The Democrats deliberately distort their intentions in the current debate on the Iraq War. They say their withdrawal timetable will “end the war” – but it’s ludicrous to suggest that removal of US troops will suddenly stop the fighting. Concerning so-called insurgents, everyone agrees they are ruthless, barbaric killers. So what will they do when Americans leave? Will bloodthirsty bad-guys suddenly turn into pacifists—or decide to retire from their murderous ways? Will they abandon sectarian hatreds and suddenly embrace their Iraqi enemies? General Petraeus, US Commander in Iraq, says American withdrawal would lead to an “increase in sectarian violence…It can get much, much worse.” Islamo-Nazis in Iraq would feel powerfully encouraged, not mollified, by removal of the one force strong enough to contain them: the US military. Democratic surrender timetables won’t “end the war” – they’ll only make it longer and more bloody, necessitating the ultimate return of American forces at an even higher cost.  

 A new CBS News/New York Times poll reveals profound confusion about governmental versus personal responsibility in protecting the environment. When asked about prospective federal laws “requiring car manufacturers to produce cars that are more energy efficient,” an astonishing 92% of the public supported the idea! With this near-unanimous public backing, why should government get involved at all? If people really do want more fuel-efficient cars, they can choose to buy them—thereby forcing manufacturers to build more of them, without bureaucratic compulsion. No government policy prevents greater fuel efficiency --in fact, generous tax breaks already encourage consumers to buy hybrids. Polls indicating a preference for influencing auto makers through government mandate rather than the power of the market indicate that people don’t trust themselves- or their neighbors – to make the right purchasing decisions unless regulations force them to do so. When the people trust government more than they trust themselves individual liberty diminishes and, potentially, disappears.  

At the big Dem Debate in South Carolina, the Presidential candidates unanimously and repeatedly signaled their intention to "end the war" in Iraq. To the very first question from Brian Williams (regarding Harry Reid's horrible suggestion that "this war is lost") Hillary Clinton shot back that "the American people want this war to end."

 

But do the Democrats honestly believe that simply pulling Americans back from combat will magically cause the fighting to cease?

 

Will Mohammed immediately drop his intention of fire-bombing Ahmed's Shhite mosque simply because GI Joe has been redeployed to new positions at the border of the country?

 

Listening to the Democrats, it became impossible to avoid the conclusion that some of them honestly believe that the continued US presence in Iraq somehow causes the nightmarish violence between Shia, Sunni and Kurd, and the wanton murders by Al Qaeda in Iraq of random civilians in all the sectarian communities. Why, exactly, would these ruthless killers suddenly become less likely to kill if the most formidable military force opposed to them is forced to retreat under fire?

 

Does it sound likely that the war will end as soon as Americans leave—because the terrorists and Islamo-Nazis will say, “oh, those tough Americans are leaving, so it wouldn’t be sporting to go on killing innocent Iraqis”?

 

The talk of “ending the war” is simultaneously delusional and deceptive. The war won’t end, it will intensify, after an American withdrawl.

 

In Vietnam, we tried the policy of bringing peace to warring factions by leaving the scene altogether – and that plan proved a disastrous, bloody failure. Withdrawal of American group troops did nothing to facilitate reconciliation or accommodation or even a lasting ceasefire. It did, however, produce a massive Communist onslaught in 1975 that led to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands.

 

As several GOP Senators noted earlier today (before the Senate voted by a slender majority to approve a surrender timetable) a withdrawal now only makes it more likely that the US will attempt to re-insert itself into the conflict when it turns genocidal and disastrous and far more bloody and chaotic than it is today, threatening the world’s energy supplies. At that point, the need to make up for lost ground will cost far more in American lives and treasure than today’s effort to give the surge a chance to work.

 

Despite all their rhetoric, Dems don’t want to “end the war” – they just want to end direct American involvement, and to allow enemy victory, in such a way that they can blame Bush for all the dire consequences sure to follow.

Patty Murray of Washington, consensus choice for the most dim-witted Senator of 'em all, today offered a unique justification for the Democrats' surrender time table in their spending bill. The august solon declared that the new legislation "sets us on a path with the best chance of achieving success in Iraq."

Success?

Success for whom? Al Qaeda? Iran? Muqtada al Sadr?

When Harry Reid offered his opinion that "the war is lost," at least he displayed a hint of candor. If he's right, however, and the war is, indeed, already lost, then what is his deputy (Senator Murray) doing talking about "success" in Iraq?

