It’s Tuesday, March 13th, 2012….but before we begin, some words of warning from a civilian, the WSJ‘s Bret Stephens in this case, that don’t seem to register with ears of a Navy Brass long-since deafened by the noise of political-correctness and deliberately destructive Liberal policies:

In the Persian Gulf, A Vulnerable Fleet

The Navy’s capabilities are impressive. But we need more ships.

 

Aboard USS Bunker Hill

It didn’t take Chief Warrant Officer Jason Echevarria more than a glance through the ship’s binoculars to figure out what the Iranian-flagged dhow 3,400 yards off the starboard beam wasn’t doing.

For one thing, the gaily colored boat was larger than the dhows that typically ply the confined waters of the Persian Gulf. Its deck was clear of netting and tackle, and the paint job seemed fresh. The Furuno radar was another giveaway. And it was shadowing us, coming at one point within a mile.

“If that’s a fishing boat, I’m a monkey’s uncle,” said Mr. Echevarria, a native of Melbourne, Fla. Later, the boat would be photographed flying the colors of the IRGC-N, the naval branch of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps.

Nobody on the Bunker Hill—a 567-foot, 9,800 ton guided-missile cruiser serving as the principal surface escort for the nearby carrier USS Carl Vinson—was surprised by the arrival of the Iranians. With Aegis radar, Seahawk helicopters and electro-optical scanners, Bunker Hill had been tracking the dhow long before it became visible in the morning haze. Michael Ford, the ship’s captain, had been watching the Iranians even longer, ever since he first deployed to the Gulf some 20 years ago. Tension with Iran, he says, “ebbs and flows in terms of the rhetoric, but the reality of the interactions is still relatively routine.”

That’s the point that nearly every senior officer I’ve met with on this trip seems most eager to make. On Jan. 3, Maj. Gen. Ataollah Salehi, the head of the Iranian military, made headlines world-wide by warning the departing carrier USS John C. Stennis not to re-enter the Gulf. Since then, however, two other U.S. carriers have come here without incident, and the Navy continues to deal with the Iranians—tower-to-air; bridge-to-bridge—generally on the basis of mutual professionalism. Far from being a flash point, the Gulf may be the only place where the U.S. and Iran have something like a functional relationship.

But functional isn’t friendly. Vice Adm. Mark Fox, the commander of the Fifth Fleet, stresses that the Navy is “absolutely prepared” for any contingency. (Too which we would say, bullSH*T!)

At the same time, he offers a long list of the ways in which Iran has in recent years developed capabilities purpose-built to challenge U.S. maritime dominance: ship-killing missiles; midget submarines of the kind that sank a South Korean corvette in 2010; mines (“the maritime equivalent of an IED,” he says); and thousands of fast inboard attack craft—basically, armed Boston Whalers meant to swarm larger U.S. ships. “I respect their capability,” says Adm. Fox dryly.

In the face of the asymmetrical threat, the Navy’s first defense is an unmatched degree of situational awareness. From the Bunker Hill’s blue-lit combat information center, Capt. Ford can see, identify and track everything that moves on or above (and probably below) the Gulf. Any departure from what the Navy calls “pattern of life” on the sea would be noticed long before the Iranians peak their head over the horizon. At that distance, the firepower a ship like the Bunker Hill can bring to bear could defeat almost anything Iran can muster.

But the Navy has its own vulnerabilities. Iranian ships could lawfully come awfully close to the Bunker Hill before revealing their intentions, leaving Capt. Ford little time to deter and defend. Last month, The Journal reported that Pentagon war planners had identified “gaps” in military capabilities and needed to spend $100 million to fill them. One such gap: The Vinson currently lacks the Phalanx Close-in Weapons System, a high-powered gatling gun used to stop incoming missiles (or fast boats) at close range. The Navy insists it’s covered by other defensive systems, but the absence of such guns was one reason the British Navy lost so many of its ships in the Falklands War.

There’s a deeper vulnerability. In our interview, Adm. Fox mentioned he had some 42 ships deployed, including two carriers. But between the Fleet’s anti-piracy mission around Somalia and its aerial support for operations in Afghanistan, there are only two major U.S. surface combatants in the Gulf—the Vinson and the Bunker Hill—plus two nuclear attack submarines, four minesweepers and some smaller patrol ships. Were the Iranians to mine the Strait of Hormuz, the ships could be trapped in the Gulf for at least as long as it took the minesweepers to clear the way.

