As the New York Times reports this morning, not a single Republican presidential candidate has the courage to tell South Carolina to stop flying the Confederate battle flag from its state capitol. It is a bit late for that, to be sure; public display of any kind of the symbol of the slaveholders’ rebellion should have been banned after the Union victory in 1865. Removing the Confederate flag from the grounds of South Carolina’s seat of government has become an African-American cause in the wake of last week’s Charleston church massacre. It may be incommensurate with the crime, but black Americans are entirely justified in their rancor against official sanction of a symbol of slavery.
The most explosive passage in Michael Oren’s new book on the frayed U.S.-Israel relationship is not about President Barack Obama’s repeated fights with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Rather, it is about Obama himself.
Struggling to understand how Obama–who has genuine empathy for Israel, Oren says–could adopt policies and postures so hostile to the Jewish state, Oren turns to Obama’s first memoir, Dreams from My Father. What he reads shocks him:
“More alarming for me still were Obama’s attitudes towards America. Vainly, I scoured Dreams from My Father for some expression of reverence, even respect, for the country its author would someday lead. Instead, the book criticizes Americans for their capitalism and consumer culture, for despoiling their environment and maintaining antiquated power structures. Traveling abroad, they exhibited “ignorance and arrogance”–the very shortcomings the president’s critics assigned to him.”
Hillary Clinton says, “Success isn’t measured by how much the wealthiest Americans have, but by how many children climb out of poverty.” So why did she charge an exorbitant speaking fee to a charity that helps poor kids?
Fine, she sent the cash to another “nonprofit” — the family’s $2 billion foundation. But Condi Rice, another ex-secretary of state, gave her own (much lower) fee from the same outfit — the Boys and Girls Club of Long Beach, Calif. — back to the charity.
How Do You Solve a Problem Like China? Cordial meetings are exactly the wrong way to confront China’s very real threats.
This week, top American and Chinese officials will meet in Washington for the annual Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED). The dialogue, which the Obama administration began in 2009, was once touted as one of Washington’s most important bilateral meetings, potentially even a de facto G-2, where the world’s two dominant powers would not only settle their differences but shape Asian, if not global, economic and political issues. Experience has proved a bitter teacher, however, and the hopes of just a few years ago have dissipated as the desired strategic partnership has devolved into an undeniable strategic competition.
After Donald Trump’s bizarre announcement last week that he was running for president, it occurred to me that many observers are misreading Trump.
Many consider him a joke. Not true. Trump knows when he is being outrageous — and acts that way consciously to build his brand. Some consider him a menace, pointing out polls that show he would do well if he abandoned the GOP after the primaries and ran as an independent. But Trump is too smart to waste money on a futile effort to capture 270 electoral votes. He will conclude — like Michael Bloomberg, another billionaire — that American politics is a two-party duopoly.
The Obama White House thinks that when it comes to the Iranian nuclear program, we ought to let bygones be bygones. What’s past is past, and now it’s time to focus on the future. Sure, the administration once thought it was a problem that the Iranians refused to disclose their past nuclear activities, or what the International Atomic Energy Agency calls the “possible military dimensions” (PMDs) of their nuclear program. As John Kerry said in April, if Iran wants sanctions relief it will need to come clean about its past activities—it will “have to do it,” said Kerry. “It will be done.”
When news broke this spring about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s appetite for other people’s money and their indifference to other people’s rules, I was rereading my way through a shelf of old Hillary biographies. My memory thus was doubly stimulated. In the fresh revelations, as in the books, the traits of the Clintons were spread out for a new generation to marvel at: the furtiveness, the shifting accounts of hazy events, the parsing of language, the bald and unnecessary denial of often trivial facts (did she have two phones or one?). Her admirers, old and young, veteran and novice alike, were faced with the Hillary Paradox.
When the climate carnival’s moveable feast of first-class seats, fine dining, nice sheets and other people’s money rolls into Paris later this year, expect one simple fact to be diplomatically overlooked: even by warmism’s own calculations, the stated goal is unattainable.
The UN is calling on national leaders to back a global agreement on reducing human-produced CO2 emissions with the stated intention of limiting “global warming to 2C degrees above the pre-industrial level”. This pact is to be signed in Paris in December and Australia has agreed to participate. Thrashed out at the 2014 Lima conference, the process called upon individual nations ‘ready to do so’ to submit national pledges by the first quarter of 2015, with Australia saying it would take the pledge sometime around now.
The air in the San Joaquin Valley this late-June is, of course, hot and dry, but also dustier and more full of particulates than usual. This year a strange flu reached epidemic proportions. I say strange, because after the initial viral symptoms subsided, one’s cough still lingered for weeks and even months. Antibiotics did not seem to faze it. Allergy clinics were full. Almost every valley resident notices that when orchards and vineyards are less watered, when row cropland lies fallow, when lawns die and blow away, when highway landscaping dries up, nature takes over and the air becomes even filthier. Green elites lecture that agriculture is unnatural, without any idea why pre-civilized, pre-irrigated, and “natural” California was an empty place, whose dry, hazy climate and dusty winds made life almost impossible. The state is running on empty.
Earlier this year, a firestorm erupted when Connecticut College philosophy professor Andrew Pessin’s 2014 Facebook comments, in which he compared Hamas in Gaza to a “wild pit bull . . . chained in a cage, regularly making mass efforts to escape,” were deemed “racist” and “dehumanizing” by student activists, colleagues, and administrators alike. Meanwhile, Middle East studies academics regularly emit commentary that is unambiguous in its bigotry, tastelessness, and vulgarity, to nary a peep. Not coincidentally, the vitriol is directed at targets academe finds politically unpopular: Israel, pro-Israel Jews, and anti-Islamists.