On this issue, the Democrats display no sense, and no shame.

Alec Baldwin’s bitter, angry phone-message to his 11-year-old daughter has now been broadcast around the world. This publicity certainly constitutes a breach of his privacy, but it also conveys some significant messages. For one thing, Baldwin’s wounded rage reminds us that in the absence of character and self control fame, glamour and wealth can’t guarantee happiness—or a warm relationship with your child. The Hollywood star has gone through a searing divorce with his ex-wife, Kim Bassinger—a sobering note for all those who once envied Baldwin for marrying such a famous beauty. Finally, cruel denunciation of his own daughter put the actor’s work as political activist and humanitarian in perspective. Too often, people who place great emphasis on serving humanity at large will ignore or abuse the individuals closest to them. Among many public figures, there’s a tendency to give yourself to strangers, while offering little to intimates family members who need you most.

A new study in The Archives of Internal Medicine shows surprisingly high levels of religious faith among America’s physicians. Researchers questioned 1,144 doctors and found that less than 10% reported “no religious affiliation,” while two thirds described the intensity of their faith as “very high” or “moderately high.” Meanwhile, only 3% said that religion had either a negative influence on patients’ health or “no influence”, while a staggering 87% said they’d seen either “God”, or “religion and spirituality,” play positive roles in patient outcomes. At a time when militant atheists attack organized religion as unscientific and destructive, it’s startling to see the positive religious outlook of scientists who deal every day with the imperfections of the human body and with situations of life and death. When those who focus on the most physical aspect of our lives show a healthy respect for spiritual power, it’s reassuring not only in religious terms, but in terms of the practice of medicine.

Did Senator Barack Obama really compare the violence of Virginia Tech to the “violence” of radio comments by Don Imus?

Yup, he really did—in an outrageous way that would seriously damage any other politician.

The lack of coverage and controversy over his jaw-dropping analogy once more highlights the double standard that the press applies to his campaign.

 On April 16, the same day that 33 innocent people died in Blacksburg, the Presidential candidate addressed a crowded Wisconsin kick-off rally in Milwaukee.

He began by noting the tragic news, and explaining why it wouldn’t be appropriate to deliver the sort of “stemwinder” (his own word) he usually delivers at such events.

He then went on to try to blame Republicans for the Virginia Tech murders, irresponsibly transmitting unsubstantiated and misleading information:

“There is gonna be discussion about how did this person get the firearms that he used. And there are already reports that potentially the semi-automatic weapons he used would have been banned under an assault weapons ban that was allowed to lapse.”

These comments show Obama’s alarming ignorance not only about the details of the murderous rampage but also about the “assault weapons ban” he referenced.

 But his speech got even worse as he proceeded. After quoting Bobby Kennedy’s remarks following the death of Dr. King, Obama tried to place that morning’s  mass murder in a larger context, suggesting that it reflected not just the act of a single lunatic but a whole  “society riven by violence.”  Immediately after noting a recent spike in violent crime in Milwaukee, he declared:

“There's also another kind of violence though that we're gonna have to think about. It's not necessarily physical violence but that the violence that we perpetrate on each other in other ways. Last week, the big news, obviously, had to do with Imus and the verbal violence that was directed at young women who were role models for all of us, role models for my daughter. I spend, along with my wife, a lot of time making sure that my two young daughters, who are gorgeous and tall and I hope will get basketball scholarships, that they feel good about who they are and that they understand they can do whatever they can dream might be possible. And for them to be degraded, or to see someone who looks like them degraded, that's a form of violence - it may be quiet, it may not surface to the same level of the tragedy we read about today and we mourn, but it is violence nonethesame.”

Leave aside the embarrassing elements associated with the off-the-cuff status of his remarks – surely, the Harvard-educated Senator understands that there is no such word as “nonethesame”-- “nonetheless” might have worked, or even “just the same.”

 And discount for a moment his odd comment about hoping that his young daughters will win basketball scholarships: both Obama and his wife (who graduated with honors from Princeton and then met her husband at Harvard Law School) are hugely successful, Ivy League-trained attorneys and celebrities, who hardly need to nourish “hoop dreams” about their girls using athletic prowess to escape the ghetto. In fact, the Senator might find it tough to defend any scholarship system that paid the way for the likes of the wealthy Obama girls rather than using available resources for deserving candidates who otherwise couldn’t afford college.

