It seems another demographic group Democrats once took for granted is snapping out of Obama fever. At the Daily Beast, David Graham reports that American Muslims don’t think the president’s actions match his pro-Islam rhetoric. Aside from insisting that Islam is a religion of peace and appointing a few Muslims to important positions, Obama hasn’t met enough with American Muslim groups or “remade the political landscape for Muslims”:

“Just like the last time, we’re quite happy if any president offers positive rhetoric toward the Muslim world or Islam, but it really needs to be backed up with concrete policy initiatives,” says Ibrahim Hooper, communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a leading American Muslim group. “We’re still in Afghanistan, we’re still in Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian situation has gone south. We’re not there—we’re just continuing with the previous policies.”

It’s not just foreign policy. Across the board, Muslims are expressing disappointment with Obama’s progress on issues relevant to them in the domestic policy realm. What they express is not so much anger as disillusionment, a recognition that the president hasn’t remade the political landscape for Muslims. (American Muslim opinions mirror international opinions. A Pew survey released Tuesday finds that citizens in majority Muslim countries remain skeptical of Obama.)

[…]

Exhibit A is the Park51 project, the proposed mosque and Islamic center in Lower Manhattan that opponents dubbed the “ground zero mosque”. After delivering what appeared to be a full-throated defense of the project, he walked back his comments the next day, saying, “I was not commenting, and I will not comment, on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there.” It was a crucial litmus test for many American Muslims—and one that Obama failed. “He’s still missing the political courage to stand up for communities, and not just Muslim communities,” says Shireen Zaman, the executive director of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, a think tank on Muslim issues.

As the Left always does when discussing different ethnic groups, it’s simply assumed at the outset that the positions cited are intrinsically anti-Muslim.

Whatever you think of the wisdom of starting or continuing the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, both conflicts were waged against specific governments the United States determined to be enemies, not against Muslims generally; indeed, both wars liberated their Muslim populations from nightmarish despots and gave them a genuine shot at liberty, so one could just as easily call a premature withdrawal from either theater anti-Muslim for enabling a descent back into totalitarianism.

Similarly, supporting the Ground Zero Mosque is only “pro-Muslim” to the extent that we associate that particular mosque with the radicalism of its organizers. Do Graham and Zaman mean to suggest that most American Muslims want sharia to be preached from a bloody site of Islamic conquest? The implication is far more Islamophobic than anything the average conservative has to say on the subject. And yes, that is the implication—considering that over 100 mosques have gone up in New York City without a peep from right-wing hatemongers, why make this particular mosque the litmus test for American tolerance?

Aside from CAIR-approved action on the preceding issues, just what are these groups looking for? What would a “remade political landscape for Muslims” look like? I submit that the United States doesn’t need to become more pro-Muslim. Polls indicate that the American people overwhelmingly distinguish between peaceful Muslims and jihad sympathizers, and a comprehensive study from the Center for Security Policy reveals that Muslims are targeted by hate crimes at comparable levels to Christians, and to a much lower degree than Jews. If anything, we go overboard in our fear of offending Muslims, as in the case of Ft. Hood shooter Major Nidal Hasan. We bend over backwards to avoid discussing the theological roots of our terrorist enemies.

For Obama, this is another demonstration that it takes a lot more than the sparkling personality of The One to satisfy people—responsible policymaking can’t help but offend somebody, and not every special-interest demand is susceptible to reason.

For the rest of the country, this should highlight the folly of leftist identity politics. Human beings are first and foremost individuals, and should evaluate political issues based on the facts and principles involved, not on superficial affinities for particular stances and groups that have been imposed by the Left.  The Founders warned us about such exploitation of factional impulses—it not only confuses and oversimplifies issues, all but guaranteeing worse policy, but it also conditions us to divide into insular cultural camps and practice the very us-vs-them thinking the Left claims to oppose.

Democrats were understandably thrilled that it was their guy, Barack Obama, who finally nailed Osama bin Laden, who has for the past decade been as elusive as he was hated. But just how much of a political boon is the victory for the president? That’s the question asked today by the Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky, who sees it as a major shift away from the Democrats’ dovish image:

But now, the killing of Osama bin Laden is changing this equation dramatically. Alleged Muslim Barack Obama did in two and a half years what Bush couldn’t do in seven and a half. It wasn’t just the result. The nature of the operation is still breathtaking, weeks later, and the risk Obama took, which he conveyed with masterful cool in his 60 Minutes interview, is mind-blowing (imagine if bin Laden hadn’t been there!). You can call the president who oversaw the operation many things, but weak isn’t one of them.

To talk as if there were two separate hunts for bin Laden is an astoundingly dishonest oversimplification. The truth is that American intelligence officials spent years following the key intelligence trail:

Some time after Sept. 11, detainees held by the U.S. told interrogators about a man believed to work as a courier for bin Laden, senior administration officials said. The man was described by detainees as a protégé of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and “one of the few Al Qaeda couriers trusted by bin laden.”

Initially, intelligence officials only had the man’s nickname, but they discovered his real name four years ago.

Two years ago, intelligence officials began to identify areas of Pakistan where the courier and his brother operated, and the great security precautions the two men took aroused U.S. suspicions.

Last August, intelligence officials tracked the men to their residence in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a relatively wealthy town 35 miles north of Islamabad where many retired military officers live […]

President Obama was made aware of the compound when it was discovered last year. By mid-February, the intelligence was solid and since mid-March, Obama led five meetings with the National Security Council regarding the issue.

Intelligence officials worked with the U.S. military to plan the operation and a small team accepted the risk and began to train for it.

On April 29, this past Friday, Obama gave the final go ahead.

The extent of Obama’s role in the operation was essentially allowing the work that began under Bush to continue, and giving the final OK once we were ready to move in. Granted, that final decision was an important one for which Obama deserves credit, but let’s not pretend he masterminded the whole thing, or that the choice was anything other than a political no-brainer—considering how much heat Bill Clinton took for letting bin Laden get away before September 11, it’s hard to imagine that most presidents would dare risk going down in history as the one who let him get away after 9/11.