How long would that take? In 1991 it took a year to clear up 1,300 mines in the Gulf. Today Iran is estimated to have some 5,000 mines. (Gee….ya think our mine-sweeping capabilities have increased….or DECREASED….since 1991?!?)

The Navy doesn’t like to advertise this, but it is trying to fulfill its traditional global role with a fleet of 285 ships—the smallest it has been since before the First World War, even if modern warships are more capable than ever before. That number is likely to decline further under President Obama’s proposed budgetary cuts. If you sleep better at night knowing that a powerful American Navy ensures the freedom of the seas in places like the Gulf, the time to start worrying about the Navy’s future is now.

Funny….it didn’t seem to bother ADM Mike Mullen, former Chairman of the JCS, who seemed far more concerned with putting gays and women in foxholes and submarines than the actual combat readiness and capabilities of the U.S. Military.

Here’s the juice: Army Chief-of-Staff General Johnny Johnson….

….might have changed the course of U.S. history by resigning over Lyndon Johnson’s idiotic decision to prosecute a war in Vietnam without a full mobilization of America’s Armed Forces.  He was at the White House, prepared to do so when he lost his nerve and ordered his driver to return to the Pentagon.  The decision haunted him the rest of his life.

It’s our studied opinion a large majority of our current senior military leadership will one day similarly regret their moral cowardice in cooperating with the current Administration.  Yeah, yeah, yeah….the Germans too were just “following orders”.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

At the top of today’s order, two insightful bits of commentary on the who, what and why of entitlements in America, the first by Scott Rasmussen, courtesy of Speed Mach….

The Real ‘Entitlement Mentality’ That Is Bankrupting America

 

Many Republicans talk of an entitlement mentality that threatens the character and finances of the United States. In their view, the problem is that too many voters feel entitled to goodies provided by the government and financed by taxpayers.

It is true that so-called entitlement programs are growing as a share of the federal budget and the national economy. Along with spending on national defense and interest on the federal debt, spending on entitlement programs consumes the overwhelming majority of the federal budget. But a close look at the data shows that it’s not a voter sense of entitlement that is driving the process. Quite the contrary.

The two biggest entitlement programs — Social Security and Medicare — are seen by voters as trust funds they pay into during their working lives and then get back in their retirement years. That’s what President Franklin D. Roosevelt sold voters back in 1935. (Like every other Liberal Democrat, he lied.) He wanted the “contributors” to have a “legal, moral and political right to collect their pensions.” That’s what voters still want today. Seventy-three percent believe the best way for the program to operate is to protect the trust funds and make sure there is enough tax revenue to pay the promised benefits. Just 10 percent want to scrap this approach and have the government pay benefits out of the general operating budget.

There are problems with the public perception, of course, starting with the fact that the way our politicians have defined “trust funds” is fraudulent. But those problems reflect the failings and deceptions of politicians rather than voters. In Social Security and Medicare, voters are not looking for a handout. They are looking for a return on money invested.

Perhaps because of their distrust of the politicians, two out of three voters now think workers should be able to consider the relevant trade-offs on their own. For example, those who would like to retire later could pay less in taxes now, while those who would like to retire earlier could pay more in taxes now. That’s an investing mindset, not a sense of entitlement.

But politicians in Washington continue to blame the voters for allegedly wanting more government than they are willing to pay for. The effort of politicians to pin the blame on voters diverts attention from the real entitlement mentality that threatens to bankrupt the nation: A political class that feels entitled to rule over the rest of us. Government spending has gone up in every years since 1954 because political leaders have pursued their own agenda rather than listening to voters.

Over the past 58 years, voters have consistently elected presidents, senators and congressman who promised to cut government spending, but it has never happened, not even once. As shown in my new book, “The People’s Money,” voters are ready to support the kind of long-term thoughtful changes needed to balance the budget and eliminate the federal debt. The only thing standing in the way of a solution is the nation’s political leaders from both parties.

While most voters view excessive government spending as the problem, those who feel entitled to rule over the rest of us see the voters as the problem. And that’s the real entitlement crisis facing the nation today. The political class wants to govern like it’s 1775, a time when kings were kings and consent of the governed didn’t matter.