The deeper (and most obvious) problem with Obama’s remarks goes well beyond passing gaffes and involves his direct, deliberate comparison of mass murder and rude remarks. The victims of Cho Seung-Hui’s violence are dead or maimed; the victims of the “violence” of Don Imus are conspicuously healthy national heroines basking in even more adulation than they received before he insulted them.

 

Aside from the laughably muddled thinking behind Obama’s analogy, he also deserves condemnation for trivializing a horrific national tragedy – on the very day it occurred.

 

John Kerry destroys his campaign with his “blown joke” about getting stuck in Iraq. Tommy Thompson issues an apology because he dared to suggest that American Jews were good at making money (I still don’t understand why that was supposed to be an insult). John McCain draws widespread condemnation for jokingly signing “Bomb-bomb-bomb---bomb-bomb Iran.”

 

But Obama sails serenely forward, even after comparing mass murder to a three-word radio insult, and suggesting that both represent the national bent toward violence that we must do more to curb.

 

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the media establishment treats Obama as an “affirmative action” candidate who gets to make embarrassing blunders without drawing criticism and derision.

 

He’d already drawn a pass after describing the Muslim call to prayer as “the most beautiful sound on earth at sunset” and after finally paying, more than fifteen years late, 17 parking tickets he arrogantly accumulated (and ignored) as a 30-year old Harvard Law Student.

 

Despite the ongoing media crush on the Junior Senator from Illinois, Hillary Clinton will ultimately find some means to pierce his glistening armor, and he’ll have to begin apologizing and defending himself, nonethesame.

 

 

 

 

In the wake of Virginia Tech, and with all the bomb threats, warnings and scare stories associated with today’s Columbine anniversary, Americans are apparently supposed to feel guilty and abashed about our “sick society.”

 

In this context, some perspective might prove useful – including a brief glance at two news stories from today that define social dysfunction far more powerfully than any recent developments in the United States.

 

In the Philippines, Associated Press reported that the Islamic militants of the utterly charming Abu Sayaf Group delivered the severed heads of seven recent kidnap victims to an army base. “The men – six road project workers and a dried fish factory worker – were kidnapped at gunpoint in two separate incidents Monday near the town of Parang on Jolo Island…. Maj. Gen. Ruben Rafael, commander of military forces on Jolo, said a group of civilians was ordered to take the heads to Parang by Abu Sayaf commander Albader Parad.”

 

This latest development didn’t arise out of the vile psychosis of a seething individual, but reflected a long-term insurgency and radical Islamist agenda of a lavishly brutal group that’s been fighting the government (and ordinary human decency) for decades.

 

Meanwhile, in another update involving “The Religion of Peace,” Iran’s Supreme Court considered the case of one Alik Maleki who, with the help of accomplices, “drowned Reza Nejadmalayeri and his fiancée, Shohreh Nikpour, in 2002 in the belief they had broken rules against contact between unmarried men and women…A local court issued death sentences against six Islamic vigilantes, including Maleki, in 2003 for filling three men and two women they believed promoted ‘moral corruption.’ The vigilantes, who support Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, stoned one victim to death and tied up four others before throwing them into a swimming pool, where they drowned.”

 

In a predictable act of mercy, the Supreme Court over-turned the death sentences of these deeply religious enthusiasts.

 

Whatever one may say about the twisted souls of Cho Seung Hui and those who initiate bomb threats across the country, they aren’t supported by governmental or religious authorities of any kind, nor do they comprise some well-organized, identifiable geurilla movement.

 

Before we worry too much about the sickness in our own society we ought to consider the appalling cruelty and barbarism that’s become endemic (and often religiously sanctioned) in much of the Islamic world.

“April is the cruelest month,” T.S. Eliot famously declared to open “The Waste Land” – and he wrote these lines even before the scarring, scary events at Virginia Tech served to dampen the fresh life and irresistible energy of the spring season. The brutal murder of 32 utterly innocent people certainly counts as a big event, but in this case the horror hardly constitutes some significant milestone or signal of overall social decay. The killer immigrated to this country (legally) some 15 years ago but never bothered to become a citizen, remaining by all accounts a loner and outsider, making him an inconvenient poster boy for those who want to indict our “sick society.” It doesn’t reduce the pain or sense of loss to observe that this sort of mass killing has occurred in every nation (including those with highly restrictive gun laws) going back at least as far as the previous, 1966 University of Texas record-holder for deadliest campus killing spree. If the widespread incidence of such horrors doesn’t ease the hurt or fear, it should at least lower the volume on the fatuous attempts by commentators of all stripes to torture some “deeper meaning” out of the vicious crime. The non-stop television coverage (with endlessly recycled images of the same notably rotund cop lumbering into action on the day of the shooting) seems to call forth more and more inane “explanations” for the murders: too many guns, too few guns, video game addiction, hip hop culture, an unwelcoming attitude toward immigrants, Global warming, anti-depressant medication, sexual repression, and so forth. We’re riveted to the suffering in Virginia with the same guilty gaze with which we see a particularly gruesome pile-up on the freeway: it doesn’t make sense, but it’s still inescapably fascinating.

