Commentary Magazine


Introducing Commentary Complete

“Khaybar”—A Middle East Reality Check

Much of the discussion about the Middle East peace process tends to focus almost entirely on what Israelis do and what the implications of more concessions to the Palestinians will be for the Jewish state. Some of this emphasis is justified, as Israel ought to do what is not only right but is in its long-term interest. For some on the left that means ignoring not only the openly stated intentions of the Palestinians and their supporters in the Muslim and Arab worlds but also their long record of rejecting peace. But as difficult as it might be to focus the international press as well as liberal Jews on the historical record of the Palestinians and their political culture that makes peace improbable if not impossible, it may be just as important to broaden the discussion to that of the culture of the entire region. If Palestinians have never found the will to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn it is in no small measure because doing so is viewed as treason to the general anti-Zionist cause.

It is that context an item brought to our attention by the Elder of Ziyon website. In one we are informed that a new blockbuster miniseries slated for broadcast throughout the Muslim world in July as part of the region’s version of sweeps week for the Ramadan holiday may not be aired after all. But rather than “Khaybar” being axed for its widely reported anti-Semitic theme, the series may be in trouble because it portrays some of the Prophet Muhammad’s “companions” and therefore offends the religious sensibilities of Dubai TV and other broadcasters. While I have no position about what Muslims ought to consider taboo, the fact that “Khaybar” is still slated to run in most of the Middle East tells us more about what the contemporary Arab world thinks about Jews than canned statements about peace intended for the Western press that peace advocates rely upon.

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Immigration and the Republicans

Writing today in the Corner at National Review Online, Jonah Goldberg takes up the point I discussed earlier today about the necessity for Republicans not to frame the immigration reform issue as one in which their principal motivation is to avoid allowing more Hispanics become Democratic voters. He agrees with me that’s wrong, but he also says that supporters of the gang of eight bill are mistaken to try and sell their legislation to the GOP on the grounds that it is good politics. He thinks the debate on the bill should rise and fall on its merits, and I’m perfectly happy to join him in supporting that sentiment.

Reform of a failed immigration system that makes a mockery of the rule of law and replacing it with something that both strengthens border security and provides productive and otherwise law-abiding residents of the United States a path to legalization is good policy. Contrary to many of our friends on the right who claim Republicans have a vital interest in derailing efforts to bring about that change, I see no conservative principle at stake in either defending the status quo or an unrealistic call for the deportation of 11 million people that we know are going nowhere. As many conservatives and most of the business community have long argued, immigration is not only a response to economic reality, it continues to be one of America’s great strengths and should be encouraged rather than opposed.

However, I disagree with Goldberg when he says that Republicans should not consider the political implications of the issue. He’s right that votes on the bill should be determined by “the national interest” on such a major issue and that, as I noted in my piece, there is no guarantee that poor Hispanics will become Republicans just because the party backs immigration reform. But while the bill isn’t going to be sold to the party simply because it is good politics, the problem is that strident anti-immigration voices on the right have already put the GOP in a position where it must do something to rebrand itself on the issue in order to have a hope of turning the situation around.

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Last Javan Synagogue Destroyed

Alas, bad news from Indonesia, which otherwise has managed its counter-radicalization program well in recent years. The last synagogue in Java—a historical building that predated Indonesian independence—has been destroyed after having been blockaded for several years by Indonesian Islamists. From the Jakarta Globe:

The last vestige of one Indonesia’s oldest and largest Jewish communities is now just a pile of rubble. Beth Shalom in Surabaya — Java’s one and only synagogue — was demolished in May after being sealed off by Islamic hard-liners in 2009. “It’s not clear when exactly it was demolished and who did it,” Freddy Istanto, the director of the Surabaya Heritage Society (SHS), told the Jakarta Globe. “In mid-May, I was informed by a member of the SHS that the synagogue was destroyed. In disbelief, I went over there and it had been flattened.”

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Rowhani and the Path to Containment

New Iranian President Hassan Rowhani is already proving the truth of my assertion that allowing his election was the smartest thing his country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has done in a long time. Speaking for the first time since winning in a landslide last Friday, Rowhani presented a far more reasonable face to the world than his predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Islamist cleric that had the distinction of being the most “moderate” of the regime supporters that Khamenei allowed to run said he wanted to reduce tensions with the United States. Though he reiterated that he would never budge from defending Iran’s “right” to continue to enrich uranium that the world rightly fears will be used to make bombs, this half-hearted olive branch is probably all he thinks he needs to do to string the West along for another round of negotiations that will do nothing but buy more time for Iran to achieve its nuclear ambition.

