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John Fund introduces today’s focus; Lois Lerner’s missing emails. 

Who knew that the Obama administration had a penchant for black humor? Earlier this year, in February, President Obama told Bill O’Reilly during an interview on Fox News that there was “not even a smidgen of corruption” in the IRS scandal involving the targeting of conservative nonprofit groups. In July 2103, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew foreshadowed his boss’s nonchalance by insisting that there was “no evidence” that any political appointee had been involved in the scandal.

Now we may know why. After months of delay in responding to congressional inquiries, the IRS now claims that, for the period of January 2009 to April 2011, all e-mails between Lois Lerner — the IRS official at the center of the scandal — and anyone outside the IRS were wiped out by a “computer crash.” As House Ways and Means chairman Dave Camp wrote in a statement, this loss means that “we are conveniently left to believe that Lois Lerner acted alone.” After all, there isn’t a “smidgen” of e-mail evidence to suggest otherwise.

A growing number of computer professionals are stepping forward to say that none of this makes sense. Norman Cillo, a former program manager at Microsoft, told The Blaze: “I don’t know of any e-mail administrator [who] doesn’t have at least three ways of getting that mail back. It’s either on the disks or it’s on a TAPE backup someplace on an archive server.” Bruce Webster, an IT expert with 30 years of experience consulting with dozens of private companies, seconds this opinion: “It would take a catastrophic mechanical failure for Lerner’s drive to suffer actual physical damage, but in any case, the FBI should be able to recover something. And the FBI and the Justice Department know it.” …

Noted liberal Ron Fournier calls for a special prosecutor.

A sloppy mistake, the government calls it, but you couldn’t blame a person for suspecting a cover-up — the loss of an untold number of emails to and from the central figure in the IRS tea party controversy. And, because the public’s trust is a fragile gift that the White House has frittered away in a series of second-term missteps, President Obama needs to act.

If the IRS can’t find the emails, maybe a special prosecutor can.

The announcement came late Friday, a too-cute-by-half cliché of a PR strategy to mitigate backlash. …

Sharyl Attkisson has some questions for the IRS.

According to the House Ways and Means Committee, the IRS reports having “lost” former IRS manager Lois Lerner’s emails to and from other IRS employees sent between January of 2009 and April of 2011 due to a ‘computer crash.’

In light of the disclosure, these are some of the logical requests that should be made of the IRS:

Please provide a timeline of the crash and documentation covering when it was first discovered and by whom; when, how and by whom it was learned that materials were lost; the official documentation reporting the crash and federal data loss; documentation reflecting all attempts to recover the materials; and the remediation records documenting the fix. This material should include the names of all officials and technicians involved, as well as all internal communications about the matter.

Please provide all documents and emails that refer to the crash from the time that it happened through the IRS’ disclosure to Congress Friday that it had occurred. …

A Power Line reader who is a DOJ lawyer says this is BS.

A reader writes from inside the Department of Justice to comment on the two-year gap in Lois Lerner’s intra-government email messages:

I’m a DOJ lawyer, so you obviously cannot use my name or any identifying information. But the idea that a “hard drive crash” somehow destroyed all of Ms. Lerner’s intra-government email correspondence during the period in question [2009-2011] is laughable. Government email servers are backed up every night. So if she actually had a hard drive fail, her emails would be recoverable from the backup. If the backup was somehow also compromised, then we are talking about a conspiracy.

Keep up the good work.

He reiterates in a postscript:

I’m serious about your keeping any identifying information out of the media. Things are very, very bad.

There has to be more to the story and the hearings should start next week.

John Steele Gordon also doubts the emails are lost.

… there are very good reasons to doubt the idea that these emails are irretrievably lost due to a simple crash of a personal computer’s hard drive.  For one thing, downloading an email from an email server does not cause the email to be deleted from the server itself. And a lawyer in the Department of Justice, who understandably wishes to be anonymous, reports that government email servers are automatically backed up every night. So both Lerner’s computer and the email server would have had to crash for these emails to have been lost. That would be some coincidence.

John Hinderaker at Power Line has a great deal of experience in accessing emails in the course of legal discovery. He’s blunt: “The Obama administration is lying, and lying in a remarkably transparent way.” He points out that even if the email server were erased after a period of time, the IRS has elaborate protocols for the permanent storage of all electronic communications. Hinderaker also notes that even if a hard drive crashes, the information stored on it can usually be recovered. He politely offers to help: …

Bart Hinkle traces how the IRS scandal implicates Dems.

The U.S. has a long and sordid history of presidents trying to sic the IRS on their political foes; that was even one of the charges of impeachment against Richard Nixon.

In this case, however, the GOP’s Obama Derangement Syndrome might be pointing it in the wrong direction. Granted, the administration did laughably appoint an Obama campaign donor to investigate whether Obama critics had been treated fairly. But much of the impetus for the IRS’ abuse of conservative groups seems to have come from Congress.

That becomes apparent from a complaint filed this month with the Senate’s ethics committee by the Center for Competitive Politics. The complaint asks the committee to investigate Sens. Carl Levin, Dick Durbin, Chuck Schumer, Al Franken, and several others for improperly trying to sway IRS deliberations and obtain confidential taxpayer information.

Admittedly, asking the Democrat-controlled committee to investigate Democrats for targeting Republican-leaning groups is a Quixotic pursuit. But Quixotic is not the same as meritless. And the complaint contains mountains of merit. …

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Andrew Malcolm introduces us to ‘Hillary Day’ as we look back at her horrible week.

… Hillary Clinton is doing everything you’d expect from someone setting up a presidential attempt in two years.

She’s publishing a book today that’s unlikely to offend anyone important. “A newsless snore,” wrote Politico’s Mike Allen, no doubt earning a prominent spot on Team Hillary’s enemies list.

The reviews of the 656-pages have been not so good. “This volume,” wrote the N.Y. Times, “is very much the work of someone keeping all her political options open.” The NewRepublic slammed its “dullness and lack of critical energy.” Slate said “Hard Choices ” is a “low-salt, low-fat, low-calorie offering with vanilla pudding as the dessert. She goes on at great length, but not great depth.”

Allen added Clinton’s book was “written so carefully not to offend that it will fuel the notion that politics infuses every part of her life.” No kidding! Politics and the Clintons? Do ya think?

These reviews miss the point. “Hard Choices” is less a book and more a political bus shelter awaiting the campaign. Anyone remember anything from Romney’s book or Huckabee’s or Obama’s? (Besides all the drugs.)

Most Americans will not read the book. So, the message from the book is whatever Clinton says it is. She’s got no grand peace treaty or accomplishment to cite.

But she worked hard as Obama’s teammate, admires him. But, you know, she’s been out a while now, so doesn’t know a lot of inside details, despite her secret lunch with POTUS the other day. …

After watching Clinton’s performance this week, Jennifer Rubin thinks the GOP is praying Hillary is nominated.

At some point during Hillary Clinton’s book rollout — perhaps it’s already happened — some Democratic activists will look at one another and ask: Really? That’s who we want to just hand the nomination to?

In the media blitz Democrats may be reminded of some old faults and some new problems that would plague her candidacy. She doesn’t handle intense scrutiny very well. (Her first interview necessitated immediate damage control on her plea of poverty.) She too often plays the victim (broke, was she?). And her “accomplishments” on further scrutiny turn out to be slight. Her refusal to recognize her own failures suggests either arrogance or cluelessness, as we saw in her unconvincing Benghazi defense. There is a reason why her popularity goes up when she is not running for something. With no declared opponent, no negative ad and no real new information about her favorability has dropped five points in 4 months — and that is before her rotten interview performance has percolated fully. Imagine a few more of those interviews, an informed and capable opponent and a series of ads featuring nothing but Hillary’s own words. You can see how beatable she might be. …

Similar thoughts from Paul Mirengoff.

Democratic operatives must be nervous, if not panicked, after Hillary Clinton’s interview with Diane Sawyer in which Sawyer, to quote the Washington Post’s headline, “destroyed” the former Secretary of State. It’s common knowledge that Clinton is anything but a natural on the campaign trail. But the tone deafness of some of her responses (e.g., we struggled to piece together the resources for mortgages for houses) suggests that Clinton may be a gaffe machine with little ability to connect with ordinary voters. …

And from Jonathan Tobin.

… to speak of the Clintons as broke in 2001 is to engage in the kind of deceit that voters can smell a mile away. Like all ex-presidents and first ladies, but especially those who were both popular and engaged in heated controversies like the Lewinsky scandal, their financial prospects were, to put it mildly, rosy. In the 13-plus years since leaving the White House, Bill Clinton has earned more than $100 million in speaking fees and both made fortunes writing their memoirs. They may have had a temporary cash flow problem in January 2001, but were soon rolling in it. Thus, for her to speak of their plight in 2001 when, as she put it:

We had no money when we got there, and we struggled to, you know, piece together the resources for mortgages, for houses, for Chelsea’s education. You know, it was not easy.

No, I suppose it wasn’t. But somehow with the help of generous donors, publishers, and those eager to pay six-figure fees for the honor of hosting the ex-president, they managed to pay their l’affaire Lewinsky lawyer fees as well as obtain multiple mortgages and houses that Clinton referenced when she used those words in the plural. But then again, Clinton had already gotten an $8 million advance for her memoirs even before her husband’s term ended. …

Seth Mandel says Hillary’s task is to spin the unspinnable. 

