It is difficult to overstate how important this is. For decades, the left has largely controlled the news media, the arts, the universities and the entertainment media. And vast numbers of Americans have imbibed these leftist messages and the leftist critiques of conservatives. What these Americans have never been able to do is to see what the left would actually do if in power.

Of course, all one...]]> Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600 One reads and hears with increasing disbelief and anger that we don't know the motive or motives of Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army major who fired over 100 shots at his fellow American soldiers in order to murder and maim as many as possible. Hasan ended up allegedly murdering 13 people, but government and Army spokesmen and the mainstream media claim they just can't figure out why he did this. They are, however, certain that it was not an act of terrorism.

Sunday's New York Times "Week in Review" article about Nidal Hasan was titled "When Soldiers Snap." The gist of the article was that Maj. Hasan had snapped -- even though he had never been in combat. He snapped in advance. Just...]]> Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600 Those of us who are not true believers in expanded government are certain of the following:

If the 1,990-page House Health Care Bill becomes law, the average American will receive worse health care, American physicians will decline in status and income, American medical innovation will dramatically slow down and pharmaceutical discoveries will decline in number and quality. And, of course, the economy of the United States will deteriorate, perhaps permanently.

However, we are also certain that there is one American group that will thrive -- trial lawyers. The very existence of a 1,990-page law guarantees years of, if not more or less permanent, lawsuits. And the law...]]> Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 How is one to rationally explain the Democrats' belief that the government taking over another one-sixth of the American economy is a good thing?

The answer is religion.

Given the huge economic failures that the left itself attributes to Medicare and Medicaid and given the economic collapse or near collapse of these systems in other countries, the left's prescriptions can only be explained in one way: The left has made its views a form of religion.

Most individuals on the left are not religious, but virtually all people, secular and religious, liberal and conservative, yearn to believe in dogma, i.e., absolute beliefs that transcend reason. For people on the left in...]]> Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 According to the Jerusalem Post, as recently as six weeks ago, just 4 percent of the Jews of Israel regarded President Obama as pro-Israel. Even if exaggerated, it is likely the most negative Israeli view of an American president since Israel's creation.

If you think Israelis are irrational in this matter, perhaps Tibet will help persuade you otherwise.

Yes, Tibet.

Whereas every Democratic and Republican president since 1991 has met with exiled Tibetan leader, the Dalai Lama, when he visited the United States, President Obama has decided that he will not do so during the Tibetan leader's visit to the United States. The president does not wish to annoy China's...]]> Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The Nobel Peace Prize, already devalued, has sunk to a new low. This assessment has nothing to do with one's estimation of this year's recipient, President Barack Obama. Most of those on the left, with a few predictable exceptions such as the New York Times, regard giving the president the award as belittling him and the prize.

How did this happen? What was the Oslo Committee's motive?

They may be moral idiots, but they are not stupid: I believe that they had two clear aims.

One is to undercut American exceptionalism -- the notion that America has a superior moral value system to that of the "world" (specifically the United Nations and the European Union) and...]]> Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 "In defending the director (Roman Polanski), the entertainment industry faces a risk that it will seem out of touch with the audiences it seeks to connect with at the movie house." -- The New York Times, Sept. 30, 2009

What is important in the Roman Polanski issue is not whether the renowned film director should be extradited from Switzerland to the United States. Given the long amount of time that has elapsed, the opposition of the victim to prosecuting Polanski, that his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was butchered by Charles Manson's monsters, and that his mother was murdered in the Holocaust, a legitimate case can be made for Polanski's not receiving jail time.

What is...]]> Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 My mother, Hilda Prager, died 10 days ago.

Because she has consumed my thoughts since then, I thought I would share some of them with my readers.

1. On the age a parent dies

One of the first things most people ask when a person loses a parent is how old he or she was. This is entirely normal, yet it demands explanation. It is entirely normal because people regard the death of a 90-year-old parent quite differently from that of, let us say, a 70-year-old, let alone someone younger than that.

For good reason. The death of a 90-year-old is not a tragedy; the death of a 60-year-old is. As the son of a woman who died at age 89, I fully recognize this. I am deeply...]]> Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 One principle that all those on the left hold is that taxes constitute more than an economic issue; they are, first and foremost, a moral one. Economists on the left may argue for higher taxes on economic grounds but they and we know that at bottom, higher taxes, especially "taxing the rich," is what they believe morality demands.