….and the second by William Voegeli writing at City-Journal.org:

Not a Penny More

 

During last summer’s debt-ceiling negotiations, David Brooks of the New York Times wrote that Republicans who rejected “trillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for a few hundred billion dollars of revenue increases” would reveal themselves as “fanatics” with “no sense of moral decency”—clearly “not fit to govern.” In November, after the failure of the congressional “supercommittee” spawned by the debt-ceiling crisis, the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson made much the same point: bringing the federal debt under control without higher taxes made sense only “in the parallel universe inhabited by GOP ideologues, a place where the laws of arithmetic do not apply.” The problem, according to Robinson, was that among today’s Republicans, “tax cuts are not a matter of policy but of faith.”

This religion, all right-thinkers know, has a leader: Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) since the organization’s founding in 1985. Norquist and ATR are best known for the “Taxpayer Protection Pledge,” which, at the federal level, binds politicians to oppose both higher marginal income-tax rates on individuals and business and “any net reduction or elimination of deductions and credits, unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing tax rates.” In the GOP, only six congressmen and seven senators have not signed the pledge; only three of the 246 elected Democrats on Capitol Hill have signed it. The pledge, Garry Wills thundered in The New York Review of Books, “means that most Republicans in Congress . . . have left behind their consciences in the pocket of Grover Norquist.” Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick has even charged that “the Republican strategy is to drive America to the brink of fiscal ruin and then argue that the only way out is to cut spending for the powerless. Taxes—a dirty word thanks to Norquist’s ‘no new taxes’ gimmick—are made to seem beyond the pale.”

These critics would have you believe that the antitax movement is nothing but belligerent extremism. The truth, however, is that you don’t have to embrace Norquist’s famous ambition—to shrink government until it’s small enough to be drowned in a bathtub—to conclude that opposing tax increases is both smart politics and wise policy. Nor do you have to make the maximalist supply-side assertion that tax cuts always pay for themselves. In rejecting tax hikes, Republicans aren’t trading in fanaticism. Rather, they’re confronting a governing failure—an abiding lack of candor about what our welfare state costs—that voters grasp but Democrats refuse to admit.

The debate over closing the federal budget deficit has seen volleys of certitudes. Speaking to an Americans for Tax Reform meeting last April, Republican senator Orrin Hatch said, “We don’t have a revenue problem. We all know we have a spending problem.” Two months later, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka insisted, “We don’t have an entitlement problem. We have a revenue problem.” Who’s right? Do we spend too much, or do we tax too little?

In terms of balancing the budget, there’s no way to answer that question—no mathematical basis for declaring either spending or revenues the problem. Sure, the 2010 federal budget would have been balanced if the government had cut spending by $1.293 trillion to equal its revenues of $2.163 trillion. But it would have been just as balanced if the government had increased revenues by $1.293 trillion to cover its total expenditures of $3.456 trillion.

What we can say is that over the last 40 years, government revenues have kept pace with economic growth while government spending has run steadily ahead of it. If you look at federal finances from the dawn of the Great Society in 1965 to the beginning of the Great Recession in 2008 (see the chart below), you’ll notice that Gross Domestic Product and federal revenues, both expressed in per-capita terms and adjusted for inflation, were about two and a half times as large at the end of the period as at the beginning. Federal expenditures were three times as large.

Not only has spending risen faster than GDP or revenues over the years; a particular kind of spending has led the charge. Let’s divide all federal spending into three broad categories. One is national defense. The second, the welfare state, includes Social Security; other income-support programs, such as disability insurance and unemployment compensation; Medicare; other health programs, such as Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program; and all programs in education, job training, and social services. I call the third “housekeeping,” meaning everything else that the federal government does: federal courts, prisons, prosecutors, and the FBI; Amtrak and air-traffic control; national parks and the EPA; embassies and consulates; veterans’ programs; NASA; and so on.

Here’s the scorecard. Spending on national defense, adjusted for inflation and population, was 42 percent higher in 2008 than in 1965, while housekeeping outlays were 76 percent higher (see the chart below). Both, in other words, grew far less rapidly than the economy or federal revenues—both of which, remember, were about 150 percent higher in 2008 than in 1965. But welfare-state expenditures were 583 percent higher. In fact, the welfare state became the core of the federal government, growing from 26 percent of federal outlays in 1965 to 61 percent in 2008.

