Keyword: jonahgoldberg
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WASHINGTON—It is now apparent that our President has lied to us. He lied when he crooned soothingly about improving the healthcare of millions of Americans through vast changes in health policy that would actually lower their costs. Those costs are now going up, and they are going up for almost everyone. They will not come down. He lied when he said we could keep our present healthcare policy. Those policies are rapidly disappearing. He lied again when he said we could keep our doctors. He lied when he said his plan would not involve rationing. I could go on, but...
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Watching President Obama's press conference Thursday, I almost started humming the old ditty the "Farmer in the Dell" because all I could think was: "The cheese stands alone." The president did his level best to explain that he was as in the dark as anybody about the problems with his signature legislation. He explained that he was not "informed directly" that the Healthcare.gov website was about as ready to run as a three-legged horse at the Preakness Stakes. Apparently, the old saw that the "buck stops" with the president never took into account the possibility that the buck could get...
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"Character is what you do when no one is watching." It's a bit of a trite saying, attributed to coaches, motivational speakers and fortune cookie writers (by the way, whose idea was it to replace fortune cookie predictions with treacly aphorisms from the "Successories" reject pile?). Still, the expression's popularity illustrates the power of the idea behind it. Character is what you do when the only controlling authority is your conscience. Because young people do not yet have fully formed characters, they often need incentives beyond exhortations to do the right thing. That's one reason most parents reward good behavior...
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Keep your doctor and your health plan? Not likely."All we've been hearing the last three years is if you like your policy you can keep it.... I'm infuriated because I was lied to," one woman told this newspaper, as part of a story on how some middle-class Californians have been stunned to learn the real costs of Obamacare. And that lie looks like the biggest lie about domestic policy ever uttered by a U.S. president. The most famous presidential lies have to do with misconduct (Richard Nixon's "I am not a crook" or Bill Clinton's "I did not have sexual...
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"All we've been hearing the last three years is if you like your policy you can keep it. ... I'm infuriated because I was lied to," one woman told the Los Angeles Times, as part of a story on how some middle-class Californians have been stunned to learn the real costs of Obamacare. And that lie looks like the biggest lie about domestic policy ever uttered by a U.S. president. The most famous presidential lies have to do with misconduct (Richard Nixon's "I am not a crook" or Bill Clinton's "I did not have sexual relations") or war. Woodrow...
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"We've got to get the Rockefeller Republicans out of the party," a fellow told me in Minnesota recently. Or was it Arizona? Or Wilkes-Barre, Pa.? Actually, I think it was all three. I hear it all the time as I travel around the country speaking to conservative groups. For those of you who don't know, the Rockefeller Republicans -- named after the former New York governor Nelson Rockefeller -- were the liberal, mostly Northeastern wing of the Republican Party. Liberal Republican sounds like a contradiction in terms today, particularly for young people who grew up in the age of strictly...
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"It's the law of the land." This is rapidly becoming the preferred shorthand argument for why criticism of Obamacare is just so, so wrong. It also serves as the lead sentence of a larger claim that all attempts to overturn the Affordable Care Act are really symptoms of a kind of extremist right-wing lunacy. For instance, here's Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who walked out of the painting "American Gothic" to deliver this homespun wisdom: "We're not going to bow to Tea Party anarchists who deny the mere fact that Obamacare is the law. We will not bow to Tea...
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She’s a rock star only because people keep calling her one. By Jonah Goldberg ‘I think she’s one of the most fascinating women of our time and this world,” confessed Bob Greenblatt, the chairman of NBC, as part of his announcement that his network is making a miniseries about former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, with Diane Lane in the starring role. Words are funny things. For instance, G.K. Chesterton once remarked that that the word “good” has many uses: “For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of 500 yards, I should call him...
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President Obama ran against cynicism — and defined his presidency by it. By Jonah Goldberg ‘My rival in this race,” President Obama announced early in 2007, “is not other candidates. It’s cynicism.” Sadly, it’s now evident cynicism won. In a much-hyped speech at Knox College on Wednesday, Obama sought to pivot back to the economy — as the journalistic cliché goes — and shape the issue environment for the 2014 congressional elections.