For example, there are obviously only two possible ways to reduce government deficits: reduce spending or increase taxes (or some combination of both). The left advocates the later; the right advocates the former. Left-wing spokesmen, such as New York Times economics columnist and Princeton University professor of economics Paul Krugman, may offer...]]> Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Those of us who oppose a massive increase in the role the national government plays in health care ("ObamaCare") do so because we fear the immense and unsustainable national debt it would incur and because we are certain that medical care in America would deteriorate. But there is a bigger reason most of us oppose it: We believe that the bigger the government becomes, the smaller the individual citizen becomes.

Here are five reasons why bigger government makes less impressive people.

1. People who are able to take care of themselves and do so are generally better than people who are able to take care of themselves but rely on others. Of course, there are times when some...]]> Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Whenever I think that some Western country or institution has reached a low point, shortly thereafter, sometimes the very next week, another Western government or institution proves me too optimistic.

Last week, it was the news that the Yale University Press will not allow any picture of Muhammad to appear in its forthcoming book on the Muhammad cartoons controversy. Not only will Yale not print the cartoons that are the subject of the book, Yale will not print any picture of Muhammad, no matter how respectful, no matter that a believing Muslim drew it, and no matter how long ago it was drawn.

This week, it was Scotland's turn to shame Western civilization. And though it...]]> Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 When I was a graduate student at Columbia University in the early 1970s, I came to the then-tentative conclusion that I would probably never encounter a morally weaker, more cowardly group of people than college administrators.

While there are exceptions to this rule and there are other institutions that regularly exhibit as much moral cowardice as universities do, nearly 40 years later my conclusion is no longer tentative.

What prompted this conclusion in the 1970s was seeing a handful of radical students take over classrooms at Columbia and shut down the university while professors and deans, individuals whose lives were supposedly dedicated to the open mind and to...]]> Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Living in liberal Los Angeles, I am surrounded by people -- and bumper stickers -- I do not agree with.

One of the more popular liberal bumper stickers of the last decade tells us "Dissent is Patriotic." Now, as it happens, it is impossible to truly disagree with that phrase, not because it is self-evidently true, but because it is self-evidently meaningless. As are most left-wing bumper stickers.

For example, another popular liberal bumper sticker proclaims, "War Is not the Answer." It, too, is completely meaningless. If the question is, "What is the square root of 8?" war is not the answer. But if the question is "How do you stop genocidal regimes?" war probably is the...]]> Tue, 04 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Readers on the left will be shocked, if not incredulous, to learn that neither I nor any conservative I know realized why the president asked Vice President Joseph Biden to join him, Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Cambridge police Sgt. James Crowley for their fabled "beer summit" at the White House.

I had simply assumed that the president invited Biden in order to lessen any tension by having someone with no connection to the case join the meeting. Likewise, another conservative, the producer of my radio show, Allen Estrin, assumed that the vice president was in the area and was spontaneously invited to join the trio. My engineer, Sean McConnell, just wondered why...]]> Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 1. President Barack Obama repeatedly tells us that one reason national health care is needed is that we can no longer afford to pay for Medicare and Medicaid. But if Medicare and Medicaid are fiscally insolvent and gradually bankrupting our society, why is a government takeover of medical care for the rest of society a good idea? What large-scale government program has not eventually spiraled out of control, let alone stayed within its projected budget? Why should anyone believe that nationalizing health care would create the first major government program to "pay for itself," let alone get smaller rather than larger over time? Why not simply see how the Democrats can reform Medicare and...]]> Wed, 22 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 There is only one good thing about the Obama administration's attempts to nationalize most health care and to begin to control Americans'
energy consumption through cap-and-trade: clarity about the left. These attempts are enabling more and more Americans to understand the thinking and therefore the danger of the left.

            The left has its first president -- with the possible exception of Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- and for the first time controls the Democratic Party and both houses of Congress. In the name of compassion for the sick and the poor and in the name of preventing worldwide environmental catastrophe,...]]> Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 "Why have you come to Honduras?"

That is the question posed to me by Hondurans, surprised that anyone from the outside world, let alone from the media, cares enough to now visit their small country (population 8 million), a country that they themselves consider relatively insignificant.