Watching some Republicans’ first stabs at responding to the event was both sad and hilarious. Some were gracious (even Dick Cheney), but the propaganda machine and its envoys cranked out the usual bluster. They tried the this-proves-that-torture-works argument, pinned to a slender reed involving a man named Abu Faraj al-Libi, but the known facts don’t support the contention that torture played a major role. Then Bush administration torture-policy architect John Yoo played against type by asserting that it was cowardly to kill bin Laden rather than taking him alive. Things finally reached self-parody when Andrew Card of the Bush White House (the one that declared “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq roughly 4,200 fatalities ago) snarked that Obama was pounding his chest too much.

No doubt there are some Republican partisans who’ve been nitpicking for political expediency, but Tomasky also belittles serious points, particularly regarding the effectiveness of harsh interrogation tactics. As former attorney general Michael Mukasey writes, waterboarding helped break Khalid Sheik Mohammed:

KSM disclosed the nickname — al Kuwaiti — along with a wealth of other information, some of which was used to stop terror plots then in progress.  He did so after refusing to answer questions and, when asked if further plots were afoot, said that his interrogators would eventually find out. Another detainee, captured in Iraq, disclosed that al Kuwaiti was a trusted operative of KSM’s successor, abu Faraj al-Libbi. When al-Libbi went so far as to deny even knowing the man, his importance became obvious.

The substance of Obama’s role in the Abbottabad raid aside, the politics aren’t such a slam-dunk either. A fair amount of voters were swayed at first, and Obama will be able to carry this superficially appealing talking point with him into the election, but whatever bounce he got in the polls seems to have disappeared. And as Tomasky notes, Obama is still vulnerable on other aspects of foreign policy, including his handling of our relationship with Israel, our continued presence in Libya, and the prospect of cutting defense spending.

Unlike the relatively easy call of ordering Osama bin Laden’s death, there is no bipartisan consensus on any of these issues, and they all require the president to make far more complex—and more consequential—value judgments. If the American people recognize the difference, Obama will still have a fight on his hands next year.

Ron Paul’s descent into self-parody continues. Earlier this week, the newly official presidential candidate offered his unique take on the mission that killed Osama bin Laden:

“I think things could have been done somewhat differently,” Paul said this week. “I would suggest the way they got Khalid [Sheikh] Mohammed. We went and cooperated with Pakistan. They arrested him, actually, and turned him over to us, and he’s been in prison. Why can’t we work with the government?”

Asked by WHO Radio’s Simon Conway whether he would have given the go-ahead to kill bin Laden if it meant entering another country, Paul shot back that it “absolutely was not necessary.”

“I don’t think it was necessary, no. It absolutely was not necessary,” Paul said during his Tuesday comments. “I think respect for the rule of law and world law and international law. What if he’d been in a hotel in London? We wanted to keep it secret, so would we have sent the airplane, you know the helicopters in to London, because they were afraid the information would get out?”

Actually, there are conflicting reports about the possibility that the United States did have Pakistan’s permission to get bin Laden on our own if we got a bead on him. Now, your guess is as good as mine as to who’s telling the truth, but something tells me that getting the details straight wouldn’t change Paul’s opinion. Either way, one wonders if Paul has ever stopped to consider the fact that bin Laden spent six years in a sizeable compound built in a town dominated by the Pakistani Army, and wonder how that little detail could have possibly escaped the Pakistanis’ notice.

Ed Morrissey succinctly explains what should be obvious to a veteran congressman who’s been active in foreign policy debates for years:

For one thing, had we found him holed up in London, we would have been able to trust the British intelligence service to cooperate.  MI-5 didn’t spend more than a decade helping to build up the Taliban and playing footsie with radical Islamists the way Pakistan’s ISI did, primarily as a bulwark against India.  Moreover, as Paul should know, we tried trusting Pakistan once before on an opportunity to target bin Laden when Bill Clinton had a chance to target his compound.  The ISI warned bin Laden, and to paraphrase President George Bush, we wound up sending a $10 million rocket into a ten-dollar tent to hit a camel’s butt.

Paul also implies that it would have been preferable to take bin Laden alive. While a live bin Laden could conceivably have been a valuable intelligence source, our experience with how to prosecute Zacarias Moussaoui and Khalid Sheik Mohammed suggest that the question of how to try the terror kingpin would have been an even bigger circus. Nor is the fact that we killed him worth losing sleep over morally—serving lethal justice to the planet’s worst evildoers sends a message to the world about what we will and won’t tolerate. And whether or not he was armed when the SEALs took him down is irrelevant; would we really want our soldiers to have risked the possibility that bin Laden had been wearing a bomb vest, or had booby-trapped the room?

Lastly, I’d like to draw Paulestinians’ attention to the bit about respect for “world law and international law” (we can skip the “rule of law” at home for now, since we already know he doesn’t respect that). I’ll be the first to agree that America shouldn’t simply disregard foreign laws whenever we’d like, but the extreme degree to which Paul takes it here goes way beyond responsible caution and into blind, unconditional deference, without regard for practical necessity or whether or not a particular nation is a good-faith actor. This brand of “non-interventionism” is hardly the sort of prudence championed by true conservatives and libertarians; it’s an internationalist submission of the United States’ interests and foreign policy to the interests of friend and foe alike, and as such is much more at home on the Left.

If that’s what you’re looking for in a presidential candidate, that’s one thing. But can we please dispense with the nonsense that Ron Paul is some sort of infallible arbiter of “true” conservatism?

Barack Obama is a man of many talents. Some presidents might be content to wreck the nation’s finances and display confused impotence to our enemies, but Obama also takes the time to needlessly poison America’s cultural well. Last night, Sean Hannity took the president to task for including Lonnie Rashid Lynn, Jr., AKA rapper/poet “Common,” on the docket of a White House celebration of American prose.