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Living large among the 1 percenters. By Jonah Goldberg If Tom Wolfe were writing The Bonfire of the Vanities today, he’d need a scene in the Grand Havana Room in New York City. It’s an Olympian den fit for what Wolfe called the “Masters of the Universe” — the super-rich gods of finance who today go by the name “the 1 percent.” Taking up the penthouse floor of 666 Fifth Avenue, the Grand Havana Room is a private, invitation-only cigar club and four-star restaurant. Through its windows, you can see the toiling salary men 39 floors below as they scurry...
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Rand Paul is the most interesting contender for the Republican nomination. And when I say interesting, I mean that in the broadest sense. A case in point: Last week, the Kentucky senator hit some turbulence when the Washington Free Beacon reported that Jack Hunter, Paul’s aide and the co-author of his book, The Tea Party Goes to Washington, was once the Southern Avenger. Who’s that? Starting in the 1990s, as a radio shock-jock, Hunter would wear a wrestling mask made from a Confederate flag, while making jokes about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and having the South re-secede. “Although Lincoln’s...
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Environmentalist killjoys pretend that this is the worst time in history to live on Earth. By Jonah Goldberg You just can’t out-gloom an environmentalist. The Atlantic invited some luminaries to answer the question “How and when will the world end?” Some contributions were funny. Others were simply plausible — a volcanic eruption from underneath Yellowstone National Park is frightfully overdue. But only an environmentalist like Bill McKibben could be a killjoy about the apocalypse itself.
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The libertarian idea is the only truly new political idea in the last couple thousand years. By Jonah Goldberg ‘Why are there no libertarian countries?” In a much-discussed essay for Salon, Michael Lind asks: “If libertarians are correct in claiming that they understand how best to organize a modern society, how is it that not a single country in the world in the early twenty-first century is organized along libertarian lines?”
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Sure, Obama probably didn’t order the IRS to discriminate. But he set the tone. By Jonah Goldberg Of course the president deserves some of the blame. Yes, it’s extremely unlikely he ordered the IRS to discriminate against tea-party, pro-life, or Jewish groups opposed to his agenda (though why anyone should take his word for it is beyond me). And his outrage now — however convenient — is appreciated. But when people he views as his “enemies” complained about a politicized IRS, what did he do? Nothing.
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Bad Faith and Benghazi: Hillary Clinton’s “whatever” defense falls flat. By Jonah Goldberg Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night and decided they’d go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make?” That was how then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton famously brushed off the question of when she knew that the attacks on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11 that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were, in fact, a terrorist assault and not a “protest” of an anti-Islam video that...
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If abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell is found guilty of homicide, he will be unique among murderers-for-hire: He set his fees based on weight. "The bigger the baby, the more he charged," a grand jury explained. It recommended he be charged with eight counts of murder -- one patient, seven babies. Despite what amounted to a blackout at many media outlets until last week, you've probably now heard at least some of the details. According to the grand jury report, Gosnell's Philadelphia "clinic" was a filthy abattoir. It stunk of urine. Flea-ridden cats defecated freely, including in procedure rooms. Fetuses...
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"What we've learned through the course of this program is that this is really not a sensible way for the healthcare system to be run." That was Gary Cohen, director of the Department of Health and Human Services' Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, talking. He was specifically responding to the apparently surprising need to halt enrollments in a program designed as a temporary bridge for people with preexisting conditions who couldn't wait until the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) fully kicks in next year. The program was allocated $5 billion, but some estimate it will take $40 billion...
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I’ve been out of pocket, so I missed most of the hullabaloo about Reverend Luis León’s indefensible Easter sermon at St. John’s Episcopal Church in front of the Obama family. Among his comments he said the “religious Right” wants “blacks to be back in the back of the bus, for women to be back in the kitchen, for gays to be in the closet, and for immigrants to be on their side of the border.” Once you get beyond the nasty, clichéd and divisive insinuations about conservatives being racists and the basic inappropriateness of the whole spectacle, it seems to...
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Just because things can be put on the same list doesn't mean they are necessarily similar. My attic contains within it thousands of comic books, an inflatable bed, some jigsaw puzzles, some family pictures and a "Frampton Comes Alive!" album. These things are, roughly speaking, in the same location, but they're hardly of equal value, importance or function. I bring this up for the simple reason that we're hearing a lot about how the GOP must deal with "abortion and gay marriage" as if they are almost the same issue. Well, in my house, I hear about my dog and...
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