Even the fact that the welfare state has grown relentlessly does not, in itself, mean that the growth has been excessive. What does begin to suggest that conclusion is the lack of candor with which the growth has been promoted. For years, the Democratic Party’s raison d’être has been to establish, defend, and expand the welfare state. The Democrats could have told us all along—forthrightly, scrupulously, and unambiguously—that their project would cost a lot of money and that, should economic growth be insufficient to pay for it, big tax increases would be necessary. Had they done so, they would be in a strong position to argue that the terms of the deal they struck with yesterday’s voters oblige today’s Americans to pay higher taxes. (A conclusion with which we totally disagree.)

But that’s not what they did. When the House Ways and Means Committee drafted Medicare in 1965, it predicted that the hospital-insurance part of the program would cost $9 billion by 1990. The actual figure was $67 billion. In 1987, Congress anticipated that a federal program to assist hospitals serving large numbers of Medicaid patients would require $1 billion by 1992. The final figure: $17 billion. One small Great Society Program, the Teacher Corps, never figured out what it was supposed to be and never accomplished any of the goals that it did set for itself, according to the political scientist Thomas E. Cronin; yet its budget quadrupled in its first seven years. Examples could be multiplied.

A more recent version of politicians’ deceptiveness about the costs of government is the Democratic insistence on calling government programs “investments.” Spending isn’t really spending, you see, because government outlays will be returned to the nation in multiples. The 2008 Democratic platform committed the party to “investing” more government money in areas as general as health, education, and energy and in programs as specific as women-owned small businesses, financial literacy, “alternative livelihoods to poppy-growing for Afghan farmers,” and the “long-term development of the Pashtun border region.” In endorsing bigger international programs, the platform also promised to “invest in our common humanity,” which doesn’t rule out much. (Yes, see how our investments in Pakistan, Afghanistan….and GM for that matter….are coming back in spades!)

When Democrats do talk about taxes, they are often equally disingenuous. In 2004, John Kerry ran for president promising to raise taxes on families with incomes above $200,000 per year and to cut taxes for the other 98 percent of the population. Four years later, Barack Obama ran for president promising that the government could meet all its existing obligations and take on many new ones, while confining tax increases to individuals making more than $200,000 and families making more than $250,000.

Do these vows hold water? A 2010 study by the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, found that reducing federal deficits by the second half of this decade to a reasonable 2 percent of GDP, while keeping Obama’s promise, would require increasing the rate in the second-highest federal income-tax bracket from 33 percent to 85.7 percent, the rate in the highest bracket from 35 percent to 90.9 percent, and the capital-gains tax rate from 15 percent to 39 percent. The study, Desperately Seeking Revenue, pointed out that such tax rates would give the prosperous a strong incentive to defer income, shift it to nontaxable forms, or spend it on deductible items, like charitable contributions. The resulting revenue shortfall would necessitate even higher tax rates or might simply make reducing deficits to 2 percent of GDP impossible. Even Jonathan Chait, who has devoted hundreds of New Republic blog posts over the years to advocating higher taxes on the rich, conceded after the August 2011 debt-ceiling agreement, “It has become clear that Obama’s pledge not to raise taxes at all on anybody earning less than $250,000 a year is no longer compatible with even the minimal demands of government over the next decade.”

That’s just the latest example of a half-century of dishonesty. Having dissembled for decades about the true costs of their agenda, Democrats now bring to their most urgent political task—securing large tax increases that will prevent a sweeping reorganization of the welfare state—all the moral authority of a bait-and-switch salesman.

The Democrats’ calculation was that when the debt hit the fan, voters and even the opposition party would fall in line to keep the welfare state intact and growing. It was a reasonable assumption. After all, the Democrats were accustomed to the genteel Republicans of yore, who had always joined them in decorously avoiding the topic of how much social-welfare programs had grown in the past when deliberating how much they should grow in the future. Back then, both sides implicitly accepted a baseline rising steadily and eternally; negotiations were merely about how quickly it should rise.

But the Democratic Party didn’t count on the antitax revolution. (i.e., NOT Grover Norquist, but the Tea Party.) At the heart of the Norquist Republicans’ truculent fanaticism is the insistence that citizens can question and alter the endless growth of the welfare state, rather than submit to it as though it were a law of nature. No wonder, then, that so many liberal pundits and politicians are so furious at the newly obstinate GOP. Democrats must finally fight for what they spent long, happy decades taking for granted—a steadily growing supply of dollars to finance new and expanded government programs.