The bad news is that he’s probably right about that.

The willingness of White House chief of staff Dennis McDonough to embrace Rowhani’s election as “a potentially hopeful sign” was a signal that President Obama is ready to head down the garden path with the Iranians again despite the fact that every previous such effort has ended in a failure that only advanced the ayatollahs toward their nuclear goal. As our Max Boot noted earlier today, the “myth of the moderate mullah” dies hard in Washington. But the problem here probably goes a lot deeper than the nonsense being spouted on cable news shows about the nonexistent chances that Rowhani represents the start of a chance to transform Iran from an Islamist tyranny to something less awful. Given the fact that everyone knows that real power resides in the hands of the supreme leader, the desire to pump meaning into his election may be more about the desire of the president and those elements of the foreign policy establishment that are keen to avoid having to face up to the truth about the Iranian nuclear peril than any belief in Rowhani’s moderation.

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Turkey’s Terrorism Confusion

One of the bedrocks of the U.S.-Turkey partnership has been U.S. provision of so-called counter-terrorism assistance to Turkey. In theory, the counter-terrorism assistance is meant to allow Turkey to counter its Kurdish insurgency, long led by the Kurdistan Workers Party, better known by its Kurdish acronym, the PKK. However, for the past three months, the Turkish government and PKK have been in active peace talks and the truce between them has held.

I have written before about how a lack of a universal definition of what terrorism is hampers the fight against it. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will label the PKK as terrorists, but somehow say that Hamas is not a terrorist group. Indeed, as the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Jonathan Schanzer pointed out, Erdoğan took time out from managing the state response to protests by liberals, secularists, trade unionists, educators, and others to meet with senior Hamas leaders today.

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A Simple Question for Obama on Syria

Like Max, I couldn’t help but notice our president’s ambivalence about the Syrian civil war. But I was surprised to read this sentence, in the Times story that Max quotes: “Coming so late into the conflict, Mr. Obama expressed no confidence it would change the outcome, but privately expressed hope it might buy time to bring about a negotiated settlement.” This, to me, is a perfect example of how fetishizing diplomacy undermines it.

It is appropriate for that quote to appear in a story in the New York Times, because the Times has reported extensively on how diplomacy is probably President Obama’s most glaring weakness of statecraft. And they deserve credit for doing so, because it is rare for the mainstream media to report on domestic politics in ways that contradict their own narratives. Since the narrative on Obama is that he is a thoughtful proponent of engagement, it took some contrarian instincts for the Times to reveal what many of us already knew: no, he’s not. He’s an egotist who believes in the power of his own command, and the cult of personality that surrounded him for so long insulated him from the reality of his own limitations.

If Obama can’t fool the media into thinking he wants to win in Syria, what are the odds he can fool the Kremlin? One of the complaints about Obama from the right and from the interventionist center-left is that he avoids talk of victory–everything he does and says is about ending a given conflict, not winning the conflict. Telegraphing this substantially reduces his negotiating leverage. It’s ironic, but Obama’s obsession with engagement severely weakens his ability to engage.

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The Dark Side of the Immigration Debate

As I noted earlier today, Marco Rubio is taking the brunt of the backlash from some conservatives who oppose efforts to reform America’s failed immigration system. But whatever impact Rubio’s stand in favor of the bipartisan compromise bill currently being considered by the Senate has on his presidential prospects, Republicans should be worried about the tenor of the debate that is developing on the right about the legislation.

While I think GOP critics of the immigration reform bill that claim any path to citizenship for illegals undermines the rule of law have a weak case (since the status quo makes a mockery of the rule of law), it is at least an argument based in principle. But if the main theme of those trying to block reform becomes one that centers on the idea that illegals that become citizens will by themselves tip the political balance of the country toward Democrats, as talk show host Steve Deace writes today in Politico, then the problem is not so much Rubio’s as it is the party as a whole. It is a short leap from that assertion to one of general resentment of a national demographic shift in which the percentage of Hispanics has risen. Loose talk along these lines has become endemic in some quarters of the right and it is time for leading Republicans—including those who disagree with Rubio on the reform bill—to stamp it out before it saddles the GOP with liberal attacks that won’t be easily answered by the usual (and generally correct) rejoinder about media bias.

