Five things Americans may be learning

Are Americans learning anything from our protracted moment of twisting in the wind under the Obama administration?

That’s a good question for this Christmas season.  I’m not convinced we have reached the tipping point at which enough Americans understand that the unquestioned assumptions we live by – assumptions instituted in our culture decades ago – are what’s killing our way of life.  But we are blessed to be able to get our education

UPDATE: The Civil War is not analogous to the killing-Americans-with-drones problem

Pundits have for weeks been erroneously comparing the issue of “killing Americans” with drone strikes abroad to the brother-against-brother character of the U.S. Civil War of 1861-1865.  It’s time to point out that the Civil War is a false analogy to the drone-execution issue.  This false analogy muddies the waters, and the public debate over executive privilege and the people’s rights needs to proceed without it.

There are two basic aspects of the Civil War that make it different from the War on Terror, in the ways that matter to the drone issue.  One is an obvious feature of the Civil War:

DO we have the right to disobey Islamic law?

My Green Room colleague Laura Curtis asked yesterday whether we should have the right to disobey Islamic law, and her post understandably got a lot of interest.

I would like to suggest that we need to pose the question a different way, because how we answer it will depend on how it is asked.  I believe the correct question is: Do we have the right to disobey Islamic law?

That’s how the philosophers of America’s founding would have put the question.

America: This time, it’s personal

I’m trying to get a book finished, and it isn’t helping to keep stopping to write blog posts.  But this point is worth making.

I believe the Obama campaign is wasting its time with attacks on Mitt Romney.  That doesn’t mean Team Obama will wise up; it has only a few tricks in its bag, and it deploys them over and over.  But it does mean that the public is inured to the Obama shtick.  There’s no there there, and increasingly, the people know it.

There’s something else about this election that tends to rob the trademark Obama demagoguery of its effect.  A growing number of Americans perceive our nation to be at a turning point (or a precipice; choose your metaphor).  If Romney were a more galvanizing candidate for conservative Republicans,

A fun Independence Day list of things that are now considered taxes

If you have decided to go along with Chief Justice Roberts and agree that Obamacare is a tax, now is the time to contemplate the many things this reading will allow Congress to require you to do.

The list is literally endless, because of the endless number of things ideologues can come up with.  But these are some of the top tunes.