The question is a valid one. The U.S. State Department has issued a travel alert (through July 29) warning Americans against coming here. There are very few outsiders here now. The plane from Houston to San Pedro Sula, Honduras' second largest city, was almost empty, and the few passengers were nearly all Hondurans. The hotels are largely empty.

It is all eerily reminiscent of...]]> Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The importance of the summit meeting in Moscow between President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev pales in comparison to the events taking place in Honduras.

Whether or not the United States and Russia reduce their nuclear arsenals is ultimately meaningless. But whether Hugo Chavez and Raul Castro are victorious in Honduras or whether the movement toward left-wing authoritarianism is finally defeated in a Latin American country is extremely significant.

The courage of the pro-liberty forces in Honduras is almost miraculous. It is almost too good to be true, given Honduras' consequent isolation in the world.

Even if you know little or nothing about...]]> Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 With the possible exception of university administrations, there is no institution as bereft of courage as Hollywood.

In Hollywood courage is defined as savaging oil, power and tobacco executives on film. Or producing yet another movie on the evils of the Iraq War.

But if courage means doing what is unpopular -- especially among one's peers -- I can recall precious few politically incorrect films made in the last decade ("The Dark Knight" comes to mind as a possible exception).

How many politically incorrect movies has Hollywood made in the last generation? How many films, for instance, have depicted communist evil?

Given that Communism murdered more than 100...]]> Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Last week, a brief moment in time captured much that has gone wrong with post-'60s liberalism and feminism.

Brig. Gen. Michael Walsh of the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers was testifying at a hearing before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. At one point during his responses to questions posed by the Committee Chair, Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., the senator interrupted the general to admonish him about using the word "ma'am" when addressing her:

"You know, do me a favor," Boxer said in an annoyed tone of voice. "Could you say 'senator' instead of 'ma'am?' It's just a thing; I worked so hard to get that title, so I'd appreciate it. Yes, thank...]]> Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 "The administration has remained as quiet as possible during the Iranian election season and in the days of street protests since Friday's vote."

-- Washington Post , Monday June 15, 2009

"We're going to withhold comment... I mean we're just waiting to see."

-- Vice-President Joe Biden

"We are monitoring the situation as it unfolds in Iran but we, like the rest of the world, are waiting and watching to see what the Iranian people decide."

-- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

"Most countries appeared to be taking a wait-and-see approach, including the European Union and China, Germany, Italy and Japan -- nations with strong economic ties to Iran....]]> Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 It appears that President Barack Obama decided not to incorporate any of the points on American-Muslim relations I included in my last column, a speech I suggested he give in Cairo to the Muslim world.

Nevertheless the president made some courageous points, and an honest appraisal of his speech needs to note them. For example, telling an audience in Cairo and presumably hundreds of millions of Muslims elsewhere that America's "bond is unbreakable" with Israel was courageous and important.

So the speech was not bad.

But it was sad.

It was extremely sad that it was necessary for anyone, let alone an American president, to tell Muslims that the Holocaust...]]> Tue, 02 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 This week, President Barack Obama is scheduled to give a major address in Cairo to the Muslim world. He is likely to reiterate what he has stated previously to Muslim audiences, that America has no battle with Islam, deeply respects Islam and the Muslim world, and apologizes for any anti-Muslim sentiment that any Americans may express.

Here is what an honest address would sound like:

"Thank you for the honor of addressing the Egyptian people and the wider Muslim world.

"I am here primarily to dispel some of the erroneous beliefs many Muslims have about America and to thereby reassure you that America has no desire to be at war with the Muslim world.

"To my...]]> Wed, 27 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 In his latest address - on Guantanamo detainees - President Obama said something of extraordinary importance that seems to have been missed by the media:

"I know some have argued that brutal methods like water-boarding were necessary to keep us safe. I could not disagree more.I reject the assertion that these are the most effective means of interrogation."

As this President chooses his words carefully, these claims need to be understood.

Note that Mr. Obama did not say what nearly all opponents of water-boarding say - that water-boarding is not an effective method of extracting reliable, life-saving, information. He took no issue with former Vice-President Dick...]]> Thu, 14 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Outside of politics, sports, and popular entertainment, how many living Germans, or French, or Austrians, or even Brits can you name?