When Democrats conduct that fight by calling Republicans nihilists, they really seem to believe that the alternative to higher taxes is the end of civilization as we know it. “The GOP may not acknowledge that it wants to privatize public schools or drive students of limited means out of the universities, or eliminate tax-funded health care and social services for the poor, or destroy the last vestiges of publicly supported transit or shut the parks,” Peter Schrag, a veteran California journalist, has written. “But that clearly is what it’s accomplishing.”

To see why that argument is wrong, think all the way back to 1995, when America had social insurance for the elderly, health care and welfare for the poor, and various other appurtenances of a welfare state, to say nothing of public schools and colleges, mass transit, public parks, and lots more. Since then, the federal government’s total revenues, adjusted for changes in population and inflation, have grown, despite the recession. In other words, to duplicate now the revenue stream that paid for the 1995 menu of government services would mean cutting taxes, not increasing them. Tax-fighting Republicans aren’t ripping the social safety net to shreds; rather, they’re alerting voters to the simple fact that America is spending more and more money to render worse and worse services.

Nor does it make sense for the GOP to accede to tax increases in order to win concessions, such as caps on government spending. There is overwhelming historical evidence that the politicians who establish such limits never shrink from using their clout to evade them. In an age when market and voter apprehensions about sovereign debt constrain borrowing, the refusal to raise taxes is a spending limit, one far more effective than any parchment barriers that politicians can devise. Norquist once said that “grand bargains” combining spending cuts and tax increases recalled the deals that “the Soviet Union was offering as it left Eastern Europe. And every time we didn’t give them an answer they kept asking for less.” By restricting the fiscal oxygen supply that sustains a fundamentally flawed system, Republicans are hastening our welfare state’s perestroika.

At the same time, they’re playing smart politics. When they refuse to raise taxes, Republicans force Democrats to make a deeply unpersuasive argument. Major expansions of the welfare state are indispensable, this argument goes; but the $5.08 trillion of federal, state, and local government outlays in 2010—35 percent of GDP—is already being spent on its very best uses; therefore, our new government endeavors will require corralling more of the 65 GDP percentage points that now roam contentedly beyond the fence.

Such a platform would be helpful for any candidate seeking the presidency—so long as it was the presidency of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. But no Democratic politician will ever use it successfully to win over a large, diverse electorate residing outside our blue ghettos, which is why Democratic presidential candidates avoid it and instead promise not to raise taxes. This silence is a deafening testament to Democrats’ morose conviction that Americans don’t like their party’s agenda enough to give it the only endorsement that really matters: voting to pay for it. It’s hard to see what incentive Republicans have to extricate Democrats from this dilemma.

In other words….

Next up, courtesy of the Morning Examiner, the AEI‘s James Pethokoukis details something else you won’t read in the MSM:

Obama’s part-time job recovery

 

The economy is adding jobs, though not enough to bring down the sky-high unemployment rate. But it’s not just the quantity of jobs that’s a problem, it’s the quality, too.

As the econ team at Wells Fargo points out:

– Despite the pickup in hiring, average earnings have continued to moderate and are up just 1.9 percent over the past year.

– Real after-tax per capita income, or real take-home pay, has fallen in two of the past three months and is down modestly over the past year.

Why are incomes falling in real terms? It’s because a “a disproportionate share of the jobs that have been added over the past two years have been in relatively low-paying industries” such as in the retail, leisure, hospitality, temp and  home health-care industry. (So much for Dimocrats disparaging minimum wage jobs; the hypocrites are happy as hell that McDonald’s has added some 62,000 employees.) Hiring in those sectors has accounted for 40.7 percent of the jobs added over the past two years. By comparison, these industries account for just 28.9 percent of the workforce. Not only is average hourly pay relatively low in these industries, but a large proportion of the jobs tend to be part-time.

And here is JPMorgan on the same topic:

The gains in employment and hours worked have been encouraging, but the data on average wages have been more downbeat. Average hourly earnings increased only 0.1% last month; over the past year wages are up 1.9%, though the trend is decelerating, as the annualized pace of pay growth over the past three months has been only 1.4%. Pay gains have not kept up with the pace of inflation, even when one strips out the volatile food and energy categories.

Americans want good jobs. Americans want prosperity. Right now, they are getting neither.

And not bloody well likely too any time in the near future.

Turning from things we’re not likely to see in the near future to things we’d rather not ever see again, in a forward from Bill Meisen, James Taranto reports on….