Hillary Clinton’s memoir, Hard Choices, was apparently assembled “with an assist”–according to New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani–from what Clinton calls her “book team.” And if Kakutani’s review is any indication, Clinton’s team was burdened by its task.

The book is understood to be Clinton’s campaign manifesto, and the book’s release–officially, tomorrow–is being treated as a campaign launch. Clinton has been dogged by one question in particular: What did she accomplish as secretary of state? She has even been unable to answer the question herself. And though I (like Clinton, presumably) haven’t read her book, early indications are that her book team was unable to answer it as well.

After an undistinguished and at times dismal term as secretary of state, the book had two basic objectives: show Clinton to have accomplished something–anything really; and dispel the image Clinton cultivated of using the prestigious perch as an Instagram-based travelogue. …

Erik Wemple of WaPo on how Diane Sawyer “destroyed” Hillary in her ABC interview.

… In an interview with Clinton that aired last night on ABC News, anchor Diane Sawyer threw the ARB right back in the face of the former secretary of state. The two tangled over the preparedness of the U.S. diplomatic installation in Benghazi for a terrorist attack. In defending her work on this front, Clinton stressed that she had delegated the particulars of security to the experts in the field. “I’m not equipped to sit and look at blueprints to determine where the blast walls need to be, where the reinforcements need to be. That’s why we hire people who have that expertise,” said Clinton, who did the interview as part of the tour for her book “Hard Choices.”

Sensing an opening, Sawyer cited the document that Clinton herself has so often cited: “This is the ARB: the mission was far short of standards; weak perimeter; incomplete fence; video surveillance needed repair. They said it’s a systemic failure.”

Clinton replied, “Well, it was with respect to that compound.”

The anchor continued pressing, asking Clinton whether the people might be seeking from her a “sentence that begins from you ‘I should have…’?” Clinton sort of ducked that one. The accountability-heavy moment came when Sawyer’s slow and steady line of questioning on Benghazi security prompted Clinton to utter this self-contradictory and sure-to-be-repeated statement: “I take responsibility, but I was not making security decisions.”

For the record, possible-presidential-candidates-in-abeyance should never attach conjunctions to their declarations of responsibility-taking.

Another telling moment came when Sawyer placed before Clinton all the warnings that bad things were afoot in Benghazi. “Did you miss it? Did you miss the moment to prevent this from happening?” Sawyer asked. Clinton’s response started with these two words: “No, but …” …

Jennifer Rubin posts on the Sawyer interview too.

Diane Sawyer is deservedly receiving kudos for her news-making interview with Hillary Clinton. In one interview she obtained more revealing information about Clinton’s values and mind-set than we’ve gotten in literally decades of questioning. For other interviewers and for Clinton’s Republican opponents-in-waiting, there are lessons to be learned:

1. Stop obsessing on what Clinton said; focus on what she did. The Benghazi talking points memo has been plowed and re-plowed, but Clinton’s own culpability in the security failures and her management style more generally at the State Department have not. The latter goes to the heart of her legacy and her qualifications as president. She talks a good game about “inputs” — meetings held, countries visited and orders given — but is easily flummoxed when pressed to talk about what outcomes she achieved. Questions about her failure to speak out against the president or secretary of state are among the most useless. Who cares? (She is a loyal Democrat. Hardly news.) What matters is the policies she followed and favors.

2.  Clinton’s image as a protector of the needy, especially women and children, is overblown. Getting at her fixation with wealth (a fault line that runs back to the Whitewater and cattle futures scandals) puts a dent in that image of selfless protector of the weak. …

Maybe Hillary was listening to Sam Cooke rather than studying. Remember his lyrics in the song Wonderful World? “Don’t know much about history Don’t know much biology Don’t know much about a science book Don’t know much about the French I took …”  Free Beacon posts on her fail.

The terrible week continues for Hillary Clinton.

At Wednesday’s Rahm Emanuel-Hillary Clinton show for her book tour, she was responsible for another unforced error.

“I actually write about Rahm in the book,” Clinton said. “I asked him not to read it before we sat and did our interview! But it was in the very first chapter, the chapter I rightly call ‘Team of Rivals’ because that’s what it was in the beginning. A senator from Illinois ran against a senator from New York just as had happened way back with a senator from Illinois named Lincoln and a senator from New York named Seward. And it turned out the same way.”

Maybe Hillary is not ‘ready’ as Lincoln was never a senator because he lost that election to Stephen A. Douglas.

John Hinderaker posts on the fail too.

We have commented a number of times about Barack Obama’s below-average knowledge of history. But he is not alone: his would-be successor in the White House, Hillary Clinton, wouldn’t fare well in a high school American history class, either. The Free Beacon covers her book-promoting appearance with Rahm Emanuel. Note that her blunder isn’t a mere slip of the tongue, but rather part of an extended analogy that she draws between herself and William Seward, which evidently had been thought out ahead of time:

“I actually write about Rahm in the book,” Clinton said. “I asked him not to read it before we sat and did our interview! But it was in the very first chapter, the chapter I rightly call ‘Team of Rivals’ because that’s what it was in the beginning. A senator from Illinois ran against a senator from New York just as had happened way back with a senator from Illinois named Lincoln and a senator from New York named Seward. And it turned out the same way.”

Lincoln, of course, lost his Senate race to Stephen Douglas in 1858. Hillary is having a tough go of it these days.

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Matthew Continetti says Iraq is on obama now.

… The cliché “personnel is policy” strikes me as true. But its truth is a function of whether the personnel we are talking about actually have the capacity to make decisions. “The first thing I think we need to do,” McCain said on the Senate floor, “is call together the people that succeeded in Iraq, those that have been retired, and get together that group and place them in positions of responsibility so that they can develop a policy to reverse this tide of radical Islamic extremism, which directly threatens the security of the United States of America.”

McCain is dreaming. Does anyone think President Obama is about to replace Susan Rice with Fred Kagan, and switch out General Austin for General Petraeus? To assign responsibility for American incompetence to President Obama’s National Security Council is to miss the target. The NSC is a symptom of the dysfunction, not its cause. Behind our endless series of foreign-policy screw-ups—Benghazi, Snowden, Syria, Crimea, Bergdahl, Iraq—is not Obama’s team. It’s Obama.

The Obama foreign policy is best represented not by the famous national security “Team of Rivals” of Obama’s first term, but by the team of yes men and incompetents of his second. Gates, Panetta, Clinton, and Petraeus are celebrities who had the wit and stature to disagree with Obama. Kerry, Rice, Hagel—this collection of loyalists and losers (quite literally in Kerry’s case) is incapable of disagreement with the president because he handpicked them for their subservience.

In 2013, when Kerry tried to “lean forward” by advocating intervention in Syria, Obama cut him off at the knees. Rice is a friend of the president’s who owes him for saving her career after she withdrew from contention for secretary of State. Hagel? I wonder if he’s even found the keys to the executive washroom.

It ought to be obvious by now, five-and-a-half years into his presidency, that Obama does not take disagreement lightly. Consider the look of contempt and resentment on his face when McCain spoke at the 2010 health care summit, the disdain and condescension that characterized his debates with Mitt Romney, the annoyance and even anger he expresses when he feels compelled to grant Fox News Channel an interview. Obama “really doesn’t like people.” It’s evident whenever he encounters dissent. …

Peter Wehner says he’s even worse than we thought.

President Obama spoke on Iraq earlier today, pledging to do nothing and essentially saying nothing, even as that nation is breaking apart, with Islamic militants overrunning Iraq and vowing to capture Baghdad.

In light of the unfolding disaster in Iraq, which is linked to the unfolding disaster in Syria, which is part of a broader failure in the Middle East, which is only one part of an across-the-board failure in foreign policy, which is separate from the failures at home–including healthcare.gov and ObamaCare more broadly, chronically high unemployment, the stimulus and “shovel ready jobs,” a historically weak economic recovery, the lowest workforce participation rate since the 1970s, increasing income inequality, and record poverty–the following needs to be said. Even those of us who were highly critical of Mr. Obama early on, who twice voted against him and worked in campaigns to defeat him, could not envision how epically incompetent he would be.

The harm this man has done is immeasurable. And he still has more than two years left to go.

Mr. Obama belongs in a category all his own.

More from Mario Loyola on the criminal negligence in our government.

… what did Obama do? He did what he normally does, which is to counteract what little capacity for action the U.S. national-security establishment retains when left on autopilot. He has visited Iraq only once during his presidency, early in 2009; but even then he only visited troops, and declined to meet with any senior Iraqi officials. He has met with Prime Minister Maliki ​only twice, once in December 2011 and once in November 2013, by which time the current debacle was well in train. By all accounts, Obama barely lifted a finger to preserve a long-term U.S. presence in Iraq, even when — as Dexter Filkins recently reported in a phenomenal feature for The New Yorker — all major Iraqi factions were asking, in private if not in public, for the U.S. to stay.

The tentative end-of-2011 withdrawal date became fixed, and all U.S. forces were gone by the beginning of 2012. What so many Iraqis feared would happen next did not take long to come. The Shiite factions that had rallied to the U.S. side ran for Iranian cover. Sunni tribal leaders who had thrown in their lot with the U.S. were left to fend for themselves in the face of impending and ever more certain assassination. The Iraqi government became more corrupt and authoritarian as Maliki cemented power within his own narrow coalition. The Kurds rested in their mountain redoubt behind their powerful peshmerga militia, as the Sunni heartland once again became fertile ground for ISIS and other Sunni extremists. The country began to descend once again into the Wahhabi-Iranian proxy war that Bush had ended on America’s terms in the final years of his presidency.

