show up with their checks. Just before last week’s Eurovision finale in Azerbaijan, the Daily Mail in London reported that the Spanish entrant, Pastora Soler, had been told to throw the competition “because the cash-strapped country can’t afford to host the lavish event next year,” as the winning nation is obliged to do. In a land where the youth unemployment rate is over 50 percent, and two-thirds of the country’s airports are under threat of closure, and whose neighbors (Britain) are drawing up plans for military intervention to evacuate their nationals in the event of total civic collapse, the pressing need to avoid winning the Eurovision Song Contest is still a poignant symbol of how total is Spain’s implosion. Ask not for whom “Ding-Ding-a-Dong” dings, it dings for thee.

One of the bizarre aspects of media coverage since 2008 is the complacent assumption that what’s happening is “cyclical” — a downturn that will eventually correct itself — rather than profoundly structural. Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, found herself skewered like souvlaki on a Thessaloniki grill for suggesting the other day that the Greeks are a race of tax evaders. She’s right. Compared to Germans, your average Athenian has a noticeable aversion to declaring income. But that’s easy for her to say: Mme. Lagarde’s half-million-dollar remuneration from the IMF is tax-free, just a routine perk of the new transnational governing class. And, in the end, whether your broke European state has reasonably efficient tax collectors like the French or incompetent ones like the Greeks is relatively peripheral.

Likewise, on this side of the Atlantic: Quebec university students, who pay the lowest tuition rates in North America, are currently striking over a proposed increase of $1,625. Spread out over seven years. Or about 232 bucks per annum. Or about the cost of one fair-trade macchiato a week. Which has, since the strike, been reduced further, to a couple of sips: If you’re wondering how guys who don’t do any work can withdraw their labor, well, “strike” is a euphemism for riot. The other week, Vanessa L’Écuyer, a sexology student at the Université du Québec à Montréal, was among those arrested for smoke-bombing the subway system and bringing the city’s morning commute to a halt. But, as in Europe, in the end, whether you fund your half-decade bachelor’s in sexology through a six-figure personal debt or whether you do it through the largesse of the state is relatively peripheral.

In the twilight of the West, America and Europe are still different but only to this extent: They’ve wound up taking separate paths to the same destination. Whether you get there via an artificial common currency for an invented pseudo-jurisdiction or through quantitative easing and the global decline of the dollar, whether you spend your final years in the care of Medicare or the National Health Service death panels, whether higher education is just another stage of cradle-to-grave welfare or you have a trillion dollars’ worth of personal college debt, in 2012 the advanced Western social-democratic citizen looks pretty similar, whether viewed from Greece or Germany, California or Quebec.

That’s to say, the unsustainable “bubble” is not student debt or subprime mortgages or anything else. The bubble is us, and the assumptions of entitlement. Too many citizens of advanced Western democracies live a life they have not earned, and are not willing to earn. Indeed, much of our present fiscal woe derives from two phases of human existence that are entirely the invention of the modern world. Once upon a time, you were a kid till you were 13 or so; then you worked; then you died. That bit between childhood and death has been chewed away at both ends. We invented something called “adolescence” that now extends not merely through the teenage years but through a desultory half decade of Whatever Studies at Complacency U up till you’re 26 and no longer eligible for coverage on your parents’ health-insurance policy. At the other end of the spectrum, we introduced something called “retirement” that, in the space of two generations, has led to the presumption that able-bodied citizens are entitled to spend the last couple of decades, or one-third of their adult lives, as a long holiday weekend.

The bit in between adolescence and retirement is your working life, and it’s been getting shorter and shorter. Which is unfortunate, as it has to pay for everything else. This structural deformity in the life cycle of Western man is at the root of most of our problems. Staying ever longer in “school” (I use the term loosely) leads to ever later workplace entry, and ever later (if at all) family formation. Which means that our generation is running up debt that will have to be repaid by our shrunken progeny. One hundred Greek grandparents have 42 Greek grandchildren. Is it likely that 42 Greeks can repay the debts run up by 100 Greeks? No wonder they’d rather stick it to the Germans. But the thriftier Germans have the same deathbed demographics. If 100 Germans resent having to pick up the check for an entire continent, is it likely 42 Germans will be able to do it?