Common’s prose covers all the bases of lefty thug culture, including railing against supposed warmongers:

Burn a Bush cos’ for peace he no push

No button

Killing over oil and grease

No weapons of destruction

How can we follow a leader when this a corrupt one

And resentment of the law as the mortal enemy of blacks, who might want to consider packing heat, just in case:

Tell the law my Uzi weighs a ton

I walk like a warrior, from them I won’t run

On the streets they try to beat us like a drum

In Cincinnati another brother hung

Common is also a friend and defender of Obama’s old pal Jeremiah Wright—in 2008 he claimed what he “picked up from the pews…was messages of love.” Why, even love for the “US of KKK-A,” and those in the CIA who cooked up AIDS to decimate the black population! I don’t know about you, but I can certainly feel the love!

Of course, keeping in line with Wright, Common is also a racist. John Nolte revealed at Big Hollywood that Common disapproves of interracial relationships.

The usual defense of these guys is something along the lines of, “they may not be role models, but they’re not writing for kids.” Someone should tell that to Common himself, who says he is trying to “reach out and say something” inspiring to children, especially those who “don’t have parents around.” My hero.

In response to the uproar, the White House simply says that Common’s words has been distorted and that cop-killing isn’t the sum total of his work. Obama has never exactly been a crusader against filth in pop culture, but he did take a harder line as a candidate, when he called out rappers who degraded women and wrote in The Audacity of Hope (paperback pp. 60-61):

Progressives in particular seem confused on this point, which is why we so often get our clocks cleaned in elections. I recently gave a speech at the Kaiser Family Foundation after they released a study showing that the amount of sex on television has doubled in recent years. Now I enjoy HBO as much as the next guy, and I generally don’t care what adults watch in the privacy of their homes. In the case of children, I think it’s primarily the duty of parents to monitor what they are watching on television, and in my speech I even suggested that everyone would benefit if parents—heaven forbid—simply turned off the TV and tried to strike up a conversation with their kids.

Having said all that, I indicated that I wasn’t too happy with ads for erectile-dysfunction drugs popping up every fifteen minutes whenever I watched a football game with my daughters in the room. I offered the further observation that a popular show targeted at teens, in which young people with no visible means of support spend several months getting drunk and jumping naked into hot tubs with strangers, was not “the real world.”

It’s one thing that Barack Obama has been largely AWOL on race relations since becoming the nation’s biggest black role model, but now he’s elevating part of the problem. “Inspiring” black children with the message that the police everywhere are naturally inclined to oppress them not only stokes division and racial resentment, it can’t help but undermine the rule of law by conditioning mistrust for one of the government entities that actually is essential to society. The Common invite highlights how yet another of the promises of Obama’s election was never more than a pipe dream: the promise that he would lead America into a post-racial age.

Conservatives who are still under the delusion that they can persuade the Left to tone down their rhetorical attacks and play nice would do well to check out Howard Kurtz’s latest column on the Daily Beast, which gives us yet another round of hypocritical finger waving over the Republican Party’s “liability on the fringe.”

Kurtz begins with, of course, the Birthers:

The [House Republican] caucus has 85 new members, more than 30 of whom are new to elective office—“the kamikazes,” they are privately called—and some took strong exception to being urged not to talk about President Obama’s birth certificate. “Well, I don’t think he was born in this country,” one freshman snapped.

A lone quote from a single unnamed GOP freshman, who represents “some” of a group of thirty or so? I guess they just don’t make epidemics the way they used to.

The birther nonsense seems especially pointless—and corrosive—when one considers that Obama was planning the helicopter raid that would kill Osama bin Laden days later, as he was releasing his long-form Hawaii certificate. Conservative author David Frum says bin Laden’s death should end the racially charged insinuations “that President Obama’s identity and loyalties lie elsewhere.”

Frum is no wild-eyed rebel; he helped coin the phrase “axis of evil” in the Bush White House and opposes virtually all of Obama’s agenda.

Don’t you just love it when lefties presume to tell us which conservatives to take seriously? I’m not sure what Kurtz means by “wild-eyed rebel,” but David Frum’s opinion here is meaningless, considering he’s made a cottage industry out of erecting “far-right” straw men he can loudly denounce so publications like the Daily Beast will fawn over how Serious and Responsible he is. Irresponsible attacks (racial or otherwise) against Obama obviously shouldn’t be tolerated, but they should be rejected on their own merits, not because he nailed bin Laden. Likewise, the political no-brainer of taking out the world’s most wanted terrorist shouldn’t insulate the president from substantive critiques of his “identity and loyalties,” like Matthew Vadum’s. Making bad decisions neither justifies dishonest attacks against you nor exempts you from honest ones.

These are the rumblings of slow-motion earthquake, a tectonic shift that may well redefine what it means to be a Republican. What was truly appalling about the birther craziness is how many in the GOP refused either to criticize those peddling the crackpot conspiracy theory—which included Donald Trump—instead offering a wink, a nod, and passive phraseology about taking the president at his word.

Yeah, nobody in the GOP or on the Right is willing to cross the Birthers…well, unless you count Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, Michael Steele, National Review, Human Events, American Spectator, Glenn Beck, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, Andrew Breitbart, Hot Air,  Townhall, Red State, and NewsRealBlog. Besides, Birther numbers have plummeted since Obama finally released the thing, suggesting that at least a fair chunk of them really were just suspicious about the president’s apparent reluctance to release it, and that they’re happy to move on now that their curiosity’s been satisfied.

Ah, but hold on, Kurtz says, nuttiness “goes well beyond” Birtherism:

It has roots in John McCain putting Sarah Palin on the ticket. Right-leaning commentators who assailed Palin as unqualified were either excoriated (Kathleen Parker got 12,000 hostile e-mails, some saying she should have been aborted), forced out (Christopher Buckley purged from National Review, the magazine founded by his father), or fired (Frum losing his job at American Enterprise Institute).