Meanwhile, on Syria, Americans quickly agreed, on a broad bipartisan basis, to make the worst of a bad situation. As soon as the rebellion began, there were those, including here at NR, who took the attitude that there were no moderate Sunni rebels in the Syrian resistance, and that we should just let our enemies in Syria (namely everyone) pulverize each other in the hopes they would all lose. In fact, the resistance included plenty of people willing to align themselves with the U.S., namely the very same tribes that had aligned themselves with the U.S. in Iraq.

The civil war in Syria would inevitably threaten the stability of Iraq, and potentially turn into a cataclysmic regional conflict. Hence, opponents of intervention in Syria should have realized that the only alternative to intervening in Syria was to send U.S. forces back into Iraq, in order to seal off the Iraq–Syria border and buttress the Iraqi security forces.

But instead of co-opting the Syrian resistance, or — the next best thing — sealing the border between Syria and Iraq, we did nothing. By the start of 2013 we had abandoned both the Sunni resistance in Syria and the Sunni heartland in Iraq to Islamist networks, particularly ISIS. The Syrian civil war’s slide across the border into Iraq rapidly became a reality. Violence increased throughout the year until Maliki came begging for American help in November 2013. But Obama hadn’t done anything to stop the region from sliding back into chaos and there was no point in starting now. Maliki left empty-handed, with little choice but to throw himself at the mercy of the Iranians — and hope for survival in a revival of the Wahhabi-Iranian proxy war. …

Great Power Line post on the the situation in Iraq when W left office.

… The bottom line was that Iraq was under control, but still in a state of low-intensity war. Iraqi forces, with the help of small groups of American advisers and — in extreme circumstances — American air power, were more than capable of handling large-scale threats from jihadists but weren’t yet capable of stopping all violence (and, indeed, may never have been). The situation was stable, and — here’s the key — sustainable.

Yes, to sustain it would have required the continued presence of American troops, and those troops may have sustained occasional additional casualties, but that’s the price we pay to secure hard-won victories. …

Jonah Goldberg says our policy in Iraq has been to make sure the country’s future conformed to the administration’s talking points.

… Barack Obama, on the other hand, believed the Iraq war was a mistake from day one and that conviction informed every foreign-policy decision he has made since. He has said, insinuated, implied, hinted, and shouted as much almost every day of his presidency. So invested in the Iraq war being a mistake — and so invested in received opinion celebrating his foresight — he has not merely acted on the reasonable view it was a mistake, he appears to have done everything he can to make sure it is remembered as a mistake for all time. The Left wanted the Iraq war to be Vietnam, and Barack Obama has given them what they wanted. All that’s missing now are the images of Americans clinging to helicopters. …

… The president deliberately let negotiations over the status of American forces in Iraq deteriorate until there was nothing to do but lament that we couldn’t work things out. Indeed (as I wrote in my column yesterday), his entire Iraq policy — his entire foreign policy — has been driven by a need to make it conform to his political talking points, rather than the other way around. There’s nothing wrong with presidents keeping their promises, but presidents have an obligation to do so with the stipulation that the national interest might diverge from what Jen Psaki can vomit up on Crossfire. …

And, as regards the missing Lois Lerner emails, John Steele Gordon says instead of being like Jimmy Carter, the president has become more like Richard Nixon. How about the worst of both?

Many people think that Barack Obama’s presidency, with his inept, if not disastrous foreign policy, and his ineffectual or counterproductive domestic programs can be aptly compared with Jimmy Carter’s. When Carter ran for reelection in 1980, it should be remembered, he carried fewer states than had Herbert Hoover in 1932.

Now, it seems, it’s worse. Today, House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp issued a press release announcing that the IRS claims to have lost all the emails that Lois Lerner sent to or received from government agencies, including the White House, between January 2009 and April 2011.  They have only her internal emails (H/T Instapundit). How very convenient. …

… So it would seem that not only does the Obama administration exhibit the worst attributes of the Carter administration, it also exhibits the worst attributes of the Nixon administration. No one believed Nixon’s explanation for the infamous missing 18 1/2 minutes of oval office tapes. I doubt many will believe that this is an accident too.

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John Fund starts our look at Cantor’s loss. First though, Pickerhead wonders why everyone is so breathless about this loss. Remember in 1994 when a sitting Speaker of the House, Tom Foley, was defeated in the general election? That was an earthquake of larger proportions than this.

Eric Cantor’s loss is historic. No sitting House majority leader has lost an election since the office was created in 1899. While Cantor’s loss was a stunning surprise, the warning signals were around for a while: 

1. Cantor managed to muddle his message on immigration. His direct-mail pieces claimed he was foursquare against amnesty. But the newspapers covering Washington, D.C., quoted him as saying he was seeking a compromise with President Obama on immigration. Voters resolved the seeming contradiction by deciding to vote out their establishment congressman. Cantor’s loss destroys any chance of a comprehensive immigration bill passing the House this year.

2. The majority leader outspent his opponent, David Brat, by $2.5 million to $40,000. Much of that money went to negative ads against Brat that turned off voters and were so vitriolic as not to be credible.

3. Cantor was also hurt by a subterranean campaign by Democrats to convince their supporters to vote in the Republican primary against Cantor. Apparently, some of them did. …

Roger Simon posts on what Cantor’s defeat means.

… At this point few if any Republicans will go near immigration reform as an issue, supposedly alienating the Hispanic vote beyond repair. Meanwhile, Democrats will have a field day branding Republicans as Tea Party crazies.  Debbie Wasserman Schultz was already at it minutes after the Brat victory. Talk about projection!

But is this primary such a disaster?  I am not so sure — and I was the one defending Cantor not long ago in these pages.  To put it mildly, politics as usual has obviously been failing.  That of course means Obama and the rest of the tawdry “progressive” crew but it also inevitably means his loyal (actually too loyal) opposition.  The old pas de deux must go. Now maybe it will — or more of it anyway.

Listening to Brat being interviewed by Sean Hannity after the primary, I was encouraged. The professor seemed a bright man, refreshingly direct and honest, addressing ideas and issues in a, well, professorial manner rarely heard in politics these days.  It almost made me sad he was leaving academia, such men having become as extinct in universities as they are in politics. …

Last on this from John Podhoretz. 

The staggering Republican primary defeat tonight of Eric Cantor, the second highest-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives and the third most-powerful Republican in Washington, is a reminder of just how volatile American politics has become. And how responsive.

Eric Cantor wasn’t supposed to lose. His own pollster had him up by, get this, 34 points the other week. He’d raised nearly $5 million, and in the past two weeks spent $1 million against his rival’s $79,000. Not enough.

There’s a lot of triumphalist talk tonight about sending a message to Washington and the establishment vs. the outsiders and all that. Most of it is nonsense. Eric Cantor was “Establishment” by definition because he was in the House Republican leadership. But he was a constant source of agitation to House Speaker John Boehner because he insisted on representing the party’s more rightward elements during negotiations with President Obama. He is the Republican Obama detests the most because he was so stalwart against the president. …

Jason Riley thinks Mia Love’s success puts the lie to constant racial complaints.

If, as expected, Mia Love is elected to the seat being vacated by retiring Democratic Rep. Jim Matheson of Utah, she will make history as the first black Republican woman in Congress. But she will also become another example of why racial gerrymandering is unnecessary.

Ms. Love, who won the party’s nomination in April, is the former mayor of Saratoga Springs, a city that is 95 percent white in a state that is 86 percent white. If voting districts need to be racially segregated because whites won’t vote for black candidates, how do you explain the political career of this daughter of Haitian immigrants?

Ms. Love is hardly the only example of white support for a black candidate, and that’s leaving aside the fact that a majority-white country twice elected Barack Obama, who performed better among white voters in 2008 in states like Georgia, Texas and the Carolinas than did John Kerry in 2004 and Al Gore in 2000. …

Roger Simon with a good post on moral narcissism. 

In 1979, Christopher Lasch published The Culture of Narcissism warning of the normalizing of pathological narcissism in our society.  Considering events since then, he was evidently on to something.  Now, some 35 years later in the Obama era, with the Bergdahl incident only the latest in a parade of endless scandals, we have arrived at a  full blown era of what has lately been called Moral Narcissism.

Moral Narcissism is an evocative term for the almost schizophrenic divide between intentions and results now common in our culture.  It doesn’t matter how anything turns out as long as your intentions are good.  And, just as importantly, the only determinant of those intentions, the only one who defines them, is you.

In other words, if you propose or do something, it only matters that you feel good or righteous about what you did or are proposing, that it makes you feel better personally.  The results are irrelevant, as are how the actual activity affects others.

Also, although it pretends (especially to the self) to altruism, moral narcissism is in essence passive aggressive, asserting superiority over the ignorant or “selfish” other. It is elitist,  anti-democratic and quite often, consciously or unconsciously, sadistic.

The Obama administration is loaded with moral narcissists, including, obviously, the president himself — Valerie Jarrett, Susan Rice, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton etc.  The media and Hollywood are also clearly stuffed to the gills with moral narcissists. …

No better illustration today of moral narcissism is the situation in Mosul, Iraq. WSJ Editors have the story of how the good intentions of the administration have created a disaster.

