Chicago Sun-Times

Fears of Islamophobia are overblown

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 02:19:43 -0500

As sure as night follows day, every Islamist terror attack is followed by warnings for Americans to be on guard against “Islamophobia.” On cue, two weeks after the Boston Marathon terrorism, Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday declared that “I also want to make clear that — just as we will pursue relentlessly anyone who would target our people or attempt to terrorize our cities — the Justice Department is firmly committed to protecting innocent people against misguided acts of retaliation.” It’s an article of faith among elements of U.S. liberalism that beneath the surface America is a seething cauldron …

Government bumbling should anger voters

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 02:24:07 -0500

Hyper-partisan battles and gridlock in Washington have sent government poll numbers plummeting. But in truth the stalemate in the capital only mirrors the polarization of the voters; the system is working as it is supposed to, reflecting the views and divisions of the public. More disturbing are the failings in the day-to-day operation of government that have come to light in recent days. Exhibit A is the chaos inflicted on air travelers by an Obama administration that is either incompetent to handle mild budget restraint or politically motivated to impose the maximum pain on Americans to score points in the …

Islamic radicalism can’t be denied

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 13:43:11 -0500

In the understandably intense focus on the Boston Marathon terrorism, let’s not lose sight of the fact that it was the second terrorist attack on America in little more than a half a year. The other one was Benghazi last Sept. 11 when a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans were killed. That perspective reminds us that the war against Islamist fanaticism is far from over, that this is a global struggle and that our enemy is not confined to al-Qaida but encompasses the whole jihad movement waging war against the West. These hard truths run against what has been …

This may go down as the ‘Age of Terror’

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 02:17:10 -0500

In trying to understand the human journey, historians discern “ages” of mankind. In his nearly a dozen “The Story of Civilization” books, Will Durant wrote of “The Age of Faith” and “The Age of Reason Begins.” Page Smith started his series of books on U.S. history with a two-volume set declaring “A New Age Now Begins.” Will future historians look back on our days and see an “Age of Terror”? For all the shock and outrage arising out of the Boston bombings, there was also a depressing familiarity. We’d seen it before, and more than once, in truth many times. …

Obama’s foreign policy stumbles

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 02:15:34 -0500

Spring may be the season of hope, but President Barack Obama faces a winter of discontent in foreign policy as he suffers setbacks from the Middle East to the Korean peninsula. Neither diplomacy nor the flexing of military muscle have produced desired results and have even backfired. Obama tasked his new secretary of state, former Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, with the herculean job of reviving the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations only to suffer disappointment at the start with this weekend’s resignation of Salam Fayyad as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority. The economist with a Ph.D. from the University of Texas was …

Obama is wise to go slowly in Syria

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 02:21:09 -0500

Pressure has been growing for President Barack Obama to intervene with military strikes to aid the rebels in Syria. But the president prudently has avoided a high-risk stake in that civil war out of a reasonable fear he would be throwing gasoline on the wildfire of violent Islamist extremism that is sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa. In one of the new bipartisan displays on Capitol Hill in recent weeks, Democrat Carl Levin and Republican John McCain of the Senate Armed Services Committee wrote Obama urging “limited military options” such as air strikes to erode the air superiority …

Weird: North Korea takes aim at Texas

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 02:14:19 -0500

Last year I fled south to Austin, Texas, to escape Chicago’s miserable winters. Little did I know that my move would place me in the crosshairs of possible nuclear annihilation. Or not. Maybe all I’ve done is replace Chicago’s bone-numbing wind chill with the mind-numbing bluster of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, who’s been threatening to aim a nuclear missile at Austin. Belligerent, saber-rattling rhetoric erupts daily from Pyongyang. Among recent rantings from Kim are a declaration that the Korean peninsula is in “a state of war,” orders to shut down a border factory operated with South Korea in …

Persecution of Christians grows

Wed, 01 May 2013 14:17:39 -0500

Nearly a third of the world’s population celebrates Good Friday and Easter this weekend, testimony to the influence of a religion that is a foundational pillar of Western civilization and the advancement of human rights. Yet, the observance of the faithful is shadowed by the reality that Christians are persecuted in a third of the nations of the world and are literally running for their lives from parts of the Middle East where the faith originated. At least 100 million Christians in 65 countries suffer persecution, according to Open Doors USA, a non-denominational organization supporting oppressed Christians. That persecution can …

No bank should be ‘too big to fail’

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 06:09:48 -0500

What do the U.S. Postal Service and the megabank JPMorgan Chase have in common? The government won’t let either one of them fail. At least Washington is up front about the mail service. But it keeps telling us that it has eliminated the “too big to fail” problem with the nation’s largest banks. The Postal Service lost $16 billion last year and its management prudently wants to save about $2 billion a year by ending Saturday home delivery of most mail (but not things like pharmaceuticals). However, Congress just said no in passing a budget resolution to keep the government …