Of course, McCain couldn’t possibly have picked Palin because he really thought she’d be a good running mate! (Also, apparently Palin on the bottom of the ticket is proof that the party’s dominated by hard-nosed fanatics, while Maverick’s presence at the top of the ticket means nothing.) I’m sorry that anonymous people on the Internet said mean things about Parker, but that kind of comes with the territory. Christopher Buckley (who, recall, not only disliked Palin but endorsed Obama) wasn’t “purged”; according to editor Rich Lowry, Buckley offered to resign from what was actually a fill-in position for the then-on-hiatus Mark Steyn anyway. Nor was Frum—AEI says they let him go because he hadn’t exactly been earning his keep for some time.

Is the GOP becoming a smaller tent where dissent is grounds for banishment?

Someone’s always carping about imaginary crackdowns from GOP thought police. And yet somehow, we never seem to feel the effects of any such crackdown.

Veteran congressman Mike Castle was booed at a 2009 town meeting when he told an angry woman waving a birth certificate that Obama is a citizen; voters dumped him for Christine O’Donnell in a Senate primary. Former Sen. Alan Simpson, calling the birther flap “absurd,” tells me the GOP is being pulled toward an unrelenting focus on social issues: “If the new paradigm is a test of purity, we haven’t got a prayer.”

Delaware voters had many reasons to boo Castle aside from Birtherism—the guy’s positions were so far to the left on economics, social issues, and defense that one wonders why he even bothered to run as a Republican. Aren’t voters allowed to side with candidates they agree with on the issues? If not, then what’s the point of primaries?

Not everyone agrees. Former Newt Gingrich aide Tony Blankley says “both parties have their extremes, and their leadership can’t embrace them. But you never want to disperse the energy of your supporters. It has to be managed.” Maybe, but Democrats have never enabled the Bush-caused-9/11 nuts this way.

No, prominent elected Democrats just post at Daily Kos, compare Republicans to Nazis, endorse Michael Moore’s conspiratorial lies, and attend churches led by racists. Completely different!

Howard Kurtz and his ilk show little interest in creating original arguments against the Right, and they barely even try to disguise or justify the misdirection and double standards they’ve been recycling for years. If the prevalence of these reruns doesn’t convince you that the Liberal Inquisition can’t be appeased, nothing will.

Despite a string of recent defeats, including the re-election of incumbent Republican Judge David Prosser and the failure of efforts to recall GOP state senators Glenn Grothman and Mary Lazich, the Wisconsin Left hasn’t given up the fight over Governor Scott Walker’s government employee union reforms, and they’re just as willing as ever to fight dirty.

WTMJ radio host Charlie Sykes has the audio and transcript of Stephen Richards, a tenured University of Wisconsin Oshkosh criminal justice professor, beginning his class with eight minutes of not only proselytizing against the reforms, but also bringing in student activists to collect signatures, during class, for the recall effort against GOP state Senator Randy Hopper (full disclosure: Hopper represents my district). Why?

And the reason you see this on campus a lot is that, um, the effect of the, of Walker’s budget on this university is number one, will be an eight percent pay cut for all faculty and staff, eight percent pay cut.

Um, there’ll be um, there’ll be a legal [inaudible] to be, belong to a union. [CF: The audio sounds to me like he’s saying, “it’ll be illegal for us to be, belong to a union.”] And you should know that, um all the faculty, janitors, maintenance people secretaries, they all belong to a union, they’re all in a union right now.  So there union will be decertified.

Um, that um, and this affects teachers, professors, parole officers, corrections officers, and a lot of police and fire.  Police and fire are not exempt from this.

Um, all public employees. So the uh, big salary cuts, uh is eight to ten percent of their wages are cut, um, not just one year but from here on out, um and, um um, they’ll make it so that we won’t be able to belong to unions.

What he means by pay cut is actually the modest reduction to benefits we’ve been over before. The claim that employees simply “won’t be able to belong to unions” is a bald-faced lie; the bill merely makes union contributions voluntary (leave it to leftists, though, to deem the coercive status quo as freedom and damn its reform as tyranny). Richards is also lying when he says police and fire unions aren’t exempted; in fact, seeing how that very point was used as an anti-Walker talking point, it’s hard to imagine he had any other intention but to deceive in saying otherwise.

In the clip, he also encourages a student who lives outside of Hopper’s district to sign anyway (don’t worry, he’s pretty sure the fine, upstanding citizens in charge “just won’t count” it if it’s invalid), and tells students to use their campus address rather than their parents’ when signing. And most disconcertingly, he says:

I think there’s about one hundred faculty that are doing this on this campus.

There’s also the question of how exactly a political dispute over government spending and union regulations pertains to a class about criminal justice. Oh, and did I mention that this criminal justice professor was a convicted drug dealer? On his RateMyProfessors.com profile and according to Sykes’ readers, the general consensus seems to be that Richards is an inattentive teacher who spends more time bloviating on his past and his pet causes than he does the class’s subject matter.

Richards has apologized for “not showing more restraint,” and UW Oshkosh Chancellor Richard Wells has released a statement condemning Richards’ behavior, claiming “agreed-upon corrective action” has been taken (though he won’t tell us what it is), and that feedback from Richards’ students has the administration satisfied that this “isolated incident” (no word on Richards’ claim of “about one hundred faculty” doing the same thing) is resolved and won’t happen again. Funny—that’s not what one of his students anonymously emailed to Sykes:

I’m sitting in Dr. (I use that term loosely) Richards’ class as I’m writing this. Just wanted to let you know that instead of apologizing for his actions and everything that has come out in the last couple days, he scolded us. He started by telling us that he has had a police escort all day due to death threats. He then proceeded to tell us that it is illegal to record a professor without his/her permission. He stated that “anyone has any smart phones or recording devices, to turn them off or leave.” He then proceeded to tell us that he could have charged those students with some sort of BS crime and had us arrested and kicked out of school. His rant has been going on for the better part of 20 minutes now and isn’t showing any signs of slowing down or stopping. Just like his political rants which take place multiple times per week, this is the kind of crap that disrupts our opportunity to learn at an institution of higher education.