… The Administration’s policy of strategic neglect toward Iraq has created a situation where al Qaeda effectively controls territories stretching for hundreds of miles through AnbarProvince and into Syria. It will likely become worse for Iraq as the Assad regime consolidates its gains in Syria and gives ISIS an incentive to seek its gains further east. It will also have consequences for the territorial integrity of Iraq, as the Kurds consider independence for their already autonomous and relatively prosperous region.

All this should serve as a warning to what we can expect in Afghanistan as the Administration replays its Iraq strategy of full withdrawal after 2016. It should also serve as a reminder of the magnitude of the strategic blunder of leaving no U.S. forces in Iraq after the country finally had a chance to serve as a new anchor of stability and U.S. influence in the region. An Iraqi army properly aided by U.S. air power would not have collapsed as it did in Mosul.

In withdrawing from Iraq in toto, Mr. Obama put his desire to have a talking point for his re-election campaign above America’s strategic interests. Now we and the world are facing this reality: A civil war in Iraq and the birth of a terrorist haven that has the confidence, and is fast acquiring the means, to raise a banner for a new generation of jihadists, both in Iraq and beyond.

The Guardian, UK covers the possible development of another El Nino.

The global El Niño weather phenomenon, whose impacts cause global famines, floods – and even wars – now has a 90% chance of striking this year, according to the latest forecast released to the Guardian.

El Niño begins as a giant pool of warm water swelling in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, that sets off a chain reaction of weather events around the world – some devastating and some beneficial.

India is expected to be the first to suffer, with weaker monsoon rains undermining the nation’s fragile food supply, followed by further scorching droughts in Australia and collapsing fisheries off South America. But some regions could benefit, in particular the US, where El Niño is seen as the “great wet hope” whose rains could break the searing drought in the west.

The knock-on effects can have impacts even more widely, from cutting global gold prices to making England’s World Cup footballers sweat a little more.

The latest El Niño prediction comes from the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), which is considered one the most reliable of the 15 or so prediction centres around the world. “It is very much odds-on for an event,” said Tim Stockdale, principal scientist at ECMWF, who said 90% of their scenarios now deliver an El Niño. “The amount of warm water in the Pacific is now significant, perhaps the biggest since the 1997-98 event.” That El Niño was the biggest in a century, producing the hottest year on record at the time and major global impacts, including a mass die-off of corals.

“But what is very much unknowable at this stage is whether this year’s El Niño will be a small event, a moderate event – that’s most likely – or a really major event,” said Stockdale, adding the picture will become clearer in the next month or two. “It is which way the winds blow that determines what happens next and there is always a random element to the winds.” …

Andrew Malcolm ends our week with late night humor.

Jay Leno spoke at an awards ceremony in Israel recently honoring Michael Bloomberg. He commented on how Obama‘s administration has handled its ‘special relationship’ with Israel.

Leno said, “President Obama declared the month of May to be Jewish American Heritage Month. He is calling it an opportunity to renew our ‘unbreakable bond with the nation of Israel.’ And Obama knows it’s unbreakable because he’s been trying to break it for the last five years.”

Meyers: Phil Mickelson is under investigation by the FBI for insider trading of Clorox stock. By the way, insider trading of Clorox stock by a pro golfer is the whitest collar crime possible.

Conan: Pope Francis says married people should have more kids. Married people said the Pope should “have a kid and then get back to us.”

Meyers: President Obama unveils a 600-page proposal to lower carbon emissions and help stop global warming. Step One: Stop printing 600-page proposals.

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Joel Kotkin says the liberal power elite with not tolerate dissent.

In ways not seen since at least the McCarthy era, Americans are finding themselves increasingly constrained by a rising class—what I call the progressive Clerisy—that accepts no dissent from its basic tenets. Like the First Estate in pre-revolutionary France, the Clerisy increasingly exercises its power to constrain dissenting views, whether on politics, social attitudes or science.

An alliance of upper level bureaucrats and cultural elites, the Clerisy, for all their concerns about inequality, have thrived, unlike most Americans, in recent years. They also enjoy strong relations with the power structure in Washington, Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Wall Street.

As the modern clerisy has seen its own power grow, even while the middle class shrinks, it has used its influence to enforce a prescribed set of acceptable ideas. On everything from gender and sexual preference to climate change, those who dissent from the official pieties risk punishment.

This power has been seen recently in a host of cancellations of commencement speakers. Just in the past few months Ayaan Hirsi Ali, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, International Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde, and former UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, have been prevented from speaking by campus virtue squads whose sensibilities they had offended.

The spate of recent cancellation reflect an increasingly overbearing academic culture that promotes speech codes on what is permissible to say and even seeks to provide “trigger warnings” to warn students about the presence of nominally troubling subject matter in readings and discussions so they can avoid the elements of reality they find offensive. 

The very term Clerisy first appeared in 1830 in the work of Samuel Coleridge to described the bearers society’s highest ideals: the intellectuals, pastors, scientists charged with transmitting their privileged knowledge them to the less enlightened orders.  

The rise of today’s Clerisy stems from the growing power and influence of its three main constituent parts: the creative elite of media and entertainment, the academic community, and the high-level government bureaucracy. …

Victor Davis Hanson says Kotkin’s narrow minded clerisy has created a Medieval system in our universities.

Employment rates for college graduates are dismal. Aggregate student debt is staggering. But university administrative salaries are soaring. The campus climate of tolerance has utterly disappeared. Only the hard sciences and graduate schools have salvaged American universities’ international reputations.

For over two centuries, our superb system of American public and private higher education kept pace with radically changing times and so ensured our prosperity and reinforced democratic pluralism.

But a funny thing has happened on the way to the 21st century. Colleges that were once our most enlightened and tolerant institutions became America’s dinosaurs.

Start with ossified institutions. Tenure may have been a good idea in the last century to ensure faculty members free expression. But such a spoils system now encourages the opposite result of protecting monotonies of thought. In a globalized world where jobs disappear in an eye blink and professionals must be attuned to the slightest changes in the global marketplace, academics insist that after six years they still deserve lifetime guarantees of employment. …

Roger Simon says the colleges are being taken over by “brown shirts.”

A fusillade of attacks by students and faculty on commencement speakers and honorary degree awardees at four of our better known schools — Smith, Haverford, Rutgers and Brandeis — has tarnished this year’s commencement season beyond any in recent memory.  Speakers as distinguished as Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund Christine Lagarde, former Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have been forced to withdraw even as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of the most courageous fighters of oppression on the planet, had to walk from her honorary degree from a university established in the shadow of the Holocaust. Go figure.

What next? The Bill of Rights gets repealed?  An academic “War on Women”? (Three of the four attacked are female.) A new generation of undergraduate Brown Shirts comes back from 1930s Berlin to smash every college window and burn every school library book by unapproved authors in a renewed Kristallnacht? …

According to Business Insider, Google has a rational response to campus crap. They are hiring more people who didn’t go to college.

After years of looking at the data, Google has found that things like college GPAs and transcripts are almost worthless in hiring. Following these revelations, the company is hiring more and more people who never even went to college.

In an interview with The New York Times, Google’s Senior Vice President for People Operations Laszlo Bock revealed that the number of degree-less hires has trended upwards as they’ve stopped asking for transcripts for everybody but the most recent graduates.  

“What’s interesting is the proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time as well,” Bock said. “So we have teams where you have 14 percent of the team made up of people who’ve never gone to college.” …

A WSJ OpEd says employment is low because the government has made jobs more expensive to create.

In President Obama’s speeches this year, a steady theme has been creating jobs and economic opportunity for Americans. In his State of the Union address in January he said that “what I believe unites the people of this nation . . . is the simple, profound belief in opportunity for all—the notion that if you work hard and take responsibility, you can get ahead.” And in his weekly address on Saturday, he repeated his strong appeal to young people: “As long as I hold this office, I’ll keep fighting to give more young people the chance to earn their own piece of the American Dream.”

Yet during the more than five years Mr. Obama has been in office, young people have been especially hard-hit by the slow and virtually jobless recovery. Given the destructive effect this has on individual initiative and the prospects of a productive and rewarding working life, the continuing struggle of young Americans to find jobs, start building families and contribute to society is no longer simply a matter of politics or policy. On a deeply human level, it’s profoundly sad.

Consider these grim employment numbers: …

Pickings from the Webvine

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The greatest mistake in the Bergdahl trade was elevating the Taliban. We start with some items to remind us of the true nature of these antediluvian misogynists. The Spectator, UK witnesses a stoning.

… ‘I couldn’t spot where the first rock came from — maybe from the mutaween, the religious police, “upholders of virtue and stoppers of sin’’, identifiable by their beards. The uniformed police, lined up, were busy throwing rocks. A tipper truck had brought up a load of Type Two aggregate of red sandstone from the road-building being undertaken by my companion’s construction company, and dumped in two heaps for those without sin to fling at the women under their shrouds. The targets could not of course duck down into their holes: they were too narrow.’

Well, that was and is the law out there, and the practice. Stoning for adultery was Moses’ law too, but the Jews haven’t practised it for a couple of millennia or so, as far as I know, just as we have given up burning our apostates. The merit of stoning, like the firing squad, is that one can’t ascribe the killing to a given individual.

Over in Pakistan last week, the stoning to death of Farzana Parveen, married and pregnant, wasn’t the result of a formal legal indictment even though it was taking place in the open space in front of the High Court in Lahore, that most sophisticated of Pakistan’s cities. It was done, it seems, mostly by her own family at the behest of her father, who regarded as adultery his daughter’s marriage to a man other than the one he had chosen. Here the police didn’t participate in the stone-throwing, but just stood and watched, together with a chance assembly of lawyers and passers-by.