Obama puts his legacy on the line in Israel

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 14:06:14 -0500

One plausible takeaway from President Barack Obama’s trip to Israel is that he has assumed responsibility for preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. While the words he said weren’t new, saying them in the Middle East and in such an uncompromising way sure made it sound like Obama means what he says. While he insisted that time remains, perhaps a year, for diplomacy to work, Obama said again and again that all options are on the table. It left Israeli President Shimon Peres convinced that Obama is ready to “shoot if necessary” should negotiations and sanctions fail to stop Tehran’s …

Obama can’t be bluffing on Iran

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 06:19:42 -0500

Much is being made about the symbolism of President Barack Obama’s trip to Israel, such as his viewing of the Dead Sea Scrolls being seen as an affirmation of more than three millennia of Jewish life in the Holy Land. Little is being made of the significance of another aspect of his visit: It comes on the 10th anniversary of the March 20, 2003, invasion of Iraq. The context is the possibility of an Israeli military strike against Iran’s nuclear program. As in Iraq, justification for attacking Iran would be intelligence asserting that it was developing weapons of mass destruction. …

Tide turning on presidential power

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 16:02:52 -0500

The ground is shifting for Republicans, Democrats and Americans in general over the scope of presidential power and U.S. foreign policy in ways that seemed unlikely only a few weeks ago. The Republican Party is reconsidering its commitment to an assertive, interventionist role for the United States in world affairs and especially in the volatile Middle East. Democrats are shaking off their deference to President Barack Obama and expressing long-suppressed discomfort with his adoption of most of President George W. Bush’s war policies and Obama’s aggressive focus on using drones to kill anyone deemed an enemy combatant. All this came …

No bounce for Obama voters

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 06:17:41 -0500

The stock market hits record highs. Household wealth recovers to pre-Great Recession levels. That closely watched barometer of the economy, the unemployment rate, is declining. The Obama economy is lifting up Americans — except maybe not so much for Obama voters. The stock market boom enriches Wall Street “fat cats” and mostly the wealthy Americans against whom President Barack Obama has railed time and again as not paying their fair share in taxes. The surge in household wealth stems mainly from the skyrocketing Dow Jones industrial average, meaning most of the increase in household prosperity is flowing to the undeserving …

Is media’s crush on Obama over?

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 11:35:16 -0500

It may go down as the straw that broke the camel’s back of the mainstream media’s obsequious, uncritical coverage of President Barack Obama: The White House’s decision to deny reporters and photographers even a peep at Obama playing golf with Tiger Woods last month in Florida. It was a trivial event and the press may have come off as too petulant in its protest. After all, the only coverage would have been a feel-good moment of sports camaraderie between two of America’s most appealing success stories (albeit in Woods’ case marred by his marital infidelities). But small things matter, and …

Turkey’s bigoted prime minister

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 06:17:23 -0500

It was another venomous blast from a leader in the Middle East calling Zionism a “crime against humanity.” But this time it didn’t come from the Holocaust-denying president of Iran. Nor was it a revelation of anti-Semitism uttered a few years ago by Egypt’s president. This time it came from a figure often presented as the moderate face of Islamism and a foreign leader President Barack Obama calls a friend — Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. “Just as with Zionism, anti-Semitism and fascism, it has become impossible not to see Islamophobia as a crime against humanity,” Erdogan said in …

Obama is caught crying wolf

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 06:25:45 -0500

However the sequester cuts in federal spending play out in the weeks ahead, the controversy offers a telling view into the big-government arrogance and ambitions of the liberal ascendency in Washington. Exhibit A was a speech given by Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) emblematic of the scare tactics rained on Americans about the impact of the spending reductions. She seized on the stabbing murder of a prison guard in Pennsylvania to argue that the sequester would lead to layoffs at federal prisons endangering the remaining prison guards and to job losses across the federal criminal justice system making the world a …

Compromise after falling off cliff

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 06:11:34 -0500

By all accounts, it’s too late to stop the so-called sequester cuts in federal spending from going into effect Friday. This latest fiscal crisis — if it is indeed that — demonstrates how bitterly polarized the politics in Washington are, and there’s no end in sight. What’s needed is an honest broker who could point the way forward through a compromise approach, if that is still possible or even desired by either side. Little common ground exists on anything about the cuts. They add up to $1.2 trillion over a decade but come to $85 billion this year, or is …

Most cons I’ve met are Illinois pols

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 06:24:01 -0500

Reading the news in the Sun-Times over the last several days, I was struck by a minor personal revelation: Most of the people I know who have gone to prison have been . . . Illinois politicians. What got me to thinking about this was, of course, the guilty pleas from former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. and his wife, former Ald. Sandi Jackson, on charges growing out of the diversion of $750,000 in campaign funds for personal use ranging from buying Michael Jackson’s fedoras to shopping trips to Costco and Build-A-Bear. That politicians loom large among the people I know …