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Re: The Reckless Rhetoric of Palin and Cain

Pete Wehner has rightly called out Sarah Palin for claiming that the US is “becoming a totalitarian surveillance state.” That is not her only mindless and stupid comment of late. She also had this to say Saturday about the terrible conflict in Syria:

I say until we know what we’re doing, until we have a commander in chief who knows what he’s doing, well, let these radical Islamic countries who aren’t even respecting basic human rights, where both sides are slaughtering each other as they scream over an arbitrary red line, ‘Allah Akbar,’ I say until we have someone who knows what they’re doing, I say let Allah sort it out.”

This is both offensive and puzzling. Start with puzzling: She claims that Syrians are fighting over a “red line.” Perhaps she’s confusing it with the Green Line that once divided Christian Beirut from Muslim Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War? In Syria the only “red line” is the imaginary one that Obama drew to discourage Bashar Assad from using chemical weapons.

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The Real “Pinkwashing” Scandal

When Sarah Schulman’s November 2011 op-ed on “pinkwashing” appeared in the New York Times, I had a conflicted reaction. There was the urge to respond, since such pseudo-academic fraudulence is not merely anti-intellectual at its heart but a voluble and angry protest against honest intellectual pursuit and thus threatened to further embarrass American academia. But there was also the understanding that no response was needed, because the column revealed that the idea of “pinkwashing”–the assumption that Jews grant rights to gays merely to manipulate them as part of Israel’s globalized chicanery–collapses immediately on its own expression.

For example, in one sentence Schulman criticizes Israel’s gay-friendly culture as a ruse because some in Israel’s public life are supposedly “homophobic.” But in the next sentence, she writes that Israeli pinkwashing “not only manipulates the hard-won gains of Israel’s gay community, but it also ignores the existence of Palestinian gay-rights organizations. Homosexuality has been decriminalized in the West Bank since the 1950s, when anti-sodomy laws imposed under British colonial influence were removed from the Jordanian penal code, which Palestinians follow.” In other words, Schulman’s own protestation against Israeli pinkwashing engages in thorough pinkwashing of Palestinian culture.

What this revealed was not only the unserious nature of Schulman’s “scholarship” but that the purpose of her op-ed was not about calling out pinkwashing; indeed, the op-ed is, to date, the clearest example of pinkwashing in print. Instead, Schulman was simply attacking Israel on behalf of the Palestinians from another direction. Call it the triumph of hope over experience, but I expected that since this was so obvious, the academic left wouldn’t sully its reputation any more by embracing this nonsense. I was wrong, of course, having given the academic left too much credit. In April the City University of New York hosted a conference on pinkwashing at which, as James Kirchick reports in detail, Schulman’s anti-Israel animus was made undeniable:

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Rubio’s High Stakes Gamble

With immigration reform at the top of the domestic agenda as Congress prepares to vote in the coming weeks on the bipartisan gang of eight bill, the spotlight is shining very brightly right now on Florida Senator Marco Rubio. Rubio remains the key player on immigration because he is the link between the gang and conservatives. Without him, the scheme has no chance, no matter how it is modified, of ever gaining approval in both houses of Congress. The bill gives Rubio the opportunity to run for president in 2016 after having actually accomplishing something important, showing that he is a doer and not just a talker as well as demonstrating that the GOP can appeal to Hispanics. But all the attention he is getting isn’t necessarily helping him.

As a package of features in Politico today makes clear, Rubio is under attack from both the right and the left. Some on the right are now damning him as a dupe of the left and a Washington insider while some of his allies in the gang of eight are suspecting that Rubio’s attempts to toughen up the enforcement aspects of the legislation will destroy it. Both the right and Rubio’s liberal gang colleagues worry that he is betraying them. Having decided to prove that he was a politician of substance, the senator is finding that it is easier to run your mouth without taking responsibility for trying to fix a problem. While some critics wonder whether he has the intestinal fortitude to stick with a position under fire and guide a complicated piece of legislation to passage, a portion of his own party is already writing him off for 2016 because of the hostility reform has engendered among grass roots conservatives who are openly hostile to immigrants.

All of which proves that the senator’s decision to stake his reputation on immigration reform is a gamble that could make or break him. But while the bill’s future is very much up in the air, the question of how Rubio will come out of this depends more on the way he conducts himself in the coming weeks than it does on whether the reform package becomes law.

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The Myth of the Moderate Mullahs

The West’s capacity for self-delusion when it comes to Iran never ceases to amaze me. Witness the ecstatic reaction to supposed centrist Hassan Rohani’s election in a rigged election. According to The Wall Street Journal: “The Obama administration and its European allies—surprised and encouraged by Hassan Rohani’s election as Iran’s next president—intend to aggressively push to resume negotiations with Tehran on its nuclear program by August to test his new government’s positions.”