The act of stoning, while not actually lawful in Pakistan, was done in what is called a ‘climate of impunity’ in the rigorous Islamic tradition of daughters marrying who they’re told to, and in the light of the awareness of several hundred other such killings in Pakistan every year going unpunished. …

We go back a few years to a NY Times article on the 2012 reemergence of stoning in Afghanistan as the Taliban regained power. We can say this president made the world safe for women to be stoned again.

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Taliban on Sunday ordered their first public executions by stoning since their fall from power nine years ago, killing a young couple who had eloped, according to Afghan officials and a witness.

The punishment was carried out by hundreds of the victims’ neighbors in a village in northern KunduzProvince, according to Nadir Khan, 40, a local farmer and Taliban sympathizer, who was interviewed by telephone. Even family members were involved, both in the stoning and in tricking the couple into returning after they had fled.

Mr. Khan said that as a Taliban mullah prepared to read the judgment of a religious court, the lovers, a 25-year-old man named Khayyam and a 19-year-old woman named Siddiqa, defiantly confessed in public to their relationship. “They said, ‘We love each other no matter what happens,’ ” Mr. Khan said.

The executions were the latest in a series of cases where the Taliban have imposed their harsh version of Shariah law for social crimes, reminiscent of their behavior during their decade of ruling the country. In recent years, Taliban officials have sought to play down their bloody punishments of the past, as they concentrated on building up popular support. …

FrontPage posts on the poisoning of schoolgirls by the Taliban. This is another item from two years ago, but it is illustrative of fact we have known for a long time about the nature of these people. The president won’t negotiate with Republicans. Perhaps he can only relate to men like his father.

In a recent effort to prevent their attendance at school, the Taliban poisoned nearly 150 Afghan schoolgirls, marking just the latest atrocity in a litany of barbaric acts the Islamist terror group continues to inflict upon the women and girls of Afghanistan.

The afflicted girls — all of whom suffered severe nausea, headaches, and dizziness — had become poisoned after drinking contaminated water from jugs in their classrooms at their high school in Afghanistan’s northern province of Takhar. Many of the students were taken to a local hospital where some were listed in critical condition.

Fearing retribution, some school officials were initially reluctant to assign blame to any particular group for the chemical attack, with one simply saying, “This is either the work of those who are against girls’ education or irresponsible armed individuals.” …

… Time magazine focused widespread indignation on Afghanistan recently by putting on its cover a picture of an 18-year-old woman from OruzganProvince whose nose and ears were cut off by her Taliban husband after she had fled her child marriage to him.

Amnesty International condemned the latest stonings, calling them the first such executions since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. “The Taliban and other insurgent groups are growing increasingly brutal in their abuses against Afghans,” said Sam Zarifi, an Amnesty International official.

Time for a look at last week’s job report. James Pethokoukis is first.

… Thanks to 217,000 net new jobs created in May, US employment is now at an all-time peak. All the 9 million jobs lost during the Great Recession have been recovered. …

… But while the milestone is certainly worth noting, its importance pales next to the current state of the “jobs gap.” The US economy now has 113,000 more jobs than in December 2007, but the working-age population today is 16 million larger. When you factor in population growth, as the Economic Policy Institute has, you find the recession has left a remaining shortfall of nearly 7 million jobs or “missing workers.” (See chart at top).

More context: the share of adult Americans with any sort of job — what I like to call the employment rate — was 58.9% last month vs. a prerecession peak of 63.4%. And as the Wall Street Journal notes, “Since the economy emerged from recession five years ago, wage gains have barely managed to keep ahead of inflation.” …

The economics editor from Nate Silver’s blog, FiveThirtyEight, has ten charts.

Six-and-a-half years after the Great Recession began — and five years after it officially ended — the U.S. has finally surpassed its precrisis employment peak. But the job market is far from fully healed.

U.S. employers added 217,000 jobs in May, bringing total non-farm employment to 138.5 million – 113,000 more than the 138.4 million jobs that existed in December 2007, the first month of the recession. It took 76 months to regain the nearly 9 million jobs lost in the recession, making this by far the slowest jobs recovery since World War II. (If any of this sounds familiar, you’re right: Private-sector employment returned to its prerecession peak in March.)

Getting back to square one isn’t much to celebrate, however. There are more than 6 million more working-age Americans today than when the recession began. Adjusting for population growth, we’re still millions of jobs short of where we were 6½ years ago — and have seen hardly any jobs recovery. …

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Streetwise Professor posts on the Taliban trade.

… So Obama has some serious explaining to do to justify this fiasco. So far his explanations have done worse than fallen flat: they’ve unleashed a firestorm of criticism. So you know what will happen: dismissing this as a manufactured DC controversy (which has already happened), attacks on the messenger (already well underway), and spin, spin, spin. Indeed, many of the media dervishes are whirling away as we sit here.

But not to worry. It’s not like anybody is noticing that Obama is feckless and incompetent, and taking advantage of that. Well, other than Putin, of course. And the Iranians. And the Chinese:

“On the surface, this may look reckless. But one theory gaining traction among senior officials and policy analysts around Asia and in Washington is that the timing is well calculated. It reflects Mr. Xi’s belief that he is dealing with a weak U.S. president who won’t push back, despite his strong rhetorical support for Asian allies.

Mr. Xi’s perception, say these analysts, has been heightened by U.S. President Barack Obama’s failures to intervene militarily in Syria and Ukraine. And it’s led him to conclude that he has a window of opportunity to aggressively assert China’s territorial claims around the region.”

I’ve often said that I hope Bismarck (“There is a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the USA”) and Adam Smith (“there is a lot of ruin in a nation”) are right. Obama is putting both aphorisms to the test.

A couple of our favorites try to understand how it came to pass we have such amateurs running our foreign policy. Kimberley Strassel introduces us to this president’s “Kissingers.”

… NSC (National Security Council) staff are foreign-policy grownups, and its meetings are barred to political henchmen.

Or that was the case, until the Obama White House. By early March 2009, two months into this presidency, the New York Times had run a profile of David Axelrod, noting that Mr. Obama’s top campaign guru and “political protector” was now “often” to be found “in the late afternoons” walking “to the Situation Room to attend some meetings of the National Security Council.” President Obama’s first national security adviser, former Marine General and NATO Commander Jim Jones, left after only two years following clashes with Mr. Obama’s inner circle.

He was replaced by Democratic political operative and former Fannie Mae lobbyist Tom Donilon. Mr. Donilon joined Ben Rhodes, the Obama campaign speechwriter, who in 2009 had been elevated to deputy national security adviser for strategic communications. Also present was Tommy Vietor, whose entire career prior to NSC spokesman was as an Obama spinmeister—as a press aide in the 2004 Senate run, and campaign flack for the 2008 Iowa caucuses, and assistant White House press secretary. In fairness, his credentials also included getting caught on camera in 2010 pounding beers, shirtless, at a Georgetown bar. America’s foreign-policy experts at work.

Not that Mr. Obama’s first instinct is even to rely on his now overtly political NSC. This paper reported in September 2013 that as the White House struggled with the question of military intervention in Syria, it summoned all the old “Obama loyalists” for advice. They included his 2008 campaign manager ( David Plouffe ), his former press secretary ( Robert Gibbs ), a former speechwriter ( Jon Favreau ), and Mr. Vietor (who had by then left the NSC to form a political consulting group).

A serious-minded NSC, in the tumultuous aftermath of Benghazi, would have responded with a sober assessment for its president of the real and continued terror threat, and of the failings that resulted in four dead Americans. Instead we find the deputy NSA, Mr. Rhodes, crafting an internal email advising his colleagues to spin, and blame it all on an Internet video. Mr. Rhodes had no interest in advising the president on hard realities. His only interest was ensuring his boss got re-elected. …

Jonah Goldberg sees the comedy. 

I think the Bergdahl story is really very serious and there are still lots of things we don’t know. My friend James Rosen’s story that Bergdahl turned mujahideen in captivity is very interesting, but it doesn’t mean — nor does Rosen say — that he was a jihadi when he left his base. And, while the case doesn’t look good for Bergdahl, we don’t know that he was a deserter yet. We only know that he was AWOL. Indeed, according to an earlier Pentagon report, we know he had a habit of wandering off base. That may make him a flake or an idiot, but it doesn’t prove he was a deserter.

Indeed, there are so many unknowns here that it might be best to withhold judgment on a lot of aspects to this story.

Save perhaps one: The White House is run by clowns. …

… My only point is that the White House’s political chops in this fiasco look about as sharp as Dom DeLuise’s forehead. That’s kind of weird when you consider that his foreign-policy shop is largely run by political hacks — as Kim Strassel notes in her excellent column from yesterday. “Obama’s Kissingers,” as Strassel calls them, should be better at the politics than the foreign policy, given their resumes. But it turns out they stink at both. When you run foreign policy like a domestic political operation, it turns out that both the policy and the politics can blow up on you. I think this is because over the long haul foreign policy doesn’t work like domestic politics. You can have the best political hacks in the world, but if you give them a job they’re not suited for, it will actually make things worse. If you want to see what I mean, ask your mechanic to do your prostate surgery. …

… They sent Susan Rice — Susan Rice! — out on the Sunday shows to beclown herself again. This woman was going to be secretary of state until she went out on the Sunday shows and read Ben Rhodes’s talking points verbatim. Apparently that’s sort of her thing. She reads what the hacks above — or below — give her. It’s like she’s the Ron Burgundy of foreign policy. But you’d think this time around she’d go over with her staff exactly what they know — and don’t know. You’d think she’d be like Roy Scheider in Jaws 2 telling the town council, “As God is my witness, I’m not going through that Hell again.” Instead she’s like Mikey from the Life cereal commercials and the White House political hacks are like the other kids. “Give these talking points to Susie, she’ll say anything.” …

George Will when a president goes rogue.