Actually, Eliot’s reference to April’s cruelty referenced the month’s capacity to stir hopes of new beginnings even in the most forlorn circumstances —

….breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

We shouldn’t let the miseries of Virginia Tech undermine the natural, wholesome, vibrant quickening associated with the season, any more than we let the burdens of filing tax returns defeat our joy at the fresh green and renewed hope in evidence everywhere. The media establishment may try to employ the mad, vicious act of a crazed killer to distract the public from the good news everywhere, including an economy that seems determined to plow ahead with bullish vitality despite the troubles in the housing market and even evidence of positive developments in Iraq and North Korea. Meanwhile, whatever our early disappointments with the emerging Presidential campaign, or all the snowed-out games in the new baseball season, there’s reason to feel grateful at another season of rebirth. April’s only cruel if we resist the visceral, timeless impulse to celebrate our presence and, if we’re willing, participation in one more season of new life in the Greatest Nation on God’s spring-green earth.

Today’s historic decision by the Supreme Court regarding partial birth abortion provoked several appalling media distortions that deserve immediate correction. Herewith, a quick effort to address three of them:.

 

1. NO COURT-MANDATED BAN. Many news outlets, on both TV and radio, highlighted the story with the headline “The Supreme Court today banned a controversial late term abortion procedure….” This is totally untrue, of course. The court didn’t ban anything. Congress, not the court, banned the grisly operation in which a doctor sucks out the brains of a half delivered fetus. It’s not in the power of the court – or at least it shouldn’t be – to bar any medical procedure. Today’s decision refused to overturn a decision made by Congress in 2003 – but despite impassioned anti-abortion rhetoric in Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion, the court did nothing to change the law or to impose new rules. Its decision does mean, however, that the new Congressional policy can now be enforced – after more than three years of delays while courts considered the question of its Constitutionality.

 

2. NO HYPOCRISY BY RUDY. Many journalists noted that Rudy Giuliani’s statement endorsing the court’s decision represented a flip-flip by the former New York Mayor. In 2000, when he ran a potential candidacy for the US Senate (again Hillary, remember) he said that if elected he wouldn’t support a ban on partial birth abortion. Today, however, he said that he (like all GOP Presidential candidates) agreed with the reasoning and judgment of the court majority. Actually, there’s no inconsistency or hypocrisy in these two positions. Rudy’s opposition to a partial birth abortion ban meant he thought it was a bad idea – NOT that he thought it was unconstitutional. Giuliani has said consistently that he supports strict construction of the Constitution, with an emphasis on originalism – rather than allowing judges to invent new rights that our founding fathers never addressed. In that context, there’s no contradiction between opposing a ban on partial birth abortion as a potential Senator, at the same time that you oppose the Supreme Court overturning a Congressional decision once it’s been made. Rudy’s affirmation of the court’s decision today should remind conservatives that even though he’s been a pro-choice advocate for years, he’s still vastly preferable to any Democrat because of his strict construction approach. Today, every major Democratic candidate strongly condemned the court’s decision, while every Republican proudly endorsed it.