Even well-informed people who love art and literature and who follow developments in science and medicine would be hard pressed to come up with many, more often any, names. In terms of greatness in literature, art, music, the sciences, philosophy, and medical breakthroughs, Europe has virtually fallen off the radar screen.

This is particularly meaningful given how different the answer would have been had you asked anyone the same question between just 80 and 120 years ago -- and certainly before that. A plethora of world-renowned names would...]]> Wed, 06 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 If you met a man who said he would like to "transform" or "remake" his wife, would you conclude that he: a) thought very highly of his wife and loved her? Or b) held his wife in rather low esteem and therefore found living with her rather difficult?

The answer is obvious: Those who wish to remake anything (or anyone) do not think highly of the person or thing they wish to remake.

Little is as revealing of Barack Obama's and the left's view of America than their use of the words "transform" and "remake" when applied to what they most want to do to America.

I among others pointed this out during the presidential campaign when Obama frequently promised he would...]]> Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Any human being with a functioning conscience or a decent heart loathes torture. Its exercise has been a blight on humanity. With this in mind, those who oppose what the Bush administration did to some terror suspects may be justified. But in order to ascertain whether they are, they need to respond to some questions:

1. Given how much you rightly hate torture, why did you oppose the removal of Saddam Hussein, whose prisons engaged in far more hideous tortures, on thousands of times more people, than America did -- all of whom, moreover, were individuals and families who either did nothing or simply opposed tyranny? One assumes, furthermore, that all those Iraqi innocents Saddam...]]> Tue, 21 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 One of the reasons for the ascendance of the English-speaking world has been that the English language is almost alone among major languages in having the word "earn."

Those of us whose native language is English assume that the phrase "to earn a living" is universal. It isn't. It is almost unique to English. Few languages have the ability to say this.

In the Romance languages, for example - a list that includes such major languages as Spanish, French, and Italian -- the word used when saying someone "earns" money, is "ganar" in Spanish, "gagner" in French. The word literally means "to win." In Hebrew the word "marveach" means "profits." In German, the word "verdient" means...]]> Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500  Last week, seven members of the Congressional Black Caucus – Reps. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., Melvin Watt, D-N.C., Michael Honda, D-Calif., Laura Richardson, D-Calif., Bobby Rush, D-Ill., Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, and Emanuel Cleaver II, D-Mo. -- returned from a visit to Cuba where they met with the dictators of Cuba, Fidel and Raul Castro.

So here are some silver linings in our dark economic

circumstances:

-- Most people are complaining less. They are more grateful for whatever they have than they were before. For example, just about everyone who still has a job is grateful for having it; nearly all of us now realize how fragile employment is. Therefore, there is an increase in the most important human quality -- gratitude. It is the root of both goodness...]]> Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0600 But in its latter meaning -- that there is one human race, one humanity, to which we all belong, I am increasingly of the opinion that this is not so.

A lifetime of study of good and evil has led me to a wholly unexpected conclusion: There may not be one human race; there may well be a genuine divide among humans.

It seems that there is a certain percentage of humanity that can engage in acts of surpassing cruelty that the rest of us could not engage in. These people really do seem to be members of a different race. Biologically speaking, they are of course human beings, Homo sapiens. But in a fundamental way they are members of another...]]> Tue, 24 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 It takes some doing.

And the left has done it.

California's Democratic legislature has been more or less able to do whatever it wants with California. The Wall Street Journal has described the result:

"The Golden State -- which a decade ago was the booming technology capital of the world -- has been done in by two decades of chronic overspending, overregulating and a hyperprogressive tax code ..."

One might argue that's this is a politically biased assessment. So here are some facts, not assessments:

-- California's state expenditures grew from $104 billion in 2003 to $145 billion in 2008.

...]]> Tue, 17 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 It is, as Robert Rector, identified by the Times of London as "one of the architects of Clinton's 1996 reform bill," "a welfare spendathon that would amount to the largest one-year increase in government handouts in American history."

It is the reason the Obama-supporting Newsweek headlined on its cover page, "We are all socialists now."

It is why, in the words of The Times of London, "Republicans are not alone in fearing that Obama's hastily concocted package is the first step towards the creation of a quasi-socialist welfare state."

President Obama and the Democrats have put America into nearly $1 trillion dollars more...]]> Tue, 10 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 One of those four was Richard Williamson, who announced in an interview aired on Swedish television in November 2008 and on January 21, 2009 that "two hundred (thousand) to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps. None of them in a gas chamber."