… Obama did not comply with the law requiring presidents to notify Congress 30 days before such exchanges of prisoners at Guantanamo. Politico can be cited about this not because among the media it is exceptionally, well, understanding of Obama’s exuberant notion of executive latitude but because it is not. Politico headlined a story on his noncompliance with the law “Obama May Finally Be Going Rogue on Gitmo.” It said Obama’s “assertive” act “defied Congress” — Congress, not the rule of law — in order “to get that process [of closing the prison at Guantanamo] moving.” It sent “a clear message” that “Obama is now willing to wield his executive powers to get the job done.” Or, as used to be said in extenuation of strong leaders, “to make the trains run on time.”

The 44th president, channeling — not for the first time — the 37th (in his post-impeachment conversation with David Frost), may say: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Already the administration says events dictated a speed that precluded complying with the law.

This explanation should be accorded open-minded, but not empty-minded, consideration. It should be considered in light of the fact that as the Veterans Affairs debacle continued, Obama went to Afghanistan to hug some troops, then completed the terrorists-for-Bergdahl transaction. And in light of the fact that Obama waged a seven-month military intervention in Libya’s civil war without complying with the law (the War Powers Resolution) that requires presidents to terminate within 60 to 90 days a military action not authorized or subsequently approved by Congress.

Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), vice chairman of the intelligence committee, says the administration told him he would be notified about negotiations for the release of terrorists. He now says he cannot “believe a thing this president says.” …

Ann Coulter has some interesting items.

… Three days before he walked off his base, Bergdahl emailed his parents:

– “I am ashamed to be an american.”

– “The US army is the biggest joke … It is the army of liars, backstabbers, fools and bullies.”

– “These people need help, yet what they get is the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid.”

– “The horror that is america is disgusting.”

These emails were given to the author of a 2012 Rolling Stone article on the case by Bergdahl’s own parents.

The overwrought soldier’s father, Bob, emailed back: “OBEY YOUR CONSCIENCE!” And then, according to the Rolling Stone profile reporting these emails — as well as the Army report on the incident — Bergdahl “decided to walk away.

“Bergdahl’s unit commander, Evan Buetow, told CNN’s Jake Tapper that intercepted Taliban “chatter” soon revealed that Bergdahl was looking for a member of the Taliban who spoke English. (Other than his father.)

Buetow said he couldn’t prove it, but he believed Bergdahl began helping the Taliban attack his own unit. After that, Buetow says, the assaults were much more direct, and Bergdahl would have known the unit’s tactics and how they would respond to an attack. …

Graduation season is upon us and Dilbert’s dad, Scott Adams, has some terrible gift ideas.

… Many of you are wondering what kind of gift to buy for the innocent wretch in your life who is about to be excreted from the gentle embrace of our education system into the turd-infested pool of misery that we call work. I am here to help.

Gifts are all about the thought you put into them and the message they send. I did some online searching and discovered that all of the top graduation gift suggestions are—as far as I can tell—designed as clever revenge for the grad’s teen years. It’s payback time!

1.              One of the top suggested gifts for grads is Money Clips. Try to keep a straight face when you give a money clip to a grad that has a mountain of student debt and no job prospects. Write something on the card along the lines of “This is to keep all of your money organized.” You want to leave some doubt as to whether your intention is to be an evil revenge-monkey or you’re just a terrible gift-buyer. If you’re like me, your unstylish wardrobe for the past twenty years is all the reasonable doubt you’ll need.

2.              Luggage is another popular gift item for grads. Nothing says get out of my house like luggage. If that isn’t subtle enough, follow the example of my parents and combine the luggage gift with a one-way ticket to another state. Message received! …

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Of course, Americans look at the Bergdahl trade from our point of view. Nathan Hodges in the WSJ puts us in the shoes of Afghan villagers.

SHEYKHAN, Afghanistan—Taliban forces led by Mohammed Fazl swept through this village on the Shomali plain north of Kabul in 1999 in a scorched-earth offensive that prompted some 300,000 people to flee for their lives.

Fifteen years later, local residents here are responding with fear and dismay to the U.S. release of the notorious commander, along with four other Taliban leaders in exchange for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the only American prisoner of war who was held by the Taliban. The group released a video on Wednesday showing the hurried handover a few days earlier of the American captive, looking gaunt and dazed.

The villages of Shomali were once the orchard of central Afghanistan, and the plain’s carefully tended vineyards were famous for their grapes.

When the Taliban seized control of this area from their Northern Alliance rivals in 1999, they systematically demolished entire villages, blowing up houses, burning fields and seeding the land with mines, according to two comprehensive studies of war crimes and atrocities during wars in Afghanistan and human rights reports. Mr. Fazl played a major role in the destruction.

“There was not a single undamaged house or garden,” said Masjidi Fatehzada, a shopkeeper in Mir Bacha Kot, the district center. “My entire shop was burned to the ground. There was nothing left.”

Khwaja Mohammad, a farmer in the village of Sheykhan, remembered how Mr. Fazl’s men took away his son, a civilian, and sent him to Kabul’s Pul-e Charkhi prison.

“They jailed him for nearly three years,” Mr. Mohammad said. “They took him when he was on his way from the bazaar to buy oil and flour.” …

Texas congressman Steve Stockman with the best tweet of last week.

The Bergdahl swap crystallizes all that is Obama:

A man who won’t let obeying the law stop him from making a bad decision.

Charles Krauthammer says; “Free him, then try him.”

… What to do? Free him, then try him. Make the swap and then, if the evidence is as strong as it now seems, court-martial him for desertion.

The swap itself remains, nonetheless, a very close call. I would fully respect a president who rejected the deal as simply too unbalanced. What is impossible to respect is a president who makes this heart-wrenching deal and then does a victory lap in the Rose Garden and has his senior officials declare it a cause for celebration. The ever dutiful, ever clueless Susan Rice hailed it as “an extraordinary day for America.”

Good God. This is no victory. This is a defeat, a concession to a miserable reality, a dirty deal, perhaps necessary as a matter of principle but to be carried out with regret, resignation, even revulsion.

The Rose Garden stunt wasn’t a messaging failure. It’s a category error. The president seems oblivious to the gravity, indeed the very nature, of what he has just done. Which is why a stunned and troubled people are asking themselves what kind of man they have twice chosen to lead them.

Jennifer Rubin posts on the terrible “Taliban terrorist trade.”

The Taliban terrorist trade is beginning to crowd out other scandals. As with the Veterans Affairs fiasco, the outrage is not partisan. Democrats are irate that Congress was not alerted about the prisoner swap while Republicans are beside themselves over the idea of negotiating with and releasing terrorists. Both sides have huge doubts that the trade was in our favor and deep concerns that the deal doesn’t restrict the terrorists’ ability to return to the battlefield. For President Obama, there are fewer excuses because the president can’t claim that he was kept out of the loop. No, this is his doing. Indeed he imagined this would be heralded as a great strategic victory.

Why has it degenerated into a fiasco? (When Chris Matthews and the Wall Street editorial board both slam a decision, you know it really is a fiasco.) Here are four main concerns that threaten to engulf Obama:

1. The White House feels compelled to embellish if not outright deceive the public and media when it gets in hot water. Now the press is beginning to call him on it. National security adviser Susan Rice says Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl served with distinction. The White House says failing to alert Congress was all an oversight. Neither story holds up. …

Max Boot posts on how the Taliban has been rescued from the ashheap of George W. Bush’s history. 

A lot has changed in warfare since the days of hand-to-hand combat with swords and spears in ancient Mesopotamia 5,000 years. One thing hasn’t changed, however: War remains a test of wills. If you break the enemy’s will, you win. If he breaks your will, you lose. If neither of your wills is broken, and assuming you have sufficient material resources to continue fighting, the war becomes a stalemate. This is a fundamental truth and yet one that President Obama seems to miss time after time.

In Afghanistan, U.S. forces and their Afghan allies have dealt defeat after defeat to the Taliban. Yet the president keeps showing that his will is wavering by attaching deadlines to U.S. troop deployments, the most recent being a promise that, while 9,800 U.S. troops will remain in Afghanistan in 2015, all of them will depart by the end of 2016. The latest sign of wavering American will, at least from the Taliban’s standpoint, is the prisoner exchange for Bowe Bergdahl.

The Taliban are going to town with a video of the exchange that has become an Internet sensation. The message of the video is obvious: the Taliban are a force to be reckoned with. The U.S. has tried to portray the Taliban as mere terrorists who are on the wrong side of history, but the fact of this exchange bolsters the Taliban’s narrative that they are actually a legitimate governmental entity that will one day rule Afghanistan again. …

Scott Johnson posts on the mullahs read of our country.

In another harsh editorial — “Hapless Obama” — the New York Daily News reports on the mullahs’ reading of Obama:

“Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has bluntly taken the measure of President Obama as a paper tiger — and the United States commander has only himself to blame.