 

3. A REAL ACHIEVEMENT FOR PRESIDENT BUSH. For months, America’s media establishment has been characterizing the Bush administration as an abject failure, and many conservatives have joined the lynch mob mentality with declarations that the President has achieved nothing positive in his more than six years in office. Today’s news gives the lie to those claims – though few pundits will acknowledge the huge triumph for Bush. The court decision brought about on a five-to-four vote reflects the President’s victory in seating two outstanding, strict-constructionist judges (Roberts and Alito) among the Supremes. The switch from O’Connor (who considered a ban on partial birth abortion unconstitutional) to Alito (who voted with the majority to let the ban stand) made all the difference—providing the most significant legal victory for the pro-life cause in more than forty years. Moreover, it was Bush who made even this test case possible – he fought for the ban in Congress, then proudly signed it into law (in contrast to Bill Clinton, who vetoed similar bans in 1996 and ’97). To all those who claim that conservatives have lost their way, that there’s no longer any difference between Democrats and Republicans, that politics doesn’t matter for the big life-and-death issues before the country, today’s decision ought to come as a correction and a reality check. If Al Gore had been president, we’d never have a partial birth abortion ban as the law of the land, and we’d never have a Supreme Court majority to affirm that ban. Moreover, some of the other great achievements of the Bush administration included sweeping tax cuts, which the President promised and then realized (in both 2001 and 2003). Those tax rate reductions bore new fruit today as the stock market continued to soar to a new all-time high.

 

For all those who insist that Bush has done nothing right, consider this: we’ve enjoyed nearly four uninterrupted years of dynamic growth in incomes, jobs (more than 7 million new jobs created) and national wealth, combined with falling deficits to the point where we’re now below the average (as a percentage of the economy) for the last 35 years. The President’s policies, however controversial, have also led to five-and-a-half years of unexpected homeland safety and security since the devastating attacks of 9/11. And with today’s Constitutional decision, thousands of babies who would have died will be welcomed into the world of life as we continue to push back against a malevolent culture of death.

 

Okay, these achievements may not suggest that Bush has achieved “everything.” But they’re not nothing – and shouldn’t be dismissed or disregarded.

For many years I’ve warned that major media outlets are often unreliable but recently that irresponsibility struck uncomfortably close to home. On Friday, April 13, I interviewed Condaleezza Rice on my radio show and the whole world reported on her comments. Reuters ran a piece, that also appeared on the Druge Report, with the headline: CONDALEEZA RICE: I’M GLAD IMUS WAS FIRED. The New York Post headline declared: CONDI SAYS IMUS GOT WHAT HE DESERVED, while the New York Daily News said: CONDI CHEERS AX AS A SLAM DUNK. The only problem is that the Secretary of State never once said that she agreed with the Imus firing. The transcript of our broadcast interview—widely available to even the laziest reporters through the US State Department – provided both my question, and her answer. “MEDVED: Do you believe that CBS made the proper decision in firing Don Imus for his hateful and unacceptable comment? RICE: Well, I’m not going to comment on what CBS should or shouldn’t have done. I’m very glad that there was, in fact, a consequence.” She went on to explain why she found the Imus remarks offensive, but never, in any way, suggested she endorsed the decision to fire him. The worldwide journalistic irresponsibility on this minor issue – with misleading headlines traveling as far afield as Ireland, India and Singapore – should remind us to take press reports on more serious subjects with a healthy dose of skepticism.

The horrifying shootings at Virginia Tech have produced sad, shabby, predictable reactions from misguided commentators trying to make sense of mass murder. On TV and radio, we’ve already heard that the killing spree was the product of too many guns, or too few guns, or violent video games, or the breakdown of the family, or ill-considered immigration policies or, even, global warming. Glib, shallow explanations allow us to turn away from the one real lesson of these events: that evil exists, and that dark forces – forces believers would call demonic or diabolical – play a powerful role in our world. Regardless of the background or motivation of the killer, Virginia Tech reminds us of the most important truth of our time: that terrorist monsters can’t be explained, or excused, or appeased, or ignored, or negotiated into civilized behavior. They must be confronted and destroyed – before they destroy more of the decent and the innocent.

Republicans are right to question a new study showing no benefits from so-called abstinence education, but they are wrong to continue fighting for federal funding for such classes.

Congress authorized the report from Mathematica Policy Research Inc. that showed that students who participated in four federally-backed abstinence programs were just as likely to have sex, and began their sexual activity at about the same age, as other students. Bush administration officials protested that the classes analyzed by the study had been initiated more than ten years ago (1996) and didn’t reflect the more sophisticated and effective approach typical of more recent efforts. Moreover, the classroom work considered by the analysis amounted to a “one shot” approach, without the repeated re-enforcement of messages that’s required for more meaningful results.

In truth, the positive impact of “abstinence education” remains an open question, with some persuasive evidence on both sides of the issue. But regardless of the social science and educational data, conservatives of conscience ought to drop the whole absurd effort to fund sex education on the federal level. Currently, Congress authorizes $176 million a year for federal funding promoting “abstinence till marriage.”