Really? Seriously? Is this on the level? Do leaders in Washington and other Western capitals still believe in the myth of “moderate mullahs” who will make a deal on Iran’s nuclear program if only we reach out to them? This flies in the face of decades of evidence that the Iranians have no intention of giving up their cherished nuclear ambitions whose realization they see (perhaps rightly, if the example of North Korea is anything to go by) as the ultimate guarantor of their revolution.

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Our Ambivalent Commander in Chief

Has there ever been a more ambivalent and self-doubting commander in chief than Barack Obama? Possibly. But not in recent memory. Obama can be decisive and determined when pushing for something he really believes in–like higher taxes, massive stimulus bills, and universal, subsidized medical coverage. But in the foreign policy arena he is typically wracked by indecision and winds up trying to come up with some halfway solution that satisfies no one. The one exception was the raid that killed Osama bin Laden–his finest hour. But when it comes to making most other major foreign policy decisions, he acts more like a law professor conducting an endless seminar than a commander-in-chief in wartime.

In Afghanistan he ordered a troop surge after a lengthy internal debate, but imposed a timeline that undermined its impact. In Iraq he delayed the troop pullouts he had promised during the 2008 campaign and made a half-hearted attempt to keep a few thousand troops after 2011 but then pulled the plug on the negotiations at the first obstacle. In Libya he agreed to intervene, but did as little as possible–both to topple Muammar Gaddafi and, even more importantly, to impose order after he was gone.

Now add Syria to the list.

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The Reckless Rhetoric of Palin and Cain

According to Sarah Palin, the GOP’s vice presidential candidate in 2008, the United States is “becoming a totalitarian surveillance state.” And Herman Cain, who ran as a GOP presidential candidate in 2012, said, “This train is running full speed down the tracks towards socialism and towards communism. Yes, I said it. Before we stop it and reverse it, we got to slow it down. That’s what we do in 2014.”

Now, we actually know what genuine totalitarian surveillance states and communist nations look like, and America is nothing close to becoming anything like them. Whatever one thinks of the NSA’s data mining and surveillance techniques, they are legal, overseen by a FISA court and Congress, and they are not anything like the Soviet Union under Stalin or North Korea under Kim Jong-un. Nor is America speeding down the tracks toward becoming Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge or Cuba under Castro.

So why use such reckless rhetoric? It’s hard to know the precise reasons. They could range from Obama Derangement Syndrome to efforts to gain attention. Whatever the case, by now I’m familiar with the pushback. Why pay any attention to what Mr. Cain and Ms. Palin say? Isn’t criticizing them merely evidence of wanting to be embraced by the liberal “establishment”–a sign of being unprincipled, ideologically soft and a RINO (Republican In Name Only)? Why not ignore their words in order to focus on the venom of the left and the genuine threat posed to America by the Obama presidency?

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Snowden Continues to Discredit Himself

Edward Snowden seems to be afraid that the CIA, NSA and other parts of the U.S. intelligence apparatus will mount a massive campaign to discredit him. Actually, they don’t have to bother. He’s doing an excellent job of discrediting himself. Notwithstanding his egregious violations of the security classifications that protect our most important secrets, Snowden had initially won some public sympathy, at least among libertarians of both the left and the right, for exposing U.S. government programs that, he claimed, spy on Americans.

In reality the programs he disclosed are focused primarily on foreigners and operate under strict safeguards to avoid violations of Americans’ privacy. But never mind–at least to the casual observer Snowden may have come across initially as a simply a concerned citizen, a whistleblower who had the country’s best interests at heart. Certainly that was how he tried to present himself.

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Election of “Moderate” Helps Iran’s Tyrant

Say what you will about Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He may lead a totalitarian theocracy that squelches freedom and threatens the region with its nuclear program and spews anti-Western and anti-Semitic filth at the world. But he is not incapable of learning a simple lesson about international politics. Four years ago, he stood back and allowed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to steal the country’s presidential election thus consigning Iran to four more years of being represented to the world by a vulgar buffoon. The violent suppression of protesters in Tehran worsened Iran’s already terrible reputation and Ahmadinejad’s role as the regime’s most visible figure made it easier to rally international support for sanctions against Iran to force it to drop its nuclear ambitions. But this time around, Khamenei wasn’t going to make the same mistake. Rather than taking action to ensure the election of a candidate more closely identified with him, he allowed a cleric who is a strong supporter of the Islamist government but not one of his personal followers to breeze to an easy victory in Friday’s election. It’s the smartest thing he’s done in years.