So to recap, we have an ex-con with a tenured position poorly teaching criminal justice who uses class time to collect signatures to recall politicians he dislikes and takes it out on his students when he gets caught, and all superiors will do is slap him on the wrist while showing no interest in investigating his claim that many of his colleagues are doing the same thing. And the people of Wisconsin are paying for it all.

Disgraces like this, sadly, are nothing new in the academic world, and they aren’t going away until three things happen. First, many more parents need to pay much closer attention to the kind of education their kids are getting, and put pressure on those in charge to take serious corrective measures. Second, students need to ask themselves if these are the kind of schools they really want to support with their business (believe it or not, there are still places in America where a real education is possible). And third, conservatives in elected office must have the guts to give these institutions an ultimatum: take the public’s trust seriously, or lose taxpayer funding. There is no reason the American people should have to subsidize the rope used to hang them.

Most of the nation is still celebrating the elimination of Osama bin Laden, the monster behind one of the worst days in American history. Some are relieved bin Laden can no longer aid the jihadist cause; others take pleasure in knowing the suffering he caused us has been partially repaid.

But at least one voice is having none of it. At the Huffington Post, “specialist in transformational change” (whatever that means) Dr. Pamela Gerloff writes that celebrating bin Laden’s death is mentally unhealthy and geopolitically dangerous:

“Celebrating” the killing of any member of our species–for example, by chanting USA! USA! and singing The Star Spangled Banner outside the White House or jubilantly demonstrating in the streets–is a violation of human dignity. Regardless of the perceived degree of “good” or “evil” in any of us, we are all, each of us, human. To celebrate the killing of a life, any life, is a failure to honor life’s inherent sanctity.

Plenty of people will argue that Osama Bin Laden did not respect the sanctity of others’ lives. To that I would ask, “What relevance does that have to our own actions?” One aspect of being human is our ability to choose our own behavior; more specifically, our capacity to return good for evil, love for hate, dignity for indignity. While Osama Bin Laden was widely considered to be the personification of evil, he was nonetheless a human being. A more peaceable response to his killing would be to mourn the many tragedies that led up to his violent death and the thousands of violent deaths that occurred in the attempt to eliminate him from the face of the Earth; and to feel compassion for anyone who, because of their role in the military or government, American or otherwise, has had to play a role in killing another. This kind of compassion can be cultivated, as practitioners of many different spiritual traditions will attest […]

It is hard not to think that some of the impulse to celebrate “justice being done” may also contain a certain pleasure in revenge–not just “closure” but “getting even.” The world is not safer with Osama Bin Laden’s violent demise (threat levels are going up, not down); evil has not been finally removed from the Earth; the War on Terror goes on–so any celebration must be tempered with the sobering fact that much work still needs to be done to establish peace.

There’s a lot to unpack here, most of it awful. But first, for the sake of fairness and decency one fair point must be acknowledged: If we truly recognize the intrinsic worth of all human life, we have to recognize that even the worst among us have souls, warped and polluted though they may be, and be careful not to think casually of any killing—even just and necessary killing, as bin Laden’s death clearly was. Now, I’d be lying if I told you I haven’t found some satisfaction in the confidence that Osama now knows the afterlife isn’t quite what he expected, but I also have to admit those thoughts don’t live up to the standard my Savior has set for me.

So we shouldn’t take pleasure in exacting bloody vengeance, but there is another aspect to the celebration that is entirely appropriate. As I survey the reactions of friends, acquaintances, and pundits, it seems to me bloodlust is not the primary animating force of their celebration. Justice is. People are celebrating the fact that an act of tremendous evil has been punished, ensuring that bin Laden will never again threaten the United States and sending a clear message to our surviving enemies: hurt us, and we’ll find you, no matter where on earth you go, no matter how long it takes. And when we do, you won’t like what comes next.

Celebrating the destruction and punishment of evil is not only a proper impulse in a free society it’s a necessary one. Quite simply, a society that does not strongly embrace and venerate the punishment of evil is a society that is incapable of survival.

Gerloff’s failure to understand this is bad, but it’s not what makes her piece one of the most disgustingly immoral things I’ve read in recent memory. No, that would be the moral equivalence between America and the jihadists who want us dead. “Good” and “evil” are placed in scare quotes. We’re told a better response would be to “feel compassion” for anyone involved in any military or government who “has had to play a role in killing another,” as if a drone strike on a terrorist hideout and detonating yourself in a crowded subway are equally tragic. And then there’s this:

The truth is that “celebrating justice” when one person is killed–as happens regularly in the gang wars of American cities–only incites further desire for revenge, which, from “the other side’s” viewpoint, is usually called “justice.”

Consider this: If a leader in our country were killed in the manner in which Osama Bin Laden was killed, as “justice” for his acts of aggression in the War on Terror–and supporters of that act were shown proudly chanting their country’s name, singing their national anthem, and demonstrating in the streets–Americans would likely feel more sickened than joyful, wouldn’t you think? The impulse to celebrate a death depends on what side you’re on.

It doesn’t matter how little you think of Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, or any American leader. It doesn’t matter how much you disagree with US military operations in Libya, Pakistan, Iraq, or Afghanistan. There is no comparison between any of our leaders or actions and those of al Qaeda, Hamas, or Hezbollah. “The other side” might say their cause is justice and ours is revenge, and some might even believe it. But reality is what it is regardless of “viewpoints.” Those who seek to kill and dominate infidels are the bad guys, and the ones trying to stop them are the good guys.

Period.

If the rest of the country were so foolish as to believe that the key to peace with monsters is quashing the celebration of monsters’ deaths, the ensuing suffering would be staggering. However unhealthy the “psychology of revenge” may be, it pales in comparison to the poison that is the neurosis of moral equivalency.

We knew this was coming. No American victory in this day and age, not even the long-overdue death of terror mastermind Osama bin Laden, is safe from political hijacking by the useful idiots of the Left.  Within hours of hearing the good news, left-wing Daily Beast flunky Peter Beinart took to the keyboard to declare that the War on Terror is finally over.

