January 22, 2015

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Charles Krauthammer notes how President Talks-A-Lot has been mostly silent about the attacks in Paris.

… As for President Obama, he never was Charlie, not even for those 48 hours. From the day of the massacre, he has been practically invisible. At the interstices of various political rallies, he issued bits of muted, mealy-mouthed boilerplate. Followed by the now-famous absence of any high-ranking U.S. official at the Paris rally, an abdication of moral and political leadership for which the White House has already admitted error.

But this was no mere error of judgment or optics or, most absurdly, of communications in which we are supposed to believe that the president was not informed by staff about the magnitude, both actual and symbolic, of the demonstration he ignored. (He needed to be told?)

On the contrary, the no-show, following the near silence, precisely reflected the president’s profound ambivalence about the very idea of the war on terror. Obama began his administration by purging the phrase from the lexicon of official Washington. He has ever since shuttled between saying that (a) the war must end because of the damage “keeping America on a perpetual wartime footing” was doing to us, and (b) the war has already ended, as he suggested repeatedly during the 2012 campaign, with bin Laden dead and al-Qaeda “on the run.” …

 

 

From the president who normally can’t shut up, to the pope who also can’t shut up. David Harsanyi posts on the latest from Rome. 

We heathens can leave the theological debate to others.

But Pope Francis, the Bishop of Rome and world leader of the Catholic Church, has some ideas about laws governing the secular world. We expect Francis to defend the dignity of faith, to bring clarity to the Catholic position. Yet instead the Pope, while en route to the Philippines, offered a number of comments about freedom of expression that ranged from the unclear to the contradictory.

More than simply saying that poking fun at religion was ugly, he argued that there should be limits on freedom of expression and on mocking faith. (All this with the caveat that the Pope’s words were not misrepresented or taken out of context, as they so often are by the media.) …

… then the Vicar of Christ goes on to explain that those who mock faith should expect to be punched in the face. “If my good friend Dr. Gasparri says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch,” says Francis. “It’s normal. It’s normal. You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others.”

The Pope is unimpressed by provocateurs. He wants them barred.

Someone should ask the Pope if provocateurs should expect an asymmetrical response? For instance, if Gasparri uttered a curse word against the Pope’s mother, should he expect to his family blown up? That would be a more pertinent analogy. …

 

 

If that wasn’t enough, now he’s trying out slurs on Catholics saying they don’t have to breed “like rabbits.” USA Today has the story. We’re beginning to understand King Henry II when he asked, “Will No One Rid Me of This Meddlesome Priest?” 

Pope Francis, after a visit to the largest Catholic nation in Asia, says Catholics may have a moral responsibility to limit the number of their children and need not reproduce “like rabbits.”

But the pope also reaffirmed the church’s ban on artificial means of birth control and said Catholics should practice “responsible parenting.”

His comments on the subject of birth control, made aboard the papal jet returning to Rome from the Philippines, were described as apparently unprecedented by the National Catholic Reporter, an independent news organization that follows the Vatican. …

 

 

Matthew Continetti thinks liberals defending Charlie Hebdo freedoms are noticeably absent elsewhere in the struggle to be free.

… The unanimity of outrage expressed on Twitter, the unthinking allegiance to the cause of the hour whatever that cause might be, the social positioning of writers struggling to be the most pure, the most righteous, the most moving in their indignation—all of these things remind me of other scandals, of other rages, in which the targets were not Islamic terrorists but men and women who disagree with elements of liberal dogma.

Do liberals actually believe in the right to offend? Their attitude seems to me to be ambivalent at best. And this equivocation was apparent within hours of the attack, when news outlets censored or refused to publish the images for which the Charlie Hebdo editors were killed. Classifying satire or opinion as “hate speech” subject to regulation is not an aberration. It is commonplace.

Indeed, the outpouring of support for free speech in the aftermath of the Paris attack coincides with, and partially obscures, the degradation of speech rights in the West. Commencement last year was marked by universities revoking appearances by speakers Condoleezza Rice and Ayaan Hirsi Ali for no other reason than that mobs disagreed with the speakers’ points of view. I do not recall liberals rallying behind Condi and Hirsi Ali then.

Nor do I recall liberals standing up for the critics of global warming and evolutionary theory, of same-sex marriage and trans rights and women in combat, of riots in Ferguson and of Obama’s decision to amnesty millions of illegal immigrants. On the contrary: To dissent from the politically correct and conventional and fashionable is to invite rebuke, disdain, expulsion from polite society, to court the label of Islamophobe or denier or bigot or cisnormative or misogynist or racist or carrier of privilege and irredeemable micro-aggressor. For the right to offend to have any meaning, however, it cannot be limited to theistic religions. You must have the right to offend secular humanists, too.

Brendan Eich donated a thousand dollars to Proposition Eight in 2008. Six years later it cost him his job. In 2014, when Charles Krauthammer merely stated his agnosticism on the question of what causes global warming, liberals organized a petition demanding his removal from the Washington Post. A rather touchy climate scientist named Michael Mann—subtly parodied in Interstellar—has sued National Review and Mark Steyn for disagreeing with him. Last May, after some sensitive souls complained, the Chicago Sun-Times removed from its site a column by Kevin D. Williamson critical of transgender activism. No one wept for Kevin. …

  

 

Yes President Ungracious did speak last night. Byron York has some of the details.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the 2015 State of the Union address was not the president at the podium but the audience in the seats. The joint session of Congress listening to President Obama Tuesday night included 83 fewer Democrats than the group that heard Obama’s first address in 2009 — 69 fewer Democrats in the House and 14 fewer in the Senate. The scene in the House Chamber was a graphic reminder of the terrible toll the Obama years have taken on Capitol Hill Democrats.

Not that the president would ever acknowledge that. Indeed, in more than an hour of speaking, Obama never once acknowledged that there was a big election in November and that the leadership of the Senate has changed. Obama’s silence on that political reality stood in stark contrast to George W. Bush’s 2007 State of the Union address, in which he graciously and at some length acknowledged the Democrats’ victory in the 2006 midterms. Bush said it was an honor to address Nancy Pelosi as “Madam Speaker.” He spoke of the pride Pelosi’s late father would have felt to see his daughter lead the House. “I congratulate the new Democrat majority,” Bush said. “Congress has changed, but not our responsibilities.”

If one cannot imagine Obama saying such a thing — well, he didn’t. …

… Beyond failing to acknowledge the new reality on Capitol Hill, Obama at times seemed equally out of touch with reality both in the nation and the world.

“In Iraq and Syria, American leadership — including our military power — is stopping ISIL’s advance,” Obama said, referring to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. The claim left some foreign policy observers aghast, since there is a general consensus that the Islamic State is making progress in the face of limited American air attacks. “That just isn’t the case, according to military officials I’ve been speaking to,” NBC foreign correspondent Richard Engel said of Obama’s statement. “[The Islamic State] are taking new territory.” Of Obama’s description of a world in which the Islamic State is retreating, Afghanistan is on the road to peace, and terrorists are on the run from South Asia to North Africa, Engel concluded, “It sounded like the president was outlining a world that he wishes we were all living in.” …