Published for www.washingtonpost.com, February 27, 2012

No doubt Barack Obama would love to reprise Ronald Reagan’s 1984 “Morning in America” reelection campaign, but the anemic economy is not cooperating. Without a robust recovery to trumpet, the president is betting his reelection on class warfare — focusing on “income inequality” and “fairness.” Class warfare is not a winning strategy, but it is the only card Obama has to play.

That’s the good news for Republicans. The bad news is: Right now, the GOP is blowing it.

This should not be a hard fight for the Republicans to win. Americans are less receptive to class warfare arguments after three years of hearing Obama make them than they were when he first took office. A recent Gallup poll found that Americans reject the view of this country as divided between “haves” and “have nots” by a 58-41 margin (in 2008, they were evenly divided 49-49).

Moreover, addressing income inequality is low on the American people’s list of priorities: 82 percent say it is extremely or very important to “grow and expand the economy” and 70 percent say it is extremely or very important to “increase the equality of opportunity for people to get ahead if they want to” (emphasis added). But only 46 percent say that it should be a priority to “reduce the income and wealth gap between the rich and the poor.”

In other words, a campaign focused on “fairness” should be a losing campaign. Yet somehow the leading GOP presidential contenders seem determined to turn Obama’s weak hand into a winning one. First, Newt Gingrich launches class warfare attacks on Mitt Romney that would make Obama blush. Then, Romney declares that he’s “not concerned about the very poor,” that “corporations are people,” and brags in economically depressed Detroit about owning four cars. Then, Rick Santorum steps up to defend income inequality, declaring: “There is income inequality in America. There always has been and hopefully — and I do say that — there always will be.”

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Published for www.washingtonpost.com, February 23, 2012

The United States has reportedly offered a plea deal to Majid Khan — a hardened al-Qaeda terrorist and close associate of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — that could see him released from Guantanamo Bay within a few years.

Giving this killer a reduced sentence is outrageous. Khan is no run-of-the-mill terrorist. He was directly subordinate to KSM and was selected by the 9/11 mastermind to conduct terrorist operations inside the United States. Khan even passed a test KSM orchestrated, which showed Khan was committed to being a suicide operative. Khan agreed to help KSM set up a front business to smuggle explosives into the United States for use against economic targets and to lead a KSM plot to blow up gas stations along the East Coast, but he was captured before he had the chance to enter the United States. He had been charged with war crimes, including murder, attempted murder, spying and providing material support for terrorism — all of which could have earned him a life sentence. Instead, he might now be released.

For what? Under the reported deal, Khan has agreed to testify against his fellow terrorists during the next four years at Guantanamo, after which he would then be eligible to be transferred to Pakistan. Khan knows a great deal about KSM and the core 9/11 conspirators — but it is hard to believe that his cooperation and testimony are really necessary to convict those terrorists. KSM has openly admitted — even boasted — of his role in 9/11 and dozens of other plots and attacks. There should be plenty of evidence against him and his principal collaborators.

Khan would be the first terrorist once held in CIA custody to be released from Guantanamo Bay. His CIA questioning was critical to protecting this country and demonstrates just how deeply embedded he was in al-Qaeda’s operations. It was Khan who provided the CIA with the critical intelligence that helped break up a network of Southeast Asian terrorists that KSM had recruited to carry out the “second wave” of attacks in the United States — including hijacking an airplane and flying it into the tallest building on the West Coast, the Library Tower in Los Angeles.

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Published for blog.american.com, February 15, 2012

CNN reports this morning:

Military commission charges have been sworn against Majid Shoukat Khan, a Pakistani national who lived in the United States from 1996 to early 2002 who is suspected of helping al Qaeda plan attacks in the United States and elsewhere, the Defense Department said Tuesday.

He is charged with conspiracy, murder and attempted murder in violation of the law of war, providing material support for terrorism, and spying. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of life in prison.