The Whine Spectator

 

“Former Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.) writes in a new book that President Obama ditched him in the 2010 election after he helped Obama win the biggest legislative victory of his term by passing healthcare reform,” the Hill reports:

Specter also claims that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) did not uphold his promise to grant him seniority accrued over 28 years of service in the Senate as a Republican.

Specter, who rocked Washington’s political establishment and made headlines around the country when he left the Republican Party to join Democrats in April of 2009, has kept quiet about these slights until now.

Awful, isn’t it? Specter trusted these guys, and they just stabbed him in the back! It must have shaken him to the core to realize just how disloyal distinguished elected officials were capable of being.

No worries mate; Arlen’s got a reserved seat in the Great Beyond….and he better be wearing SPF 2,000….degrees Celcius!

Then there’s this by Mario Loyola writing at NRO‘s The Corner, courtesy of Conn Carroll:

How Obama Is Choking Off U.S. Oil Production

 

The news wires are reporting that President Obama actively lobbied Senate Democrats to defeat the Keystone pipeline yesterday. The effect of blocking the Keystone XL Pipeline is to defer 700,000 barrels of oil per day. And as I reported at The Weekly Standard recently, the president’s policy of choking off oil production under federal leases will prevent another 1 million barrels of oil per day this year, and even more next year. 

Obama will soon be personally responsible for preventing some 2 million barrels per day of possible North American crude oil production from reaching the American economy. The U.S. currently produces only about 6 million barrels of domestic crude oil, so that would be more than a 30 percent increase in domestic production.  

The president likes to say that America is producing more oil than ever before, but that’s due entirely to shale oil (e.g., fracking) and oil sands. The boom in production from private sources is currently shielding the administration from the political consequences of taking such a huge amount of oil off the market.  

Two millions barrels per day of oil production would affect not just the price of gasoline in North America, but also the economics of world oil production: The president is preventing the U.S. from increasing oil production by an amount nearly equivalent to Iran’s total oil exports. He insists that gasoline prices are rising because of “fears” about a disruption in Iranian supply, but he wants you to believe that gasoline prices would be unaffected by a 30 percent increase in domestic U.S. oil production in the next two years.

If you’re gullible enough to believe that, consider this: The recession drove world oil demand from a peak of 86 million barrels per day in 2007 to a low of 85 million barrels per day in 2009. In the same period, the price of gasoline fell by half. We are once again entering a period of scarcity, where slight fluctuations in demand or supply will have a disproportionate impact on gas prices — but this time the scarcity is largely the product of Obama’s policies.

Points the Republicans need to hammer home like nails in a coffin….or stakes in the Energy Vampire’s heart.

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s this from Hank Murphy:

Next up, Socialism’s War on Christianity (and quite frankly, Judaism) continues, as detailed by FOX News’ Todd Starnes:

British Govt. Says Christians Don’t Have Right to Wear Crucifix at Work

 

The British government believes that Christians do not have the right to wear a crucifix at work because the wearing the cross is not a “requirement of the faith.” That’s the position the government is taking in a case pitting British Airways against two women who claimed they were punished for refusing to take off their religious symbols.

Nadia Eweida and Shirley Chaplin claim they were discriminated against after British Airways banned them from wearing a cross and a crucifix. The European Court of Human Right will determine if the right to wear a cross is protected under the European Convention on Human Rights.

The Sunday Telegraph reported that the government will argue that employees can not only ban the wearing of the cross, but they can also fire workers who insist on doing so.

That position has sparked outrage across Great Britain. Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, accused the government of “dictating” to Christians and said it was an example of Christianity becoming sidelined. “The irony is that when governments and courts dictate to Christians that the cross is a matter of insignificance, it becomes an even more important symbol and express of our faith,” Lord Carey told The Daily Telegraph.

Andrea Williams, the director of the Christian Legal Centre, said it was simply one more example of the British government and courts cracking down on Christians. “In recent months the courts have refused to recognize the wearing of a cross, belief in marriage between a man and a woman and Sundays as a day of worship as ‘core’ expressions of the Christian faith,” she told The Daily Telegraph. “What next? Will our courts overrule the Ten Commandments?”

You betcha….and likely as not in favor of Sharia Law.

And speaking of the Religion of Peace, we’ll call it a wrap with the WSJ‘s William McGurn’s observations on….

Bill Maher’s ‘Fatwa’

Liberals use Muslim terminology pejoratively, knowing the civility police will never be coming for them.