In the interview, Williamson also referred to the Holocaust as "the, quote unquote, Holocaust ..." He has long been a Holocaust denier. As far back as 1989, for example, he risked criminal prosecution in Canada, where he praised books written by Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel.

While empirically true, it is misleading to simply say, as many news reports have, that Pope Benedict repealed the...]]> Tue, 03 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 We had all heard that in Kenya, the native country of Barack Obama's father, the president's Inauguration Day was a national holiday. But that, apparently, was so elsewhere in Africa as well.

This in and of itself raises a fascinating question: why? Why, for example, did the remote African island of Mayotte, a French governed part of the Comoro Islands, make Barack Obama's Inauguration Day a national holiday? If, let us say, the child of an Italian or Jewish or Arab father had been elected president of the United States, would Italians, Israelis, or Arabs have reacted similarly? Would Italy or Israel or Egypt have declared America's Inauguration Day a...]]> Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0600 As a politically moderate friend of mine said to me, the speech was joyless.

And when it wasn't joyless, it was often either incoherent or disjointed or factually wrong.

That is not to say nothing good was said. There were some fine thoughts, delivered in Barack Obama's effective manner.

So let's honor the good:

"In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned." We may differ on how greatness is earned but this point cannot be stated too often.

"For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and...]]> Tue, 13 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0600 The opposite is the case with the large majority of Palestinians. It would be quite difficult to find many Palestinians who do not celebrate the deaths of Israeli Jews or non-Israeli Jews. This is not only reflected in Palestinian polls that show majority support for terrorism -- and terrorism means killing innocent Jews -- it is also reflected in Palestinian media, Palestinian schools, and Palestinian mosques that routinely glorify murderers of Jews, and refer to all Jews as "monkeys" and the like.

Take for example, Palestinian reaction to the 2001 Palestinian terror bombing of a Jerusalem Sbarro pizzeria in which 15 Jews, five of whom were two sets of...]]> Tue, 06 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0600 This past week, Dershowitz wrote two eloquent columns defending Israel's attack on Hamas in Gaza. One was titled "Israel, Hamas, and Moral Idiocy," published in the Christian Science Monitor and the other, "Israel's Policy Is Perfectly 'Proportionate,'" was published in the Wall Street Journal.

In his Monitor column, Dershowitz describes "three types of international response to the Israeli military actions against the Hamas rockets" -- "Iran, Hamas, and other knee-jerk Israeli-bashers," "the United Nations, the European Union, Russia, and others who, at least when it comes to Israel, see a moral and legal equivalence between terrorists who target civilians...]]> Tue, 16 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0600 For a generation, America has been awash in the celebration of minorities and minorities' celebration of themselves. Just recall "Black is Beautiful" or "I am a woman, I am invincible."

At the same time, the majority group in America -- white Christians -- has been allowed to celebrate very little. Rather, they have constantly been reminded of what they should be ashamed of -- their racism, sexism, homophobia, patriarchy, and xenophobia -- real and alleged.

But what about minority shame?

Why does one almost never hear expressions of group shame from members of any American group other than white Christians (specifically,...]]> Tue, 09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0600 Its message begins with a religious man and woman reacting to the cheerful gay group (celebrating the Barack Obama victory) by singing these words:

"Look! Nobody's watching

It's time to spread some hate

And put it in the constitution

Now, how? Proposition Hate!

Great!"

Shaiman puts hateful words in the mouths of the religious proponents of the man-woman definition of marriage: "It's time to spread some hate and put it in the constitution." But no one put hate in the constitution. The only words Proposition 8 added to the California Constitution were: "Only marriage...]]> Tue, 02 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0600 But one target seemed to make little sense. In fact, until the attack was over people were uncertain whether the terrorists' attack on the Jewish center known as the Chabad House was part of the original plan or chosen spontaneously. Only when the lone terrorist who was captured told his interrogators that the Chabad House was planned a year earlier was it indisputable that killing the Rabbi, his wife, their children and any other Jews present was part of the plan.

The question is why?

Why would a terrorist group of Islamists from Pakistan whose primary goal is to have Pakistan gain control of the third of Kashmir that belongs to India and...]]>