Khan is no ordinary terrorist. It was Khan who provided the CIA with the critical intelligence that helped them break up a network of Southeast Asian terrorists that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) had recruited to carry out the “second wave” of attacks in the United States—a plot to hijack an airplane and fly it into the tallest building on the West Coast, the Library Tower in Los Angeles. Here is how he did so:

After Khan was captured and taken into CIA custody, KSM told his CIA de-briefers that he had assigned Khan to deliver $50,000 to an individual working for a senior JI terrorist. CIA officials went to Khan’s cell and confronted him with this information from KSM. Khan confirmed KSM’s account and provided additional information—telling them that he had delivered the money to a JI operative named Zubair. Khan then provided both a physical description and a contact number for Zubair. This was a vital breakthrough. The contact number not only gave officials the ability to track down and capture Zubair—it also gave the National Security Agency the opportunity to begin using signals intelligence to track the entire JI network behind the plot.

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Published for www.washingtonpost.com, February 13, 2012

Don’t pick a fight, the saying goes, with a man who buys ink by the barrel. Here’s a corollary for President Obama: Don’t pick a fight with an elderly, retired, cloistered nun who founded the world’s largest religious media network.

That is precisely the mistake Obama made when his administration announced that religious employers like Mother Angelica’s Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) would be forced to provide coverage for contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs — a violation of their deeply held religious beliefs. The Obama policy, EWTN declared in a federal lawsuit last week, is “un-American, unprecedented and flagrantly unconstitutional.”

Millions of Americans agreed. And faced with a political firestorm, President Obama on Friday announced what he termed an “accommodation” of religious employers: the mandate to provide abortifacient drugs, sterilization and contraception would remain in place — but insurers will be required to provide them for “free.” The decision has been called everything from a compromise to capitulation — but in truth the president didn’t retreat one inch.

Under the revised policy Obama announced, the government still coerces religious institutions to purchase insurance policies that include services they consider gravely immoral. And put aside, for a moment, Obama’s arrogance in presuming that the federal government can simply order private businesses to give a product away for free. Liberals like Obama don’t seem to realize that there is nothing “free” in this world. Unlike many of the religious groups Obama has targeted, insurance companies are not charities. Someone will have to pay. That someone will eventually be the religious institutions. The costs will be passed on, over time, via higher premiums — which means religious employers will still be forced to pay for services they consider immoral and unjust.

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Published for www.washingtonpost.com, February 6, 2012

Mitt Romney’s defenders argue that he was taken out of context when he declared, “I’m not concerned about the very poor,” pointing out that he also said, “We have a safety net [to help the very poor]. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it.” If anything, the context is more disturbing than the initial gaffe. To understand why, Romney needs to listen to the words of Ronald Reagan, whose birthday we celebrate today.

In his farewell address at the Republican National Convention in 1992, Reagan laid out a parting vision for the Republican Party and the conservative movement. He told the assembled delegates, “With each sunrise we are reminded that millions of our citizens have yet to share in the abundance of American prosperity. Many languish in neighborhoods riddled with drugs and bereft of hope. Still others hesitate to venture out on the streets for fear of criminal violence. Let us pledge ourselves to a new beginning for them.”

To help lift our fellow Americans from poverty, Reagan continued, “let us apply our ingenuity and remarkable spirit to revolutionize education in America, so that everyone among us will have the mental tools to build a better life.” And, he declared, “let us harness the competitive energy that built America, into rebuilding our inner cities so that real jobs can be created for those who live there and real hope can rise out of despair.”

In Reagan’s vision, conservatives should never accept a permanent underclass trapped in dependency and despair. But that is precisely what Romney described. Here is what Romney said: “We have a very ample safety net, and we can talk about whether it needs to be strengthened or whether there are holes in it. But we have food stamps, we have Medicaid, we have housing vouchers, we have programs to help the poor.” So Romney is fine with an entire class of Americans being permanently on food stamps, Medicaid, housing vouchers and other government welfare programs? His solution for our fellow citizens trapped in poverty and dependency is to find holes in the safety net and repair them?