Hassan Rowhani is the new president of Iran, but though the vote is seen as a setback for Khamenei, the supreme leader is actually the big winner. Having seen how Ahmadinejad’s antics and open expression of hatred made it easier to sell Western governments on the necessity of taking the Iranian threat seriously, Khamenei is right to think Rowhani’s victory will be interpreted by many in the Western foreign policy establishment as a chance to see if Iran is taking a step back from the nuclear precipice. But as with past “moderates” who won the presidency, Rowhani may be the new face of the regime but it won’t change a thing about who runs Iran, its support for Bashar Assad and Hezbollah terrorism, or its drive for nuclear weapons. The alleged moderate—whose views on those issues don’t deviate a whit from those of Khamenei anyway—won’t have any influence on those matters.

Rowhani’s election will make it more complicated for those who want to press Iran harder to give up its nuclear program and strengthen the voices of those useful idiots in the West (like the editorial board of the New York Times) who will argue that Rowhani’s election is a good reason to devote another year or two or three to dead-end diplomatic efforts that will do nothing but give Iran more time to achieve its nuclear goal.

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Obama’s Multiplying Foreign Policy Failures

On April 23, 2007, then-Senator and future presidential candidate Barack Obama gave a speech in which he said this:

Until we change our approach in Iraq, it will be increasingly difficult to refocus our efforts on the challenges in the wider region – on the conflict in the Middle East, where Hamas and Hezbollah feel emboldened and Israel’s prospects for a secure peace seem uncertain; on Iran, which has been strengthened by the war in Iraq; and on Afghanistan, where more American forces are needed to battle al Qaeda, track down Osama bin Laden, and stop that country from backsliding toward instability… Now it’s our moment to lead – our generation’s time to tell another great American story. So someday we can tell our children that this was the time when we helped forge peace in the Middle East.

It hasn’t quite turned out that way, has it?

Just yesterday the Obama administration admitted what our allies have long said – that the Syrian regime used chemical weapons against opposition forces. At least 80,000 people have died in the Syrian conflict, there are almost 1.5 million refugees, and the number of internally displaced persons has rise to more than four million. (Tony Blair discusses Syria in this op-ed.) Moreover, as the Washington Post reports 

As fighters with Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement wage the battles that are helping Syria’s regime survive, their chief sponsor, Iran, is emerging as the biggest victor in the wider regional struggle for influence that the Syrian conflict has become… after the Assad regime’s capture of the small but strategic town of Qusair last week — a battle in which the Iranian-backed Shiite militia played a pivotal role — Iran’s supporters and foes alike are mulling a new reality: that the regional balance of power appears to be tilting in favor of Tehran, with potentially profound implications for a Middle East still grappling with the upheaval wrought by the Arab Spring revolts.

That’s not all.

The Syrian civil war is badly destabilizing our most reliable Arab ally, Jordan. Lebanon is increasingly fragile. In Egypt and across North Africa the Muslim Brotherhood has gained power. Since Mr. Obama withdrew American forces in Iraq, sectarian violence has markedly increased there, with the hard-won gains from the Bush administration’s surge being washed away. The war in Afghanistan is going poorly, while relations with the Karzai regime are quite bad, limiting American leverage in that nation (our much-trumped retreat of forces from Afghanistan have of course limited our leverage as well). Turkey is struggling to contain a political crisis that has threatened the nation’s economy and paralyzed the government. There are no prospects for genuine peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. The Libyan people are weary of two years of militia violence that has kept the country in chaos and stalled reform, with the government weak and unstable. And al Qaeda is ascendant in North Africa.

I could go on, but you get the picture.

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Belated Action on Syria Won’t Deter Iran

Yesterday’s decision by the Obama administration to arm Syrian rebels ended years of American dithering while more than 90,000 people were slaughtered by the Assad regime. But coming as it did after a month of victories in the field by Assad and his Iranian-backed Hezbollah auxiliaries, the idea that this belated measure will have much of an impact on the fighting seems wildly optimistic. After weeks of indecision about whether the president should make good on his promise to act should Bashar Assad cross the “red line” of using chemical weapons, the announcement seemed aimed more at redeeming Obama’s good name than its impact on the ground. Should the rebel stronghold of Aleppo fall to government attacks in the coming weeks, Obama’s belated move will be seen for what it is: a half-hearted gesture aimed more at silencing critics (such as former President Bill Clinton) than the result of a strategy aimed at protecting U.S. interests or saving lives. As our Max Boot wrote, there is good reason to believe nothing said or done by the U.S. at this point will stop the government offensive.