Delivering an address on a stage hung with a banner that read “America cannot do a damn thing,” Khamenei Wednesday sneeringly declared that Obama has abandoned military force as a tool of foreign policy. …”

Now for important stuff. Free Beacon reports the GOP might pick up a Senate seat in Iowa.

The U.S. Senate race in Iowa is now in a dead heat after Republican candidate Joni Ernst secured a primary win on Tuesday, according to a recent poll by Rasmussen Reports.

Ernst—a state senator and Iraq War veteran who still serves as a lieutenant colonel in the Iowa Army National Guard—received 45 percent support in the poll, while Rep. Bruce Braley (D., Iowa) garnered 44 percent. The survey of 750 likely Iowa voters had a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percent.

The poll indicates a bump in support for Ernst, who trailed Braley by about 7 percentage points in early April, according to a survey at the time by SuffolkUniversity. …

Father’s day is coming soon. The NY Times reviews a book; “Do Father’s Matter?”

When our young daughters first decided to play on top of our Honda minivan, parked in our driveway, my wife was worried. But to me, it seemed no less safe than chasing a ball that frequently ended up in the street. And they loved the height, the novelty, the danger. So I let them stay. They never fell. And with the summer weather here, playing on the car is once again keeping them occupied for hours.

Now that I have read Paul Raeburn’s “Do Fathers Matter?,” I know that my comfort with more dangerous play — my willingness to let my daughters stand on top of a minivan — is a typically paternal trait. Dads roughhouse with children more, too. They also gain weight when their wives are pregnant and have an outsize effect on their children’s vocabulary. The presence of dads can delay daughters’ puberty. But older dads have more children with dwarfism and with Marfan syndrome.

In Mr. Raeburn’s book, there is plenty of good news for dads, and plenty of bad. A zippy tour through the latest research on fathers’ distinctive, or predominant, contributions to their children’s lives, “Do Fathers Matter?” is filled with provocative studies of human dads — not to mention a lot of curious animal experiments. (You’ll learn about blackbirds’ vasectomies.) But above all, Mr. Raeburn shows how little we know about the role of fathers, and how preliminary his book is. Its end is really a beginning, a prospectus for further research. …

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Before we get to the Bergdahl trade, the obama disaster de jour, we’ll pay some attention to some other items. Tennessee law prof Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit devotes his weekly USA Today column to the VA, the disaster of a few weeks ago. Reynolds makes the point that firing Shinseki will have little long term effect on the perverse incentives that always pervade government efforts.

… People sometimes think that government or “nonprofit” operations will be run more honestly than for-profit businesses because the businesses operate on the basis of “greed.” But, in fact, greed is a human characteristic that is present in any organization made up of humans. It’s all about incentives.

And, ironically, a for-profit medical system might actually offer employees less room for greed than a government system. That’s because VA patients were stuck with the VA. If wait times were long, they just had to wait, or do without care. In a free-market system, a provider whose wait times were too long would lose business, and even if the employees faked up the wait-time numbers, that loss of business would show up on the bottom line. That would lead top managers to act, or lose their jobs.

In the VA system, however, the losses didn’t show up on the bottom line because, well, there isn’t one. Instead, the losses were diffused among the many patients who went without care — visible to them, but not to the people who ran the agency, who relied on the cooked-books numbers from their bonus-seeking underlings.

And, contrary to what Klein suggests, that’s the problem with socialism. The absence of a bottom line doesn’t reduce greed and self-dealing — it removes a constraint on greed and self-dealing. And when that happens, ordinary people pay the price. Keep that in mind, when people suggest that free-market systems are somehow morally inferior to socialism.

A couple of left greenies got all excited thinking China was going to work on limiting carbon emissions. David Harsanyi points out it is not true. The Chinese are not as stupid as our government.

Jonathan Chait recently scolded the Wall Street Journal for an editorial it ran detailing the harm the EPA’s proposal to slash 30 percent of carbon dioxide emissions from existing power would inflict on the economy. And though he utilized the standard inventory of liberal grievances, Chait added a gotcha. You see, though the WSJ had “sneered” at the prospect of Obama’s unilateral move inspiring countries like China to similarly tackle emissions, Chait points out that the very next day the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases went ahead and promised to set its own absolute cap on emissions by 2016. “The target will be written into China’s next five-year plan, which comes into force in 2016,” said He Jiankun, chairman of China’s Advisory Committee on Climate Change, according to a Reuters story.

Obama’s leadership was already working! Salon, (“Hopping on the climate bandwagon? China says it, too, may cap emissions”) Think Progress (“One Day After U.S. Announces Emissions Target, China Says Carbon Cap Is On The Way”) and others, were thrilled about the news.

There are, it turns out, a few minor problems with this storyline. The most glaring? It isn’t actually true. Andrew C. Revkin of the New York Times did some legwork and reports that He Jiankun has absolutely no power to speak for the Chinese government or even the climate committee. And no one had actually made any mention of China pondering a new quantitative cap on carbon dioxide emissions. (h/t Tim Carney.) …

… it would irrational to expect a growing nation with a per capita GDP of $5,000 to set absolute caps in emissions. China, in fact, has consistently stated that emissions would likely keep rising until its per capita GDP was around five times what it is today. Which is good news for the billions of Chinese still living in poverty and bad news for Western Luddites.

And from USA Today more on the ice that is still on the Great Lakes.

I’m gonna keep writing about this until the last cube of ice is melted (if that happens). Unimaginably, there’s still ice from the savage winter of 2013-14 on the south shore of Lake Superior near Marquette, Mich.

The Marquette Mining-Journal newspaper reports that according to some forecasts, the ice may last until July:

“To many area residents who suffered through one of the worst winters on record for the area, seeing the ice chunks on the lake every day is a continuing reminder of that wintry grip of Mother Nature, which still has yet to completely loosen,” the paper noted on its website.

OK. Now we learn from Ralph Peters why the administration was so blindsided by the Bergdahl backlash.

… I actually believe that Ms. Rice was kind of sincere, in her spectacularly oblivious way. In the best Manchurian Candidate manner, she said what she had been programmed to say by her political culture, then she was blindsided by the firestorm she ignited by scratching two flinty words together. At least she didn’t blame Bergdahl’s desertion on a video.

The president, too, appears stunned. He has so little understanding of (or interest in) the values and traditions of our troops that he and his advisers really believed that those in uniform would erupt into public joy at the news of Bergdahl’s release — as D.C. frat kids did when Osama bin Laden’s death was trumpeted.

Both President Obama and Ms. Rice seem to think that the crime of desertion in wartime is kind of like skipping class. They have no idea of how great a sin desertion in the face of the enemy is to those in our military. The only worse sin is to side actively with the enemy and kill your brothers in arms. This is not sleeping in on Monday morning and ducking Gender Studies 101.

But compassion, please! The president and all the president’s men and women are not alone. Our media elite — where it’s a rare bird who bothered to serve in uniform — instantly became experts on military justice. Of earnest mien and blithe assumption, one talking head after another announced that “we always try to rescue our troops, even deserters.”

Uh, no. “Save the deserter” is a recent battle cry of the politically indoctrinated brass. For much of our history, we did make some efforts to track down deserters in wartime. Then we shot or hanged them. Or, if we were in good spirits, we merely used a branding iron to burn a large D into their cheeks or foreheads. Even as we grew more enlightened, desertion brought serious time in a military prison. At hard labor. …

Peter Wehner posts on the “dishonorable deal.” 

Even I, a consistent and at times quite a harsh critic of President Obama, have been taken aback by the latest turn of events.

To recapitulate: Mr. Obama released five high-value, high-risk terrorists from Guantanamo Bay in exchange for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who it appears was a deserter–and has been known to be a deserter for a couple of years. People who served with him are calling on the military to court martial Bergdahl. Media reports indicate that at least six Americans died  in their efforts to rescue him.

In de facto negotiating with the Taliban and acceding to their demands, the president violated a law he signed, requiring him to inform Congress 30 days in advance of any prisoner release from GuantanamoBay. And the effect of this deal will be to incentivize the capture of more Americans, since it obviously pays dividends. …

Jennifer Rubin wonders if Hillary Clinton will “go down with the obama foreign policy ship.”

…This is not only a catastrophe for Obama and for the United States, but also for Hillary Clinton. On Tuesday, she defended the Taliban trade despite public outcry from even Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s fellow soldiers. Clinton must decide whether to stick by the president and get pulled down in the undertow or to separate herself to maintain her credibility in a run for the White House. If she does the former, the press and public will increasingly see her as running for the third Obama term and determined to stick close to his failed policies. If she does the latter, she risks the ire of the base and the wrath of the White House.

The dilemma reminds us of several unappealing Clinton traits. First, she is overly cautious, always waiting to calculate which way the wind is blowing. That leaves all sides dissatisfied and reinforces the view that she is an entirely political figure, not a model stateswoman. Second, we really don’t know what she thinks. Unlike previously secretaries of state who left a personal imprint on their work, we really have no idea what her own policy would look like. She has been a good soldier, but where is the evidence she knows where and how to lead? And finally, a great deal of the downward spiral for the Obama foreign policy concerns her own competence and judgment. She didn’t seem to have kept an eye on al-Qaeda in North Africa, nor does her handling of the U.S.-Israeli relationship indicated a deft touch and ability to instill trust in others. She championed the president’s Iran engagement and backed the interim agreement, both of which seem destined to be seen as foolish gambits.