Look around you. The late-20th-century Western lifestyle isn’t going to be around much longer. In a few years’ time, our children will look at old TV commercials showing retirees dancing, golfing, cruising away their sixties and seventies, and wonder what alternative universe that came from. In turn, their children will be amazed to discover that in the early 21st century the Western world thought it entirely normal that vast swathes of the citizenry should while away their youth enjoying what, a mere hundred years earlier, would have been the leisurely varsity of the younger son of a Mitteleuropean Grand Duke.

I was sad to learn that Helga Vlahović died a few weeks ago, but her central metaphor all those years ago wasn’t wrong. Any functioning society is like an orchestra. When the parts don’t fit together, it’s always the other fellow who’s out of tune. So the Greeks will blame the Germans, and vice versa. But the developed world is all playing the same recessional. In the world after Western prosperity, we will work till we’re older and we will start younger — and we will despise those who thought they could defy not just the rules of economic gravity but the basic human life cycle.

A Grim Jobs Report for America

By Larry Kudlow
Friday, June 01, 2012

You would think $1 trillion in spending stimulus and $2.5 trillion of Fed pump-priming would produce an economy a whole lot stronger than 1.9 percent GDP, which was the revised first-quarter number. And you’d think all that government spending would deliver a whole lot more jobs than 69,000 in May.

But it hasn’t happened.

The Keynesian government-spending model has proven a complete failure. It’s the Obama model. And it has produced such an anemic recovery that frankly, at 2 percent growth, we’re back on the front end of a potential recession. If anything goes wrong — like another blow-up in Europe — there’s no safety margin to stop a new recession.

And that brings us to the grim May employment report, which generated only 69,000 nonfarm payrolls. It’s the third consecutive subpar tally, replete with downward revisions for the two prior months. It’s a devastating number for the American economy, and a catastrophic number for Obama’s reelection hopes. All momentum on jobs and the economy has evaporated.

Inside the May report, the data is just as bad. The unemployment rate rose slightly from 8.1 to 8.2 percent. The so called U6 unemployment rate, tracking the marginally employed or completely discouraged, increased to 14.8 percent from 14.5 percent. And labor earnings are barely rising at 1.7 percent over the past year, almost in line with the inflation rate. In fact, through April, after-tax, after-inflation income is scarcely rising at 0.6 percent for the past year.

The private workweek also fell in May. So did the manufacturing workweek and aggregate hours worked for all employees. The small-business household survey did rise, but that follows declines in the prior two months.

Barack Obama doesn’t get this, but businesses create jobs. And firms have to be profitable in order to hire. Yet the president is on the campaign trail criticizing Mitt Romney by degrading the importance of profits. Huh?

Without profits businesses can’t expand. And if they don’t expand, they can’t hire. And if they don’t have profitable rates of return, they’re not going to attract new capital for investment.

Which brings us to a couple of important reasons for the virtual freeze in hiring.

First there’s the fiscal tax cliff. If all the Bush tax rates go up, incentives will go down and liquidity will leave the system. You can’t pick up a newspaper these days and not find a story about how the fiscal cliff is elevating uncertainty and slowing U.S. growth. House Speaker John Boehner asked Obama for help in extending the Bush tax cuts this summer. But Obama said no. Instead, he wants to raise marginal tax rates on successful upper-income earners, capital gains, dividends, estates, and many successful corporations.

Where’s the corporate tax reform that would lower rates and broaden the base and end the double-taxation of the overseas profits of American companies? A business tax cut would help enormously, but it’s nowhere in sight. Neither is the Keystone Pipeline, which is a surefire job-creator. Obama’s too busy trashing Bain Capital profits and Romney’s business career, both of which, by the way, have recently been praised by former president Bill Clinton. (It was Clinton, you might recall, who lowered investment taxes and presided over an economic boom.)

A second uncertainty facing businesses is the Supreme Court decision on Obamacare due in a few weeks. If all those crazy tax-and-regulation mandates are deemed unconstitutional, it’s Katy bar the door as businesses put profits to work and hire. But they’re not going to move until they see that court decision.