That is not conservatism. That is liberalism. The left judges compassion by how much money we spend, which is why the liberal project is to strengthen the safety net and grow the nanny state. The conservative project is to help people escape the safety net. Conservatives seek to create an opportunity society where we can lift people out of lives of dependency. We are not okay with having millions of Americans trapped in poverty and living on the dole. We are not okay with multiple generations trapped in government welfare. We believe in a society where the poor have opportunities for advancement. We want them to have the education and skills they need to find good jobs, get off public assistance and to move up to the middle class and beyond — as far as their ambition and ability will take them.

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Post published for www.blog.american.com, February 2, 2012

Earlier this week, President Obama did something unprecedented when he acknowledged the existence of the CIA’s drone campaign—the first time an American president has publicly declared that the United States is using unmanned drones to kill al Qaeda terrorists.

It is unclear whether the disclosure was inadvertent, or the result of a conscious decision by the administration to be more forthcoming about the drone program. But one of the consequences of the president’s remarks is that it exposes the program to greater risk of successful legal challenges by groups opposed to the drone campaign.

Before the president spoke, the government could argue in court that the very fact that the United States is conducting drone strikes in a given area and context was classified and thus within the scope of a “state secret” assertion. Indeed, the administration has successfully argued in previous legal cases that national security prohibits the discussion of the covert program.

Now, if a civil plaintiff were to claim harm from a drone strike in the general area and context implicitly acknowledged by Obama, the plaintiff might be allowed to proceed—even if the government could still assert state secrets privilege over specific details of an operation or the workings or techniques of the drone program. The president’s public acknowledgment of these operations has thus narrowed the ground for a “state secrets” assertion and made it at least marginally more difficult to get cases dismissed on national security grounds.

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Published for www.washingtonpost.com, January 30, 2012

In recent days, two ads were released in Florida attacking Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital. One was produced by the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), a left-wing public-worker union that has pledged to spend upward of $100 million to reelect Barack Obama. The other was produced by Newt Gingrich’s super PAC, Winning the Future.

Can you tell which is which?

Ad No. 1: With a crescendo of ominous music in the background, a news anchor declares: “With Medicare, the government says con artists are draining the life blood out of it by filing millions of dollars in phony claims.” As he speaks, images of an unseen person counting hundred-dollar bills appear. The screen flashes: “Cayman Islands” … “Swiss bank” … “$100 million IRA” … “Illegal activity” … “Romney supervised” … “Company guilty of massive Medicare fraud” — and then, over a picture of smiling Romney, the words “Blood Money” appear.

Ad No. 2: A picture of a smirking Romney appears while an announcer asks: “What kind of businessman is Mitt Romney? While Romney was a director of the Damon Corp., the company was defrauding Medicare of millions. Prosecutors called it corporate greed run amok. The company was fined $100 million dollars. But Romney himself made a fortune. Corporate greed. Medicare fraud. Sound familiar?”

So which is the union ad and which is the Gingrich super PAC ad? (Answer: Ad No. 2 is from AFSCME, Ad No. 1 is from Gingrich’s super PAC. If you got it wrong, you should not be surprised — the two are virtually indistinguishable. Indeed, the pro-Gingrich video is the more incendiary of the two, not simply accusing Romney of fraud but attacking him for the crime of being wealthy and successful. If you’re a free-market conservative, that should leave you deeply troubled.

And Team Gingrich has another worrisome ally in this line of attack. Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) blasted out a long memo to the press on Friday echoing the claims made by Gingrich and AFSCME and castigating Romney for “[l]aying off workers, defrauding Medicare, bankrupting companies, and storing millions of dollars in notorious off-shore tax havens.”