Wow, what a relief! So that means Iran’s nuclear program is kaput? Er, no. Well, maybe it means the UN Security Council has stopped playing nice with Middle Eastern thug regimes. Wait, that didn’t happen, either. I know – peace between Israel and the Palestinians is finally in sight! Nope, try again. Um, then maybe anti-American sentiment among Muslim populations is waning? Uh-uh.

If none of that’s the case, then what does Beinart mean?

I don’t mean that there is no threat of further jihadist attack. In the short term, the threat may even rise. I don’t mean that we should abandon all efforts at tracking terrorist cells. Of course not. But the war on terror was a way of seeing the world, explicitly modeled on World War II and the Cold War. It suggested that the struggle against “radical Islam” or “Islamofascism” or “Islamic terrorism” should be the overarching goal of American foreign policy, the prism through which we see the world […] It made East Asia an afterthought during a critical period in China’s rise; it allowed all manner of dictators to sell their repression in Washington, just as they had during the Cold War; it facilitated America’s descent into torture; it wildly exaggerated the ideological appeal of a jihadist-Salafist movement whose vision of society most Muslims find revolting.

Bin Laden’s death is an opportunity to lay the war on terror to rest as well. Although President Obama avoids the phrase, its assumptions still drive our war in Afghanistan, a crushingly expensive adventure in nation building in a desperately poor country whose powerful neighbor wants us to fail. Those assumptions fuel anti-Muslim racism in the United States, where large swaths of the Republican Party have decided they are at risk of living under Sharia law. And they blind us to the differences among Islamist movements, allowing Glenn Beck and company to depict Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood as al Qaeda’s farm team.

Instead, we can now take on real problems, like debt and China. Because Barack Obama has been such a crusader on those issues so far.

I’m struggling to decide what the most contemptible part of this screed is. Is it the insane implication that Obama taking one problem less seriously will lead to him taking the others more seriously, despite his manifest unseriousness towards both? The way he relies on his own past smears of conservatives as Islamophobes to prop up his latest thesis? Where he casually says, oh by the way, the Cold War was no big deal either?

I don’t know what the sleaziest element is, but it’s easy to see which one is the most dangerous:

The war on terror is over; Al Qaeda lost.

This has perhaps been no greater point of contention between hawks and doves since the September 11 attacks: is the War on Terror simply an effort to destroy the terrorist organization under whose banner 9/11 was carried out, or is it a larger struggle against the broader ideological movement of which al Qaeda was but one part?

I hate to break it to you, but despite the loss of their leader, al Qaeda has by no means been neutered, and either way, they’re far from the only Islamofascist game in town. Extremists have won a string of governments throughout the Middle East, and in particular, NRB’s Moshe Phillips notes that Hamas is still kicking. Indeed, learning where bin Laden was hiding—right under the noses of our Pakistani “allies”—should be enough to illustrate why it’s a bit early to herald a new era of U.S.-Mideast relations.

Then again, it’s not as if any of the above would change Peter Beinart’s mind—recall that according to him, the War on Terror has never been a war. Whether Osama bin Laden’s relaxing in a compound or sleeping with the fishes means nothing to him; he’d be saying it’s time to pack up regardless. In that sense, his entire column is a farce—bin Laden’s death is just the latest pretext of seriousness he’s using to whine, “are we there yet?”

Editor’s note: click here for NRB’s comic artist Bosch Fawstin’s take on this issue.

Once upon a time, superheroes were a source of comfort and escape from the difficulties and ugliness of real life. While real-life recession and terrorism aren’t likely to meet any tidy resolutions soon, we can always count on Batman to solve the Riddler’s latest puzzle just in time, or Spider-Man to save the damsel in distress (well, usually).

Somewhere along the line, though, it was decided that our heroes had to grapple with real-world issues. When done sparingly and handled well, this can elevate the genre, such as Harry Osborn’s battle with drugs or 2008’s brilliant The Dark Knight. But more often than not, such efforts these days instead result in train wrecks of heavy-handed political proselytizing and moral confusion.

Such is the case with the latest development in DC Comics’ Action Comics #900, in which Superman decides he has to renounce his U.S. citizenship:

In it, Superman consults with the President’s national security advisor, who is incensed that Superman appeared in Tehran to non-violently support the protesters demonstrating against the Iranian regime, no doubt an analogue for the recent real-life protests in the Middle East. However, since Superman is viewed as an American icon in the DC Universe as well as our own, the Iranian government has construed his actions as the will of the American President, and indeed, an act of war.

Superman replies that it was foolish to think that his actions would not reflect politically on the American government, and that he therefore plans to renounce his American citizenship at the United Nations the next day — and to continue working as a superhero from a more global than national perspective. From a “realistic” standpoint it makes sense; it would indeed be impossible for a nigh-omnipotent being ideologically aligned with America to intercede against injustice beyond American borders without creating enormous political fallout for the U.S. government.

First, it’s interesting to note that the story’s starting dispute comes dangerously close to a damning indictment of Barack Obama for not taking a stronger stand on the Iranian protests of summer 2009, which is surprising coming from an iconic cultural mainstay and a major entertainment company. And while John Hawkins is right to note that there are certain practical difficulties with throwing someone as powerful as Superman into geopolitical situations, I can see definite story potential in exploring the tension between Superman’s no-nonsense moral clarity and the empty suits on Capitol Hill.

But renouncing his citizenship? That goes far beyond distancing himself from any particular policy or administration. As an alien raised on a Kansas farm who grows up to fight for truth, justice, and the American way both as a superhero and as a newspaper reporter, Superman’s American identity and values have always been central to the character. That’s not to say he should be a pawn of the government, or that he should never save the day overseas, but it does mean he can’t simply switch who he is at will.

At the heart of this concept seems to be a recurring leftist inability to distinguish a nation’s citizens from her government. Superman’s not a government agent; he doesn’t need to be a “global citizen” to act independently of Uncle Sam.

Gutting his patriotism isn’t the only way the Man of Steel has been badly mishandled in recent years; remember when 2006’s lukewarm Superman Returns had him impregnate Lois Lane, then leave the planet for years? It makes you wonder: who do we turn to when our heroes are the ones who need saving?