Then there’s the whole European mess with the threat of banking contagion from Spain, Greece, and Italy. That could blow up the whole world economy if it goes completely sour. The Europeans should guarantee all bank deposits, interbank loans, and bank debt until this story is straightened out. But they’re not. So the problem festers.

And now European companies are withdrawing money from local banks and investing in dollars (especially through Treasury bonds that are yielding an incredibly low 1.5 percent). But the rapid rise of King Dollar is generating commodity deflation, which is a deterrent to manufacturing production. According to the May ISM report, manufacturing is slowing.

The Fed may yet launch a new quantitative easing to stop commodity deflation and accommodate the gigantic worldwide dollar demand. But the merits of this move are dubious. On the other hand, an extension of the Bush tax cuts right now would stop the economic and job slide and reestablish certainty.

In fact, all the countries around the world should move to the supply side with lower tax rates to spur economic-growth incentives. Europe, China, and Latin America ought to go back and read Ronald Reagan’s speeches and examine his actions when he faced a similar crisis 30 years ago. It would be an hour or two well spent.

The Obama Assassinations

By Rich Lowry
Friday, June 01, 2012

Killing has never been so discriminating, so urbane, so cool.

The New York Times and Newsweek both ran long, largely admiring articles on how President Barack Obama selects individual terrorists to terminate with extreme prejudice. The administration’s “smart power” isn’t working out so well, but smart killing is a smash success.

Obama’s national-security team — as well as his top political adviser, David Axelrod — gather on “Terror Tuesdays” to go over an expanding “kill list” that the president examines with the aid of capsule biographies of the terrorists, or “baseball cards.” Then the president decides who lives and who — if we get him in our sights — dies.

Needless to say, had Dick Cheney consulted “baseball cards” to decide in weekly meetings attended by Karl Rove who deserved to have close encounters with drone-fired missiles, Nancy Pelosi would have drafted the articles of impeachment herself.

The Obama killings vindicate the core premises of the Bush war on terror: This is a war, and the protections of our criminal-justice system don’t apply to the enemy. In light of the kill list, it’s a wonder anyone ever objected to Bush-era detentions or interrogations. If we can pick someone off a roster of names and sentence him to death without due process, surely we can capture and hold that same person. If we can execute someone — and any of his associates who happen to be in the vicinity — from on high, surely we can keep him awake at night and otherwise discomfit him should he fall into our hands.

The Times notes that “Mr. Obama’s record has not drawn anything like the sweeping criticism from allies that his predecessor faced.” True enough. It hasn’t been subjected to a highly politicized assault at home and abroad by people desperate to put it in the worst possible light and even make it a war crime.

With a few exceptions, the Left has retired from the field when it comes to smearing the executive branch for prosecuting the war. If the Left were still in the game, it would insist on always calling the actions assassinations, demand congressional authorization and judicial sign-off, excoriate the secret proceedings, and pour scorn on the entire notion of enemy combatants’ standing outside the criminal-justice system. It would call the assassinations a “terrorist-recruiting tool,” as indeed they are, since almost anything we do to combat al-Qaeda will offend some sympathizers of al-Qaeda.

For most of the left, the highest principle of just-war theory is licet si Obama id faciat (it’s okay if Obama does it). This is how Gitmo, formerly a standing repudiation of all that we hold dear as a nation, becomes an afterthought when it is owned and operated by one Barack H. Obama. As it happens, the president holds exactly the same Obama-centric view. So long as the kill list is overseen by him as judge and executioner, it’s beyond reproach.

The press tends to agree. The Newsweek article reports, “The choices he faces are brutally difficult, and he has struggled with them — sometimes turning them over in his mind again and again.” Really? He thinks about whom he is deciding to kill? The nation is blessed to have such a scrupulous leader. The Times maintains that the president parses the kill list as “a student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.” If no anecdotes have yet emerged about President Obama justifying a particular kill with reference to the Summa Theologica, it’s probably only a matter of time.

In authorizing the strikes, the president is to be commended for his cold-bloodedness, although no tactic is perfect or without costs. The war in Yemen is sliding the wrong way, and relations with target-rich Pakistan are at a low ebb. But there should be no doubt now that the commander-in-chief possesses fearsome powers in the war on terror. All it took for Democrats to accept that was for President Obama to begin exercising them.