This goal represents a very appropriate concern for parents, pastors, educators, even local school administrators, but it’s impossible to argue that the federal government ought to get involved.

Using the time, effort and money of the Congress of the United States to promote either birth control or abstinence education is an absurd abuse of the proper role for the federal government. Nothing’s more intimate, more personal, than sexual behavior--- so any attempt to influence that behavior (on a public health or other basis) ought to occur as close as possible to the individual, not in Washington, D.C.

Republicans ought to re-affirm core principles and save the public’s money by slashing (ruthlessly) all $176 million for abstinence education, as well as the far larger FEDERAL amounts promoting condoms and “sex ed” in the schools. If educators, administrators or activists believe that our education system must address such intimate issues, let them fight it out on the local level, where some school systems would back “abstinence only,” others would back “condoms only” and others, one might fervently hope, would endorse the idea that schools should concentrate on skills (reading and writing constitute a good start) rather than shaping sexual attitudes.

And while we’re at it (in terms of changing the inconsistent and embarrassing GOP association with federally funded “abstinence”) let’s junk the whole word “abstinence” regarding responsible sexual behavior. It sounds too religious, too restrictive, too impractical – as if you want to get kids to live celibate lives. Those of us who believe in responsible sex education don’t deny the importance, beauty or joy of sexuality: we emphasize the value of intimate relations. We don’t want our young people to “abstain” from sex in the sense of giving up its rewards; we want them to enjoy healthy sex lives in the right context to maximize those rewards.

One of the biggest problems with abstinence education is that the world abstinence remains so off-putting – smacking of self-sacrifice, as if we’re trying to recruit little monks and nuns. We need more effective language –and far less federal involvement in an issue where Congress ought to save millions of tax dollars.

Two quick questions about the Don Imus affair –

1) Which is worse—which actually does more damage to our culture and society --- unleashing a dumb, tasteless, insulting joke about a college basketball team looking like “nappy-headed ho’s” or using your daily TV show to advance the dangerous, lunatic idea that 9/11 was “an inside job?” Obviously, the repeated suggestion on a major network (ABC) by a supposedly beloved commentator (Rosie O’Donnell on “The View”) that our duly elected officials are conspiratorial mass murderers represents a more serious threat to sanity and public decency. Where is her apology, by the way? The fact that many people already believe the “neo cons” planned and executed 9/11 only makes her comments more outrageously damaging, not less so.

2) Which use of language shows a major media host more “out of control” – use of the term “ho” (a staple of popular hip hop songs, as many have pointed out) or the deployment of the dreaded “f- bomb” on live national radio, followed within minutes by the use of the similarly proscribed “s-word”? The FCC has never fined anyone for saying “ho” on the air (to the very best of my knowledge) but they regularly fine and punish the use of f-words and s-words. Ironically, this means that MSNBC fired the wrong guy: another host on that struggling network used both the “f word” AND the “s word” in the same one hour live interview on my radio show. Fortunately, our tape-Delay allowed us to bleep out his offensive comments and to save us from incurring fines and to rescue him from, potentially, damaging his career. Regularly listeners to my show know which MSNBC was so loose-lipped (or liquor lubricated, as I suspect) that he broke the most obvious rules of broadcast etiquette. He still gets to host his show on MSNBC. Imus does not. Does that make sense?

I’ve never met Don Imus, never spoken to him. I don’t listen to his show --- it’s hard to find in most of the country (outside New York City and D.C.). But when all the avatars of political correctness work themselves into a frothing lynch mob frenzy over a minor (though unjustifiable) offense, it’s hard not to feel sorry for the guy. The level of public indignation and self-righteous hysteria clearly exceeds the intensity of the offense.

Robin Hood was famous for robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, but what do you call a rogue operation that robs from everybody to give to the rich? How about calling it the U.S. Department of Agriculture—a bloated and wasteful bureaucracy that pays out a crushing $18 billion a year in subsidies to agribusiness. As the Wall Street Journal reports, much of this money goes to well-to-do people who farm as a hobby, and earn non-farm income above $200,000, but still get a whopping $400 million in taxpayer subsidies.

When people wonder if we can cut federal spending, they should look at the USDA—a massive scam that employs more than 110,000 people at a cost to the taxpayer of $95 billion a year. Believe it or not, even a modest Bush administration plan to put a cap on subsidies to rich non-farmers has run into furious bi-partisan opposition.