As the White House deals a devastating blow to one Obama conspiracy theory, leave it to leftists to dig up another one to browbeat allegedly-bigoted conservatives with. At the Daily Beast, pseudo-feminist Michelle Goldberg “traces the far-right history of the claim” that something funny’s going on with Barack Obama’s academic background:

Claims about Obama’s educational history date back to September 2008, when The Wall Street Journal attacked him for not releasing his school records, writing in an editorial, “Some think his transcript, if released, would reveal Mr. Obama as a mediocre student who benefited from racial preference.” Since then, Orly Taitz, queen of the birthers, has developed elaborate theories about Obama’s college years. As Taitz argues, Obama himself acknowledged that he was directionless when he started college. How, then, did he get himself accepted into the Ivy League?

Despite purporting to refute the right-wing “fever swamps,” Goldberg won’t actually reference the WSJ piece again, so it’s worth mentioning that it makes substantive points, among them that the ambiguity of Obama’s college days doesn’t square with the prominence of his personal story in his claim to fame. And as Andy McCarthy points out, Obama has a habit of modifying details of his biography for different audiences. (Ace has more solid analysis of Obama’s college days here.)

But not a peep about any of this from Goldberg. Instead of addressing what serious Obama critics have said, she spends the next couple paragraphs shooting down the theories of Orly Taitz, an especially destructive Birther attorney, who speculates that Obama attended Columbia as a foreign exchange student, attended for a mere nine months instead of two years, and even that he got into Harvard Law thanks to the machinations of a Saudi prince.

Whatever the fact-to-crap ratio of Taitz’s allegations may be (the Saudi connection seems outlandish, but the explanation of the National Student Clearinghouse rep, who says Taitz got bad results from submitting queries to NSC’s database incorrectly, doesn’t seem adequate either), it’s ultimately a sideshow. The point is, Goldberg is making clowns like Orly Taitz the face of the opposition rather than McCarthy or the Wall Street Journal editorial board because she wants to delegitimize their argument without addressing it. Why? Why else—race-baiting:

It’s easy enough to see why this particular narrative has endured. Not only does it position the president as a Muslim Manchurian candidate with longtime ties to agents of the caliphate, but it also assures resentful whites that this seemingly brilliant black man isn’t so smart after all. In that sense, it’s of a piece with the right-wing obsession with Obama’s use of a teleprompter, and with the widespread suspicion that he didn’t really write the eloquent Dreams From My Father, a claim Trump recently made at a Tea Party rally. Obama, in this view, is both sinister and stupid, canny enough to perpetrate one of the biggest frauds in American history but still the ultimate affirmative-action baby.

Trump is clearly not as intelligent as Obama, but he’s not an idiot, either. When he blows this particular dog whistle, he knows exactly what the Republican base is hearing.

No, the Right’s desire to knock Obama’s brain down a peg is a reaction to the endless mainstream media narrative that conservatives and Republicans are morons, while Obama is a genius (indeed, look no further than Goldberg’s own unsupported claim that Donald Trump’s intellect “clearly” pales in comparison to The One’s). To demonstrate the absurdity of claiming this is about Obama’s race, let’s perform a little thought experiment.

Imagine for a moment that instead of black Democrat President Barack Obama, we currently have white Democrat President Barry Osborn, who, aside from his racial and ethnic background, is identical to Obama in every way—same handling of the economy, same healthcare plan, same treatment of Israel, and the same positions on abortion, guns, etc. Then take any of the claims listed above—the president isn’t that bright, he didn’t write his book, he’s helpless without a teleprompter. Regardless of their particular merits, simply ask yourself: do you really think we’d be treating Osborn any more favorably than Obama? Do you think we’d pull these punches against a white ideological opponent, or be more open to left-wing ideas just because they came from a white leftist?

Of course not. Leftists understood from the start that Obama’s skin color would make a potent weapon for smearing opponents instead of engaging their ideas, which is exactly what Michelle Goldberg has done here.

Conservatives frequently make unfavorable comparisons between Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter, but it’s a rarer occurrence to see leftists do the same. So when a lefty zealot like Eric Alterman does precisely that in his latest Daily Beast article, it’s bound to raise eyebrows, though it shouldn’t—where The One reminds right-wingers of Carter through his international and economic ineptness, Alterman sees Obama aping some very different traits from his predecessor:

The gregarious Massachusetts pol, House Speaker Tip O’Neil, could hardly have been more eager to work with a Democratic president after eight years of Nixon and Ford. But when they first met, and O’Neil attempted to advise Carter about which members of Congress might need some special pleading, or even the assorted political favor or two with regard to certain issues, to O’Neil’s open-jawed amazement, Carter replied, “No, I’ll describe the problem in a rational way to the American people. I’m sure they’ll realize I’m right.” The red-nosed Irishman later said he “could have slugged” Carter over this lethal combination of arrogance and naivety, but it would soon become Carter’s calling card.

Alterman doesn’t know just how right he is. The Left can never entertain the possibility that they might be wrong on questions of fundamental principle. Progressive ideology holds itself to be the culmination of man’s intellectual and moral development thus far, enlightenment from which there could be no fundamentally different deviation. John F. Kennedy said the days of “grand warfare of rival ideologies” were behind us, replaced with “more basic discussion” of “technical questions.” If someone rejects the key tenets of the progressive agenda, it must be because he either doesn’t yet understand it properly, or is blinded by his personal biases or interests. Someone simply can’t be enlightened and well-informed, and still reject leftist policies.

Both men rule without regard to the concerns of the base of their party. Both held themselves to be above politics when it came to making tough decisions. Both were possessed with superhuman self-confidence when it came to their own political judgment mixed with contempt for what they understood to be the petty concerns of pundits and party leaders. And worst of all, one fears, neither one appeared willing to change course no matter how many storm clouds loomed on the horizon […]

[A]s Ezra Klein points out,, Obama’s deficit reduction plan, while not quite as brutal as the Republican Ryan plan, is even more conservative than the Simpson-Bowles plan, which was itself deeply conservative. He calls for raising less money in new taxes and far smaller cuts in the defense budget, chasing the Republicans into territory that is well to the right of anything even Ronald Reagan dared propose before his 1980 shellacking of Jimmy Carter.