Barack Obama: Drone Warrior

By Charles Krauthammer
Thursday, May 31, 2012

A very strange story, a 6,000-word front-page New York Times piece on how, every Tuesday, Barack Obama shuffles “baseball cards” with the pictures and bios of suspected terrorists from around the world and chooses who shall die by drone strike. He even reserves for himself the decision of whether to proceed when the probability of killing family members or bystanders is significant.

The article could have been titled “Barack Obama: Drone Warrior.” Great detail on how Obama personally runs the assassination campaign. On-the-record quotes from the highest officials. This was no leak. This was a White House press release.

Why? To portray Obama as tough guy. And why now? Because in crisis after recent crisis, Obama has looked particularly weak: standing helplessly by as thousands are massacred in Syria; being played by Iran in nuclear negotiations, now reeling with the collapse of the latest round in Baghdad; being treated with contempt by Vladimir Putin, who blocks any action on Syria or Iran and adds personal insult by standing up Obama at the latter’s G-8 and NATO summits.

The Obama camp thought that any political problem with foreign policy would be cured by the Osama bin Laden operation. But the administration’s attempt to politically exploit the raid’s one-year anniversary backfired, earning ridicule and condemnation for its crude appropriation of the heroic acts of others.

A campaign ad had Bill Clinton praising Obama for the courage of ordering the raid because, had it failed and Americans been killed, “the downside would have been horrible for him.” Outraged veterans released a response ad pointing out that it would have been considerably more horrible for the dead SEALs. Obama only compounded the self-aggrandizement problem when he spoke a week later about the military “fighting on my behalf.”

The Osama-slayer card having been vastly overplayed, what to do? A new card: Obama, drone warrior, steely and solitary, delivering death with cool dispatch to the rest of the al-Qaeda depth chart.

So the peacemaker, Nobel laureate, nuclear disarmer, apologizer to the world for America’s having lost its moral way when it harshly interrogated the very people Obama now kills has become — just in time for the 2012 campaign — Zeus the Avenger, smiting by lightning strike.

A rather strange ethics. You go around the world preening about how America has turned a new moral page by electing a president profoundly offended by George W. Bush’s belligerence and prisoner maltreatment, and now you’re ostentatiously telling the world that you personally play judge, jury, and executioner to unseen combatants of your choosing, and whatever innocents happen to be in their company.

This is not to argue against drone attacks. In principle, they are fully justified. No quarter need be given to terrorists who wear civilian clothes, hide among civilians, and target civilians indiscriminately. But it is to question the moral amnesia of those whose delicate sensibilities were offended by the Bush methods that kept America safe for a decade — and who now embrace Obama’s campaign of assassination by remote control.

Moreover, there is an acute military problem. Dead terrorists can’t talk.

Drone attacks are cheap — which is good. But the path of least resistance has a cost. It yields no intelligence about terror networks or terror plans.

One capture could potentially make us safer than ten killings. But because of the moral incoherence of Obama’s War on Terror, there are practically no captures any more. What would be the point? There’s nowhere for the CIA to interrogate. And what would they learn even if they did, Obama having decreed a new regime of kid-gloves, name-rank-and-serial-number interrogation?

This administration came out opposing military tribunals, wanting to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York, reading the Christmas Day bomber his Miranda rights, and trying mightily (and unsuccessfully, there being — surprise! — no plausible alternative) to close Guantanamo. Yet alongside this exquisite delicacy about the rights of terrorists is the campaign to kill them in their beds.

You festoon your prisoners with rights — but you take no prisoners. The morality is perverse. Which is why the results are so mixed. We do kill terror operatives, an important part of the War on Terror, but we gratuitously forfeit potentially life-saving intelligence.

But that will cost us later. For now, we are to bask in the moral seriousness and cool purpose of our drone-warrior president.

When Did Free Speech Become Illegal

By Diana West
Friday, June 01, 2012

Back in 2001, Britain's political parties signed a fantastic pledge. They agreed to say nothing to "stir up racial or religious hatred, or lead to prejudice on grounds of race, nationality or religion."

