Columns

Actually, Joe set himself up. From the moment he set foot on Israeli soil, our vice president was in full pander mode. First, he headed to Yad Vashem memorial, where he put on a yarmulke and declared Israel "a central bolt in our existence." "For world Jewry," Joe went on, presumably including 5 million Americans, "Israel is the heart. ... Israel is the light. ... Israel is the hope."

In a swindle that would make Bernie Madoff look like an amateur, Barack Obama has gotten a substantial segment of the population to believe that he can add millions of people to the government-insured rolls without increasing the already record-breaking federal deficit.

The political commentariat doesn't know what to make of those thousands of Americans who have spontaneously thronged to tea parties and town hall meetings to oppose the big government programs of the Obama administration and Democratic congressional leaders.

[Friday] night I sat amongst 1,300 dedicated Republicans and listened to former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin address the Orange County Republicans' Lincoln Day Dinner.

Though Bush 41 and Bush 43 often disagreed, one issue did unite them both with Bill Clinton: protectionism. Globalists all, they rejected any federal measure to protect America's industrial base, economic independence or the wages of U.S. workers. Together they rammed through NAFTA, brought America under the World Trade Organization, abolished tariffs and granted Chinese-made goods unrestricted access to the immense U.S. market.

NBC's "Law & Order" programs are long established and all over the schedule. But the sex-obsessed vice cops of "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" are a breed apart. They exist to be socially provocative, which is to say, to rattle, to disturb. Viewers at home probably weren't ready for the plot that aired on NBC on March 3. These scriptwriters are so revolting that they become almost comical. As you read what follows, you decided how closely this mirrors anything resembling the world of reality. Someone was strangling prostitutes to death and leaving prayer cards behind. The first suspect was a perverted man whose wife proclaimed he had converted to Christianity and overcome his sinful ways. The cops quickly discovered the man dismissed his wife as a "prude," and he was cheating on her with a variety of young girls because "it's not a crime to want a little variety" in his sex life, including "toys, role play, and threesomes." Despite his ardor for sexual gunplay as well, this so-called Christian was not the strangler.

WASHINGTON -- If your impression of an Afghan woman is of a shapeless, frightened form engulfed in yards of heat-trapping fabric, you haven't met Shafiqa Quraishi. Make that Colonel Quraishi, who earned her title as one of 900-plus female members of the Afghan National Police. Quraishi, who today is director of Gender, Human, and Child Rights within the Afghan Ministry of the Interior, was one of nine women in town to receive the International Women of Courage Award from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She and fellow Afghan award recipient Shukria Asil sat down Thursday for lunch and conversation with members of the U.S.-Afghan Women's Council to discuss ways to help women and children struggling for rights and security.

I knew that I must have been off pretty badly when I casually wrote in this national column that Florida Gov. Charlie Crist would be a good example of a Republican that voters in critical swing states could accept in the upcoming elections for Senate and the U.S. House.

WASHINGTON -- As the Afghanistan War intensifies -- Marja, soon Kandahar, and the steady arrival of 30,000 new American troops -- it has come to be seen as Obama's war. Not so. It's become America's war. When the former opposition party -- habitually anti-war for the last four decades -- adopts, reaffirms and escalates a war begun by the habitually hawkish other party, partisanship falls away, and the war becomes nationalized.

WASHINGTON -- The increasingly puerile spectacle of presidential State of the Union addresses is indicative of the state of the union, and is unnecessary: The Constitution requires only that the president "shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union." But a reaction may be brewing against these embarrassing events.