It’s true that some conservatives have praise for Simpson-Bowles, but Brian Riedl at the Heritage Foundation explains that the plan is hardly an ideal center-right reference point thanks to its emphasis on raising taxes (including an automatic “tax hike trigger”), slashing defense spending, leaving entitlements relatively unscathed, and measuring “all tax and spending changes against a baseline that already assumes nearly $2 trillion in tax increases from letting parts of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts expire and from no longer renewing many other annual tax cuts.”

And I’m scratching my head trying to figure out how Obama’s unserious, ineffective stab at the budget manages to out-Reagan Reagan, inasmuch as the New York Times piece he links is all about the outcome of the 1980 election, and says very little about the issues either candidate ran on.

So once again, we see that Obama’s real problem is that he’s not far left enough; in fact, he’s further to the right than that infamous centrist Ronald Reagan! The question, then, is how much of this argument is a sincere manifestation of progressivism’s aforementioned ideological blinders, and how much is a calculated propaganda effort to make the president seem more reasonable than his opponents?

The University of Iowa College Republicans’ Conservative Coming Out Week has a simple message—conservatives are people too, they aren’t alone, and they don’t need to fear discrimination on college campuses like liberal Iowa City. Leave it to faculty left-wingers, then, to demonstrate why conservative students need a little encouragement.

The Iowa Republican reports that Ellen Lewin, UI professor of—what else?—“Anthropology and Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies,” didn’t take kindly to the CR’s campus-wide email announcing the event:

Lewin responded to email by writing, “#*@% [F-Word] YOU, REPUBLICANS” from her official university email account.

Natalie Ginty, a University of Iowa Student and Chairwoman of the Iowa Federation of College Republicans, demanded an apology from Lewin’s supervisors.  “We understand that as a faculty member she has the right to express her political opinion, but by leaving her credentials at the bottom of the email she was representing the University of Iowa, not herself alone,” Ginty wrote to James Enloe, the head of the Department of Anthropology.

“Vile responses like Ellen’s need to end. Demonizing the other party through name-calling only further entrenches feelings of disdain for the other side. I am sure you understand that nothing is ever accomplished by aimless screams of attack,” Ginty concluded.

In an email to the College Republicans, Professor Lewin wrote, “This is a time when political passions are inflamed, and when I received your unsolicited email, I had just finished reading some newspaper accounts of fresh outrages committed by Republicans in government.  I admit the language was inappropriate, and apologize for any affront to anyone’s delicate sensibilities.  I would really appreciate your not sending blanket emails to everyone on campus, especially in these difficult times.”

Lewin followed up on Tuesday with this gem:

I should note that several things in the original message were extremely offensive, nearly rising to the level of obscenity.  Despite the Republicans’ general disdain for LGBT rights you called your upcoming event “conservative coming out day,” appropriating the language of the LGBT right movement.   Your reference to the Wisconsin protests suggested that they were frivolous attempts to avoid work.  And the “Animal Rights BBQ” is extremely insensitive to those who consider animal rights an important cause.  Then, in the email that Ms. Ginty sent complaining about my language, she referred to me as Ellen, not Professor Lewin, which is the correct way for a student to address a faculty member, or indeed, for anyone to refer to an adult with whom they are not acquainted.  I do apologize for my intemperate language, but the message you all sent out was extremely disturbing and offensive.

And, of course, UI President Sally Mason weighed in with a pitifully noncommittal statement about celebrating diversity and respecting differing viewpoints…without naming anyone who may have failed to display that respect. Let’s hear it for leadership.

So to summarize, it takes “delicate sensibilities” to be offended by a “F*** YOU, REPUBLICANS” from a professor in response to an perfectly respectable email announcing a college-approved group’s events. And no, the email’s content wasn’t “extremely disturbing and offensive.” Let’s look at the obscenity-worthy offenses.

Appropriated LGBT language:

Conservatives in Iowa City: it is time to come out of the closet! I know at times it feels like you are the only person that disagrees with this liberal town, but you are not alone! […] Wear RED Day! Come out of the closet and show your true colors!

Translation: only left-wing gay activists are allowed to come clean about who they really are, or take pride in their lifestyles and beliefs. You think it’s occurred to Ellen—excuse me, Professor Lewin—that by practically declaring it a hate crime for Republicans to talk about discrimination against themselves in the same way homosexuals do, she’s given the world a perfect example of why right-of-center college students need coming-out weeks of their own?

The Wisconsin protests reference:

Wednesday: Come pick up your Doctors Notice to miss class for “sick of stress” just like the Wisconsin public employees during the union protests from 11 to 1 on the Pentacrest.

Actually, odds are that many of the pilgrimages to Madison were “frivolous attempts to avoid work” (or worse). Just watch the flippancy with which teachers describe how “sick” and “anguished” Governor Scott Walker made them, justifying their unethical engagement in medical fraud, which closed down schools and cost Wisconsin taxpayers millions (all to protest, it bears repeating, benefit reductions which still leave them with a better deal than private-sector workers).

Insensitivity to animal rights:

Stick around for an Animal Rights BBQ at 6pm.

Last time I checked, animal-rights activists weren’t exactly known for being shrinking violets, considering their use of Holocaust imagery, buckets of blood, et cetera. I wonder if Professor Lewin has ever dropped an F-bomb on PETA?

In a better time, books on education carried teachers’ oaths, like this one written by Robert DeBruyn. Professor Lewin and her superiors would do well to reflect upon some of its passages:

I will practice my profession with conscience and dignity; the well-being of my students will be my primary concern always.

I will honor the position of parents and uphold public trust.

I will maintain by all the means in my power the honor of my profession.

I will not permit considerations of religion, nationality, race, party politics, social standing, or the monetary rewards received from my labors to intervene between my duty and my students.