This gag order did more than keep the parties polite. Vital issues -- from massive immigration and multiculturalism to their eradicating effects on British civilization -- were officially banned. Thus, such concerns became impermissible thoughts. Not that such issues weren't already thoughtcrime, as George Orwell would have put it. But this unprecedented pledge turned "violators" into political lepers.

I thought of that elite code of cowardice this week when a London judge sentenced a 42-year-old British secretary named Jacqueline Woodhouse to 21 weeks in jail. Her crime? An expletive-laden rant about immigration, multiculturalism and the disappearance of British civilization. Not in so many words. But that was the unmistakable gist of Woodhouse's commentary one January night on the London Underground.

This same week, another London judge ordered two black girls, 18 and 19, to perform community service after a savage physical attack on two white legal secretaries. "I am satisfied what you both did, you did that night because you were fueled by alcohol," Judge Stephen Kramer said, as though tut-tutting a child's unknowing apple theft.

A few months ago, another London judge freed four Somali Muslim women who set upon a white couple, yelling, "Kill the white slag," and other anti-white slurs. The gang beat the woman to the ground and ripped out a patch of her hair. Judge Robert Brown was lenient because, he ruled, as Muslims, the women were not used to being drunk.

Jacqueline Woodhouse was drunk, too, but that was no mitigating factor in her case. She harmed no one, but that was no mitigating factor, either. Judge Michael Snow invoked the "deep sense of shame" Woodhouse's display elicited, because "our citizens ... may, as a consequence, believe that it secretly represents the views of other white people."

"Thoughtcrime is death," as Orwell wrote in "1984."

And, thanks to YouTube, it becomes continuous spectacle. Woodhouse's court-deemed "victim," Galbant Singh Juttla, recorded and uploaded her display. After the six-minute clip went viral, Woodhouse turned herself in to police.

But what might she have confessed to?

I did it, mates. I said: "I used to live in England. Now I live in the United Nations."

That'll be 21 weeks in the clink?

Woodhouse said a lot of other things as she surveyed her fellow passengers, her squawky voice weirdly reminiscent of an Eliza Doolittle grown old without having met her Henry Higgins. "All bleeping foreign bleeping bleeps," she says. "Where do you come from? Where do you come from? Where do you come from?" She estimated that 30 percent of the train's passengers were in the country illegally.

Off with her head.

Expletives fly regarding England ("this bleeping country is a bleeping joke"), Pakistanis, illegals, pigs.

"I wouldn't mind if you loved our country," she said, lucid, to a Pakistani beside her.

"Long live Pakistan," he said twice in Urdu, later leading a chorus of the Pakistani national anthem.

Woodhouse then notices her "victim" recording her. "Oh, look, he's filming," she says. "Hello, government." She leans into the camera.

"Why don't you tell us your name, as well?" Juttla the "victim" says.

"Why don't you tell me where you're from?" she says.

"I'm British, I'm British, yeah? I'm British," he tells her.

"Right. OK," she says.

"So, what's your problem?" he says.

"Oh, what's your problem?" she says.

"Yeah, you should watch what you say."

"Watch what I say?"

"Yeah."

"I used to live in England. Now I live in the United Nations."

"So keep your mouth shut then."

"Why should I?"

Twenty-one weeks in jail, folks.

Why, Woodhouse quite rationally asks, "am I not allowed to express my opinions?"

"We don't want to hear your opinions," Juttla replies.

This tears it. "Why is it all right for you but not all right for me?" She's shrieking now, her voice cutting the air like a ragged-edged razor.

There is background laughter, but nothing is funny. For a few, farcical minutes, a nation's tragedy, its unmarked passing, has taken the spotlight, the lead role played by a drunken secretary because there is no one else.

"Just keep your mouth shut," Juttla says for the umpteenth time.

"Why should you open your gob and I can't open mine?"

"Because you questioned me first," he says, which isn't true. Juttla questioned Woodhouse first, asking for her name. Surely, Big Brother would want to know.

"I'm sorry," she says. "Not one rule for you and one rule for me."

Oh, yes, Jacqueline. One rule for indigenous islanders.

One rule for everyone else.