Obama’s foreign policy slide into chaos, retreat and appeasement now present Clinton with the most important choice of her career: Does she choose to play to the left or to strike out on her own and take the furor from her base on issues on which she claims to have expertise and maturity? I suspect it is first, but for her, her party’s and the country’s sake (since she could be president) I certainly hope she strikes out on her own.

WSJ – Notable and Quotable has this from Jay Carney last June.

… We cannot discuss all the details of our efforts, but there should be no doubt that on a daily basis we are continuing to pursue—using our military, intelligence and diplomatic tools—the effort to return him home safely. And our hearts are with the Bergdahl family.

With regard to the transfer of Taliban detainees from GuantanamoBay, we have made—the United States has not made the decision to do that, though we do expect the Taliban to raise this issue in our discussion, if and when those discussions happen.

As we have long said, however, we would not make any decisions about transfer of any detainees without consulting with Congress and without doing so in accordance with U.S. law.

John Hinderaker posts on the White House claiming Bergdahl was being “swift boated.”

This would be unbelievable, if we weren’t talking about Barack Obama’s White House. Chuck Todd reported on the Today show this morning that, in trying to explain why they so badly miscalculated the Bergdahl affair, White House aides told him that they didn’t know that the soldiers who served with Bergdahl were “going to swift boat him.” … 

… There is a nice historical continuity here. Just as the men who served with John Kerry told inconvenient truths about him–far from being factually inaccurate, the most effective Swift Boat ads quoted Kerry’s own words when he called his fellow servicemen war criminals–those who served with Bergdahl were driven to tell the truth about him in the wake of the administration’s false claim that Bergdahl “served with honor and distinction.” Is the White House now calling them all liars? I don’t think so, but if that is their claim, let’s see the Army’s 2010 report. I am pretty sure it will confirm that Bergdahl was a deserter, at best.

Just when you think the Obama administration can’t make the Bergdahl fiasco any worse, they fool you.

Hinderaker also posts that Mad Magazine is making fun of the trade. Mad came up with a take-off of Saving Private Ryan and treated us to a movie poster for “Trading Private Bergdahl – They got five Taliban leaders. We got one deserting weasel.”

Recently, President Obama exchanged five Taliban leaders for an American POW, Bowe Bergdahl. One prisoner for five is an iffy trade to begin with — but even more so when it was revealed that Bergdahl had deserted his post. So, Obama got his man, but there was a lot of collateral damage — it kind of reminds us of a movie we once saw…

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Craig Pirrong gets first dibs on the Bergdahl flap.

Obama has exchanged five hard-core Taliban held in Gitmo for Bowe Bergdahl, a US soldier who went missing in 2009, and who was captured by the Taliban and subsequently held by the Haqqani Network. (The circumstances of his going  walkabout are important, as I discuss in more detail below.)

There are many, many things wrong with this. In fact, pretty much everything is wrong with this.

Negotiating exchanges with terrorists, especially at such an exchange rate, is a bad idea. It just incentivizes the capture and ransoming of US military personnel, and US citizens. I understand that presidents are under a lot of pressure to renege on pledges not to negotiate with hostage takers, but the frequent reneging perpetuates the bad equilibrium. Many have pointed out that previous administrations, including for instance Reagan’s, have engaged in such exchanges or negotiations for such exchanges. The simple fact is that because it has been done before doesn’t mean we should be doing it now: N wrongs don’t make a right. The appalling outcomes of the previous negotiations (and not just in the US-Israel too) should be proof of the futility and indeed perversity of such a course.

The fact that the five people exchanged are truly very, very bad guys only puts an exclamation point to the previous conclusion. The fact that the Qataris will allegedly hold these people so they cannot fight against the US means nothing: they will be living large, with their families, a long way from Gitmo. It is the precedent and the incentive for future hostage taking that is the problem.

This is apparently part of some grand Obama scheme to negotiate a settlement in Afghanistan with the Taliban. I cannot think of anything more delusional. …

An officer in Bergdahl’s battalion tells the story of how he came to be missing. This is from the Daily Beast.  

… the truth is: Bergdahl was a deserter, and soldiers from his own unit died trying to track him down.

On the night prior to his capture, Bergdahl pulled guard duty at OP Mest, a small outpost about two hours south of the provincial capitol. The base resembled a wagon circle of armored vehicles with some razor wire strung around them. A guard tower sat high up on a nearby hill, but the outpost itself was no fortress. Besides the tower, the only hard structure that I saw in July 2009 was a plywood shed filled with bottled water. Soldiers either slept in poncho tents or inside their vehicles.

The next morning, Bergdahl failed to show for the morning roll call. The soldiers in 2nd Platoon, Blackfoot Company discovered his rifle, helmet, body armor and web gear in a neat stack. He had, however, taken his compass. His fellow soldiers later mentioned his stated desire to walk from Afghanistan to India.

The Daily Beast’s Christopher Dickey later wrote that “[w]hether Bergdahl…just walked away from his base or was lagging behind on a patrol at the time of his capture remains an open and fiercely debated question.” Not to me and the members of my unit. Make no mistake: Bergdahl did not “lag behind on a patrol,” as was cited in news reports at the time. There was no patrol that night. Bergdahl was relieved from guard duty, and instead of going to sleep, he fled the outpost on foot. He deserted. I’ve talked to members of Bergdahl’s platoon—including the last Americans to see him before his capture. I’ve reviewed the relevant documents. That’s what happened. …

How does the president ends up in the Rose Garden with a Taliban wannabee? Or is Bergdahl’s father trying out for Duck Dynasty? Victor Davis Hanson has more substantive questions.

There has been a lot to think about during these years of Obama’s foreign policy. But the problem is not just the existential issues, from reset to Benghazi, but also the less heralded developments, such as young non-high-school graduate Edward Snowden’s trotting off with the most sensitive secrets of the NSA, the “stuff happens” outing of a CIA station chief in Afghanistan, and the failure to destroy the downed drone that ended up in Iran.

In the latter category falls the mysterious prisoner swap of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl for five top Taliban inmates, given that even at this early juncture there are lots of disturbing questions: Why not as the law demanded consult Congress on the releases from Guantanamo, or at least the congressional leadership? Why swap some of the most dangerous and important members of the Taliban hierarchy? What exactly were the circumstances of the original departure of Bergdahl (in 2009 two military officials told the AP that Bergdahl “had just walked off” with three other Afghans), and why were other soldiers requested not to disclose what they knew about the nature of his departure or the costly efforts to find Bergdahl? What exactly is the present U.S. position on trading captives for prisoners/hostages? Do we really believe that the released terrorists will be kept another year in the Middle East? …

Max Boot posts on how not to handle a prisoner swap. 

Ronald Reagan traded arms for hostages. Benjamin Netanyahu traded more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for Corporal Gilad Shalit. Ehud Olmert traded five living terrorists–one of them responsible for killing a four-year-old girl by crushing her skull with the butt of his rifle–for two dead Israeli soldiers. So there is nothing new about making deals with terrorists or exchanging captives with them. It’s even possible that President Obama did the right thing by freeing five senior Taliban leaders in exchange for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who has been held by the Taliban since 2009. Certainly Obama as commander in chief had the power to do so even if some members of Congress are miffed at not being consulted. 

What I find offensive is that the president and his team are not treating this as a grubby and inglorious compromise–an attempt to reconcile our competing ideals of “don’t deal with terrorists” and “leave no man behind.” Instead the administration seems to be taking a victory lap. The president held a White House event with Bergdahl’s parents. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel flew to Afghanistan to commemorate the occasion. National Security Adviser Susan Rice called it “a great day for America.” …

Time for a welcome change of subject. John Fund writes on the new war between the states.

Wealth and people are moving in America, from places where local policies inhibit economic growth to places where the tax and regulatory climate is sunnier.

The numbers are clear. Between 1995 and 2010 over $2 trillion in adjusted gross income moved between the states. That’s the equivalent of the GDP of California, the ninth largest GDP in the world. Some of the movement might be due to weather — that helps to explain some of Florida’s $86.4 billion gain and New York’s $58.6 billion loss. But we can attribute a great deal to the fact that capital flows to where it is best treated. Travis Brown, author of the new book How Money Walks, reports that the nine states without a personal income tax gained $146 billion in new wealth while the nine states with the highest income tax rates lost $107 billion. …

More on this with a focus on three states from Sam Brownback, Governor of Kansas. Interesting here is cooperation rather than competition.

Fifty years ago, in 1964, Ronald Reagan gave a famous speech widely broadcast on radio and television called “A Time for Choosing,” in which he described the contrast between two potential paths forward for our nation. One path was the continuation of the big-government policies of higher taxes, higher spending, soaring debt, more centralization of power in Washington, more regulation of the economy, more dependence on government programs . . . and less freedom.

The other path, the new path, he described would bring to our nation lower taxes, less spending, reduced deficits, less government dependence, less centralization of power . . . and more freedom. He described a path in which “the free men and women of this country” were not “the masses,” a “term we haven’t applied to ourselves in America.” He reminded us that “the full power of centralized government . . . was the very thing the Founding Fathers sought to minimize.” And that the Founding Fathers further understood that “outside of its legitimate functions, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the economy.”

Today some call that a choice between a “red state” or “blue state” model. I say it is a choice between dependence and self-reliance, between intrusion and freedom.

While President Obama continues to implement his big-government vision for the nation, Kansas and its neighbors in Missouri and Oklahoma are charting a course based on a vision of lower taxes and leaner governments leading to a more prosperous citizenry. Together our states are implementing taxes and regulatory policies that are building a Midwest renaissance. …