But the real problem with an administration response that is too little and too late to probably do any good is not so much the disaster that is unfolding in Syria as its impact on the looming U.S. confrontation with Iran. Some may hope the president’s long ratiocination about Syria portends an American willingness to translate the president’s tough rhetoric about stopping Iranian nukes into action. But it’s hard to argue how Tehran could interpret recent events in any manner other than one that will encourage them to think that they needn’t worry about Washington acting in time to stop them from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

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Is “Forced Fatherhood” Actually Forced?

If there’s one thing that liberals seem uncomfortable with above all else, it’s the importance of personal responsibility. With many issues that divide the right and the left, most come down to conservatives’ understanding that a need exists for individuals to be accountable for their own actions. As conservatives, we believe it is important to plan and provide for our own health care, retirement and finances, and families. Liberals, however, believe that this responsibility rests also with the government and fellow citizens, hence their promotion of ObamaCare, Social Security, welfare, food stamps, and public housing in place of private and charitable solutions to genuine poverty.

In yesterday’s New York Times we witnessed a jaw-dropping example of this phenomenon as Laurie Shrage, a professor of “gender studies” argues that just because a man impregnates a woman doesn’t mean he should be legally considered his child’s father. Shrage contends that only when a man chooses to take on that mantle should he be legally and socially required to take on the responsibilities of fatherhood, especially as it pertains to financial obligations like child support.  Read More

GOP Should Listen to Santorum

Rick Santorum has had a hard time getting in the discussion about 2016. The deep bench of Republican contenders for the next presidential election has moved the unofficial runner up in the 2012 GOP contest to the party’s back burner. Most of the media seems to think that with Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and Paul Ryan in the conversation, why bother listening to the guy who won 11 primaries and caucuses while giving Mitt Romney a run for his money a year ago? Santorum, who managed to overcome the same media indifference and skepticism throughout the winter and spring of 2012, is probably not going to do as well next time around. But he still has an important message for a party that has spent the last several months debating why Barack Obama beat them. Speaking yesterday at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in Washington, Santorum returned to a favorite theme during the last campaign: don’t ignore the working class.

Most Republicans have already accepted the truth of the two conclusions that both conservative activists and mainstream establishment types agree are the primary lessons of 2012: a. don’t use abortion and rape in the same sentence (call it the “Todd Akin rule”); and b. parties that oppose the excesses of the liberal welfare state shouldn’t nominate millionaire Wall Street executives (the “Mitt Romney rule”). While some on the right are still having trouble with the Akin rule, fortunately for the GOP, all of their likely 2016 contenders are officeholders, not hedge fund operators. But Santorum’s message goes farther than mere biography and points out why the convention theme that delighted most Republicans fell flat with the rest of the country.

Amid all the back and forth about what went wrong in 2012, no other Republican has criticized the Tampa Convention’s emphasis on a critique of President Obama’s infamous “You didn’t build that” comment. But Santorum understands that as much as the GOP’s paean to capitalism and individual initiative was correct and highly satisfying for conservatives, it also reinforced the Democratic attempt to smear Republicans as tools of the rich and inimitable to the interests of the middle class and workers.

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Chris Christie: The Pop Culture Candidate?

The election of 2016 is still a long way off, but that hasn’t stopped pundits and prognosticators (like us) from endlessly debating who may be running in our next presidential election. While Democrats have few reasonable contenders outside of Hillary Clinton, Republicans have had the opposite problem–there’s at least a dozen possible names currently floating around. From congressmen like Paul Ryan to Senators like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul to popular governors like Scott Walker and Chris Christie, the Republican bench is deep and varied. A great deal of vitriol has been written about the latter recently by conservatives, highlighting just how far out of favor the once beloved New Jersey governor has fallen in the eyes of grassroots activists and journalists. That hasn’t caused Christie to shy away from the spotlight, and it may have even been his plan all along to end up in conservatives’ doghouse all along.

There’s a number of contenders vying for the hearts and minds of the conservative grassroots: Rand Paul, who became a darling after his filibuster; Scott Walker, who has publicly, and successfully, taken on public sector unions in his state; and the current darling, I would argue, Ted Cruz, whose “Cruz to Victory” fundraising campaign soared to the top of Twitter’s “trending topics” at the height of its popularity. It’s not easy to make a fundraiser a trending topic, but the enthusiasm of his supporters made the push seem more like a pep rally than a request for donations.

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