 

‘I don’t like fatwas.” The words come from Bill Maher. The HBO comedian was tweeting his disapproval of the campaign to deprive Rush Limbaugh of his sponsors. Especially distressing for Mr. Maher is that the campaign continues even though Mr. Limbaugh has apologized for his rude remarks about the Georgetown Law student who had testified before Congress on behalf of the contraceptive mandate.

Mr. Maher’s “defense,” of course, may have more to do with self-defense. For in the midst of the ritual denunciations of Mr. Limbaugh, it has emerged that liberals—Mr. Maher included—have long called conservative women things far more vulgar. That has led to embarrassing explanations of why Mr. Maher gets a pass, and whether the super PAC backing President Obama should return the million dollars that Mr. Maher has donated.

Even more surprising than Mr. Maher’s defense of Mr. Limbaugh, however, has to be his use of “fatwa.” These days when a liberal invokes Islamic language or imagery, typically it’s directed against someone like Mr. Limbaugh instead of in defense of him. Indeed, a foreigner surveying our mainstream media might be surprised to find out how frequently Islamic terminology such as “fatwa,” “mullah,” “jihad,” “Shariah” and “ayatollah” are used in a completely opprobrious sense—provided they are directed against Republicans or conservatives.

The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen gave us a perfect example recently, when he opened a February column about GOP candidate Rick Santorum this way: “Mullah Rick has spoken.” Mr. Cohen described Mr. Santorum’s political platform as a “fatwa” and fretted that the Republican’s “divisive approach” calls to mind history’s warning about how “the public square gets used for beheadings and the like” when religion “takes too prominent a role.”

He is by no means alone. On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” New York Times columnist Bill Keller worried that Mr. Santorum might be “creeping up on a kind of Christian version of Shariah law.” Last year a fellow Times columnist, Joe Nocera, suggested that America had been horrified to watch the “jihad” that tea-party Republicans were waging on the country, and he urged them to “put aside their suicide vests.” A month earlier, “Hardball” host Chris Matthews likened Republicans negotiating the debt ceiling with the president to “the Wahhabis of American government,” a reference to the Islamic sect whose strict rule defines life in Saudi Arabia.

What’s interesting about all these usages is that they come without nuance. The liberals who deploy them mean them in their full pejorative sense: with “jihad” shorthand for a brutal war of fanaticism, “mullah” implying a religious fanatic, “Shariah” a synonym for an inhumane system of law, and so on. What’s also interesting is that none of these words was invoked to describe an actual mullah, an actual fatwa, or an actual suicide bomber.

When it comes to these very real areas, liberal America proves far more reluctant to speak forthrightly. In the 2008 presidential campaign, sensitivities were such that even references to the Democrat’s middle name were deemed bad form.

That was when some conservatives insisted on referring to “Barack Hussein Obama,” sometimes with a stress on “Hussein.” When a radio host three times used Mr. Obama’s middle name at a McCain for President rally in Ohio, the GOP candidate quickly held a press conference to address the issue. “I absolutely repudiate such comments,” Mr. McCain declared, and the press corps tut-tutted its approval.

Mr. McCain’s repudiation notwithstanding, we are far from making derogatory allusions to Islam out of bounds in our discourse. To the contrary, polite society tolerates even the most harsh and stereotypical, so long as it involves Republicans. Anyone remember any calls for civility when former Democratic Congressman Martin Frost took to Politico to liken the tea partiers in Congress to the Taliban who blew up two ancient Buddha carvings on an Afghanistan hillside?

Perhaps it is because the liberal view of religion and Republicans is so reflexively negative that they see no practical difference between those who oppose higher taxes and those who would chop off a woman’s fingertips for wearing nail polish. Whatever the reason, liberals continue to do so freely because they know the civility police will never be coming for them.

Let’s be clear. If Tina Brown really wants to call Republicans suicide bombers or someone else wants to talk about Mr. Santorum’s fatwa, that’s their right. As the increasingly diminishing effect of analogies to Hitler suggests, over time overstatement usually undermines rather than advances argument. In any event, Americans are perfectly capable of making their own evaluations.

So we don’t need the word police. But spare us the sermons on civility.

Since the attack on 9/11, Americans have rightly been reminded how unfair it is to equate the hundreds of millions of decent Muslims with radicals who behead, car bomb and assassinate in the name of Islam. Would that our liberal commentariat could make a similar distinction between a conservative and a terrorist.

We for one won’t hold our breath waiting for it to happen.

Magoo