By Andrew P. Napolitano
The president's men trash the Constitution to pursue antagonists
Independent voices from the TWT Communities
Chief Political Correctness High Priestess Diane Rehm, with one of her often-biased radio panel discussions, recently carried this ancient back to the late 1930s' Great Debate, framed as "isolationism" vs. "interventionism" in foreign policy. (Full disclosure: I was a teen-age member of William Allen White's Committee for Defending America by Aiding the Allies. Contrary to rumor, on Dec. 8, 1941, I was not refunded my $3.50 contribution taken from my weekly 25-cent "allowance.")
The only thing "new" in North Korea's new year is that their hell is under new management. "The great leader," Kim Jong-il, has been replaced by Kim Jong-un, "the great successor," but the state that causes incomprehensible misery for its unfortunate inhabitants continues tyrannically along.
President Obama's shock troops are marching in the streets. Occupy Wall Street - a movement composed of communists, anarchists, socialists and anti-globalization student radicals - is spreading. Protests have swelled in cities including New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver and Philadelphia. The protesters are gaining influence and numbers. A ragtag group of hippie students has turned into a potent political force.
Conservatives have a new celebrity spokesman-writer-thinker-philosopher. David Mamet, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, screenwriter, movie director and sometime essayist, has come out of the closet. No longer, he declares, is he a "brain-dead liberal." Now he's a wide-awake conservative. Sometime after arriving in Hollywood, of all places, and at age 60, he engaged in a conversation with his Republican rabbi (where did he find one?), who gave him the books of conservative writers, such as Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Milton Friedman and Paul Johnson.
As scientists learn ever more about genetics, they may soon discover the Chinese have two unique strands of DNA: a gambling gene and another for hospitality.
As a longtime conservative, I believe in building coalitions. We can't agree on everything, and it doesn't help the cause to concentrate on areas of disagreement.
History, as the co-founder of communism, Friedrich Engels, wrote, has a way of repeating itself, first as tragedy and a second time as farce.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who said "the ends justify the means" in "The Communist Manifesto," were merely more succinct.