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Published for www.commentarymagazine.com/corner, January 23, 2012

One week ago, Newt Gingrich was on the ropes in South Carolina, under near-universal assault on the right from his attacks on Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital. Everyone from Rush Limbaugh to the Club for Growth and the Wall Street Journal had all declared their disgust. The conservative backlash had given Romney a double-digit lead in the polls. At a candidate forum hosted by Mike Huckabee, Gingrich was booed by the crowd when he tried to defend his Bain attacks.

Fast forward one week, and Gingrich is the winner of the South Carolina primary. Not only did Gingrich win, he crushed Romney 40.4 percent to 27.9 percent — a swing of more than 20 points in just a week. And a new poll shows that, after trailing Romney by more than 20 points in Florida last week, Gingrich has now opened an eight-point lead in the Sunshine State.

What happened? Simply put, Romney let Gingrich up off the mat.

In his concession speech after Saturday’s loss, Romney laid into Gingrich, accusing him of “demonizing success” and using the “weapons of the left.” Romney declared, “If Republican leaders want to join this president in demonizing success and disparaging conservative values then they’re not going to be fit to be our nominee,” adding “We cannot defeat the president with a candidate who has joined in that very assault on free enterprise.”

It was the right message, delivered a week too late. If Romney had made those very points in the South Carolina debates he might have been the one who received the standing ovations instead of Gingrich — and might well have emerged the winner in the Palmetto State.

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Published for www.blog.american.com, January 19, 2012

Authorities at Guantanamo Bay recently began reading privileged attorney-client communications in an effort to prevent terrorists from passing messages and receiving unauthorized information from their brethren on the outside. Detainee advocates have responded with outrage, but we may now have learned what sparked the new procedures—an al Qaeda terrorist training manual has been found at Gitmo.

The Miami Herald reports this morning:

“A copy of Al Qaida’s fiery magazine Inspire somehow got inside the prison camps at Guantánamo, a prosecutor disclosed at the war court Wednesday.

Navy Cmdr. Andrea Lockhart blurted out the embarrassing disclosure in defending the prison camp commander’s plan to give greater scrutiny to legal mail bound for alleged terrorists. She was discussing a system used by civilian lawyers to send materials to Guantánamo captives who are suing the U.S. for their freedom through habeas corpus petitions in Washington, D.C.”

An al Qaeda lawyer, Shayana Kadidal of The Center for Constitutional Rights, suggested that an interrogator may have provided the magazine to a detainee to curry favor with a captive. This is simply preposterous. No interrogator in his right mind would give a detainee a copy of Inspire—because the magazine is much more than an al Qaeda “propaganda magazine.” It is an al Qaeda terrorist training manual, replete with detailed instructions for how to commit terrorist attacks against the United States.

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Published by www.washingtonpost.com, January 16, 2012

When they meet in the green room before Monday night’s debate in South Carolina, Mitt Romney should probably give Newt Gingrich a big thank you. In just a few days’ time, Gingrich has managed has to do something Romney has tried and failed to do for more than five years: rally conservatives behind Mitt Romney.

Rush Limbaugh has called Gingrich’s attacks on Romney’s record at Bain Capital “indefensible,” “sad,” “absurd,” and “the language of leftists like Michael Moore and Oliver Stone.” Club for Growth President Chris Chocola declared them “disgusting” and called on Gingrich to “apologize to Governor Romney.” The Wall Street Journal wrote that those like Gingrich attacking Romney’s business record “are embarrassing themselves” and “taking the Obama line.”

Voters in South Carolina appear to agree. At a candidates’ forum hosted by Mike Huckabee on Saturday, Gingrich was booed lustily when he tried to defend his Bain attacks. Hilton Head resident Donald Hare spoke for many when he was asked by the New York Times this weekend if he is supporting Romney and replied “I am now. What Newt did convinced me.” A new Insider Advantage poll this weekend shows Romney gaining ground with an 11-point lead. It appears the former speaker’s anti-capitalist attacks have only helped, not hurt, Romney’s campaign.

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